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Many business people think they are alcoholics and diseased because they need to drink several bottles of alcohol every night. They can’t stop. But their lifestyle is usually to blame, not the alcohol.
In the book, Intoxication, by Roland Siegel, he claims that the pursuit of altered states through drugs is a natural part of our biology and it is as deep-rooted as our drive for food, sleep and sex. The desire for drugs, for intoxication, is our ’fourth drive’.
Mainstream recovery is based on talk. First you have to talk yourself out of taking drugs (“no drugs today, no drugs today”), and then talk endlessly through the relationship dramas, sexual dysfunction, depression, psychosis, panic and anxiety that may arise afterwards, not to mention the endless probing into what went wrong.
Just watched the Australian movie Ruben Guthrie. It wasn’t a particularly great movie but it was interesting because the main character was a hard partying high-achiever, who was using drugs and alcohol to sustain his success and feed that part of his nature that loved living on the edge.
I consider addiction a natural state because the desire to feel good, safe or real is natural. If I’m addicted to alcohol it is because, in my experience, alcohol is the best way to feel good, safe or real. This is either in all situations or specific ones such as rock star Jimmy Barnes who wouldn’t go on stage unless he’d first drunk a bottle of vodka.