I’m sorry your son is struggling and I also honor your struggle but you get to be educated so you can love and care for your son with skill and without stigmatizing him, or marginalizing him.
“Addiction, properly understood, is neither a disease to be cured — though it has aspects of a disease — nor a problem to be eliminated. On the contrary, addiction is the individual’s attempt to solve a quandary. Before we can address addiction, this simple fact must be understood.
What is the problem that addiction is meant to resolve? As the Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards wrote about his own heroin habit, it can be a search for oblivion. He writes of “the contortions we go through just not to be ourselves for a few hours.”
Why would a person long to escape themselves? Because, as a result of their life experiences, they are intensely distressed and may feel trapped within their situation.
To put it another way, all the addictive substances (and addictive behaviors) soothe pain or at least distract from pain. Specifically, abusive substances like opiates are powerful painkillers, both physical and emotional; as is cocaine; as is alcohol.
Hence, the question is not why the addiction, but why the pain? And, again, the answer resides neither in genes nor in “choices,” but in the lives and experiences of the addicted.”
Source: Compassion4Addiction
“Treatment must begin with an acknowledgment of the fundamental problem the addiction is attempting to resolve in the person’s life. In other words, what needs to be explored is not what’s wrong with the addiction, but what is “right” about it. Addicted people already know that their habits are body and soul-annihilating, not to mention socially nihilistic. They require validation, not for the way the addiction wants to meet these needs, but for the fundamental needs themselves.
Of course, an addicted person’s needs are the same as what all humans need: self-acceptance, relief of pain, peace of mind, social connection, and a sense of power and place.
Treatment, thus, should explore how, in a person’s life, these needs were not fulfilled; why that person developed the belief that only through particular substances or behaviors would they be met: or what, in other words, created the susceptibility.
Here we have to recognize that no substance in itself or by itself is addictive: most people can use most “addictive” substances (e.g., alcohol or opiates for pain relief), even repeatedly, without becoming addicted to them.
The next question is: how do we help people legitimize their needs without having to resort to self-harming and self-defeating habits. The treatment of addiction needs to be devoid of moral judgments, blame, and ostracizing — either of the addict or their family members, or of their addictive behaviors. As the spiritual master A.H. Almaas writes, “Only when compassion is present will people allow themselves to see the truth.””
Source: Compassion4Addiction
