Every addiction is heart’s effort to fill inner hole that requires love

By David McElroy · May 12, 2018

It’s easy for me to be disdainful of your addiction, whatever it is.

I don’t want to admit that I sometimes feel this way about others, but it’s true. I’m probably just being defensive, because disdaining others’ addictions is a good distraction from dealing with the core issues involved with my own.

People are addicted to all sorts of things. Alcohol. Gambling. Sex. Shopping. Other recreational drugs. Television. Gaming. Social media. The list is endless. It seems as though almost anything pleasant can be turned into an addiction.

For me, it’s food, especially sugar. I keep myself overweight and sluggish when I’m unhappy, all because I’m pulled back again and again to the bizarre compulsion to eat when I’m not hungry. At the heart of the matter, it’s not about taste or gluttony or brain chemistry. It’s all about the need to find the love and understanding and security which I’ve never had.

I prefer not to think of this pattern as an addiction, but I can’t deny the truth. After a conversation years ago with the late Tim Baer, an alcoholic friend who had been sober for years, I realized that our patterns and our compulsions were the same. He had found a path that worked for him to stay sober — through Alcoholics Anonymous — but I’ve not yet found a way to stay away from the ice cream aisle.

I’m not an addiction expert — and I’m sure some with real expertise would disagree with my amateur thoughts — but I see all addictions as being attempts to fill an ugly inner hole.

We all have a need for love and security. We feel a need to know for certain that someone loves us unconditionally and won’t leave us. People who have that inner assurance will never know addiction. Those of us who don’t have the assurance that we have those things will always seek them until we have them. (And one of the most infuriating things about it is that we will often push it away when someone offers it, because we’re scared to believe it’s real.)

You can end up with this need for a variety of reasons. Maybe you felt abandoned. Maybe you never bonded with one of your parents as a child. Maybe there was nobody in your childhood who accepted you and loved you unconditionally. Maybe a parent died before his or her time.

But whatever your specific cause, the pattern seems similar. You feel a need and an inner craving grows. Because you don’t understand what you need — since this comes from a deeper place than the conscious mind — some unconscious part of you chooses a substitute.

You might learn that you feel better — or at least numb — when you drink alcohol. You might feel some relief when you get the thrill of gambling. You might feel some relief when you overwork yourself and get praised for your success. You might feel it when you have sex over and over, as often as possible. Or you might end up numbing your feelings by stuffing yourself with food you’re not hungry for.

The immediate feeling is one of relief. For a moment, you don’t feel so bad. But then the need is back. You still feel the same desire for something you can’t name.

And worst of all, you feel a deep and abiding sense of shame. You feel ashamed that you aren’t “good enough” for someone to love. You feel ashamed that you can’t control your addictive behavior. You feel ashamed about various consequences of your behavior.

I’ve never met an addict who didn’t experience some version of these effects. I’ve known people who were in denial about what they felt, but I’ve never known anyone who didn’t suffer from the same core needs.

I know what my needs are, but I don’t know how to get them met.

When I was a child, I didn’t have a mother for much of the time. It took me many years to recognize the enormous hole that was left in me by her absence. I felt lost and unloved because she wasn’t there.

I never could be good enough for my father. I could never do enough to get his approval. He taught me that it’s sometimes worse to have a bad parent there than to have a loving parent missing. His presence and emotional abuse were the most damaging of all for me.

As an adult, I like to think I’m rational and that I consciously control my actions, but I know better. I’m still a child who’s eager to find love and understanding and approval. I’m desperate — and I can’t understand why I haven’t been “good enough” to have someone give me the love I need.

There are various approaches to healing addiction. Different people strongly believe in whatever worked for them. Some are advocates for the AA approach. Some favor what they consider scientific approaches. Some favor drugs or psychological counseling.

For me, I know only one thing which works. When I find a healthy and loving relationship, I stop craving food that I don’t need. When I’m feeling loved, I quit eating when I’m not hungry. I start dropping excess fat and I feel better — without any real effort.

For me, it’s all about love. When I have love, I feel emotionally healthy and balanced. The voice of shame inside subsides. I feel warm and satiated. I feel good enough.

I’ve come a long way in understanding this mess. That understanding doesn’t fix everything, but at least it lets me know what I need — and it lets me recognize other people who suffer from the same unmet needs, whether they recognize those needs or not.

One day, I’ll share the love I need with someone — and the shameful need in my heart will finally be satisfied for good.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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