Escaping the Hungry Ghost Realm: Celebrating 20 Years of Freedom from Drug Addiction
This week I’m celebrating 20 years of “sobriety” from my addiction to methamphetamine. All the information about what that addiction looked like can be found here. I put “sobriety” in air quotes because I have used other drugs recreationally and transformationally since then, but not in a way that qualifies as addiction. I still drink alcohol, about 2 drinks a week on average. Sobriety means a lot of things to a lot of different people—for me, it’s when I stopped using the drug that was destroying my life, and from which I found it nearly impossible to stop without outside assistance.
That assistance looked like a 90-day outpatient rehabilitation program in 2005, at age 20. It helped me develop the healthy coping strategies that have kept me away from drug addiction all these years.
However, back in 2005 (and I suspect still today in 2024) they were still using the outdated willpower model of addiction treatment—that users simply weren’t trying hard enough to “just say no.” This is a message that kept me in cycles of shame for over a decade, blaming myself for my inherent weaknesses for succumbing to addiction. “There’s something wrong with me,” the shaming voice used to say to me. This would lead me to stay in bed for hours at a time, procrastinate, surround myself with people who were not good to me, and other negative behaviors that kept me on a rotating hamster wheel of disappointment. “Why can’t I seem to get and keep a great job?” I might ponder, even though I had a degree from a university routinely ranked as one of the world’s best. “Why can’t I find a stable long-term relationship?” My internal voice was constantly putting me down while also offering some curiosity—how could other people have the things I wanted? It must be something I’m doing wrong. If I’m “doing” it wrong instead of “being” wrong…could I do it differently?
After years of wondering (and hitting my head against the wall), in 2016, at age 31, I found the healing I needed: emotional healing. Finally, I could understand how the absence of well-attuned emotional responsiveness by my caregivers (through no true fault of their own) and other stressful events in childhood led to my feelings of emptiness. I will write about pieces of that journey in other posts—there’s so much to say!
One crucial book that prepared me for the big transformation was Dr Gabor Maté’s book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, per a lot of recommendations over the years (it was published in 2008). It was the precursor I needed to get my brain ready to do all of the massive healing work I did in 2016 that felt a lot like dying and coming back to life, reborn.
The “hungry ghost” metaphor is from Chinese religion and Buddhism. In Buddhism, the idea of reincarnation was introduced—that a spirit will leave one body at death and choose another form as its next life. Hungry Ghost is one of the 6 realms it’s possible to reincarnate into. A hungry ghost has a large distended belly and a small straw for a mouth, always inhaling food but never feeling satiated. It’s a metaphor for addiction—“representing beings who are driven by intense emotional needs in an animalistic way”. You can learn more in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. It is thought that committing evil deeds in one life leads to being placed into the Hungry Ghost realm in the next one.
If you’re a Studio Ghibli fan, the character of “No Face” in Spirited Away represents a hungry ghost, consuming and consuming but never feeling full. He has no concrete sense of self, consuming in order to feel something or like someone.
Dr. Gabor Maté’s book links, not past-life evil deeds and present addiction, but past childhood evil deeds committed against children, and their present addiction, as they struggle to self-soothe and cope with life’s vicissitudes. He delves into historical evil deeds as well, such as the genocide of First Nation people in Canada by European settlers. He’s a primary care doctor in a neighborhood of Vancouver, British Columbia known for its population of the homeless, addicts, and the generally down-and-out.
Maté doesn’t look down on these folks from his high position in a clean white lab coat, doling out diagnoses and treatment options; he joins them in their suffering, reflecting on his own minor addiction to classical music CDs. His addiction is white-collar and niche to be sure, but he makes a good case as to how this interest becomes escapist as he obsesses over which recordings he must seek out, overriding family commitments and budget constraints. He talks about his own trauma as a Jewish child born during the Holocaust in Hungary and how that led him to be obsessive about his career and seeking outside recognition, which kept him from being present with his wife and children.
He explores his own healing journey even more in recent books such as The Myth of Normal and the many TV specials he’s been featured in.
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts is essential reading for anyone in recovery or hoping to understand the core of addiction.
Dulled Feelings Passage
“The addict’s reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making: the internal shutdown of vulnerability.
From the latin word vulnerare, ‘to wound’, vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens to overwhelm our capacity to function. The automatic repression of painful emotions is a helpless child’s prime defence mechanism and can enable the child to endure trauma that would otherwise be catastrophic. The unfortunate consequence is a wholesale dulling of emotional awareness. ‘Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression,’ wrote the American novelist Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March; ‘if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining.’
Intuitively we all know that it’s better to feel than not to feel. Beyond their energizing subjective change, emotions have crucial survival value. They orient us, interpret the world for us and offer us vital information. They tell us what is dangerous and what is benign, what threatens our existence and what will nurture our growth. Imagine how disabled we would be if we could not see or hear or taste or sense heat or cold or physical pain. Emotional shutdown is similar. Our emotions are an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus and an essential part of who we are. They make life worthwhile, exciting, challenging, beautiful and meaningful.
When we flee our vulnerability, we lose our full capacity for feeling emotion. We may even become emotional amnesiacs, not remembering ever having felt truly elated or truly sad. A nagging void opens, and we experience it as alienation, as profound as ennui, as the sense of deficient emptiness.”
At 19, when I was deep into using methamphetamine, I had trouble feeling. I think I’d had a lot of anger as a child that I quickly realized didn’t make me very popular with others so I shoved it down. But suppressing the anger had the effect of suppressing all the emotions. When I entered adulthood, I felt wholely numb. This drug created a high and euphoria that relieved me of the oppressive numbness.
“Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.”
It can be difficult for many of us to get the healing we need because we’re stuck in this “my parents did the best they could” narrative. It’s okay to not hate your parents and still acknowledge how they may have caused harm, even if inadvertently. My parents are very kind people who have so many wonderful qualities—qualities that helped me heal and become the resilient person I am today. However, due to legacies of inherited stress and trauma, there were limitations to the nurturing they could offer. This stunted my development in some ways, leading me to find relief in hard drugs when they were presented. I also self-selected, unintentionally, friends who were just like me. We had overlapping wounds so we found each other, which is beautiful! However, it meant that at least one of us at any given time had some drugs on us that we all could use, so for a while we really kept each other stuck.
“It is impossible to understand addiction without asking what relief the addict finds, or hopes to find, in the drug or the addictive behavior.”
I just wanted to feel something and to feel less itchy in my skin. I constantly felt irritable. Part of this was having a high sensitivity to sensory input such as clothing textures and lighting. Another part was not having been modeled great self-soothing behavior from the adults around me most as a child. Folks in my family are much more likely to grab a beer or a glass of wine than journal about their emotions. Children absorb these implicit behaviors and internalize them.
“The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past...Mindful awareness can bring into consciousness those hidden, past-based perspectives so that they no longer frame our worldview.’Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present…Until you reach that point, you are unconscious.’ …In present awareness we are liberated from the past.”
“long-term distortions” = you guys…I felt PSYCHOTIC after healing this shit. I had invented all sorts of weird, grandiose stories to avoid the truth about my suffering. I talk about that more in this podcast episode, I Saved My Family and All I Got Was This Participation Trophy.
“The difference between passion and addiction is that between a divine spark and a flame that incinerates. Passion creates, addiction consumes.”
Addiction is not a special interest. It’s a total escape from your life and the things and people who need you.
“Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer. Along with our ability to feel our own pain go our best hopes for healing, dignity and love. What seems nonadapative and self-harming in the present was, at some point in our lives, an adaptation to help us endure what we then had to go through. If people are addicted to self-soothing behaviours, it's only because in their formative years they did not receive the soothing they needed. Such understanding helps delete toxic self-judgment on the past and supports responsibility for the now. Hence the need for compassionate self-inquiry.”
Self-soothing is something I still have to focus on, otherwise, I’m back to negative self-talk. I love Kristin Neff’s teachings in her works on Self-Compassion.
Not ready to read the book? Listen to Gabor on The Diary of A CEO pod/videocast.
Cracked Up
I produced a conversation between Dr. Maté, actor/comedian Darrell Hammond, filmmaker Michelle Esrick, and Jane Stevens as part of the Cracked Up: The Evolving Conversation series. You can rent that amazing conversation here. Scroll to the bottom of the page. It’s Ep3.
