Escape, Evasion of Pains and Failures – Drugs and Addictions Are Often an Escape from Reality, a Way to Protect Oneself from It

24 January 2019 (Wall Street International)* — When the present is perceived as threatening, we deal with it in a presentified and structuring way, or we deal with it through filters – fears, desires, anxieties, values -, losing autonomy, generating conflicts, experiencing everything as unbearable in the family, school, at work, among friends or in intimate relationships.

The immobilizing repetition – the attempt to avoid tensions – configures the submissive, the emptied, positioned between feeling good and avoiding feeling bad. This acquired immobility creates points of tension, pains equivalent to the points created by bedsores.

The more the process of immobility, subordination, and lack of autonomy increases, the more one protects oneself from pain, from frustration, and the more one reaches the impossibility of any action. This experience stuns, reality hurts. Drugs and addictions are displacements that impose themselves to avoid pain, to avoid failure.

At that moment, the drug, the escape from reality is transformed into protection against reality; it is like a shock absorber that allows one to live with humiliation, frustration, impotence, incapacity, and thus feel capable and operative in the “drug hunting”, or in the hiding places perpetrated against family or police surveillance.