Let’s say that Person A is in a long-term relationship with person B – they have built things together, their lives are intertwined through so many things, they seem glued to one another. From a distance, they seem to have everything going for them, only, person A feels there’s a huge hole in themselves that, no matter what they do, gets deeper by the year… Their life constantly navigates towards filling that hole and they are on an obsessive lookout for, let’s call it H – the thing that would fill their hole. They find the H in many other persons, but, anytime they want to go have that H, they realize how valuable, still, is their life with person B. What they would lose in leaving person B, would be more significant than what they would gain from H, but they still can’t settle into their life with B minus H. Now the person who possesses H, in most cases doesn’t have more than the H going for them. They have very few of the qualities that the person A desires.

The painful part comes from this ending up manifesting as a chronic circumstance that some call “between a rock and a hard place”

Does this all sound like a drama? That’s because it is. No matter how hard I have tried to summarize it and express a short version of it, one can still see that this is a full-fledged hamster-wheel type drama that has one no way out of. But because of the condescending connotations of the word drama, let’s use “riddle”. It sounds less harsh and less incriminatory.

Let’s look at this riddle this way: imagine a pot that is filled with boiling soup. The soup splashes all over the place regularly. Burning liquid mess that creates wounds and misery. What is happening in this type of riddle is that we keep trying to manage the splashing by engaging with the drops of burning soup, using all our might to get them to not land on important, valuable parts of ourselves or of the environment. We might even think of changing the size and form of the pot, the colour of the pot, we might try to put a lid on it… but the soup keeps boiling and it keeps squirting the soup out…

Still sounds like a riddle, doesn’t it? The only solution is to stop tending to the pot and the soup itself. There is no solution there, where the soup would magically stop boiling. Nothing in this world can solve the dilemma found between a hard place and a rock. EXCEPT tending to the fire underneath the pot. That is the only place that transformation can happen.

How does that look for person A? Person A must come to the understanding that they are fueling the riddle. Something in them cooks this meal of never good enough, never the right thing, never the right person, never the right circumstance. It is their own make-up that is producing this perpetual dissatisfaction with what IS. Dissatisfaction with reality is a world-spread misery-producing circumstance, where the simple pull at reality creates the low, the hole, the pit of people’s lives. This is the cortisol part of the riddle. From that pit, person A is able to spring up into the adrenaline part of life, usually linked to finding the H we were talking about. Person A needs to see, to become aware of this perpetual “up in the skies”/”deep down in hell” dynamic. Some call this dynamic fight or flight.

This is, in my view the single most important thing to see through – this addiction to cortisol vs adrenaline that they, like any other addict, cannot get out of. There is an operator that is allowing and encouraging this dance and this is where person A has their only chance for peace – in observing the operator. Fixing, trying to manipulate and to coerce external circumstances and people will not interrupt the hormonal flood that keeps them hooked into unhappiness, dissatisfaction, suicidal thoughts and chronic fatigue. It will only enhance it. More disease, more pain, more despair… it will never ever end because life pulls towards health and it will fight any disease-producing agent that will fuel disease.

What’s to be done then? Well, exactly like in the Alcoholics Anonymous programs, the very first step, the crucial step in freeing ourselves from the addiction is to come to the realization that yes, we are addicts. A profound, honest, authentic understanding of this fact is life-changing. Nothing more needs to happen at this point other than this inner recognition of a truth we have been running from through fight or flight…

But the brain of the addict can rarely do that except if it is stopped by something really threatening – a disease for example in the case of the addiction to substances, but also, in personal drama addiction it can be a divorce, the death of someone cherished, etc… The addict’s brain will perceive this inner truth as being boring, flat, defeat-inducing lethargy. This brain needs constant stimulation, constant see-sawing, constant emergency mode in order to survive.

I will write about the next steps soon…

 

 

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