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Violence...It's an Addiction

When most of us hear the word “addict” and the accompanying word “addiction,” we often feel some sort of uncomfortable charge in our system, largely because of our own life experiences with and around addicts and addictions. Here, I would like to take the charge out of those words by coming to an agreement about what addiction means. In my life, any ego solution that is not in my best interest that I use to relieve my own unresolved emotional pain, when repeated, is an addiction! 

There is one fundamental truth that all addicts know at the gut level.  We hate emotional pain!  I invite you to consider that “normal” people cannot stand it either. Emotional pain is an energy field in our operating system (between our throat and our solar-plexus). It can be called a “pain body.” The pain body is a negative energy field, a discrete, invisible entity that occupies, often seems to possess, our bodies and minds.  

This pain body could be pain that we had with us upon our arrival; energy junk, trauma that may have settled in us as an inheritance, a residue from our forebears, a family gift. We may call this our innate pain body. The innate pain body forms the basis upon which all emotional pain can continue to accumulate. As we aged, our conditioners (parents, etc.) and our dysfunctional society often controlled us by feeding more emotional pain into the system. In our nascent years (pre-cognitive, mostly pre-sentient), we were incapable of resolving the energy of those feelings. We kept them in our system as viruses…pain bodies. 

As we aged, we begin to experience the dance of the hungry pain body. This is so for all of us. All energy needs to be fed in order to survive. The pain body is a negative energy field that ebbs and flows in our system. It requires food that is of a like vibration. That is the law of attraction. It cannot resonate with and digest positive, joyful, life-enhancing energy. When the pain body emerges, it says, feed me! 

The nearest source of pain to feed the pain body is found in our minds. The mind, thinking that it has plenty of negative thoughts about life to satisfy the hungry beast, says, OK, here’s some energy food. The pain body gobbles it up. The mind’s pain supply is limited. Eventually the mind runs out of food. The pain body says, Feed me!! I’m still here, and I’m still hungry! We then need to look outside of our body for energy that is vibrating at the same relative frequency. Remember, the pain body cannot feed on positive, healthy vibrations. When we forage for energy to feed our pain body, we often need to create the energy. We create or bring up pain in others to feed our pain body. Anybody within our energy field will do. More often than not, we turn to family, friends, loved ones or co-workers as victims. The resultant pain, often manifesting as verbal or physical violence severely damages all relationships. It certainly disrupts peace and joy. 

Curiously enough, once the pain body has had enough to eat, it in effect belches, and then goes into a dormant state. It will come back later for another feeding. We all know the dance of the pain body. What we are left with after the feeding is the enormous havoc wreaked by our opting to dance with the pain.  

The prime directive of the pain body as fed by the ego-driven mind seems to be the generation and maintenance of emotional trauma in the host. The host would, of course, be you and me. 

When we try to resolve that pain with any ego (mind) solution, we never experience permanent or even long-term resolution. Examples of ego solutions, which often are not in our best interests, are:

  • drinking alcohol
  • ingesting psychotropic drugs (prescribed and non-prescribed)
  • smoking
  • eating
  • gambling
  • VIOLENCE
 

When these “solutions” become excessive and repetitive, they are called addictions. The solutions often lead to even more emotional pain.

 
  • All addiction is caused by unresolved emotional pain. 
  • All addiction is addiction to the ego!
 

While certain substances can be physically or psychologically addictive, addictions are also emotionally entrenched habits we have unconsciously created in an effort to avoid having to feel unresolved emotional pain.

 

The addiction is not the problem. It has merely served as the toxic, ineffective, often destructive method for dealing with the problem of unresolved emotional pain…until the addiction itself becomes the problem. That is why traditional treatment has often been only partially, temporarily effective.  Most traditional treatment programs, including those involved in stopping violent behavior at all age levels, tend to focus on the addictive behavior, not the problem.

 

One goal of The Freedom Step is to heal the real problem rather than treat the symptom.  The difference between the two is that:

  • With treatment, the situation remains the same, that is, the treatment goes to the addiction.  Whereas,
  • With healing, the resolution is elicited by changing the focus to the underlying cause of the situation.  The resolution brings about the absolute removal of the cause.
 

It is one thing to prescribe medicine for high blood pressure.  It is quite another to bring about changes in the patient’s life so that he stops being angry and tense.

 

Awareness of this is essential. If we treat only our chemical or psychological symptom, we are avoiding the real problem. We then relapse into our primary addiction “of choice.” If that is physical or psychological violence, everyone in our personal community immediately suffers and the cycle continues.  

So how do we address and “heal” the causes of addiction (past/present emotional pain) so that the symptoms (addictive behaviors) may be eliminated completely? 

 

The Freedom Step came into existence as a vehicle to bring healing to all who suffer from unresolved emotional pain.  That would include virtually everybody on this planet. The primary mission of The Freedom Step is to enable the participant to take the critical consciousness step out of the bondage of ego-driven, unresolved emotional pain into the light of Pure Awareness, our essential nature. The Freedom Step introduces us to our own instinctive anti-virus.