Addiction consumes addicts with the need for substances that alleviate emotional and physical pain and or mental challenges. Non-addicts can be just as conscious of addiction in our attempts to dissipate addiction as well as the substances that feed it. While no one knows if they will become an addict until they start something, there are things that are happening in all of our lives that fracture people to the point that they will search for relief wherever it may be found. Of all the apples that the snake uses to lure us into hell, the most poisonous one is known as SHAME. The toxicity of the best friend of the snake is so intense that it can bring down whole forests when a single tree merely takes one bite. In fact that distress is so deadly that it can stay living generation after generation after generation while spreading from one tree to one forest and on to the next. It loves everyone equally as it works to hide or remove the parts of heaven in each us to the point that hell is all we can see and feel. It is rarely seen but is felt so deeply and expressed so intensely that it can bring even the strongest to their knees. That pain fuels jealousy, denial and justification as well as judgement while encouraging everyone to live in illusions of perfection so that no one sees that we are each, in part, made up of hell. That affliction is the plague on this earth that creates lies, anger, hatred, bullying, self-loathing, disgust and the abuse of ourselves as well as others; emotionally, mentally and physically. It is the creator of emotional definitions that are so defeatist in nature that it is virtually impossible to eradicate them; children are especially vulnerable. We can all feel guilty at times but it is the velocity and ferociousness of shame that creates such an emptiness in our souls that it helps addiction to find its beginning. It’s the whispering voice in our minds and hearts that tells us that we are inadequate in comparison to others and dangles heavenly expectations just out of our reach. With or without our conscious knowledge, that degradation breathes when we do and slips out of our exhalation, our words and into the air for others to breathe in. It loves our dreams so profoundly that it will fight us to the death for each and every one of them. If everyone on the circle of heavell is doing the right thing, shame would never have the capacity, the strength in this world to create such devastation. Tricks are not just for drugs, substances, people, places or things but are the tools that the snake uses to destroy each of us. The strongest chain that binds all of us to hell, even to addiction, is the apple known as shame as it tells us who we are and who we will never be; in our dreams and through our dreams. It is however not the real truth or even a green truth but a complete falsehood that can and does brutalize the lives of addicts and non-addicts. Happy people do not shame others but unhappy people do every single day; sometimes publicly and other times in secret but never for the good of anyone because it is the best friend of the snake. You should never be here.
To the victims of shaming and those who exhale it: In life every single person makes mistakes or behaves inappropriately at some point or is different or needs help or fails to know how to or repeats their normal or BLAH; the mistakes are how we learn. Shame will no longer have any power in this world when we work to overcome ours and then share with others how to change and improve by our examples. Just because you have survived yours does not mean others will or can as well. The use of humiliation is a reflection of the person expressing it and not of what others deserve; there is no excuse for it but there is an understanding of how it came to be. Despite what you learned, feel, heard or saw, substances, people, things, behaviors, denial, shame or BLAH will not remove your pain nor keep it from rising. What has been done cannot be undone. Choose to stand, today, while holding the hand of courage as well as the hand of fear. Breathe in brave because it lives in you in moments. Look in the mirror at you. You are a circle of heavell so seek out your hell and accept or change it but never deny it nor repeat the normalcy of it. Addicts and non-addicts are really very much the same as they behave today as they did yesterday as they will continue to do so in the future to the detriment of all. You know your heaven as well as your hell so you are the perfect person to love you. There is more to see but not if you bite the apples of denial, excuses, justification and especially the most poisonous one of all known as SHAME. Stop listening to the snake because he is not your friend even if he tells you he is.
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