Must couples in trouble necessarily fail? No, not necessarily: no healthy couple is doomed to failure. In fact, the only ‘doomed’ relationships are those where one or both partners are unapologetically physically or emotionally abusive . Without a doubt, the only realistic option for someone who finds her- or himself in a fundamentally abusive or exploitative relationship is to exit immediately. Apart from that, I believe that many (if not all) relationships “on the rocks” could be healed under the right circumstances. From my perspective, the fact that this healing so often fails to take place could be an indication that one or both of the partners have stopped listening. Additionally, ceasing to listen indicates a spiritual problem. Let me explain.

It would seem that the  person who hears another’s voice, but is no longer committed to listening to what the other has to say has given up on her or his partner, as well as their relationship together. If you look more closely, however, it soon becomes clear that the person has actually given up on him- or herself. Empathetic listening and appreciative inquiry represent a three-fold choice: 1) to accept the other, 2) to trust the other, and 3) to engage with the other. Closing off the lines of communication also represents a choice: to cease accepting, trusting and engaging with one’s partner. Before I relate this to fundamental spiritual principles, let’s look briefly at each choice.

The choice to accept another human being is foundational. True acceptance represents a fundamental option to see in the other person another self, with exactly the same sorts of strengths and weaknesses that we ourselves possess. This choice to acknowledge the other person as another self  has two destructive opposites. The first perversion of acceptance we call ‘exploitation‘. Philosopher Martin Buber contrasts these approaches with the terms I-Thou (for true acceptance of the other), and I-It (for exploitation). To see your partner merely in terms of his or her usefulness (like a tool or a piece of furniture) or her or his capacity to satisfy you represents a fundamental denial of humanity on your part. The second perversion of the choice to accept your partner shows itself as conditional acceptance. In brief, “I’ll accept you if you do such-and-such or so-and-so.” Conditional acceptance of another puts you in the position of being their judge, jury and executioner. In fact, it represents nothing less than your attempt to usurp the position in your partner’s life properly held by God alone.

Next, let’s look at the choice not to trust your partner. Why don’t you trust her or him? Because you’ve been hurt before? The refusal to trust your partner goes way beyond self-preservation. Once again, it is passing a judgment of condemnation on another person — another self — who exhibits the same sorts of faults and failings that you yourself exhibit. In fact, if the truth were known, the faults and failings that you find most easy to condemn and most difficult to forgive in others are the very ones that you exhibit most strongly yourself. In fact, the two keys that are absolutely essential to unlocking both acceptance and trust are these: first, to acknowledge an identical humanity in both yourself and the other, and, second, to commit yourself to the path of unconditional forgiveness. Who cannot look at the plight of even the most desperate of people around us and not be able truthfully to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I?” The greatest message of Christianity — and also, I’m afraid,  its most forgotten and neglected — is simply this: unconditional, unlimited forgiveness. If you cannot forgive unconditionally, you cannot trust for very long.

The final choice is the choice to engage with your partner. If you refuse to engage with her or him, you thereby give credence to the (Jungian) ego’s false belief that you are vulnerable and need protection. It’s the same force that drives people’s frantic searching for that illusive (and illusory) ‘security’ that they believe will fix everything and protect them from danger. Once again, it would be foolish to put ourselves in harm’s way by engaging with an abusive partner. We owe it to ourselves and to them to take the necessary precautions so as not to allow ourselves to become victims of deliberate abuse. However, if you imagine that refusing to engage with your well-intentioned partner will grant you some sort of immunity from harm and from hurt, you are mistaken. Do you believe that spiritually you are invulnerable and that nothing outside of yourself — not even death — can destroy the essence of you? “Greater love has no one,” we have heard, “than to lay down his life for another.” Oddly, dieing for someone can actually be a whole lot easier than living for them.

Finally, what does the choice not to listen say about that person’s spiritual condition? The testimony it gives is nothing short of damning. Personally, I would liken it to what Christians refer to as the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ or the ‘unforgivable sin.’ Here’s what I mean. Whenever I write, I use the terms ‘acceptance,’  ‘trust’ and ‘engagement’ as  synonyms for what are called the ‘theological virtues’, namely: faith, hope , and love. The ‘sin’ against faith is the decision not to accept the will of God exactly as we encounter it in our world. The ‘sin’ against hope is the choice not to trust that our only Source of genuine security is divine providence. The ‘sin’ against love is the refusal to become meaningfully engaged with those we were sent to serve: our fellow creatures who, along with us, share the “image and likeness of God.” If the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ is a refusal to believe that the love of God is powerful enough to forgive us (and so we refuse to ask for forgiveness, and therefore refuse to accept it), then turning a deaf ear to someone we once claimed to love is a ‘sin against love’, for, as we know, the opposite of love is not hate, but deliberate indifference.

What can you do if you find yourself failing to listen? Remember the futility of protecting yourself. What can you protect yourself from? Even more importantly, what are you protecting yourself for? After all, your mission here in this world is not to try (futilely) to keep yourself safe. It’s to share with your fellows (and especially those in relationship with you) the same kind of acceptance, trust, and engagement that your God has shown to you. God hears his people’s cry . . . can you do any less?

And what about you who find yourself ‘learning to love one another’ and your words keep falling on deaf ears? You, too, have the opportunity to pass on the love of God. Your acceptance of the other can be renewed continually. Your trust of the other need never fail or fade. You may stand ever at the ready to engage. However, engagement (love) requires reciprocity. God does not condemn, so how could you? God does not constrain, either (because love can never be forced), but rather waits for all eternity for the other to emerge from his or her isolation and re-engage. You can have the willingness to re-engage, whether or not the other ever seeks it. You may never re-engage as you once did: time and the world goes on while the other chooses to isolate, stagnate, or (what’s worse) repeat the same self-defeating choices and behaviors with other partners. You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to accept and trust and engage with people at every stage and every condition of your life: people who, like you, have chosen to listen not only with their ears, but with their hearts.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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“There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories
Of Christmases long, long ago”

Nostalgia — the recalling of pleasant emotions from times past — is a wonderful part of the human experience, and imparts a wonderful warmth and intimacy to the close of the calendar year, especially in latitudes where warmth and sunshine are in very short supply. Nostalgia allows us to relive moments of our past with simplicity and purity, memories stripped of the inconveniences of real life that prevented us from fully enjoying those experiences at the time. Nostalgia is a creative enterprise, a cooperative effort of the memory and the imagination, that constructs a mythical world of times gone by out of fragments of events and wishful thinking.

As an emotional vacation, nostalgia is harmless enough. Only when it becomes a way of life — as it easily can — does it become a threat to our most precious gift: the future. Nostalgia the drug, when taken in too large a dose, can cause either a compulsive longing (when a return to the “good old days” becomes our fixation) or a sense of seething indignation (when we imagine the indignities and deprivations we once suffered), or both. When nostalgia in either of these forms becomes a way of life, particularly during the midlife transition, it can effectively lock the future in a stranglehold from which it cannot escape. Then hope — not wishful thinking, but the real hope that represents trust in a loving God — suffocates as well.

Each of us is engaged in a life-or-death struggle, and what’s at stake is nothing less than our very souls. If that statement sounds like religious fundamentalism, it is actually entirely the opposite. Our human souls are essentially creative, and meant to partner with a loving Creator to design and build a future of incredible possibility. We are expressions of the conscious driving force guiding and directing the evolution of the universe, no longer on the physical plane or the animate plane but in the realm of consciousness itself. As the mystic John of the Cross wrote allegorically about spiritual growth in terms of an ascent of a mountain (in The Ascent of Mount Carmel), after a certain level of growth, “beyond here there are no paths.” All the signposts of the past point us only to this decision-point. They can point us no further. Beyond this point, we walk only in blind trust of the Power that brought us this far. This is the maturity into which the midlife transition transforms us. Spiritual maturity is no country for the feint of heart.

Lurking in the background, calling to us ever more insistently, the voice of nostalgia warns us about going forward. If the creative Spirit is driving each individual forward in his or her personal evolution, then nostalgia, pulling us away from the unknown and back toward the safe haven of our imagination-scrubbed past, represents the forces of death and decay, masquerading as safety, security, self-interest, and even righteousness. Religious fundamentalism, whether represented by radical Moslems, Hindus, Christians, Marxists, Nazis, or free-market economists, represent men and women devoid of hope and without trust in Providence, however one chooses to define It. Rather, they represent humankind in midlife crisis, seeking quick and easy answers and emotional relief from the terror of the blank page that demands their writing on it in bold letters. Seeking refuge in nostalgic traditions can be the spiritual equivalent of writer’s block.

How can we move forward then into spiritual and humanitarian maturity? Ironically, it means recapturing our lost past. The ancients well understood that all ‘history’ is a distortion. As we have often heard, ‘history’ is the story as told by the winners. All memory is distorted by the same selective memory and enhanced by a similar imagination. The ancients realized that facts are of little consequence. Only their meaning really matters. To the ancients, myth — the attempt to distill meaning from the ‘facts’ — was what had importance, the ‘facts’ were simply an assemblage of meaningless data. If your personal evolution cannot be enhanced by your experience lending some significance to the present, then your experiences in the past has become little more than an emotional tranquilizer. Rather, the lessons of the past are what they are because they have the power to challenge and drive us beyond our reticence to face the terror of the unknown, the void, our future.

Sacred Scriptures are recognized as such not because they were dictated by an executive Deity to a dumb but faithful scribe. Humanity acknowledges writings as ‘sacred’ because those writings refuse to stay frozen in the past like some engraved tablets of stone, serving only as silent witnesses against an errant population. Rather, we recognize their Divine authorship because they stubbornly refuse to stay safely boxed up in the past. No, they live and breathe and enter into dialogue with us continually. What we see there today will be different from what we saw there yesterday, because we have evolved, and the world has evolved. The Word of God cannot be nostalgic, because it constantly challenges us onward toward our destiny to become hour by hour and day by day the image and likeness of our Creator: co-creators of something (our future) out of nothing (our past). Our hope embodies our commitment to become the people that we were always meant to be: regardless of whether or not we have any conception at all of who or what that may be.

It’s the holiday season. Go ahead and take your rest with smoking jacket and slippers, a pipe, a snifter of brandy, and a sentimental old book before a roaring fire, if that’s the form your reverie takes. Saunter down the path of nostalgia and, like Scrooge on the arm of the Ghost of Christmas Past, look in on happier times and enjoy the glow of fond memories. But come back to us. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come may be fearsome and shrouded in darkness, but that is the one in whose dread eyes you will see the reflection of your true Self. For in those eyes, terrifying though they may be, you’ll find real hope. Happy holidays and God bless us, every one!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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Still, the more I experience anger in myself and others, and the more deeply I consider it, the less certain I am that anger should be classified as an emotion at all! Instead, my observations seem to indicate that anger is a pseudo-emotion, or, rather, an emotional substitute.  It seems to me that we use anger as a cover-up to hide what we’re really feeling — whatever our true emotion(s) may be. When you use anger as a mask to keep people from seeing what’s actually going on emotionally with you, it provides you a secondary (but equally important) benefit: it also hides what you’re really feeling from you. When abused children (who stuff their emotions for survival) are later taught how to identify feelings, professionals often use a simple “mad, sad, glad, scared” chart to help them. Often, this chart has drawings of faces to assist in the identification. I wonder what would happen if we simply removed the ‘mad’ category entirely. I have good reason to suggest this, even for you and me, and whether or not we were ever abused as children.

I was taught a simple but profound truth when I sought help during my own midlife crisis: that anger — particularly repressed (or ‘stuffed’) anger — blocks all other emotions, positive ones as well as negative ones. That’s why, if you ever visit a psychologist who does somatic or gestalt work, you’ll invariably find a padded bat and cushion. People store repressed emotion in the very cells of their bodies. You may not be consciously aware of the emotions that are hiding there, but your body is. Very often it will tell you by aches and pains, or by succumbing to frequent illnesses or disease (note: ‘dis-ease’). When, under the supervision of a professional, people are allowed to let their body really go in a safe environment, whacking the stuffings out of the cushion with the padded bat, the first ‘emotion’ to come pouring out is generally anger. Once the anger has been released, the emotions come unblocked, and all sorts of unsuspected feelings come pouring out.

There are many ways in which we can stuff emotions. In most cultures like ours, the show of emotion can be taken by others as well as ourselves as a sign of weakness or being out of control. For many reasons, emotions are suspect, and therefore uncomfortable. Rather than identify them, face them and express them openly, we find it easier to medicate them whenever possible. These days, our choice of anti-emotion medications is very extensive, from legal and illegal drugs and alcohol, to gambling, shopping, eating, and, our hands-down favorite, TV. From our apartment window in DC, we can look across the courtyard into the building next door, and we see a huge wall-mounted TV that is running when we get up in the morning, and it’s still running when we go to bed at night. It’s never off. These days, we can scarcely go anywhere where there’s not a TV staring us in the face. Even my cell phone a TV function on it! I think we need to face the facts: ‘information’ has become simply an excuse for providing entertainment for ourselves during every possible waking moment. Why is this so necessary, if not to avoid uncomfortable feelings?

People use medications like this to avoid having emotions. Strangely enough, that’s exactly the effect that anger has on us. Anger blocks other emotions. Furthermore, anger masks what’s really going on. I invite you to take a few minutes to think about the last few times you can remember getting really angry. Can you remember the event(s) that triggered your anger (many times, the anesthetic nature of the anger itself will cause us to forget even what made us mad)? Anger is a powerful reaction. Can you think back to what you were reacting to? Now, I invite you to ask yourself, “What was causing me to have such a strong reaction?”

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that your last anger attack was a case of road rage. (Was I close?) Let’s say that you “saw white” when another driver cut you off in traffic. You know how you felt. Now, can you identify why exactly you felt that way? Was it because the other driver was ‘stupid’? No, not really. Was it because s/he behaved badly? Yet, we watch other people behave badly all the time and we don’t get upset by it. It must have been something much more personal. Did you get upset because the other driver got into your personal space? Did you see it as a personal affront and a case of disrespecting you? Were you outraged because the other driver took you for granted? Possibly. I do sometimes become annoyed when someone comes up from behind me just before a lane merge and pokes her/his car’s nose in front of me as if gaining that millionth of a second will actually accomplish something. But, generally speaking, most time you react to other people’s bad driving, isn’t it because it’s scary?

There’s my point, exactly (and it’s a point the Dr. Diamond makes really well in his book): anger is simply a convenient drug that people use to mask from others — and from themselves — what they’re really feeling. Somehow, it’s OK to get angry, when it’s not OK to feel scared, lonely, hurt, disappointed, or any number of other emotions that we’d rather not have. People in 12-step recovery are told that anger is a luxury that they cannot afford to indulge in. Evidently, derives from the fact that anger works just like any other drug: it covers up what’s really going on. And, whenever someone finds her/himself getting angry frequently, s/he will have to ‘detox’ (let go of the anger) before s/he will be able to identify what’s really happening.

Here’s something you can try, the next time you’re angry (or enraged, furious, outraged, or indignant): remove yourself from any and all distractions. Then, rather than stewing in it, use whatever methods you need to employ to release your anger (breathing deeply helps enormously). When you’ve calmed down sufficiently, get the anger-triggering event clearly in mind. Then, begin asking yourself, “Why am I feeling angry about this?” Clearly identify the new emotion that comes up. Then ask yourself, “Why am I feeling [new emotion] about this?” Do this until the real underlying reason and its accompanying emotion are very clear to you. You may not like what you find out about yourself, but that’s alright, too (we generally don’t need to mask what we find perfectly acceptable and allowable). You’ll probably come up with one of these: ‘I feel hurt’ or ‘I feel disvalued’ or (the most fundamental hidden feeling) ‘I feel scared.’

Whatever the source is, you’ll find that, once you’ve identified and faced the underlying cause and its accompanying emotion(s), you’ll no longer need to be angry and you’ll find that there’s something positive that you can do to address what’s really going on for you. Remember: nothing that you can do can change other people’s thinking or behavior. You only have the power to change yourself. By getting behind the anger, you give yourself the opportunity to do just that by identifying the underlying causes in you. In midlife, your perspective must shift from the effects that the outside world is having on you to what you need to do to behave more authentically. The most important step you can take in that process is to part the curtain of anger, annoyance and irritation and face head-on those personal issues that you might prefer not to have to face right now. I suggest that you do yourself the favor of dealing with them whenever your anger arises.

Sadly, hard experience teaches that issues left untreated remain not only to continue to haunt you, but, you pass them on to your loved ones: your spouse or partner, parents, siblings and/or children. As we enter the holiday season this year, perhaps the gift that your loved ones would most appreciate (and most benefit from) might be to stop the cover-up and to face courageously whatever issues your anger may be masking. Isn’t it worth a try?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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Love is a drug

In 1980, singer Grace Jones recorded the hit song, Love Is a Drug. That reference to love as a narcotic can be remarkably accurate, particularly at midlife. I see huge differences in the forces that drive people to ‘hook up’ during adolescence and young adulthood as compared with what happens at midlife. Obviously, youth is made for experimentation, getting involved in new situations, or trying on a variety of relationships to see which ones might be a good ‘fit’ for creating a family of one’s own. By midlife, all this should have become ‘old hat.’  All, that is, but the desire for companionship, and the thrill of the hunt and the excitement of conquest.  There’s enough of the narcotic in relationship-hunting at both stages of life, but at midlife, there’s a lot less of the ‘family-building’ motive going on. For most people, by midlife, that’s a “been there; done that” experience.

Certainly, illicit relationships (going out on your partner) can happen at any time of life.  When they do, I believe that they’re always narcotic relationships. I mean that seeking or permitting a new relationship while you’re already committed to another partner always represents your attempt to medicate something going on inside you that you don’t want to deal with. For someone who’s already in a relationship to allow her- or himself to get involved with someone else, means that you’re letting yourself get ‘hooked’ on love as a drug so you won’t have to feel (or deal with) what’s going on inside and around you. Narcotics always offer the promise of pain relief. But at what ultimate cost? Nobody who’s ‘hooked’ really looks at the facts (they’ve become too numb) and recognizes that, when the drug wears off, the pain will still be there waiting for you. Even worse, when the drug wears off, you’ll have the additional pain of having to deal with the guilt and shame you’ll eventually have to face for having compromised your values. Oh . . . and I almost forgot: narcotics wind up being very, very, expensive.

I have been in a committed relationship now for over fourteen years (it took me a long time to find someone worth committing to). Like all relationships, we’ve had our ups and downs, our laughing and crying, and our shouting matches. As someone who used to have chronic relationship issues, I find myself often amazed that, although I find other people attractive, and thoughts of what ‘hooking up’ would be like sometimes show up, they’re no more attractive to me than a huge serving of [fill in your favorite grossly fattening desert here]. In both cases, I can genuinely say, “Yum!” without actually wanting to indulge. That’s what people do when they’re committed to living life on life’s terms, rather than looking for the next ‘narcotic’ escape.

Virtual Addiction

“But,” you say, “all I ever do is flirt. I’d never actually do anything about it.” I have to tell you: that doesn’t matter. You don’t actually have to consummate a narcotic relationship to have it give you the escapist ‘high’ you’re looking for. If you’re at all wise, you know that going out on your partner can be very dangerous. A messy divorce or breakup with everybody knowing all about your private business can really mess up a good fantasy.  No matter how you look at it, ‘hooking up’ is really risky business. How can you get the thrill of the hunt and the ecstasy of conquest while minimizing the risk? Behold the internet! It’s private: just the two of you can know. There’s no possibility of being observed by a casual onlooker. There’s no risk of disease. Nobody (so you lead yourself to believe) will be the wiser, and nobody will get hurt. You imagine that you can medicate your problems away through this other person (or people) and thus you can have the best of all worlds.

We call this delusional thinking ‘virtual addiction.’ By ‘hooking up’ over the internet, you get your narcotic at a fraction of the price. If this describes you, you’re missing the hidden costs. While you’re busy numbing your pain (and getting high) with your virtual relationship(s), the pain that’s coming from your primary relationship is growing . . . but you’re unaware of it. In a word, a healthy, fulfilling relationship doesn’t need a narcotic to mask what’s really going on. As you experience the midlife transition, it’s normal for you to experience huge changes in yourself: how you look at your life, how you look at all your relationships, how you look at your career, how you look at your future. All these things shift — often dramatically — during the midlife transition. Regardless of the changes that are going on around you (in your spouse, your family, your job, etc.), the biggest changes are happening in you.

All those things that narcotic relationships may be telling you may be correct. Maybe your spouse no longer loves you. Maybe you made a mistake in your choice relationship. Maybe your future will be entirely different from the one you had imaged for yourself. Any or all of these things may be true. It doesn’t matter! Getting yourself involved in a narcotic relationship (physically or virtually) isn’t going to solve anything. You can look at whatever seriously good feelings you may be generating for yourself from stepping out on your relationship as just a down payment on the pain that you’re storing up for yourself. While you’re off chasing feeling good, the problems you’re escaping are busy festering and getting worse. Sooner or later, your house of cards is going to come crashing down and, strangely enough, you already know that’s true. Guilty people subconsciously want to get caught.

Midlife Mastery

If you’re involved in a narcotic relationship, what do you need to do to get ‘clean and sober’? First and foremost: tell yourself the truth. Perhaps the biggest betrayal that you’re experiencing here is your betrayal of yourself. Put aside for a time your fears of not getting your relationship ‘fix.’ Recognize that your perspective has become warped. Get a confidant in whom you can have total trust (for example, hire a therapist). Start talking out loud about what’s going on with you. You’ll be amazed how ridiculous your addictive thoughts sound when you’re speaking them aloud to someone else. Explore with your confidant all those things about your life that you’re trying to avoid dealing with. Be courageous now (in facing your fears), or go down to flaming defeat later (when your relationships blow up in your face). The choice is yours.

I’ve often said that midlife presents each of us with the opportunity to come to terms physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually with the person who we really are. It’s perhaps the greatest challenge to our courage and integrity that we’ll ever face. There are so many and varied ways that we humans can avoid having to deal with these issues; but the only way to resolve them is head-on. Every minute that you continue to use things like narcotic relationships to maintain your avoidance, you also continue to accrue emotional and spiritual interest in terms of the suffering you’re going to have to face eventually. As they tell us in the ad: “Eventually . . . . why not now?”

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

What do you do? If you're like many people, you begin watching your diet and getting involved in an exercise regimen, because you want to hang on to the appearance of youth for as long as possible. Doesn't that sound terrifically healthy? On the surface, that seems to be not only the obvious, but also the best choice, when, in fact, that could be the start of a downward spiral that very often ends up not only damaging your health and robbing you of your sense of well-being, but could also destroy your career and tear apart your family. Am I exaggerating? Not in the least! Nobody sets out to ruin his or her life; that outcome only results from a steady stream of small, seemingly insignificant poor choices that eventually lead to a bad end. We call this an error cascade: when a series of small, almost unnoticeable missteps conclude in catastrophic results. For the person entering the midlife transition, it most often begins with the mistaken belief that he or she is 'going downhill' and that somehow the process is reversible. How this one seemingly innocuous idea can lead to heartbreak represents the rest of this story, and 'getting' the moral of this story all depends on understanding the nature of addictive behavior.

Let's start with an example from recent news: specifically a study by three Tufts University psychologists (Robin B. Kanarek, Kristen E. D’Anci, Nicole Jurdak, and Wendy Foulds Mathes) published in the August, 2009 edition of the journal, Behavioral Neuroscience. What they discovered was that the famous 'runner's high' that people who exercise strenuously may experience is caused by "exercise-induced increases in endogenous opioid peptides [that] act in a manner similar to chronic administration of opiate drugs." In other words, strenuous exercise creates a neurological state that mirrors the addictive use of opiates. "Exercise, like drugs of abuse, leads to the release of
neurotransmitters such as endorphins and dopamine, which are involved
with a sense of reward," Kanarek said. Furthermore, according to a report by National Geographic News, "This brought on 'anorexia athletica' in the food-restricted running rats: They dramatically increased their running and started losing weight. In humans, anorexia athletica can be a fatal mental disorder that makes its sufferers compulsively exercise to lose weight."

Although the authors certainly recognize the phenomenon of the "sense of reward" involved in the opiate experience, I believe that they're missing the key factor that makes addictive behavior so nefarious: addiction depends less upon the promise of a "sense of reward" than it does on a fear of not experiencing that feeling. Read that sentence again, because it's very important. Addictive behavior is based less on the pursuit of pleasure than it is on the fear and avoidance of (perceived) pain. People who have become addicted to a behavior will pursue that behavior even through excruciating pain simply to avoid what they fear they'll experience otherwise. Therefore, addiction is all about fear, avoidance, denial and escape — usually from a person's own feelings and emotions.

What exactly are these 'addictive behaviors' I've been talking about? When most of us hear the word 'addiction,' we tend to think of the use of illegal substances, the abuse of alcohol or prescription medications, or perhaps compulsive gambling. We seldom think of work, sex, shopping, eating, TV or browsing the internet in the same vein. The truth is that any behavior can be addictive. It's not so much what we do as why we do it that turns common everyday tasks into behaviors that threaten our health, well-being, careers, relationships, and, ultimately, our very existence. When we insist on escaping the discomfort of leaving the security and comfort of the environment we know to embrace the insecurity and discomfort of facing the unknown, we're inviting addiction.

When we fear that our stress will become unbearable (whether that stress comes from forces outside of ourselves, or is self-generated), addictive behavior always presents itself as an attractive stress reliever. Two of the consequences of adopting addictive behavior for stress relief are 1) addictive behavior provides only temporary relief: eventually the pain of the addiction becomes worse than the pain that was being avoided; and 2) addiction stunts mental, emotional, and spiritual growth, leaving people less capable of dealing with the underlying issues (which continue to worsen during the course of the addiction).

If you're in or approaching midlife (or you're unsure but have started addressing issues related to aging), you need to ask yourself this question: "What am I doing to numb my feelings?" That's an excellent indicator of the presence of addictive behavior(s). Another equally good question is this one: "What activity in my life would drive me to distraction if I weren't allowed to do it anymore today?" Remember: whether the activity is 'innocent' or 'harmless' or not is totally irrelevant. What matters is that you're using that activity to avoid looking at some nagging issue in your life, to stuff your feelings, and/or to support or foster an unhealthy dependency.

Let's look at just three of the ways that midlife addiction can bring about heartbreak. When sex and/or relationships are used to avoid feelings, the most obvious collateral damage will be to your primary and family relationships. Rather than have to face and manage the difficult conversations and negotiations that arise in any close relationship, it's so much easier to find 'relief' in sex, porn, and spending time with people who 'understand' you better than your spouse and family members do. When you do that, you relegate those relationships to a secondary, subordinate position in your life: relationships that you'll get around to 'someday' (if ever). When your primary relationships suffer, every other relationship in your life becomes distorted: all your work relationships, as well as your relationship with yourself and your Higher Power. You lack the energy and the time to deal with the issues that are confronting you here and now, because you've allowed yourself to get caught up in a more comfortable distraction. You've become addicted.

Another common midlife situation occurs when your career takes center stage in your life to the exclusion of your primary and family relationships and your own health and well-being. "What I've sacrificed for my career" should not be seen as a badge of honor, rather a sign of an inability or unwillingness to take the necessary steps to bring balance and harmony into your life. Creating balance and harmony requires a willingness to wrestle honestly and openly with your values and your ambitions and impose a priority on your choice of how you spend your time. Keep in mind that there's always a 'road not taken,' always something that must be left behind. It's always easier to allow addictive behavior to keep you from making responsible — and often painful but necessary — decisions. Very often being a 'slave' to your job really means simply an unwillingness to take responsibility for your choices and, ultimately, the direction of your life.

The third and final example relates to those 'luxuries' that you 'owe' yourself because of all the 'hardship' that you're 'forced' to endure in your life. I've put so many words ('luxuries', 'owe', 'hardship', and 'forced') in quotes because each and every one represents an excuse that you make to yourself for getting your own way and avoiding taking responsibility for your decisions. Have you ever heard yourself saying, "You'd [insert addictive behavior here], too, if you had my life"? Using this approach, you can justify almost any kind of unjustifiable behavior imaginable. Using this logic, other people or situations are causing — really forcing — you to do things against your will. But it's hardly surprising to realize that those things you're being 'forced' to do are precisely the things that you'd do anyway if you were given free reign without any burden of responsibility. This approach is equally effective in eventually destroying your health, well-being, relationships and career because, after all, none of it is your 'fault'. In essence, "the devil made you do it!"

Midlife presents the perfect conditions for spawning addictive behaviors, because it's at midlife when the emotional 'training wheels' have to come off, and, for perhaps the first time in your life you're being forced to look seriously in the mirror at the unvarnished you. You have to come to terms with your own values and principles. You experience the need to challenge your assumptions and 'obligations'. It's at midlife when you really have to come up with an answer to the question, "Who am I and what do I really want?" For many people . . . OK for most people . . . these are terrifying questions. People, especially men, will very often do almost anything (particularly adopting addictive behaviors) to escape having to face and answer these questions, because, fundamentally, they're spiritual questions.

Addiction, particularly at midlife, is most certainly a disease, and it's a spiritual disease, at that. As such, it requires a spiritual treatment. That's why 12-Step programs (like Alcoholics Anonymous) offer such effective treatment for addictive behavior: they suggest that people give up trying to remake the world according to their own standards, get in touch with a High Power of their own understanding, clean house by addressing the wreckage caused by past behaviors, and, finally, learn to live their lives according to spiritual principles and values. Those are the very steps that every individual must necessarily take to navigate a successful midlife transition. They're also the very steps that can break the bonds of midlife addiction as well as salve the heartbreak it causes, and lead people to maturity and, ultimately, to midlife mastery.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown