The self-centred Nature of Addiction

It is probably the most difficult aspect of the illness of addiction to deal with and to experience as a loving supporter. The illness of addiction is said to be rooted in self-centredness and so is an integral part and contributing factor to the continued destruction and unmanageability of life, both for the addict and those that are subjected to addict and their deteriorating life.

For any person suffering from addiction it is completely foreign to actually perceive life from any other perspective than a selfish one. During this weeks groups it has become very evident that this self-centred part of our identity is probably the hardest part to change even though it is clearly one of the most destructive parts of our selfs’.

As addicts we walk around often playing the victim, seeing the world as being unfair and feeling that no-one appreciates or loves us. We carry tremendous amounts of resentments from our past where we feel people have done us in, treated us badly and disappointed us. We are rarely able to see our part in any of the situations and certainly struggle to take responsibility for our part.

This unfortunately becomes compounded by the fact that as addicts we build our identities on attitudes of entitlement, grandiosity, arrogance etc. We believe we have the right too many things - we have the right to be supported, we have a right to be the way we are, we have a right to use and drink and cause damage. Even when we enter treatment we carry these same attitudes demanding everything we feel we have a right to.

It is amazing when we start to evaluate what our roles and responsibilities in society and our family should be, just how far away we are from fulfilling those roles. We have this belief that everyone is responsible for their roles in our lives but somehow find ourselves feeling that we don’t need to play our part. Putting others first and taking into account the needs of others seems so unnatural for us addicts. We simply cannot understand how the world could not revolve around us.

In order for us to achieve recovery we need to reconstruct an identity based on our defined roles and responsibilities within society and our families. As we begin to examine what we should expect from ourselves in terms of these roles we realise just how selfish we have been and just how much our recovery depends on us stepping up to the plate to fulfil these roles. If we can hang onto this realisation and shift our focus from being self-centred to person-centred we actually start to find our worth and purpose in life.

Reclaiming our rightful position and place in society requires that we step up to the plate and attend to our responsibilities. We have to begin to see our problems as minor as compared to the problems we have created by avoiding our roles and responsibilities. We have to get out of the self-centred victim mentality and start to realise that we have a lot of work to do to repair some of the damage our addiction has done.