Courtesy Flush

Audio version now available.

There are only two bathrooms in our house, which means sharing sometimes. Occasionally, the sharing is delightful, like when I am brushing my teeth as my wife steps out of the shower. More often, sharing involves one person sitting down as another person tries not to gag while attempting to identify a new pimplish bump just far enough back on the shoulder as to make the mirror a frustrating accomplice in a fruitless attempt at diagnosis.

My wife instinctively demands, “Courtesy flush, please,” even when she walks into a miraculously unoccupied bathroom.

This morning I was sharing the bathroom with my bride mere moments after opening my eyes to the new day. She was listening to the news while taking a shower–the responsible morning habits of a well-informed and hygienic member of the electorate. I am not accustomed to such a harsh reentry into our terrorizing reality. Details of a truce being “negotiated” without inviting the war’s defensive participant to the negotiation made my well-rested ears hurt. It conjured an image of sitting alone with a pre-cooked grocery store rotisserie chicken and arguing with myself about who gets the wishbone. Fucking crazy. Too crazy for first thing in the morning.

Over the weekend, George Will educated me that James Madison, in Federalist 10, warned that, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” That premonition drives home the anticipatory brilliance of our founding fathers. And that’s why I can’t give our president credit for the awakening that his clear addiction to power is stirring up among our citizenry. While he is busy dipping the Oval Office in gold so the world’s most important hub of democratic decision making resembles an ancient Roman bath house, just how little actual physical labor Americans do is being thrust into the spotlight. As Dr. Anna Lembe explains in her 2021 book, Dopamine Nation, we use our increasingly ample free time to indulge. “…we’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance: Drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting…If you haven’t met your drug of choice yet, it’s coming soon…” Pleasure is all around us, hiding behind our anxiety and terror in plain sight.

One of the things I admire about George Will and Anna Lembke and also Dr. Gabor Mate (who so calmly and reasonably diagnosed our president with an addiction to power in a rational, nonpartisan way devoid of objection to specific policies) is that they are not alarmists. They have been learning, and sharing what they learn, for so long that their urgency-o-meters are pinned at zero. A new set of facts and interpretations is no more critical than the revelations they have made for decades, and the world is still spinning on its axis, so no need to light their own hair on fire for emphasis.

I am currently recording an audio version of our 2020 book, soberevolution, and realizing that five years ago, I was a bit of an alarmist. “It’s the most…,” and, “Without immediate attention…,” are the kinds of critical warnings and calls to action that appear throughout my book about an addiction to a substance that has been around since the inception of intentional fermentation at least as far back as 10k B.C. I still believe strongly in my messages from five years ago, but the frequency with which I felt compelled to pull the fire alarm seems a bit excessive.

Just like Will and Lembke and Mate, I’ve now been at this a while. My alarm-puller is tired, and my hair is far too thin to intentionally light any of it on fire. I went back to school and got me some behavioral health edumacation, and I’ve conducted 520 case studies on the impact of alcoholism. And while my understanding of addiction is growing, I’m not going to try to get your attention by scaring you. You are either in a position to pick up what I’m laying down, or you aren’t. Yelling at you won’t change that.

Building on Lembke’s work, I’ve learned that addiction is a spectrum disorder. We’re all addicted to something (or things) to some degree or another. We can’t help it. Pleasure abounds, and our comfort and safety are assumed like at no previous time in human existence. That statement was a little yelly, so I’ll tone it down like a respectable researcher. We just have a lot of access to pleasure and distraction, and we can’t see our budding little addictions because they are hiding behind our anxiety and trauma.

Addiction doesn’t look like it used to. We don’t cook porn on a spoon and shoot it into our veins. We don’t cut our Amazon shopping cart into lines and snort it up our noses. We don’t need a bong or pipe or vape pen or one hitter to sit on the couch and scroll or binge for hours. We aren’t afraid of our addictions because we are not yet fully aware of them. They don’t look like the pictures of addiction imprinted on our brains. No one has made a PSA depicting video games as sizzling eggs, sunny side up.

Our 21st century addictions have noninvasive delivery methods. “Noninvasive” is a term almost exclusively thought of in a positive light–a scientific advancement and miraculous wonder. I’ve not yet undergone noninvasive surgery, but I picture lasers and robots and sonar and shit like that. But noninvasive isn’t all good. We largely consume our addictions noninvasively now, too. Where invading our veins and mouths and noses used to be critical to our addictions, now our eyes and ears are our compulsive behaviors’ ports of entry.

SO WAKE UP BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!

Wait, let me channel my inner George Will and calm the fuck down. Awareness is really helpful if we want to cure that which ails us. Like when you have a pimply bump on your shoulder, try to twist further toward the bathroom mirror, or bend down so the person on the toilet can help with diagnosis. After a courtesy flush, of course.

I took a grad school class on compulsive sexual behaviors. The professor was insistent on using the term CSB rather than sex addiction. Addiction was too stigmatized and laden with shame for his taste. I think addiction conjured visions of a needle dangling from the inside bend of an elbow. I often talk about alcoholism as a maladaptive coping mechanism or as problematic drinking, especially when I sense that my audience will be cringy about either the traditional label or the politically correct label: alcohol use disorder. Stigma is a conversation stifler.

Which leaves us with a quandary. When it comes to the vast myriad of emerging addictions, and the spectrum on which people participate compulsively, we can either use the stigmatized terminology, or we can do what we are, especially in America, so adept at doing, and make up a new word that we will stigmatize slowly over time. My son described a comedian he likes as a dwarf. My wife and I recoiled and explained that the politically correct term is little person. Our son looked confused. “So someone who has dwarfism can’t be called a dwarf?” It was an innocent teenage question that illustrates the baffling American tradition of stigmatizing a perfectly good word, then discarding it in favor of a less descriptive word. And for the record, I looked it up, and the Cleveland Clinic still refers to skeletal dysplasia as dwarfism, so I’m not any more insensitive than one of the world’s leading, cutting-edge medical institutions where you can surely get a robot to laser you noninvasively.

The point is, some of us cross an invisible line into clear-cut addiction. Denial is futile, and we have to pick a prestigmatized label from the plethora of choices. Alcoholic. Addict. Junckie. Drunk. Pothead. Methhead. Crack whore. Tweaker. Or we can creatively add, “aholic,” to the end of any word to more inclusively corral the abundance of modern pleasure. Shopaholic. Gambleaholic. Workaholic. Sexaholic. Exerciseaholic. Gameaholic. Sugaraholic. Bookaholic (Lembke). Musicaholic (Mate). Baseballaholic (Will). Try it. It’s easy, and it works for just about any potentially compulsive behavior you can imagine.

Or we can turn to the Latin translation of addiction. It ought to take us at least 15 minutes to stigmatize dependentia into something with which no one would ever willingly self-associate.

I guess I would prefer that we just use the word addiction, and work on eradicating the stigma. I bet many of you gasped indignantly ten paragraphs ago when I declared that everyone is addicted to something. But if I said you could spend less time scrolling social media, or you could benefit from a little less caffeine, you might readily embrace those descriptors. That’s what acknowledging addiction as a universal spectrum disorder is all about. Destigmatizing addiction results in authentic self-evaluation without the shame. It’s pretty cool, really. Things on my addiction spectrum include decorating my office with 24K gold and inspecting pimply bumps on people’s backs. Not really, but if those were my things, it would be cathartic to admit it.

At the risk of catastrophizing, we have been engulfed by pleasure, and ignorance isn’t going to work forever. If we think our teens and their smart phones are the only things about which we should be worried, we are dramatically underestimating the unavoidable consequences of abundance.

Most of us, especially us Americans, aren’t going to like the solutions to our addiction crisis. They are the same solutions we have been acknowledging, then simultaneously ignoring, for decades. Getting into nature. Exercising. Getting enough restorative sleep. Eating whole foods with emphasis on above-ground vegetables. Avoiding toxic substances. Yes, that includes the new batch of “relaxing” beverages that has not yet caught the attention of the FDA. Spending time in flesh-and-blood contact with other humans. Addressing traumas of the past with vulnerability and authenticity, and professional help if necessary. Living in an environment that is almost exclusively emotionally safe. Nurturing something (anything). Becoming really good, through practice and not chemical shortcuts, at something helpful. Being a nice person. Serving others.

That is a long list full of possibilities. People who embrace most of those options find themselves in favorable positions on the addiction spectrum. Most of us Americans want to know if there is a pill we can take instead, and if we can dip our vegetables in ranch dressing. The cycle is vicious. Acknowledging what we are up against is a great first step.

Oh, and destigmatizing the word addiction.

Stigma is a stinky turd deserving of a courtesy flush.

If alcohol was or is your addiction, and you are ready to flush the stigma and take an authentic look at the pain you were medicating, please consider joining us in SHOUT Sobriety.

SHOUT Sobriety