{"id":18973,"date":"2020-02-05T09:00:06","date_gmt":"2020-02-05T17:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=18973"},"modified":"2020-02-03T11:31:44","modified_gmt":"2020-02-03T19:31:44","slug":"freedom-from-addiction-accepting-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2020\/02\/05\/freedom-from-addiction-accepting-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Freedom from Addiction<\/em>: Accepting truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

I drive from here to Kelowna, then to Calgary, and back to Victoria a few times a year. Driving alone, which I usually do, there is time and space enough for me to think deeply about things. Having lived in active addiction for most of my life (save the past two years that I have been in recovery), I often wonder about this phenomenon.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On one of my long drives last summer, I was looking at the sky and the countryside in interior BC, and I was in awe of how big it all was. The world is so big!<\/i> I kept thinking. The universe is incomprehensively huge. Reality is enormous, eternal.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Freedom from Addiction<\/em> is a column exploring issues relating to addiction (photo by Katie Mondey\/Nexus<\/em>).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Addiction shrinks a person\u2019s awareness of reality, the scope of which corresponds to the degree of severity of the addiction. So, the more seriously a person is entrenched in addiction, the smaller their world becomes, or seems to be.<\/p>\n

For example, if a person is addicted to crack cocaine, their reality is basically all about the drug. Their only goal is to obtain it, use it, and then obtain it and use it again, and again, and again.<\/p>\n

Amazingly, if you speak to an active addict, they don\u2019t usually realize that their world has been reduced to little more than getting high. And even if they do realize this to some extent, they cannot see the way out. To them, this is the best\u2014and indeed the only\u2014thing the world has to offer.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, though, something enters through a crack in our awareness and breaks us open, and we can no longer remain ignorant of the bigger picture. After this happened to me, and I entered addiction recovery for sex and love addiction, I was awestruck at how much of life I had been blind to, at how much I had missed. I simply could not see past that which was not instrumental to maintaining my addiction. As I recover, my awareness of reality grows. Or rather, awareness is addiction recovery. This is the meaning of \u201cthe truth shall set you free.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The way out may involve many therapeutic interventions, medication, and other discoveries of science. Fundamentally, though, the way out is through willingness to see things as they are. To me, this is the greatest thing about science: it\u2019s a quest to see things as they are in spite of the way we want them to be.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, I find this scientific approach to understanding and knowing reality a deeply spiritual path as well. And it\u2019s been the basis of my own recovery from addiction.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My aim is to look for the objective truth and follow it faithfully.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As humans, we are both the experimenting scientists and the guinea pigs of our own lives. We must seek the truth if we wish to be free, for accepting the truth is in itself incredibly freeing, whatever the truth turns out to be.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I drive from here to Kelowna, then to Calgary, and back to Victoria a few times a year. Driving alone, which I usually do, there is time and space enough for me to think deeply about things. Having lived in active addiction for most of my life (save the past two years that I have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18168,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,247],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-february-5-2020"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18973"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18978,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18973\/revisions\/18978"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}