THE ROOTS OF ADDICTION

Part 1

The Roots of Addiction

Your essential self is perfection. You are essentially one with Source, or love, or light—whatever word you use for divinity. Even before you knew language, you came into this world with absolute connection to the ultimate power of the universe.

This is a core truth. It’s the truth we are born with, the truth that makes us whole, gives us a sense of connection, a sense of peace and harmony. But in the process of living we often forget this core truth, and we lose our balance. We lose sight of who and what we truly are.

In Part 1 of this course we will consider how that happens. We’ll consider how addictive behavior works in the context of our search for love and connection. We’ll look at the root causes of our addictive behaviors: unresolved trauma, spiritual disconnection, and toxic shame. And we’ll start to examine what we can do when our addictive behaviors no longer serve us, when they become compulsive and begin to hurt us and close us off further from what we truly seek.

During our early life we began making agreements. Our parents rewarded us when we did what they wanted and they punished us when we didn’t. We also learned behaviors and habits in school, church, and from other adults and children on the playground. The tools of reward and punishment were often emotional and sometimes physical. The impact of other people’s opinions and reactions to us became a very strong force in the habits we created. In this process we created agreements in our mind of who we should be, what we shouldn’t be, who we were, and who we were not. Over time we learned to live our life based on the agreements in our own mind. We learned to live according to the agreements that came from the opinions of others. In this process of domestication, it turns out that the choices we make and the life we live is more driven by the opinions we learned from others than one we would choose on our own.

― Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements