Why Addicts Sometimes Want to Destroy Themselves

 Why would someone whose life is already falling apart keep making things worse? In this episode, Doc Jacques explores one of the strangest parts of addiction — the urge to keep digging when you’re already in a hole. With some straight talk and a little humor, he looks at the mindset that can drive addicts toward self-destruction and why understanding it can be the first step toward change. 

Transcript

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I'm again for Dr. Jonathan Addiction Lifeguard Podcast. I am Dr. Jonathan Burford, a psychologist, licensed professional counselor, and addiction specialist. You are suffering from addiction, misery, trauma, whatever it is. I'm here to help. If you're in search of help, try to get your life back together. Join me here at Dr. Dr. Addiction Lifeguard, the Addiction Recovery Podcast. I wanted to be real clear about what this podcast is intended for. It is intended for entertainment and informational purposes, but not considered help. If you actually need real help and you're in need of help, please seek that out. If you're in dire need of help, you can go to your nearest emergency room or you can check into a rehab center or call a counselor like me and talk about your problems and work through them. But don't rely on the podcast to be that form of help. It's not. It's just a podcast. It's for entertainment and information only. So let's keep it in that light, alright? Have a good time, learn something, and then get the real help that you need from a professional. Sometimes addiction reaches a place where the addict stops trying to win, trying to stop. They stop trying to fix things, they stop trying to improve their lives. Instead, they quietly begin to tear everything down. They tear everything down, their relationships, their careers, their health, their reputation, sometimes even their own survival, and they die. And the addict often knows they're doing it, but they just keep doing it anyway. So that's what I wanted to talk about today is why do addicts sometimes self-destruct, even though they seemingly don't want to. It's it kind of comes down to the what's the point moment. Um there's usually a psychological shift that happens when they get to that point. It's the moment when they they they say to themselves, What's the point? I've already ruined everything, I might as well just keep going. What who cares? It doesn't matter anymore. This is one of the most dangerous places in addiction because once hope disappears, self-destruction begins to feel logical. And that's a crazy twist that happens. There's a there's a thing that can occur um in addiction where there's this there's this shame spiral. Addiction addiction kind of runs on that shame. Um it's one of the things that many times people feel when they're in the worst of their addiction. It's it's not guilt, it's shame. And guilt says something different than shame. It's guilt says I did something bad. Shame says I am something bad. And so that's what I hear from a lot of my clients is there that shift that occurs where they start to see themselves as the bad thing, not it's something they they did. Um if I'm already the problem, then why pretend to be otherwise? It's almost like the surrendering you see them them do. And it's once they believe that they're fundamentally broken, that's what starts to take hold. And that belief fuels the self-destruction cycle. If you've ever been in that place, and I'm hoping that somebody that's listening to this might relate to this, and maybe this changes their lives. The strange comfort of hitting bottom. I've been there. I've been there, I spent years there. And one of the darker truths about addiction is that the bottom can become very familiar. It was for me, and it's it is for a lot of my clients. They just so are so used to being there. When everything is falling apart, expectations disappear, responsibility disappears, pressure disappears. You just kind of fully surrendered to what the enemy wants you to do, which is to be at that bottom. Because you can't be um lifting yourself up and be uplifted and be in a place where you're gonna be in a good place. You're right, you got to be taken down, you gotta be held down, you gotta be down to that rock bottom. And the addict sometimes feels a strange relief from that because there's there's nothing left to lose. And they can't they they can just keep the cycle going then. Um you know, if you've ever been there, and I I certainly have been there a few times in my life where it just it just nothing matters. It didn't matter anymore. And and that's when, again, I think the enemy really takes a good, strong foothold in your life. What happens is there's this emotional numbness you get. So when somebody has been using long enough, the emotional system begins to be exhausted. They're not even chasing pleasure anymore. Pleasure of, you know, getting high isn't even fun. It's, you know, when I was drinking, drinking was no longer fun. It was a chore. It was it was this thing that I was exercising to feel like I was in a better place. So you're not even really chasing it anymore. You're chasing the numbness. You just you don't want to feel anything. And that's the thing that that makes it so it's difficult for people who have don't have addiction to understand about addiction. When the when the the goal shifts, because you're not feeling guilty, you're not feeling pain, you're not even thinking about the future. The future doesn't matter. It's just what can I do right now? The substance becomes the off switch for your consciousness. It's not something that happens consciously, it's like this unconscious thing, but it becomes the off-switch for your conscience. And the conscience is what tells you, look, this is wrong. It's like wrong doesn't even factor into it anymore because you don't feel any guilt. There's, you know, you and and that's the thing that non-addicts don't understand. Because when you drink or you do, you if you were high or you're you're getting drunk, you would get to a point where you're like, oh, this doesn't feel good anymore. That's not even part of it. So this numbness kicks in, and it's a real it's a real problem to to try to remove yourself from it. So even even when you're at your worst, you there's gotta be something that maybe there's a little glimmer of hope of like, but there's gotta be something different than this. What's interesting is there's this kind of strange place that addicts get to, where there's this hidden desire to be saved. Even in the middle of self-destruction, most people who have addiction still very quietly think, maybe someone will stop me. Uh, they might they might push people away who try to do that. They may lie, they may sabotage help, but they want somebody to stop them. When I was at my worst, I remember thinking um, as I was just getting just blind drunk, that maybe somebody would notice and somebody would finally step in and say, Hey man, this isn't worth it. Ironically, when people would, I would push them away. And it happened several times in my life where people were trying to say, Hey, there's a better way. And I would say, ah, you don't know what you're talking about, you know, just leave me alone. But underneath underneath all of that, there is often a small voice hoping someone will still care enough to intervene. And so that hidden desire to be saved is still there. It's just how loud is that voice? And usually when people are at their worst, it's not very loud, but it is there. So there's this moment of truth where every addict eventually reaches a moment where they they see their life clearly. Um that moment is the moment where they've lost or they're about to lose something that was very dear to them. Sometimes it's a hospital bed or a jail cell, sometimes it's losing a relationship, sometimes it's just looking in the mirror and you can't even recognize that person that's staring back at you. And then it's in that moment, that awakening, where that that addict is gonna say, Is this really who I am? Where you say to yourself, Is this really who I am? Um the change that occurs with that is something that can make the difference in life or death or freedom or incarceration. Unfortunately, that moment uh sometimes is where the damage is the worst. So that moment of clarity is where the change can become possible. So you've kind of hit this this crater of of your life. Sometimes, and if you if you're an addict, you understand this, that crater uh is a very large crater. In other words, it's very it's it's got a it's it's very long, it's it's very wide. It's not deep necessarily, but it's wide. And so that crater can be something that you're bouncing around in for a long time. That's what we refer to as like hitting bottom. And maybe your bottom has a bottom and has a basement, it has a sub-basement, and it has a parking garage underneath that. True. But the other part of it is that moment of clarity is where that change can happen. When you're in that hospital bed or that jail cell, maybe that's the end for you. Like I can't, I can't do this anymore. So there's a truth about this cycle of of what happens in those moments. And addiction, the the enemy convinces people that they are beyond saving. I see it all the time. They the enemy wants you to believe that you are not redeemable. Because once it gets a foothold in your life, it's going to keep it trying to enlarge that foothold larger and larger and larger so that you see yourself in that place where you're just not worth saving. But that belief is part of your disease, it's part of the the problem. But that's the leverage point for the enemy. It wants to work its way into your life that way, get you to believe the nonsense of you know, self-esteem or self-destruction, or you know, harming other people, or maybe, you know, maybe you find yourself in prison or jail. And like, okay, you got two years or five years or six months or whatever it is. And it's like, this is what my life's become now, this is what I am, and then you surrender over to it. But this is this is the brutal truth. Um, recovery almost always begins with one thing honesty. The moment that addict finally says, I can't keep living like this, it's at that moment there's there's an opportunity for change. And I've talked to to a couple of people recently who suffered with that and they just felt like they weren't sure where to turn or what to do. And I'm like, Well, you gotta let things go. You gotta let things go. You gotta find a way to allow yourself to have that opening in your life. It's very, very difficult for people to uh uh to let something go in the processes of surrender. Um, I felt like because of my background and my family, especially with my father telling me that I was worthless and I wasn't gonna amount to anything and that um you know I wasn't intelligent, I remember I never forget the time he told me I was not even very articulate. Um, that can be a devastating thing for a child to hear. And so you begin to take on those traits. So if you were treated as if you were not worth time or effort or care or emotion from your parents, if you were taught that you are less than by your parents, if you were ignored, what in the world do you think is gonna happen when you get older? Well, you're gonna take on I'm not worth much. Consequently, then you're gonna surround yourself with people that see you as not worthwhile. Uh, you're you're not worthy of their attention. And so you go for emotional scraps uh at the at the table of emotion. And that's gonna lead to a lot of self-destruction. It's just a repeating of the message over and over again. Or if you were brutalized as a child, either physically or sexually, you're going to think that that's that's what you're worth, or that is your value. And so then you go out and repeat this with these horribly destructive relationships where you're getting uh hit and yelled at and punched and tortured in that way, or maybe you're just constantly getting sexually assaulted because you keep hanging around with people that that's their that's their power that they feel is when they do that. And so you get in these very destructive relationships that are very um uh harmful to you. So you learn through these responses of uh or these experiences, and you respond to it by continually seeking destructive uh affirming messages that that is what you're worth. So your your bottom can look different than the person next to you. But the self-sabotage thing, that is a thing that occurs when you know possibly there's a time when somebody says, Hey, I do cherish you or I do consider you, I do want you, I want you to be around, I I like who I see, and you can't believe it, you can't accept it because you've been programmed to think that you're not worth that, you're not worthy, and that's a lie. And the enemy works in weird ways in that way, because it it wants you to accept the destructive message, because that's you know, it's gained a foothold in your life in that way. So fighting your addiction means that you have to then work towards giving something up, and so that's where that process of healing occurs, when you're willing to give up the the thing that has plagued you. The enemy looks for a foothold in your life, and then it wants to find a way to destroy you, because destruction is the enemy's purpose. So if you're looking at a relationship that you have in your life, and the relationship is harmful, destructive, uh the person is abusing you in some way or neglecting you, whatever it is, the five forms of abuse. Um sexual abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse, um, abandonment. Uh wait, and there's another one in there. Um, I'll think of it in a minute. If that's what's happening, you've got abuse, uh you you you're gonna that's that's gonna leak into I don't feel good about myself, and the cycling of you're not worth attention, you're not worthy of attention, you're not worth me spending time trying to help you. And so all the healthy relationships you have in your life, they end up drifting away. And that's you pushing people away. Because you when you're asking somebody to help you, but you're you're emotionally distant, you're you're pushing them away, how are they gonna help you? And so then you're like, it just reinforces that message. So then the self-sabotage starts starts kicking in. But as I said, underneath that, there's still gonna be this small voice of like, hey, I'm I'm not I'm not you know, less than somebody somebody can come along and help. So when you're at your worst, and you're curled up in that ball, and you're drinking as much as you can possibly drink before you black out. That was my method, um, what what's gonna happen to you is there's gonna be this tragic end, and all hope is lost at that point. So you either die from alcohol poisoning, or you aspirate your own vomit, or you get behind the wheel and you crash it into a car, into a tree. But everything's gone at that point, and that's not retrievable. Like that's the end. So when you're at your worst, here's the here are the signs. I don't care. Nobody cares, nothing else matters. Responsibilities, I don't feel anything, I don't feel any expectations, I've let everything go. That's an invitation for the enemy to come into your life and finally take you out. Recovery is about fighting that. Recovery is about saying, I you know what, I can't do this anymore, I'm not gonna do this anymore. It's the ending of that cycle. But trust me, when you are curled up in that ball on the floor, and nothing matters, two things can happen. One, you surrender to that, and that's the end. Or two, you finally turn yourself over. In other words, you are gonna let go all of your misery, all of your pain, and you're willing to let it go. I'm not gonna feel the pain anymore, and then you get healed, and you begin the journey of recovery. I'm not saying you're praying it away, because I don't really believe that can really ever happen. I know there are many people that would disagree with me and say that I, you know, I prayed and God lifted this temptation from me. Yeah, but you had to work up to that point. And what kind of suffering did you go through before you got to that point? Uh, I don't think it's I don't I don't necessarily agree with the idea that, you know, you had this epiphany and this moment of clarity and boom, you were changed. I think you went through a lot of suffering to get to that point, and you were willing to let the suffering go, and that's how you got changed. I really believe that. I do not believe that somebody who is not in that place and hasn't gone through that suffering and hasn't been opening themselves up and willing to offer up what they're suffering from is changed. I think you take that opportunity to get changed, and you invite through prayer for that change to occur. And uh, you know, the the other thing that's kind of funny the enemy works against us in weird ways, comes to us in pleasant ways, dressed well, sounding nice, sounding inviting, not terrorizing us with, you know, these monsters with horns on their heads screaming at us, or you know, that's that's not what the enemy wants to because you run away from that, right? That's scary and horrible. Uh it comes in a nice, inviting way, a pleasant person who says, Come on, you can do this, you can have one, it's not going to be a problem. And they sound very convincing. Well, okay, so the temptation is there, but when you're at that place where you just don't care anymore, you know, you've given up that hope, it's hard to it's hard to come back out of that. It is hard. But so the the I guess I I kind of lost my point there. So the the point of it being when you are trying to figure out how do I get to a better place, it is a letting go of what you've been experiencing. And literally, for some people, it means walking away from everything that they have experienced. People, place, position, something, something has allowed a foothold into your life. For me, it was people. Um, and the lie of isolation and self-worth. That was what created that foothold in my life that uh had me spinning so far into just utter darkness. Some people, it is uh the belief that they are only valued because they are a sexual object. Um I have treated people that were uh, you know, in the pornography industry, sex cam girls, prostitutes, strippers. I I've had them all in my office. And that is unfortunately 100% of them that I've ever encountered were sexually abused or horribly emotionally abused as children. And the result is that they think that their self-worth is tied to somehow how they look or their sexuality, and so that gets exploited. Well, that's the enemy working in your life right there. That's it, man. Um, so you might have to walk away from anything and everything you knew to get away from it. If it's if it's uh, you know, a group that you party with, if it's a group that uh, you know, you're a member of some organization and that's a destructive organization, you might have to leave that organization. And uh it's a it's a problem. You know, in the biker community, you have a uh an outbad, um meaning that no nobody in your club that you were friends with, maybe for 15 or 20 or 30 years, will ever speak to you again. They're not gonna talk to you, they're not gonna look look at you, you have to walk away from everything. And so now everything that you had is gone. And uh you you leave and they don't want you to leave, that's what's going to happen. And that can happen with families too. Maybe you're in a family that that has, you know, everybody everybody has an addiction problem in your family. Um and you just can't be around them. That might be the case. You know um what are you going to do? Well you're going to lose a lot but you're going to gain a lot in the end. And that's that's the key is what are you going to gain? So when you've gotten to that place where um you feel like you've lost everything you you've it's it's there there's no hope. That's the change point. So if you're listening to this and you you feel like you're at the bottom you might actually be closer to the beginning of that change than you realize. Because the bottom is where illusions disappear and sometimes the first honest thought an addict has is in the years i or in years is simply I need help. And that thought can change everything. I need help. That might be the first time you've been honest with yourself I in my office when people come in and they are at the bottom they begin to realize they're they they they can change. Like I fill them with hope but it's not false hope. It requires a lot of work a lot of introspection the introspection is one that leads to the change. But for me especially as a Christian um God working in your life is is really gonna make a huge change. Many people don't believe in God I understand that many people believe in God but they think God doesn't believe in them. I understand that too many people have been uh tortured or traumatized by religion. I get that too I understand it. I understand all of that but really the enemy wants your soul so think about that. Like the enemy wants your soul are you going to give it to him you need to change and that I need help moment is all you have to say and you have to say that to the right person in the right situation like coming into my office and saying I need help. You don't know what it looks like you don't know what it feels like you don't know how to do it. Yeah well that's because you've never tried and that's not your expertise. You're an expert at an at addiction you're not an expert at recovery. So you just have to ask for the help. I need help. That's it go into the rooms go into an AA or an NA meeting or raise your hand and say I need help. Just say that and that will begin the change. But do something don't let the enemy win well that's it for this episode of Doc Shock Your Diction Life Guard. I hope you've enjoyed this episode if you have subscribe give me a like send me a message let me know and if you want to support the show you can do that hit the support the show button at the bottom of your screen and if you need help hey you can reach out to me you can reach me through my website Wellspringmindbody.com and send me a message let me know what your needs are if not and you're in a different country you've got a lot of countries listening out of the United States hey listen go get help go get a counselor go into rehab go to the hospital do something go to some meetings but do something so in the meantime thanks for listening this is Doc Shock your addiction lifeguard saying see ya