As someone who works with people in some of their most painful places, it has become easy to see how people truly need understanding and compassion, no matter where they are in life.

From a starting place, following up to the posting the other day about pain, we have started to learn that pain avoidance includes developing “anxiety binding disorders.”  These can be eating to not feel anything, drinking and drugs do the same thing.  There are numerous “ABMS” and in most cases, they help. But in some cases, they outgrow their usage and in fact start to do us harm.

We all know about “moderation” but the effects of some ABM’s actually do damage to us and our ability to actually make any changes to our behaviour.  Some ABM’s alter our cells and their function from the very first moment we use them.  I will do other posts on addictions specifically, but the purpose here is to show that everybody starts somewhere with an ABM, but not everybody goes to the next stage of Addiction.

From this place, our own “guilt & shame” for our own avoidance behaviours becomes uncomfortable to feel, so instead of feeling it, we use another ABM called “judgment”. This keeps it external, focused on someone else and again, we don’t have to feel our own emotions.

Human behaviour is influenced by Biology, Physical Environment, Social Environment & What has happened in their lives.  That is true for all of us. It is how we act & respond in the midst of all of this that is different.

I will stop here today, but my purpose in this post was to highlight how we all do things to avoid feeling, but those “things” don’t always affect us equally.

So from this place of humanity & sameness, being open to what is truly happening within Addictions and the people involved, rather than judgment is a great first step, for all of us.