2 years clean - The Less You Need, the More You Are

Two Years Clean

March 10th 2021 was the date where I started a journey. It started because of an antibiotic treatment I had to go through. The antibiotic treatment was because a health condition I have had from birth had reactivated. I was born with toxoplasmosis, and somehow it had reactivated after more than two decades.

For many years, from when I was about 18 years old until that day, March 10th of 2021, I had had a crippling addiction to a substance. It is considered a substance that is not a "hard drug", but it is a drug, and it was crippling me. Motivation, confidence, self-esteem... they were all vanishing, or very difficult to keep a hold of.

Because of the start of my antibiotic treatment, I knew that I had to drop the addiction and do it cold turkey. So March 10th was the day where I let go and embraced the land of healthy challenge, facing of fears, discomfort, and taking life on and facing demons that I had long forgotten, that I had burried a long time ago, and some, that I did not remember.

Attachment

So what challenge, problem, difficulty am I trying to adress here? And what can this challenge be summed up as? Attachment. First of all, I think it would be helpful and appropriate to define the term "attachment". Attachment is understood here as phenomena where the someone cannot let go, and feels the need to have something or someone. In other words, attachments are all those relationships to things and people, that are based on the premise that without them, we would be lost, unhappy, insecure, or unsatisfied.

What attachments do you have? And are some attachments okay? I will give some examples of attachments I have or I think I have.

- smoking cigarettes

- masturbation

- eating food

- my phone

- my values

So the question becomes: is there a difference between needing needlessly, and needing in an instinctual, "natural" way? If there is, then what is the difference?

I want to try to answer this question in terms of energy. So let's say that there are two "directions" in which energy can flow: in and out. You receive energy or you release/give energy. Energy is understood here as psychoemotional energy. The way I see it, the needless needs are those that we have that we use as an outlet of energy because of not knowing what to do with said energy. The needed needs, so to speak, are those we have that bring us energy, those we get energy from. If we take the list above again, we can classify which are needed, and which are useless, or unnecessary. There is also some nuance in each of the needs in the list.

- smoking cigarettes: unnecessary. Pure release of energy that I do not know how to use otherwise.

- masturbation: both necessary and unnecessary. Necessary if it is with the purpose of fulfilling some natural urges. Unnecessary if it becomes compulsive, forced, and has the purpose of escaping feelings of loneliness, pitty, sadness... (aka, psychoemotional energy that is not allocated and dealt with properly).

- eating: necessary (humans need nutrition to survive - which then rises the question of the attachment to the survival of the Self, the Ego). Eating is unnecessary if it done to release anxiety, sadness, etc. Stress-eating is something many people do.

- my phone: necessary if with the purpose to contact someone and innecessary if with the purpose to ignore feelings of stress, boredom, loneliness, etc.

- values: necessary if with the purpose to contribute to society, the world and with the intention to make the world a more worthy place to live in. It is unnecessary if it has the purpose of taking advantage of others and just having the values to make myself feel more important and better than others. Being genuine or ingenuine is the key for this one.

Attachment
Attachment

The less you need, the more you are

Let's suppose for simplicity's sake and for visualization's sake, that we are equivalent to the energy that we contain and manage to healthily process, express and communicate. Again, this is psychoemotional energy. If we argue that the supposition is valid, then we could also argue, that the less attachments, the more we are. So how do we manage this energy?

The energy that is processed unhealthily through addictions and unnecessary attachments, is mostly the darkness that we are too afraid of facing. The fears are some kind of "meta-attachment" since it is an expression of an attachment, to an attachment that we have: security.

There are many psychological schools of thought that argue different ways to solve the problem of attachments. The one I mostly agree with is one that argues that acceptance is the way foreward. Acceptance that leads to integration of the trauma, and transcendence. Integrate and transcend. Every attachment is rooted in the projection of ego upon whatever it is that one is attached to. So the solution? To accept that there is this attachment, and slowly, objectifying the feeling of needing to keep doing/taking whatever you are attached to. This leads me to my next point: self-inquiry.

Self-inquiry

Breathe
Breathe

Self-inquiry is the process, mechanism and treatment that one can do on oneself to become free from impulses that promote the attachment to either substances or behaviors. How to do it? First of all, you have to recognize what painful event or thing you're avoiding. What painful event, trauma and other kind of neurosis are you avoiding by taking whatever you are taking or doing?

Step 1: Locate the thought that turns into a feeling - become aware of the feeling of needing. It is even more effective when it is a feeling that can be located in your body

Step 2: Close your eyes and imagine the feeling in your body that is connected to the needing being an object, separate from yourself. Do not identify with it.

Step 3: Say "I know why you would think that, I see you, I recognize you. You don't need to think that anymore, it's okay now." to yourself. Because you do KNOW NOW that you are not the person that is avoiding the pain like you used to! You're transforming!

Step 4: Let go. Take a deep breath and exhale. Feel the thought, the feeling, that has become an object in your mind, leave and fly away, so to speak.

I hope this was informative and inspirational. You can message me if you feel like getting more information or feel like talking about these things. :)

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  • Brilliant. Good luck with your journey.