What is Suffering in Addiction?

Many years ago, when my husband first got sober, he was a regular attendee at a 7:00am recovery meeting at a coffee shop near a park in downtown Minneapolis. He had come from a place of hopeless suffering to a new life because of a spiritual awakening, and he was ready and willing to share that with others. They talked about the suffering alcoholic in the recovery meetings he attended. He remembered it and knew it well.

Several days in a row as he walked into his morning meeting, he noticed a man sitting in a cardboard box in the park, drinking from a bottle. He thought to himself, “This is exactly the type of suffering alcoholic that I can help.” So, one day he went up and knocked on the box and asked the guy if he wanted help.

The guy basically told him to f-off and that he was happy as he was. That day, Kevin learned an important lesson he has since been kind enough to share with me and many other people in recovery. It’s a tough one to digest at first. But that important lesson is as follows: when alcoholics drink, we do not suffer.

You might need to read that again to make sure you read it right. When alcoholics drink, we do not suffer. Often, our family and friends suffer. Those we owe money to suffer. Our employers suffer. Sometimes local businesses and local communities suffer. If we have children, they suffer. We suffer later when we are hung over. And the minute we begin to sober up, we suffer. But, when an alcoholic is drunk or blacked out, they are not suffering. At the very least, they are suffering significantly less than if they were in the exact same circumstances not drunk. And that is a very hard truth to swallow.

I often used to argue that drinking caused suffering. But, when I was honest with myself, I realized that it was not the drinking that caused the suffering. The things that I did when I was drinking certainly added to the burden of guilt that was the cause of the true suffering. Sometimes my propensity for suppression led to feelings exploding when I was drunk, but those were simply feelings that were ever-present and suppressed. The drinking didn’t cause the feelings, it simply released them. The release of suppressed emotions could not be called suffering. Perhaps it even helped. But the main point I make here is that drunkenness itself did not cause suffering.

Peak suffering for anyone with any type of addiction or obsession is actually the first moments of no longer engaging in the compulsive behavior with which we are obsessed. Suffering was at its peak for me when I tried to get sober but had not yet found a spiritual solution. Suffering was at its peak for me when I tried to stop my bulimia, when I was trying to just eat normally through behavior changes rather than a spiritual solution.

My husband calls this place of peak suffering “caught between a drink and God”. You can also be caught between drugs and God. You can be caught between gambling and God. You can be caught between food restriction and God. You can be caught between binge eating and God. You can be caught between codependency and God. But it’s not the compulsive behavior itself that causes the suffering. It is actually not doing it that causes suffering for the person with the addiction. That is because the obsessive behaviors were just there to soothe the uncomfortable feelings of being alive with which I could not otherwise manage.

That’s why the solution to addictions is not to stop engaging in the addiction. When I simply stopped doing them, I suffered so immensely that I always ended up eventually relapsing either back into the original addiction or into another one. The solution is to get to the bottom of the uncomfortable feelings of existence that led me into the addiction in the first place. When those are relieved, so is the obsession.

The hard part of relief from suffering is being honest about the true nature of suffering. As long as I continued to believe alcohol was the cause of my suffering, I continued to suffer because I was not addressing the true issue. When I got down to the causes and conditions, such as my discomfort in my own skin and my past guilt, I began the process of moving toward God and toward relief from addiction. When I was able to finally bring those things to God for forgiveness, then relief and the true healing began. And, for the record, that’s when I stopped relapsing.

**The is one of the essays from the bonus e-book that you get when you pre-order my book 52 Life-Changing Lessons I Learned in Recovery, coming out December 10, 2024. If you want the rest of the e-book free, send proof of purchase to marketing@mangopublishinggroup.com if you have pre-ordered already. Or, start by pre-ordering the book here.