I have dealt with addictions on every level from every direction, from myself with food, or online gaming, to loved ones with alcohol and even drugs. The one that has affected me throughout my life were loves ones with alcohol problems. It has brought me a lot of hardships and pain that I still deal with today. It's one of the major reasons I prefer not drinking. I do in moderation and it was only recently (in my thirties to be exact) that I ever got sick from it or had a hard time recollecting what happened the night before.
So with close friends and family dealing with their own hardships concerning addiction, it brought up some very recent memories of what I recently overcame in my personal life along with some philosophical and even emotional discussions with my husband.
Where, do addictions come from? What compels us to be addicted to something? From experience, it is usually to numb us or make us forget about some past pain or maybe not to deal with the difficulties that come with life. We cover it all with something like booze, weed or getting lost in a time consuming activity like gambling or gaming.
That's what brings us to our destructive behaviour. The addictions create more problems to pile on top of the first problem that brought you to the addiction in the first place. The problems can range from neglect of your children to rampages of anger, to which you have no idea where is comes from. How ironic that we hurt others because we hurt.
This is where my analogy of zombies comes in. Instead of the concept of "baggage" or "skeletons", I replace it with zombies.
Zombies in all of this do exactly what they are created for, they are something that comes back to haunt you after you thought it was long gone, dead and buried. They can attack you, infect you, terrify you, make you angry and make you feel hopeless about it all. They come in all forms, from the small to big, from the recent to the decrepit, worst of all they can be loved ones. If I lost you in this analogy and you are imagining The Walking Dead, to simplify, zombies = pain/trauma/avoidance.
So how do we deal with zombies? Eventually we have to face them and get rid of them anyhow we can. It's scary, it's ugly, painful and hard. It's a dirty job and there is no way to avoid getting your hands bloody and your body bruised in the process. Sometimes we want to give up because we allowed the zombies to overrun our place.
So if you're holed up in your little safe zone and you figure you can ignore all of it, you're wrong, because sooner or later you'll have to open that door, get past the zombies to reconnect with the ones you love who are still there waiting for you on the other side.
It's a painful process, repetitive and full of hard decisions but you have to remember in all of this. You chose to stay stuck in that pit of zombies and allowed them to horde around you, suffocating you and it's up to you to clear them out, no one else can do that job but you. Your loved ones may have tried and got badly hurt in the process.
Continue to hide from it all and sooner or later you become a zombie yourself. They exist right now in our reality. They are those poor souls who turned away from getting clean, they are the people you see on the weekends all wasted after binge, they are the parents who neglect their children because they would rather do their "thing" than to care for their children, they are the neighbours that you see beat each other up in the street. It can easily be you or me.
So the question is, are you a zombie? No? Then do have zombies to face? If you said no to the second question, you are in denial. We all have zombies to face. I face down mines because I love to live zombie free.