We recently wrote about a thoughtful video from Johann Kari where he asserts that everything we know about addiction is wrong. Our experience tells us he’s right and if you haven’t already done so, please go watch it.
Among the most interesting of his thoughts is one that goes to the core of why Delta Recovery exists. Kari says that we shouldn’t even call it addiction and I can’t stop thinking about this.
The Oxford Languages Dictionary (via Google) defines “addicted” as, “physically and mentally dependent on a particular substance, and unable to stop taking it without incurring adverse effects.” In its present use, that is certainly a useful and accurate definition. But has the word always meant that?
My wife and I love to look up etymologies. We find it endlessly amusing to learn about how words came into our lexicon and have evolved over time. It turns out that while we use the word “addict” as a noun, it began its life in our language in the mid-16th century as an adjective meaning to be bound or devoted to someone or something. It wasn’t until Shakespeare used the word in Henry V that the meaning slowly began to evolve into how we use it today.
The word that now conjures up images of the town drunk or the strung out guy in a ditch used to mean to be devoted to another person, a notion that brings to mind Valentine’s Day cards and has been the inspiration for more art, poetry and song that perhaps any other subject. Oh, how fitting that is. The word addiction has always meant to bond. It’s what the addict bonds to that has changed over the last 500 years.
The end of a person’s active addiction – as we currently use the word – is often marked by the ones who love the addict the most dramatically altering the bonds that they have shared for their entire relationship because the addict is now incapable of truly bonding with anything other than their drug(s) of choice. Far more often than you would imagine, the addict will continue to bond with their drug and walk away from someone that loves them.
Humans will bond with something. I believe almost all of us yearn for deep and rich human connections but in the absence of that, we will always bond with something. For many of us, myself included, we bonded with a substance and it cost us connection.
Recovery is about restoring those connections. It is relearning the value and meaning of those connections, making amends for the ones we’ve broken and spending the rest of our lives nurturing relationships so that we don’t fall back into bonding with a substance. Delta’s entire program is about relationships; culling out the dysfunctional ones, building new bonds and strengthening bonds with loved ones who may have set some boundaries during our active addiction, but loved us anyway.
Maybe we are calling this disease by the wrong name. It’s just bonding with the wrong things. Recovery is about bonding with the right things.