Paul Bakalite Emotional intelligence
As a younger man I drank and took recreational drugs because
they made me feel great. Anxious social situations became easy and entertaining.
Sex seemed more dangerous and exciting. Most young people view drugs and alcohol
as fun because, superficially, they are fun.
But addictions, chemical or otherwise, fill voids where something else should
be. Many addicts I know have something in common: an emotional injury of some
sort, whether in their past or in their present. It was not until later in
my life when drinking and unhappiness overwhelmed me that I felt the need
to understand what my excesses were really about.
There was always a residual anxiety under my intoxication and a manic quality
to my fun. I now see how that indicated a void in me. Emotional wounds my
younger self was incapable of identifying festered in my unconscious. Invisible
to me, they motivated me to anaesthetise myself with increasing amounts of
alcohol and drugs.
I remember when I first took ecstasy; the experience was transcendent. But
what was it I was so keen to transcend? And if the experience was celestial,
why did it become predictable and artificial?
“I'll be telling strangers I love 'em in a minute,” I thought
as I came up for the hundredth time. Like alcohol, ecstasy became tedious
because I wasn't using it as an occasional recreation in a happy life, but
as an habitual exit from an unhappy one. Heroin users sometimes say their
high is ‘like coming home'. As you get drunk, come up on a pill, toke
a crack pipe (or whichever you do) it can feel like peace, belonging, leaving
it all behind; home and safe at last. Take enough of any drug you end up somewhere
else. I didn't just want to be somewhere else; I wanted to be someone else.
Some
feelings are so painful that we cannot feel them at all. We only feel the
emptiness of their absence; a hole in the heart. I know now that I couldn’t
accept myself or fully experience my own emotions because I was raised in
an environment that denied my true, gay identity, and in a household where
emotions were dismissed.
I've spent much of life keenly asserting my individuality, while on an unconscious
level I’d been programmed to despise my genuine nature. In managing
this conflict, like most addicts, I was extremely controlling. But you cannot
make up for unmet childhood needs by bullying people in adult life. You cannot
sate this legacy of need with drink or drugs. I was trying to fill an emptiness
that could never be filled by those means, so was always left dissatisfied.
The void is filling now, as I discover ways to make recompense in the present
for the deficit of emotional nurturing I carried from the past.
Recovery is surrender; relinquishing attempts at frantic control and turning
internal conflict first into an uneasy ceasefire, then into lasting, increasingly
stable peace; very different from the temporary relief and denied feelings
of addiction. Ultimately, there’s no point denying any emotional injury,
be it something lingering from childhood or the result of a new adult trauma,
like the impact of HIV. Blocked feelings use up energy that would otherwise
be put into having a fulfilling life.
I’m 41 this year. I’ve been through a couple of years of counselling
and attended AA. I’ve survived. Many people don’t get an understanding
of their unconscious motivations until disintegration forces them to take
stock, often not until they make searching spiritual enquiry of themselves
or go into psychotherapy. If you’re thinking 'what’s he on about',
believe me, that’s what I would have thought. When you are young you
just do what you do without analysing it. If you have an addiction (or are
developing one), you can’t get enough distance from your own behaviour
to look back at it with the perspective that age or a sober mind allow.
Of most significance is that there may be something in you so emotionally
painful that your own mind does not allow you to experience it on a conscious
level at all. But you will experience it indirectly. You might have a suspicion
that something is lost to you, a sadness that bursts out unexpectedly, or
maybe you feel you just can’t get a handle on life. If so, it may be
that the feelings you are not having are controlling you. It is those feelings
that can steer a life into addiction. Awakening to them can bring us back
from a life unlived.
