Ghada’s Reviews > In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction > Status Update

Human beings have an ingrained opposition to any sense of being forced, an automatic resistance to coercion that my friend Dr. Gordon Neufeld has called counterwill. It is triggered whenever a person feels controlled or pressured to do someone else’s bidding—and we can generate counterwill even against pressure that we put on ourselves.

The dominant emotions suffusing all addictive behaviour are fear and resentment—an inseparable vaudeville team of unhappiness. One prompts and sets up the other: fear of the way things are and resentment that they are that way; fear of life and resentment that life is as difficult as it is; fear of unpleasant mind-states and resentment that unpleasant moods and thoughts persist.

Justification is another form of judgment every bit as debilitating as condemnation. When we justify, we hope to win the judge’s favour or to hoodwink her. Justification connives to absolve the self of responsibility; understanding helps us assume responsibility. When we don’t have to defend ourselves against others or, what’s more, against ourselves, we are open to seeing how things are.

Decisions that we may believe to be freely made can arise from unconscious emotional drives or subliminal beliefs. They can be dictated by brain mechanisms programmed early in childhood and determined by events of which we have no recollection.

Popular lore has it that the addict has to “hit bottom” before gaining the motivation to give up his habit. That may be true in some individual cases, but as a general rule it fails because what constitutes the lowest point is highly personal to each addict.

Addictions, even as they resemble normal human yearnings, are more about desire than attainment. In the addicted mode, the emotional charge is in the pursuit and the acquisition of the desired object, not in the possession and enjoyment of it. The greatest pleasure is in the momentary satisfaction of yearning.