Unless we have lived experience with addiction and recovery, many of us worry that we won’t be able to meaningfully empathize with the experiences of addicts.
I felt this to some degree during my student placement, but a terrible dread set in once I started my first ‘real’ job in the field. How could I possibly connect to the experience of someone who struggles with severe and chronic addiction? How could I relate to the experience of someone who's lost their friends, family, job? How I could hope to understand someone who's been rejected, marginalized, and ostracized by the cruel judgment of an invalidating society? How could I ever build a bridge of empathy?
Contrary to popular belief, we're much closer to the addict than we tend to think. With respect to what fundamentally matters, we’re essentially the same—we share the same psychological architecture and partake of the same existential dynamic.
To see what I mean, indulge me for a moment and answer the following five Yes-or-No questions:
1-Has there ever been a time when you felt like you wanted or needed to make a change about something in your life? (e.g. start doing something, stop doing something, etc.)
2-Have you ever tried to make a change about something in your life? (Maybe, though not necessarily, about something you thought about in Question #1)
3-Have you ever failed to make a change about something in your life? Either you set out to do something and didn’t end up doing it; or you started to do it, but didn’t continue doing it? (Maybe, though not necessarily, about something you thought about in Question #2)
4-Have you ever felt bad about yourself (e.g. shame, guilt, embarrassment, anger, sadness, etc.) for having failed to make a change in your life? (Maybe, though not necessarily, about something you thought about in Question #3)
5-If you’ve felt bad about yourself for having failed to make a change, was part of how you felt due to the judgments and expectations of others—whether individuals, groups, or society as a whole? Note that this could be direct (e.g. someone saying something mean to you if you failed) or indirect (e.g. seeing advertisements of people succeeding where you failed).
My guess is that if you were really honest with yourself, you answered Yes to at least the first four questions (if not all five).
Question 1 is about whether you’ve ever wanted to change anything (big or small) about something in your life that wasn’t going exactly the way you wanted it be going, or something that you weren’t completely happy or proud about. Questions 2 and 3 are pretty universal—it’s safe to assume that you’ve tried to make at least one change in your life, and unless you’ve been perfectly successful in all of your attempts to achieve absolutely everything in your life, you have to answer Yes to that question too. Question 4 seems just as clear—it doesn’t feel good to fail to change what you hoped to change; again, it doesn’t have to be life-destroying emotional pain; just any ‘bad’ feeling, even temporary frustration. Question 5 might not apply to everyone, but it’s quite common: a significant part of the reason we feel bad in the first place is that we’re failing to live up to the standards of others; we fear their judgment and rejection.
If you’ve felt any of these things, then you can build a bridge of empathy to the addict. In the sense that matters most, you can understand and relate to the most important dimensions of their experience.
Anyone who has struggled with a severe, chronic addiction can answer Yes to Questions 1-5. Have they ever wanted to make a change to something? Absolutely. Have they ever tried to do it? You bet. Have they ever failed to perfectly implement this change? Yep. Have they ever felt awful about themselves for having failed in this way? Of course. And has part of that feeling come from the expectations and judgments of others? Yes.
Rinse and repeat.
THIS is the fundamental experience of the addict. But it’s also the fundamental experience of anyone attempting behaviour change. You want to change, try to change, fail to change, feel bad about it, and feel worse about it because of how others make you feel about it. THIS is what unites us all. THIS is what builds the bridge of empathy.
Of course, it doesn’t mean that you fully understand everything about an addict’s experience. If you haven’t been a decades-long crystal meth user, you won’t understand what it’s like to use and struggle with crystal meth. But you don’t need to understand any of that to build the bridge of empathy necessary to understand and help an addict. You just need to know what it’s like to want to change, try to change, fail to change, feel bad when you fail, and feel even worse when others judge you for it.
You don't need to live where I live. You just need to be able to build a bridge to reach me.
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