I’m not sure there are any addictions that are, at bottom, mentally based. It seems to me that all addictions that I can identify are, instead, located first in the body, as the repeated and buried childhood trauma of some kind; these buried memories then get cathected into the mind, where a conceptual layer is formed to cover and disguise the original crippling pain.
In general, I would say that the stronger the addiction, the more powerful the hidden pain, and sometimes — as with theological, and/or philosophical, and/or political disputes over dogmatically held beLIEfs — the more powerful the hidden pain, then the more cemented in the conceptual helmet that we wear to both keep the outside out and the inside in — or rather, down, under, buried, where (we think) it belongs, “out of sight, out of mind.”
Now that psychiatrist Gsbor Maté is becoming a strong figure on the world stage regarding his views and experience of addiction —
— I offer here a set of 4 pdfs detailing my own inner work with addiction, all from the still yet unpublished MY SECRET LIFE: Ten Tools for Transformation of the Self (1997). In this volume I wanted to let others know how I “do it,” without therapy, without medication, without anything except my own inner guidance which so far, in all my 76 years, beginning 50 years ago when I was 26, has proved to be utterly flawless. So grateful!
https://www.exopermaculture.com/2018/05/18/ak-reader-secret-life-1997-chapters-11-14-body/
