Navigating Addiction through Soulful Anchoring
Navigating addiction can be painful, however, it is necessary to fully grasp the nature of our addiction moving forward. The?American Addiction Center ?defines at-risk addicts as people who have a combination of the following traits:
These seem to be intuitive, but it is curious to note the underlying set of factors in all of those traits. Navigating our addiction through the lens of anchors will help us re-structure our wiring into a more productive capacity.
Navigating Anchors
Verse 1 of the Hymn, “We have an Anchor ” by Priscilla J Ownes:
Will your anchor hold in the storms of life,
when the clouds unfold their wings of strife?
When the strong tides lift, and the cables strain,
will your anchor drift, or firm remain?
We have an anchor that keeps the soul
steadfast and sure while the billows roll;
fastened to the Rock which cannot move,
grounded firm and deep in the Saviour’s love!
By sick coincidence, this 100 year old hymn, is accurate. The underlying factor in at-risk personalities can be understood in terms of lacking healthy anchors. Unlike the hymn, which suggests we have an anchor in a reductionist, sky-daddy, emporer type god, our anchors should rest firmly in elements of healthy substance, so that it will hold in the storms of life.
An internal anchor can be understood to mean our emotional processing center (also known as the soul) located at the intersection of our most fundamental identity and our most fundamental value that produces a net narrative by which we navigate what happens to us in life.
Navigating Fundamental Identity
Personal deconstruction is still quite young in its’ rise in society, it is not a well defined idea. You can read more about it?here .
For our purpose here, deconstruction can be understood to mean the purposeful disassembling of previously established anchors for pragmatic inspection and reassembly into something effective and serving of our goals.
Our fundamental identity must be uncovered through the process of deconstruction. This can be quite tedious and lengthy if you are just getting started, however, rest assured that on the other side of this process is a less dramatic life of stability. You can start the process by finding a quiet place of your choosing, a cup of something warm, and tools to take notes. It is important to prime your mind for acceptance before continuing. This will set the tone for productivity.
Who we are is not what we have done. Who we are is not what we have said. Who we are is not associated with what flavor ice cream we like or whether or not we like to sky dive. Our fundamental identity can first be understood as simply…human.
But for many of us, this leaves us more empty than we started. Yes, we are human, however, what does being human mean? A better question is, what does being human mean to YOU. It is important to continually re-engage with this as it will inevitably change and become more focused througout your life as you keep exploring more of life.
The process of becoming more human is inherent to, well, being human. We have strayed away from this for far too long.
Navigating Fundamental Value
Navigating our addiction through anchoring must also include our fundamental value.
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Fundamental value can be understood to mean the point at which subsequent values connect and align to produce to our light. We often describe people with adjectives such as, “kind” or “thoughtful”.?The limits of language ?prevent us from reducing someone’s light to a singular adjective. However, it is important to try.?Our limited ability to focus ?should encourage us to reduce our internal elements to their most effective point, but not beyond that.
This is difficult to grasp because we tend to think of ourselves as so many things altogether, all at once. It is?worth giving a fuck about ?to engage in the practice of viewing ourselves and our narratives in their simplist form without compromising any necessary meaning.
So how do we identify our most fundamental value?
Take your notebook out and write down everything that you value without thinking. After this, line through the “values” that are redundant, or too similar to some of the others you wrote down. Take some time to then categorize the ones you have left in a tree. Try lining through any redundant or repetitive values again.
After spending some time doing this. Throw that paper away and do it again.
After completing this process a second time, take 3 values off the top and organize them into a triangle. Name this triangle. This is your fundamental value.
Navigating the Soul
It is worth perceiving the soul as our emotional processing center. This is the location at which all of life comes through and is filtered through our anchor to produce a net narrative about something.
It happens something like the following:
Bob grew up in a boring neighborhood in Phoenix, Arizona. Bob’s parents, while not around much, would tell him that he wouldn’t amount to much unless his grades were perfect. In fact, the only time Bob seemed to get attention from his parents was when he brought home poor grades, good grades received no recognition at all.
Bob had a group of friends that conveniently lived around the same neighborhood. After school, they rarely engaged in healthy habits. Rather, they would participate in things that provided an avenue of escape such as drinking alcohol.
Bob wasn’t particularly athletic or gifted, this was reinforced at school by many of his peers.
Bob’s first anchor was that his value was determined by his institutional performance. Bob then identified with the value of poor performance since attention, or confirmation of existence, was only given if poor performance was presented.
Bob’s second anchor was that healthy habits were not valuable. Social proof through his friends provided an identity in which he engages in valuing drinking as a means to add meaning to life.
Bob’s third anchor was that this was where he was supposed to be as someone ungifted and unatheletic. So any effort to change has never entered his mind, yet.
Bob’s net narrative was that he had no real value unless he played his role as a perceived loser.
Enter the Arena
It can be a painful process to start navigating addiction this way and admit that one never took the time to examine the narratives we have about ourselves. It is never too late to start. Navigating our addiction through this lens can be a powerful tool for change.
Did Bob become an alcoholic? Perhaps, perhaps not. But if experience can tell us anything, his anchors were ripe for the potential trickery of alcohol. There are certainly examples of young adults taking the reins early and overcoming such negativity. For those of us who have fallen into the throws of addiction, we must enter the arena if we are to produce change. Engage with our minds and with life through reassembling our anchors into a vessel for positive redirection.
Maybe you were Bob’s parent. Instead of attaching value to receiving attention for poor performance, you could have anchored in him that his value is immense simply because he is here and he is human, regardless of performance. Metrics have a time and place, but only when our context is healthy enough to pursue what we want.
Instead of finding meaning in unhealthy habits for the rest of his life, Bob could run into someone like you, who had already reassembled this anchor into finding pleasure in the consitent progress found in engagin in healthy habits. You could show Bob this by empathizing with his background first, then showing results in your own life. This won’t happen unless you get started, however.
There are many ways to map out the possibilities of how this could play out, but the point is it must start with us, here and now.