The Rev. Joseph Farnes
All Saints, Boise
Proper 9B
As part of my counseling degree internship, I’ve been working with folks at the county drug court. I work with individuals and groups around substance use disorders: for some it is primarily alcohol, for others methamphetamine, for others opiates like heroin or fentanyl.
For much of history, substance use was a “moral” problem, that it was strictly a choice, a choice that the person who was addicted kept choosing. In the 20th Century, in some ways our view began to change, to embrace more of a medical model. Substances affect our brains, and our brains are responsible for our behavior, and our brains love patterns and habits. The brain’s dopamine circuits get out of whack. Our brains and our bodies get hooked – and thus we find it harder to choose what is healthier for us.
Of course, the “moral” view of addiction hasn’t gone away. It’s still impacting how we treat drug addiction. We pass heavy sentencing guidelines for certain drugs to show we’re “tough” on drugs. And then we fill our prisons and jails with inmates, we make it as miserable as possible (while also making sure that private prison contractors get plenty of government funding) … and then we are surprised that people still just circle back into prison. Making people miserable doesn’t keep them from choosing drugs … so maybe “choice” isn’t really what’s happening. Something has messed with their ability to choose.
So what makes someone choose to use substances in the first place? Very rarely is it about “fun.” It’s about covering up pain inside. Childhood trauma, abuse, assault, neglect are incredibly common. Substances become the coping mechanism that shoves away the pain. It might numb the pain, might help someone run away from the pain in busy-ness, might disconnect them from the world and their pain.
When I’m working with someone in drug court, it’s not just them in the room. I’m never really having a one-on-one session. The room is filled with others: their addiction, their substance of choice, their trauma, their shame, their grief, their fear, and all the voices of all the people who have hurt them in the past. When I’m trying to help them in their healing, I have just an hour or two to work; they walk out the door, and all those patterns, all those thoughts, all those feelings abide with them every other hour of the day. It’s why it’s more than just “choice”.
But we’d be mistaken if we think this is only about addictions and drugs. All of us are this way. All of us have experiences from our past that still reverberate in our heads. We all have pains that have impacted us, and we all have those ways of coping that we cling to.
Some folks grew up with a hypercritical parent – and that parent’s voice is always present with them. Their self-esteem is about perfection, or about fixing everything … because that hypercritical parent’s voice is always criticizing them, and so they have to be perfect or make it all right. Perfectionism and “fixing others” is about trying to quiet an angry inner voice that makes them miserable … and perfectionism and “fixing” make them miserable and exhausted, but it’s the way they learned to try to quiet the voice. It’s what their wounded childhood self had learned in order to cope. This coping skill, like a drug, soothes in a way even as it harms more deeply.
And no priest, no counselor will have a voice louder than that inner voice that makes its presence known throughout the day. And that inner voice will sometimes get even louder when it’s pointed out. As a priest and as a counselor, I’ve watched it happen in real time – like in a movie where the bomb squad cuts the wire and the timer gets faster and faster – and boom! That inner voice’s energy explodes outward. It hurts, as a priest, feeling that explosive burst. But that inner voice, that inner pattern of behavior presents itself as so strong that it’s a virtue, not a hindrance.
This voice, this pattern of behavior, this habit has been reinforced over decades and decades – and our brains love habits. This way of thinking, this way of behaving has been around for 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years… what will it take to change something that is harming this person, and harming the folks who love them?
Jesus goes to his hometown – and they reject his teaching. The people who knew him disparaged him and rejected him. “Who is he, this young whippersnapper? Does he think he’s better than us? Does he think he knows something? How dare he!” And Jesus sends out the apostles – to towns that will be as hostile as they will be welcoming. They would rather keep the way things are than change and grow in the Gospel.
Do we blame them? No. They are just like us … they are us.
To change is to let go of things that we have clung to for a long while. Do we cling to perfectionism to protect our sense of self? Does our self-hatred spill over – do we imagine everyone else hates us as much as we do, or do we snap at them like a wounded animal? Do we cling to an image of being deeply spiritual when we feel a hollowness inside? Do we cling to work and busy-ness to keep us running from an inner voice that says we’re never going to be good enough?
What we cling to, we will have to let go. We have to let go of them so we can see where we are really hurt. We need to look into our pain. What is it that hurts? What is it that we are afraid of? What makes this pain so powerful in our lives, so powerful that we’d still choose coping strategies that make us and others so positively miserable?
Like St Paul, we need to look at the thorn in our side. “A messenger of Satan” he calls it – and Satan, in Hebrew, means “accuser.” Centuries later, we still wonder what that means. I wonder if St Paul had a deep pain to his sense of self. Maybe he grew up thinking he wasn’t good enough, or was unlovable, or was only valued for what he knew. Maybe he was abused, and decades later he still bore a wound of shame. The wound doesn’t go away – there’s no magic that makes that pain go away.
But Paul looks into his woundedness, looks into his pain, looks into whatever it is that hurts deep inside. And he hears Christ: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”
We’re all struggling with something. We all are. That very thing you struggle with, someone else here or watching online also feels. And Christ’s grace is sufficient for you, for me, for everyone. Much like how cravings rarely ever go away completely for someone in recovery, these thoughts and feelings rarely ever go away completely as we heal. They show up, they still try to get us to go back to a pattern that makes us and others miserable. They poke us hard in our wounds to get us to react. But we don’t have to invite these thoughts in to stay, we don’t have to invite them in to tea. We don’t have to react the way they want us to. We can try to choose, in that single moment, to do something better for ourselves and for others. “One day at a time” as they say in AA. I won’t fix my sense of self in a day. I might not ever be “fixed” or cured from these negative thoughts. But you know what? As Christ says, “My grace is sufficient for you.” Yes, it truly is.