I disagree.
In my own experience, which includes many years of counselling addicts and alcoholics in a rehab centre as well as for a GP surgery, addiction is not someone's Chief Feature. Rather, it is the way in which a particular Chief Feature may be manifested.
If you observe the behaviour of an addict or an alcoholic (and for the sake of clarity, I'm going to use the term "addict" here to cover both), you'll see that driving the addiction is a particular set of negative emotional responses to life situations. Those negative emotions may well disclose the addict's Chief Feature.
What's more, the Chief Feature also shows itself in the denial and the excuses an addict will make for not tackling their addiction by, for instance, joining a Twelve Step group or entering rehab.
For example, in my own case, my alcoholic drinking was fuelled by a longing for emotional wellbeing and a yearning for the stability of a loving relationship. Nothing wrong with that, you may say, and I'd agree - so far. But in addition, I was envious of those who seemed to me to have achieved that state, and my envy was aided by a sort of deep-seated naivete which meant that I trusted that sooner or later events would arrange themselves in my life so that I could be happy. And in the meantime, I drank. Envy and naivete were the twin negative emotions that powered my addiction.
And naivete was perhaps the worse of the two, strange as that may seem.
Why? Because it stopped me from seeking help when my drinking was obviously getting out of hand. I naively thought that I couldn't be an alcoholic because I was an intelligent, middle-class woman in a good job, with a nice house, high-achieving children, and a respectable lifestyle. For goodness' sake, I was in the Work! People like me couldn't possibly be addicted - could they?
Of course they could. I was. And when I finally saw through all the self-deception, all my misplaced trust that life and other people would help me sort out my problems, when I realized that my drinking had brought me to an absolute rock bottom in my life - then, and only then, was my naivety broken, and I took the immense step of telephoning AA. That was the start of my recovery. I've told my story in my memoir, "A Raging Thirst", but this is the bare outline of what happened.
In other addicts, it may be pride that prevents them from seeking recovery, pride that stops them admitting they are addicts. Pride that propels their social life, pride at being the "life and soul of the party", or the yuppie with the biggest stash of cocaine. After all, it does give a certain social standing among one's peers.
What a pity that sooner or later, instead of the cheerful, outgoing soul of the party they imagine themselves to be, they realize that their friends just see them as poor old Jim, who always passes out on the sofa. Or silly Jane, her nose dusted with white powder and hopelessly in debt to her dealer, desperately trying to maintain her self-respect as her non-addict friends eventually abandon her to her addiction.
In the Enneagram, each point, each number, is given a "passion" or "addiction",the terms varying according to which book you read.
These emotional addictions, the place to which we habitually gravitate under stress, varies from anger to sloth, by way of pride, deceit, envy, avarice, fear and gluttony. These negative emotions are the rallying point for the real Chief Feature, although it's important to point out that these terms are very broad brush-strokes which can't portray the subtlety of a real life Chief Feature. Years of patient self-observation in the context of a Work group, and with the help of one's teacher, eventually show one the exact pattern of one's Chief Feature, how it manifests, how it interacts with others, and how it spoils everything we touch.
And this real Chief Feature, which underlies our whole False Personality and causes us to act mechanically, self-destructively, is what drives our addiction to alcohol or drugs.
The actual addiction is a set of very tenacious and very strong I's, which latch on to alcohol or drugs as a means of satisfying the distress and discomfort our Chief Feature causes us in everyday life.
Addiction in this sense is partly genetic and partly due to the environment. For instance, if you have a predisposition to alcohol addiction (which can tentatively be linked to certain genetic markers), but you grow up in a teetotal society, you might instead become addicted to cocaine or marijuana.
The genetic pattern we inherit means that in many ways we addicts can be said to have "a skin too few". We don't make enough of our own endorphins to feel at ease in life, or our receptors don't process them adequately. We crave a relief that other people don't seem to need. And when this craving combines with our Chief Feature, we have the perfect setup for the defiance of the addict who believes he "needs" his drug of choice, that he can't function without it, that it's what helps him deal with his problems, rather than being the source of most of those problems.
I once took Richard Rohr to task - not in person, but in a review - because he states in his book on the Twelve Steps that everyone is an addict. In a sense, of course, he was right. And he made that blanket statement because most people do have "addictions" of some sort, from obsessive hand-washing to venting anger or eating too much chocolate, and by identifying these addictions and the thinking that propels them, his audience could better understand the way the Twelve Steps work.
So far, so good. But to a real addict, suffering torment in the early days of recovery, it seems a mockery to equate his ordeal with the temptation felt by an overweight lady in the presence of a Mars bar! The Mars bar may be eaten with relative impunity. In the end, the consumption of excess sugar and fat will make one put on weight, but it will be a slow process. Nobody wrecked a sweetshop because of their craving for sugar! Nobody gets into a fight outside a supermarket because they've just consumed two candy bars!
And if the overweight lady does eat the Mars bar, so what? She has another chance to go back on her diet immediately afterwards. The slip doesn't kill her. She won't die from giving in to her craving.
But if the alcoholic succumbs to his own craving and picks up that first drink, it may well turn out to be the start of his final binge, the one that leads to his sordid death in a shop doorway, choking on his own body fluids. Or to a despairing act of suicide when he realizes what he has done.
Or the cocaine addict, giving in to the urge to score one more line, may drop dead of a heart attack. That is a very real possibility. The gene for this response has been identified, and I have it myself, so I'm very glad I couldn't afford to be a cocaine addict in my time of desperation.
Surely we can all agree that these addictions are different not just in effect, but in kind. One carries the imminent danger of death, while the other costs only money or causes a temporary health problem.
When the addict comes to write his moral inventory, he will surely discover his Chief Feature; if he's not in the Work he will not call it by that name, but will see it as a major character defect which drives his drinking career, and which must be overcome before he can achieve sobriety.
I wish more people in the Work had the courage to admit their addiction to their teacher and to their group. Gurdjieff helped a number of alcoholics, one example of which is given in "Meetings With Remarkable Men". He did not despise us, and neither should anyone else in the Work. Gurdjieff showed great compassion towards alcoholics, his understanding being, as usual, far ahead of his time. If anyone in a Work group today admits to an addiction, they should expect to be treated likewise.
And if one day addiction is talked about openly in groups, it will help us come closer to understanding its relationship to our personal work, and lead us more surely towards discovering our own Chief Feature.
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