COLUMN: 'As a young boy I watched as my father slowly sank into alcoholism...'

As a young boy I watched as my father slowly sank into alcoholism, his personality eroding and his behaviour towards people becoming more belligerent and aggressive.

I had always thought of alcoholism as a disease from which he couldn’t escape, one that sought to entomb him in misery and us with him.

Over the years, as I gained insight, I understood that he drank to numb himself, to forget the crushing weight of reality and to escape his life and its shortcomings. Perhaps though, I should have looked at it differently.

He certainly drank to numb the pain he was in but he drank more to remember than to forget, to remember what it felt like to be carefree and happy, before the traumas of life left their wounds.

Trauma, you see, isn’t the blow that life deals, it’s the way it changes us, the residual baggage we carry as a result of life’s knocks in the shape of poor coping mechanisms, stilted world views, distrust, shame, guilt and fear.

It’s the inescapable negative emotions that trauma creates that linger because we never learn to put them down or to acknowledge them so that we can learn happiness in spite of their presence.

His addiction was not his disease. His addiction was a reaction to his lacerated soul, a way to quiet his demons that his body came to crave daily because the unhappiness never stops nagging unless we work at telling it to do so.

His addiction was a symptom, a physical marker of his soul’s torture.

This is the nature of addiction, be it alcohol, opioids, prescription pills, gambling or anything else that transports us, however briefly, to a place where we feel happy and this creates the vicious circle of addiction.

We go there to find happiness but our stay is all too brief and so we have to do more of what got us there to escape our misery but by doing that we invite even more until we fall in love with the misery in our hatred of ourselves and the constant unhappiness.

From boyhood, younger man and beyond until I reached the realisation of what I was doing, I behaved in a self-destructive spiral.

It was only much later I realised that the reasoning was that wherever I was headed it had to be better than where I came from.

How wrong I was as misery courted more misery and my relationships fell apart in the face of my own inauthentic and addictive behaviours.

Only by learning to look inside and be honest with myself could I ever have effected change.

Any one of us, looking for those moments of bliss where we are removed from our troubles and find glimpses of peace or joy and can only find happiness in those moments of escape, can think of themselves as addicted, it’s not just the preserve of the ruined body of the heroin addict or the gambler who steals from their employer or loses their home to debt.

If the unhappiness in us leads us to being controlled by escaping it then we develop an addiction but the unhappiness is the cause.

Overeating in response to unhappiness or shopping to excess with money you can’t afford in response to feeling bad can also be addictions.

We can become addicted to negativity, to the idea that other people’s lives are better than ours, addicted to judgement and envy where we measure our own unhappiness against someone else’s happiness.

All these negative actions result in externalising our unhappiness in an attempt to feel better and all of them prevent us getting to the root of why we feel the need to do them in the first place.

The addict looks for peace, for comfort and to escape their world and feel a positive emotion in response to stressors and yet that’s not a bad thing in itself. Don’t we all want peace and happiness and occasionally want to shut out the world?

To find ways of getting to a place of happiness and peace while being master rather than slave to our feelings is key.

We must look inside and find the root of our unhappiness and find ways to accept it, to let it go and to realise that if we want to we can be the architects of our own happiness, no matter the traumas, no matter the painful memories or negative feelings.

Through developing self-awareness and with help and guidance we can iron out the wrinkles or at least learn to see that though they are present they don’t own us.

Today is a new day. Nothing you have ever done before now can be changed.

Learn to let go of the emotions that linger or are associated with your past self, that trigger your unhappiness. You can do nothing about them and holding on to them is corrosive for your soul.

If you need to atone or to make amends do that and move on. Accept all these things and be the architect and let the design of your new self be an award-winning one.