Hersh - The last addiction: why self help is not enough, own your desire, live beyond recovery, find lasting freedom

Without suffering, happiness cannot be understood.
The ideal passes through suffering like gold through fire.

F YODOR D OSTOEVSKY , The Brothers Karamazov

W e are living in a time when the books about peoples private lives are flying off the shelves, stories of unthinkable shame and pain as well as stories of exhilarating overcoming. We thirst for memoirs that tell us that, even though our own lives might not be as crazy as the ones we are reading about, we can find our way out of the mixed-up mazes we are lost in. We gulp down stories of men and women who have overcome difficult childhoods and lonely journeys through private hellssometimes of their own making and sometimes of the making of othersin hope that we too will be overcomers. We are drunk with stories about alcoholics, drug addicts, overeaters, sex addicts, gamblers, bulimics, and people who love too much.

And we are hung over. Sometimes our heads hurt from the aftermath of reading stories that turn out to be untrue. More often, our thinking is blurred by stories that dont parallel our own closely enough to sustain our hope. And many stories leave our throats parched, thirsty for more, even when they are true and close to home, because we cant find the key to open our own door to join the overcomers.

This is a book about addiction, which is both the motivation and the cause of our quest. Every addiction confines and crushes the human spirit with cruel and unusual punishment. I know. My own drinking began as a prescription from a doctor for anxiety and ended in some unthinkable places that deeply hurt me and those I love. I will tell you more about my own experience with addiction throughout this book. But this is not a book only for alcoholics or drug addicts or those who love them.

I hope to stretch your thinking about addiction. The truth is that no one escapes the reality of compulsion. Everyone loves something too much. Everyone struggles with passion gone awry. Thats why were all buying all those books. If you believe you dont struggle with addiction, youre probably more addicted than I am. In his wonderful book Addiction and Grace, Gerald May wrote, It is as if these severely addicted people have played out, on an extreme scale, a drama that all human beings experience more subtly and more covertly. We all suffer from the same condition. We all seek a resting place from striving and suffering, and we often cling to what promises to be a haven, only to find out that we have created our own hell. I hope this book will deepen your compassion and commitment to yourself and to others, all those who are in bondage to something that initially promised to make everything better, until it made everything worse.

This book looks at the hard realities and possible redemption within substance abuse, but addiction reaches much further:

• the good church woman whose eyes are lined with fatigue and whose heart is filled with frenzy, but still she cannot say no

• the man who spends hours a day on the Internet, jeopardizing job and family life

• the person who has no sense of individual self and is consumed by striving to become who, what, and where everyone else needs him to be

• the woman with the flawless makeup and wardrobe who does not know how to face her obsession with appearance or where to confess the toll that it is taking on her own soul

• the man or woman who longs for a real relationship, yet spends every night and weekend in front of the television, watching unreal stories

• the man who cannot keep up financially because he has gambled away everything he makesand moreon Internet gambling sites

• the woman who ingests thirty-two laxatives a day and engages in the unspeakable ritual of hinging and purging to maintain her weight

• the man or woman who strays from marriage in serial affairs, whether they are physical or emotional in nature

begins by uncovering the lies we tell about addiction. We will look unflinchingly at the evidence, the energy, and the experience of addiction. I hope this book will help you tell your own story. Telling our own stories requires that we recognize addiction for what it is. As we see more clearly our own hearts and our longings for intimacy, we will be able to put words to the lengths we will go to kill, satisfy, control, or find substitutes for those longings.

tells some true stories about addiction. But I warn you, not every story concludes with the happy ending that is common in popular memoirs. Writing something that will sell often produces a highly edited version of oneself or the subtly embellished version. In truth, we learn most about ourselves and the true meaning of redemption in reading of strugglers who fall down, get back up again, and fall down again.

we will consider what redemption looks like, not only for people who know that they are addicts, but also for family members who watch in anger and agony as their loved ones relapse time and time again. This is not a self-help book. I am deliberately not using the words recovery or overcoming, because these words can get us into more trouble. Thats the last addiction, the idea that I can save myself with myself We knowI mean deep down we knowthat it is futile to try to save ourselves with the very selves that got us into trouble in the first place.

In the final chapters of this book we will examine the healing path and what it means to livereally livein newness of life, free from self-defeating, self-enslaving patterns of behavior. I think thats what we all wanta fresh start, a way to begin again, a new chance. This book does not conclude with a list of things to do to get that fresh start. Instead, it closes in an encounter with a Person who asks the question: What if