Self-Love Is the Cure for All That Ails the Addict

“I now find myself eating for all the same reasons I drank: 
I’m lonely, I’m afraid.”

Craig Nakken, The Addictive Personality

Many people mistakenly belief that addiction itself is the primary problem. It is not. Addiction is a symptom of a deeper problem. The deeper problem is self-hatred. Most every addict suffers from a severe amount of self-loathing. In fact, self-love is a tern that is completely foreign to people who are caught in the throes of addictive behaviors.

No one over-indulges in alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, sex, shopping or any other addictive behavior for no reason. The reason is clear to me. It is lack of self-love. That lack of self-love leads to lack of self-esteem and lack of self-worth. We are then left fearful and lonely.

We fear that others will find out how miserably imperfect and unacceptable we are and so we isolate as much as possible to avoid rejection. As we separate ourselves from people and healthy relationships, we begin building replacement relationships with things.

Since we are too afraid to open up and tell someone how much we are hurting, we turn to assuaging away our fears and loneliness through food, drink, illicit sex, television, shopping sprees or attaching ourselves to another person who is equally as self-loathing was we are. As an out-of-control codependent, I always attached myself to people who were needier than I was. It was a subconscious attachment. I never understood at the time that I chose people who were perpetual victims, but I realize now that I did because they were the only people on earth that I believed would accept worthless me.

When I couldn’t get my addictive fix from these people, I quickly turned to other addictive behaviors. I ate lots of chocolate and handfuls of peanuts: Nothing like sugar or salt to ease away the emotional pain of self-loathing! If that wasn’t enough, I went shopping. It always provided me with the buzz I needed to rise above my empty, sad feelings. Suddenly the world didn’t seem so bad—that is until the shopping high or the sugar rush wore off and I was faced with me alone again.

Addiction is about medicating away bad feelings, emotional uneasiness. And most of those bad feelings are tied to how we think about ourselves. There are primarily tied to our own self-hatred.

Once we stop hating ourselves, once we choose to be kind to ourselves, accepting of ourselves, we will begin to find peace. Self-kindness and compassion are the first steps toward self-love. And self-love, once we have mastered it, will set us free of our addictive habits. Once we are no longer hating ourselves, we will no longer be fearful. Once we are no longer fearful, we will have the ability to be vulnerable and to open ourselves up to healthy fulfilling relationships with other healthy people. And then we will no longer be lonely and we will no longer need our addictive fix—of any kind!