The Main Cause of Alcohol and Drug Addiction

This is the first of a three part series based on the upcoming book, "Recovering Reality - Alcohol and Drug Addiction Causes and Cure."

Think about this very common scenario - a person completes detox and treatment and a few months later is once again using alcohol and drugs. The physical side of addiction is removed so why did this person return to using alcohol and drugs? After all the destruction alcohol and drugs has wreaked in a persons life - the broken relationships, the job and financial losses, legal problems, health issues - here they are returning to alcohol and drugs. People are perplexed at the seemingly unnatural behavior exhibited by the person trapped in addiction. But it actually makes perfect sense when you understand how our personal core belief systems manipulate our thoughts and feeling to create our experience of life.

What the heck is a core belief system? We all have a personal core belief system. It is as vital to our life as the major organs of our physical body. Our core belief system is what generates our motive emotional life force and the filter through with we experience life. A belief is a deep conviction that a person feels is absolutely true. Our core belief system is the container for all of our vital beliefs about ourselves and the world in which we live. It interprets the events of life that we encounter and returns an emotional bundle of thoughts and feelings that drives the decisions and actions we take in life. The key point is that our behavior is directly related to the feelings and thoughts bubbling up from our beliefs system. For instance, if someone treats you disrespectfully, you most likely will feel anger and contempt which is what will drive the actions you take in response, etc. It is our feelings that are the main driver of our behavior! Thus, the cause of the self-destructive behavior that goes with addiction is found in our personal core belief system.

Your core belief system communicates with you through what I call an inner parent. When you were a child your relied on your human parents to provide for everything you needed to survive and thrive in life. They made your important decisions for your life, fed you, protected you, and nurtured you. The human parents are literally God to a young child! They are the all-powerful beings on which the child's very life depends.

When you became an adult you still needed these important services once provided by your human parents. Your personal core beliefs create the inner parent that you need to leave your human parents and begin making your own way in life. Our inner parent's main job is the same as our human parents' was when we were a children - to protect, nurture, and help us grow to our full potential in life.

Like the human parent's to a young child, this inner parent is god-like in nature because we give it our absolute faith and trust. It's power comes from the fact that it controls the thoughts and feelings that create our conscious experience of life. It is what defines the most vital relationship of our existence - our relationship with ourselves! Thus, our very lives depend on the inner parent-god that is running our inner world. There is no such thing as an atheist at the level of the our core beliefs!

But what if your inner parent has become abusive? What if your inner parent is totally untrustworthy and is constantly deceiving you about reality? What if it is has convinced you that you are a bad person and don’t deserve good things in life. What if it calls you despicable names and tells you that you are a failure and will never amount to anything good? What if it has deceived you into believing that you are so bad that it is impossible for another person to truly love you? What if your inner parent constantly threatens you and tells you it’s OK to destroy your life with alcohol and drugs? If your human parents were this abusive, they would have been locked up and replaced with better parents!

When your inner parent is this abusive life seems very threatening and dangerous. Fear, terror, anger, and rage dominates your emotional world which produces a constant train of conflict, rejection, and failure. One day you take a drink or drug and all that tension and emotional pain disappears. You actually feel good, connected to life, and hopeful for the future. But the next day, the painful emotions that define your normal conscious life reappear. So you use alcohol and drugs again, and again, and again. You use as much as it takes to get that relief from the emotional suffering caused by your abusive inner parent. But this leads to giving your abusive inner parent more power and control over your life because using alcohol and drugs leads to behaviors that cause even more conflict, rejection, failure, and shame.

The cause of addiction is the constant emotional suffering created by an abusive inner parent at the level of our core belief system. The relief first felt when using alcohol and drugs is what hooks us to using ever more alcohol and drugs in the vain effort of relieving the ever growing emotional pain that using alcohol and drugs creates.

The essence of the spiritual cure for addiction is to fire your abusive inner parent and replace it with an inner parent that actually cares for you and has the ability to restore you to vibrant life. When you place your faith and trust in the right inner parent your experience of life transforms such that you no longer need to use alcohol and drugs to feel good about life.

How do you replace an abusive inner parent? Stayed tuned for part 2.

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