Addiction affliction

HuffPo has an article on addiction - and I felt to add my perspective to the underlying psychology of addiction.

The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think

Disconnection - FELT- disconnection from Life - from love, from wholeness - MUST seek itself everywhere at all times.

The core identity issue is that when our own mind is believed to be the cause of disconnected or loveless experience, then the pattern the results is a conflicted or split minded fear and guilt that then seeks protection FROM itself by looking ANYWHERE BUT where the pain and fear of invalidating hate and anger is, and thus displace itself in looking OUT and seeking answer OUTSIDE - away from where the problem is.

So a misaligned or untrue sense of self cuts off awareness of true, believes it is victim to events it cannot tolerate or control, and attempts to tolerate and control them as a split off mind by projecting them onto the Life of the world and onto others.
Substitutes for love that cost true connection, a personal sense of power that seeks its own while blind to the true relationship of Life-connection.
Addiction first begins with the compulsion to THINK as a persona-mask or shield of limitation and protection FROM a sense of vulnerability in fear of exposure as an unworthiness of living love. Of being seen or known truly or of extending true presence.

This view of addiction is revealing the device or template for the particular version of segregative and separated consciousness that seeks control over life individually and collectively and has culminated in the world that in a sense we have made that REFLECTS the addictive disconnect from Life - as a self-destructive blindness.

But the birthing into the physical experience does not HAVE to be templated as the disconnect of a fearfully or unworthily defined self. It is not hard-wired to our consciousness though it has been conditioned over millennia.
The addict in denial has generated its own version or definitions of everything in what to that perspective seem self-protective. These are what we call our psychological defences. But they are protecting the FEAR and the BELIEF in GUILT as if these were the FOUNDATION without which all would be a negative intolerable chaos.
BUT to actually LOOK upon this seeming foundation in clear awareness is to SEE that it s not YOU.
Opening a conscious communication in ones awareness of a true FOUNDATION in Life rather than ones own THINKING, initiates and supports and guides a life of reintegration that shifts to align and act out from a true foundation - a truly FELT foundation.
The re-integrative sense of self is one of an unfolding and shared existence whose meaning is in felt existence itself as the movement of sharing, of desire, of embrace or passion, in true desire.
For to truly live is to be truly you, right here, as this now. The now of the addict is sacrificed t GET away from what is defined as disconnect and invalid and thus disregarded except as a means to get somewhere else. There is no appreciation of the harmonies and qualities of all things as the richness of living excepting in conditions that are defined love - conditions in which one allows or permits relaxation into feeling connected. But even this is pervaded with attendant fears of change, of loss, of running out, of separation-fears. And often the association of being 'hurt by love' will prevent any real relaxation but restrict experience to the superficial and shifting, as if to be safe from feeling connected because it EXPECTS and associates that with PAIN.

The 'world' that results from persisting in an untrue and split off sense of self is insane, self destructive and tragic in its denials and deceits. But it is not HAPPENNING to you, it is a subscription service. One doesn't change an insane world by seeking to solve it OUT THERE, one pauses from insane entanglement to notice and OWN that insanity is operating as an out of true or fearfully defined sense of self. NOT using it to FIX yourself opens the perspective UPON it in which YOU can recognize inherited or conditioned CHOICES that operate against your true desire and so your DO NOT WANT THEM and allow your free imaginative natural being to uncover and move with a better choice.
This is not a blame or shame or negatively charged denial of the previous choice.
The attempt to control and coerce upon one's Life is the thinking that sets up the disconnect from the light of relational awareness - the Field Awareness - in which one feels and navigates within and as an integral aspect of a wholeness.
True thinking is in the Heart. Not emotionally masked agenda, but the communication that resonates and is relevant to what you know and feel to be true of you to the best of your ability in any given moment. The machine mind does NOT know or love you who are Life, but runs as a misplaced protection that CANNOT protect you and which overburdens itself in the attempt to manage what it is neither designed or capable of achieving. In releasing usurped functions to a felt connected Life, true function is restored. Healing is what happens naturally when true relation, communication and recognition are accepted. Love's response is to love's extension. Coercion is not the way. Willingness and self-honesty to joy are the way.
Thankyou for your attention.

Vicky McDonald commented to the article:
Having a sibling spiral out of control on drugs when he was a teenager and then dying from the same at 49 years old, I saw and knew to early in my life how drugs/alcohol ravage human beings. We tried everything to help him, loving him unconditionally, tough love, therapists, baker act, but mostly never, ever turning our backs on him and always telling him how much we loved him, but nothing ever worked, he used and drank himself to death, I do not feel their is one reason, genetically, physically, emotionally why users use... to me it is a human mystery that will remain unsolved for as long as life exists on this planet.

(I couldn't get this comment to post but here it is anyway)

No matter what anyone does, the power to choose is inviolate. In any situation one chooses the best or least worst option as one defines oneself in that situation or relationship.

The key word is defines. How does one define anything but as a sense of giving and receiving meaning. But we do not recognize this power is operating, but take for granted, and live out within, mutually agreed definitions, that are not necessarily true of us or agreed with by others.

The 'mystery' of free will is that it does not make sense to the need to make sense of everything in our own terms. But what cannot BE understood, then holds our mind open OR is used to lock them shut. I lost a daughter to suicide - or I have had the blessing of a beloved daughter who suddenly and inexplicably left. The mind can spin on everywhich way it can but it only goes round in circles.

My second daughter is 'special needs' and without guile of mental complexity and spoke sanity into our family when she said "we did not want Ellie to die, but she did".

We each have a deep sense of what we deeply WANT that may be deeply buried and treasured,  but we know when we feel deprived of it. Living a life in which one feels denied of core sense of unmet need may be unbearable. But amidst the unbearable is the opportunity to become aware of self-definitions that form our personality structure - or who we believe - and in that sense love - ourselves to be. There are so many ways in which I deny myself happiness by insisting it must come a certain way. Is it true to say we are all addicted to our 'self' until we wake from a perspective beyond it?