It doesn’t care about you. It toys with you.
It doesn’t befriend with you. It draws you in.
All along, it whispers “more” and “higher” and “mine.”
Addiction has no empathy for you, your situation, or the messes it makes.
And the longer the two of you are involved, the harder you find it to care about the people you hurt, or the people who love you.
Why is that? Why does addiction seem to steal the caring nature, and empathetic connection, a person has with others? And if he or she can work toward getting empathy back, will addiction be easier to fight?
Experts in addiction treatment say yes.
The craving for a substance or activity in the throes of addiction is completely absorbing. An addict becomes selfish and self-concerned, as he or she pursues the object of his or her addiction. Lacking empathy, he or she quickly ramps up conflict, inflicts emotional damage, and creates suffering for the people around him or her, seemingly without remorse.
When a person is empathetic, he or she has the capacity to understand others, to see and grasp life or experiences from another person’s point of view or reference point. Being aware and responsive to the emotions, circumstances, and motives of other people improves connection and communication. If addicts can recover this ability, they can recover relationships, and possibly the will to rejoin the world and recover.
Empathy is a vital tool and skill that can assist treatment in a variety of key ways:
- Empathy eases the inner and external friction that leads to relational breaks. Through treatment that employs empathetic listening as a way to encourage and guide, addicts may feel more understood, and seek to understand more about other’s perspectives, before defaulting to anger or retreat.
- Empathy is reparative. It is decidedly positive and healing, during a period that is intensely painful for addicts and their loved ones. By attempting to listen and consider others, there is a deeper sense that change is being sought, and can be achieved.
- Empathy reduces intolerance. Understanding and compassion ease the sense of “otherness” that can lead to isolation, withdrawal, or judgment that empowers harmful addiction, and alienates the user from society.
- Empathy inspires generosity. A recovery of empathetic thought and comprehension is required to help and meet another person’s needs. Studies show generosity to be foundational to happiness.
- Empathy alleviates self-absorption. Encouraging empathy helps break the obsession addicts have with their own thoughts, feelings, wants, and perceived needs.
To achieve long-term recovery and emotional sobriety, the capacity to empathize must be restored. This ability can be taught in a safe, supportive rehabilitative environment. Empathy is best retrained in atmospheres that allow addicts to routinely receive information from other addicts’ experiences, and make attempts to offer support.
Treatment becomes exponentially more productive, as breakthroughs in empathetic listening occur, and self-obsessed thinking patterns are broken. Increasingly, the hold of the addiction loosens, and empathy for loved ones and community resurface.
It should also be noted that group therapy, and individual therapy, help fulfill an addict’s crucial need to receive empathy. Treatment is more effective, if it is not mired in the criticism, disappointment, and shaming that addicts endure from both loved ones and strangers, all the time.
Perhaps American novelist Barbara Kingsolver put it best: “Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.”
