I shared a lot about personal feelings of deep utter emptiness, that comes many many years.
And the link that is made with addiction.

I am 37 and single.

Here is a quote from my writing today:

I read a book last week about how to break free from addiction, by some dr who has a rehad centre with great results. The dr isn’t Christian. However, it is still worth taking note of his insight as he himself is a rehabilitated addict.

This dr believes that there is a certain number of people, about 10 % of the population who are born addicts. He says so, because he describes these people as having a certain gene composition that makes them prone to feelings of deep emptiness. In order to make life bearable, they turn to mood-altering substances to help them cope.

This group is also prone to keep on grabbing for coffee, chocolate and sugar for their effect on mood.

Addictions specifically addressed in this book includes nicotine, alcohol, drugs, prescription drugs, food related, workaholics, exercise madness and even compulsive helpers. One can also make of a relationship, sex or love an addiction, where another human being provide the mood-altering effect to help you cope. Perhaps this is why some people can never be out of a relationship and are so desperately “needy”. These people turn to these things to help them feel better.

According to him, the problem is often wrongly diagnosed as depression or ADD, which it isn’t. In fact, he is totally opposed to antidepressants to such a person, because it just changes their addiction to something else and it is even worse to detox from antidepressants than from heroin.

Antidepressants dull your senses and feelings. Who wants to go through life numbed? That’s not the answer.

He describes this group of people as sensitive and creative.

He continues in his book to explain how when merely taking one of these people away from their mood altering substance through rehabilitation, can lead to the “dry drunk” syndrome – where the person is made to live with the emotional emptiness pain without help which is really terrible and so bad that he often finds himself back with the addictive substance without being able to really help himself. Just to cope.

He also explains how these “addicts” tend to always want to find problems in their past or their childhood or upbringing in order to help them make sense out of this, but the dr. explains how that is not helpful. Sometimes councelling and inner healing is necessary, but this dr also has a good point. Addicts often comes from broken homes, for the addictive tendency in the genes often breaks up homes, but it is according to him more the consequence of addiction, not the cause, and he gives examples of many people who came to him for rehab that had very loving and stable upbringings.

In addition, the book also explains that addiction is also a “disease” of emotional isolation and he describes how most heroin addicts die alone, and isolated.

I personally understand this and can identify with all this so much. I am extremely grateful to this dr for giving me so much insight into this. I myself knows what it is to have this constant desperately empty feeling. At times it is so bad that I literally screamed out to God to help me. It’s like at that moment nothing matters but to find relief, it is so intense.

I am also deeply thankful for the Christian loving home I was brought up in, the Christian community I was sheltered in during my youth and to God who protected me, for had I fallen into the wrong hands and had been exposed to drugs at young age I dread to think where I would have been now, especially if I did not receive His Spirit at a young age..

I grabbed for relationships with men that could touch me and hold me to help me feel better. And it did. Except that all, except for one (whom I lived with for 5 years) were themselves so unstable and broken that their issues, insecurities and own addictions caused such turbulence that the relationships became destructive every time and the “fix” I needed from that to help me cope with life came with so much additional pain, that eventually the original emptiness pain was even better than the pain experienced within the relationship.

Today I realise that that was a form of idolatry, and a type of addiction, and it wasn’t wholesome relationships. Their effects were probably in a way as destructive as a food addiction or even an alcohol addiction.

PS: Idolatry is when anything or anybody else but God takes centre stage in our life, and we feed from that glory and not from Him. It is what Jeremiah 2 is talking about “Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be ye very desolate, saith the Lord. For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water”.

I was a Christian when I moved in with the man I lived with for 5 years. I knew it was condemned by other Christians but I always justified it. To me, while I was with this man, who held my hand as often as he could, constantly cuddled with me, called me his princess and never ever were harsh to me, I felt my love tank filled enough (physical touch is my love language) so that I did not have to live with that terrible disabling, tormenting, immense emotional pain. He was like a drug to me. And when I think back, I was like one to him also. We almost never faught. Our relationship wasn’t deep. We couldn’t one afford to break what we had between us because we needed it. I needed it to cope with life. It was like my drug. In those years I excelled at work and also did my masters degree. Evenings we would be like care bears, cuddled up with one another, even when we went out to restaurants. His touch calmed me and nurtured me in a way.

In my mind I thought, how could God want me to leave this and go back to the constant state of pain?. Even in Christian soaking meetings as we had in 1994-1996 I still experienced this pain.

After 5 years God spoke incredibly strong to me about this and I left this man to pursue God in obedience and holiness. Why we didn’t marry? He did ask me eventually, after I decided to leave him, but he had fears for marriage after his first one failed. But then I didn’t want to anymore. I knew we were spiritually disconnected, and God mattered to me most. Yet this was a big thing to give up.

As I am older now, I can see how this was not a healthy relationship. It lacked in dept and in content. Our connection was our mutual addiction, which we channeled and found some relief in the arms of one another and in loving behaviour. But is that love? Today I think differently.

Yet, I am less “religious” today and I can even understand why God allowed me to be in that relationship. When there are only two alternatives at one point, God in His love will sometimes allow the less destructive one, but always keep on luring us to the ultimate solution.

Enough about me now, back to the addicts…because of the obsession of the addict just to find something to help him feel better and to make life bearable, he often doesn’t plan ahead properly and does not have the capacity to focus on personal growth in the same way as a non-addict. Life skills are thus often lacking, and alarmingly even more so after somebody totally surrendered to some destructive addiction and comes back to real life after a rehab session.

So with the rehabilitated person who now lost his crutch in life, he has to now deal with it in an even more crippling way, not having the skills required, and having to deal with the emptiness as well. No wonder most fall back over and over again.

I spoke to the father of the heroin addict I spent some time with recently, and I discovered that his son also had been through one rehab after another, costing his father astronomical amounts of money, and every time falling back. Such a sweet, intelligent, handsome young man, of 38 years old, coming from an apparently solid home, and with all the opportunities for him, having had even a distinction in final year for one of his subjects, and with such a likeable personality and phenomenal leadership qualities – such a beautiful and rich life he could have had, but instead he wasted his life away with heroin, spending many nights in the inner city of Pretoria, sleeping on the street, injecting himself with heroin, which he bought with somebody’s money which he either stole or lied and deceived to get it.

(Note: we have been wrongly informed that somebody becomes a drug addict after taking it just once. You need to take it for a rather long time and at regular intervals for it to become addictive. Just taking it up to 3 times a week, even for many years, will not make a person an addict. An addict is somebody that found in this a way to cope with life, and chose to start using it extensively and so became hooked. It is rather easy to detox from it also. It is the mood altering effect as a crutch that brings the “addict” type person back to it. Millions of people have used heroin, have become drunk, have overeaten at times, but that didn’t make them addicts. We are talking about something that is deliberately grabbed at as a crutch – and so becomes an addiction, as more and more needs to be taken in order to bring the emotional relief from the already existing emotional pain)

Just a few days after that I met another father, who lost his son of 30 years old, due to him being murdered in the inner city, after he was going out to get his next batch of heroin. This fathers story is identical almost. Rehab after rehab and every time he just fell back again.
The father almost started crying when he showed me the funeral card of his beautiful talented son, who worked two years in London with remarkable achievements before coming back to South Africa where he was killed last year. The father is a beautiful Christian man. His dairy shop is filled with bible scriptures and Christian slogans and the presence of God can be felt in the place. This young man surely came from a very good and balanced home.

He was addicted to heroin for 15 years. The other one for the last 20 years, on and off. And his friend, whom I also met (but not his parents – I don’t think they are still alive) had been on it for 9 years. He (this friend) had to send back his wife and little baby to her parents, for he couldn’t look after them anymore and found himself also living on the street, craving and living only for his next “fix”. A beautiful Christian young man, who believes in Jesus with all his heart, had been to many Christian camps. A Christian heroin addict this friend is – sounds like quite a contradictory term doesn’t it. At least he didn’t lie to me, he was the one that told me honestly and openly that they are heroin addicts and that they stole money from my purse and that he felt so bad he could barely sleep afterwards. I think he is ready to break with his habit, but the other one not.

So, why am I telling you all of this? Because the problem is bigger than we think, and needs to be treated holistically.

From my side however, I did find a “cure”. It is only the presence of God that takes away that deep sense of emptiness in me and makes life bearable. But one also need to trust God to do it. Heb 11:6 “But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him”.

I cannot control God however. But I find myself drawing away to a place of hiding in Him. Where I can focus on His presence and draw from Him.
I do that so often.

Mostly I don’t talk much with God. I just connect with Him. Its like when you bathe in the sun and you just let the rays fall on you, so I draw near to Him and allow His presence to calm me and fill me and His love to surround me….and then the emptiness subsides.

I have noticed how my heroin addict “friends” become when they start having withdrawal symptoms. They become extremely anxious and restless. I feel like that when I come out of God’s presence. Sometimes after just a few hours I have experienced similar “withdrawal” symptoms and then I need to run again to a place where I can focus on God in stillness and “drink” from Him. Perhaps that is why I spent so much time alone in my room and look for freelance type jobs where I can work from home.

The presence of God has become like a type of drug to me. The way I find life to be bearable.

I also find relief when I focus on helping others, carrying their burdens, counselling them and praying with them, especially if their problems are very deep and involved emotionally. But I must guard against becoming a compulsive helper (another type of addiction) – for then again something else apart from God becomes ones life source.

I also find that when I am clinging for God’s presence, in such state of neediness, then I can’t read books, even not the bible (apart from just a few verses). It’s like when somebody is drowing and reaching out to a rescuer, you can’t give him a book to read. Or explain to him strategies. When I need emotional rescuing I need a strong dose of God’s Spirit, I can’t feed my mind with information at that point. Helping people takes me away from my pain and also help me to focus on something else, and is like therapy to me.

When I find a challenging assignment I can also get a rush from that which can suppress feelings of emptiness, so I can understand how workaholism can also be a coping mechanism.

But I need something always challenging work-wise to give me enough rush – and yet again, when that becomes my source again I am into idolatry.

God wants to be my all.

I find myself so dependant upon Him, as I get more a realisation of how all other things I cling to and run to in order to make life bearable for me and to help rid of the emotional pain of deep emptiness, are just variations of idolatry. God wants to be my all sufficient One.

In a sense I find it frustrating at times. For God works on His time and not mine. And sometimes I would want to be able to show more for my life, but my heart and spirit is like on a chain with Him, He has become my source like heroin is to the drug addict, and I just can’t live without His presence.

It is so sweet when I feel like He surrounds me. It feels like bliss. Life can be how hard and problems can be how many, but when I can sense God’s presence like this it totally calms me and satisfies me deeply.

When I sense that, I often say thank you. And when I had it consistently and long enough I sometimes forget what it is like without it. When I lose it again, it is like I freshly appreciate the delight thereof, when I find it back again. I really can not live without God. I can easily live without doctrines, without church, even without a bible, but I can not live without the sense of God’s presence.

Yet sometimes He is silent about what is going to happen next.
Sometimes I don’t know how the finances will work ( well, lately I really don’t).

He is in control, I am losing all control, and I really have no choice, for I can not survive without Him.

I need Him, I need His presence 24/7 and when I start striving, I lose the sense of His presence, and it is just too painful.

Can anybody understand that. Perhaps to a person that has never experienced that it may sound like utter madness.

Amie