50 ways TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

One of the wonders of the world of addiction is just how wrong so many people can be about so many things. And by this, I don’t mean the kind of wrongness you get from the culture in general about the nature of addiction — though there’s a lot of that — I mean the way the addicts themselves are so wrong about the very nature of their existence.

Because to pursue an addiction, you must be deeply convinced that what you are doing is basically right for you — so when you get to the other side of it, and you realise that it was actually very wrong for you, it is an astonishing discovery.

I have heard this most clearly from compulsive gamblers, perhaps because they can put an exact number on the scale of their misapprehension — in recovery, a former gambler can look back on days in which he would be gambling sums of ¤30,000 or ¤40,000, and be amazed that he had somehow lost whatever sense of proportion he had, on such an astronomical scale.

Indeed, not only had he completely overlooked the fact that you can do a lot with ¤40,000 in the normal run of events, he had been sure that betting such vast amounts was, in fact, the really smart play. In these moments when he was at his most deranged, he thought he was absolutely right — that he couldn’t be more right about anything, than about this bet of ¤40,000 on an obscure tennis match.

Likewise, the retired drinker can be flabbergasted at the level of self-delusion in which he indulged for so long, a time during which he felt he was calling most things right about life in general.

This, indeed, is probably the biggest difficulty in the treatment of addiction, the fact that, on the whole, you are dealing with people whose entire view of themselves and of the way that they have been in the world, has been sadly mistaken.

And that is just the

“Our sense of who we are and what we’re doing here is more fragile than we admit”

beginning — I mean, if you could be that wrong about betting absurd amounts of money on horses, or about the appalling nature of your drinking, what else were you wrong about?

My own view is that addiction tends to greatly exaggerate something that is there already in many people who have no problem with addiction at all — that most of us are more ‘wrong’ about things, than we rightly understand.

Often, we will look back and wonder why we used to like the music we did, or hate the music we did, when we have now revised our opinions and corrected these errors of judgment — but then, maybe we’ll eventually revise all that too, and realise we were right the first time?

Or we are mystified that we liked some of the people we did, and avoided some of the people we used to avoid, when we have come to realise that we were unwise in that area of decision-making, too.

What we need to accept is that we are far more changeable than we believe ourselves to be, that our sense of who we are and what we’re doing here is more fragile that we care to admit.

Our tech overlords are working on this, incessantly enabling our minds to be filled with badness and confusion, pushing at so many open doors. They know that people can be fed these ugly certainties, these horrible absolutes, because often, when we’re wrong, we won’t realise it until it’s far too late.

And if they can get us addicted to their products — as they have done with such diabolical success — they can throw anything at us, and enough of it will stick.

Human vulnerability did not start in the year 2000, but there are more ways of getting at it now, and twisting it, than ever before. There are more ways of misleading people who are already going in the wrong direction. Indeed, you could say that there are 50 ways, but you’d probably be wrong about that, too.