Need Anxiety Relief? These Substances Work

Unless they recover, alcoholics simply cannot stop taking the first drink. Why? Because alcohol works. It dulls the pain of corrective conscience every anger-ridden individual experiences. If it didn’t work, neither the problem drinker nor the alcoholic would ever have developed the obsessive need to wash, rinse and repeat his problems away ad infinitum. Food works too. Sex works. So do drugs like nicotine, cocaine, and opioids… they all work. 

There are certain kinds of behaviors that can be just as effective too. Yoga, religion, people-pleasing. Each of these are as addictive and effective as the other, typically taken in varying dosages. Actually, any psychotropic activity or substance that stimulates the pleasure-reward circuitry in the brain, will work—which is how they fast become what we recognize as addictions. The problems is that what seems to be a true solution, never is. 

A fixation with any of these fixes is what keeps angry folks forever-plagued by bad habits, vices, anxiety, and fear, all symptoms of underlying resentment. The become astonishingly difficult to break. Suppress one and there is an immediate compulsion to pick up another. Surely you’ve noticed that virtually all alcoholics and drug addicts, in addition to their primary issues, also struggle with food and sex. 

Do you remember when AA’s were made fun of because although they had given up booze, so many had become ardent chain-smokers? Clearly the underlying problem sending them to exploit substances had not been resolved. Now that society at large has pushed smoking so far out of fashion, many sober AA’s are now obese and reliant on prescription antidepressants. Food, drugs and sex have replaced the alcohol, but also the nicotine. The cause remains. 

Here is why this is so. Through resentment and ensuing emotional reaction, anger, all alcoholics have become intertwined with a Self that resides within them. The term popularly used is that they are beset by the “bondage of self,” a slavish state displacing allegiance to their Creator with obsessive loyalty to the Ego-entity. This is the very noticeable and classically selfish nature that characterizes the personality and lifestyle of the alcoholic or drug addict. 

As It continues to use the human host to play God, a rising pain ruthlessly drives the individual toward whatever solutions are most available to him. It could be anything, as long as it relieves the agony of the pained conscience that never fails to follow the sin of playing God. In essence, he becomes a slave to Its sin, obsessed with finding relief. 

The answer to an alcohol obsession or any addiction problem is to first give up anger—all unrecognized resentment. This is to forgive, and to forgive, which means to stop playing God, IE. stop judging others and the world. Do that, nothing more, and the facility to regulate behavior automatically returns.

Alcoholic consumption, obesity, and their deleterious effects can be statistically tied to economic downturns, media agitators or catastrophic events. That’s only because people do not properly deal with the inconveniences of loss or with others who disagree with them. 

Alcoholism in communist, socialist, and other authoritarian regimes are much higher than they are in western civilizations. The level of anger is much higher. There is a wholesale rise in emotional upset. They resent it. Then that bitterness produces guilt and carbohydrate foods like alcohol and sugar are abused—to numb the pain. They’re emotional anesthetics. And they work!

This is why so many Americans are dying from being fat, drunk, drugged and obsessed with sex. Give up the anger and POOF!—the need to abuse all goes away.

Can you see now why Alcoholics Anonymous famous 12-Step method works so well? It’s because their program doesn’t treat symptoms. Instead, it zeros in right on the cause—resentment. It’s all about resentment! Not harms reduction. Not changing environments. Not religion. Not counseling. Getting free of anger triggers a spiritual awakening. That’s how it’s done. Then immediately the obsession melts. The vicious cycle is broken and the ability to regulate returns.

Now, some people would say, ‘WAIT! You make it sound like some sort of psychology.’ Wrong! The 12-Steps is a spiritual approach, not a clinical one. Resentment is not a psychological phenomenon. It’s a spiritual phenomenon, attendant to a brokenness within, who by playing God through emotional judgment, becomes upset, irritated, and infected by the unrecognized low-grade temptations toward bitterness that get inside us, feeding a Dark Entity.

Resentment feeds and nurtures the Lower Self, a metaphysical Entity residing within that rules the thinking of every, unconscious, God-separated individual. Get free of anger and gain mastery over resentment, and you do not reach some imagined psychological parity. You become emotionally neutral, conscious—a spiritually whole and healthy human being who can look the world in the eye without fear or the need for substances and behaviors to manufacture a sense of worth.

Resentment is a metaphysical phenomenon going to all spiritual infection within. This is why I am so supportive of the 12-Step approach to finding God for alcoholics and addicts. It’s all about dealing with resentments—past ones, future ones as well as those that threaten right now in the present.

It’s how to stop playing God and let Him in so that the alcoholic becomes His agent. There is no inventory of Selfish Acts—but there is one of past, present, and future resentfulness. Spiritually awakened, ex-problem drinkers and drug addicts don’t distract their way out of their dilemma. They give up anger. Then they’re lifted out of it by a loving God. They lose their selfishness, becoming useful to God and mankind. All in that precise order.
It’s a miracle called being RECOVERED.