🤯 On Addiction: Negative Thinking, Social Media, Substance Abuse

Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems bad to you in yourself is purified by the very fact that you have noticed it in yourself. And avoid fear, though fear is simply the consequence of every lie. Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love, and meanwhile do not even be very frightened by your own bad acts.

- The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky

The commandment said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” but if the commandment is properly understood it also says the opposite: You shall love yourself in the right way. Therefore, if anyone is unwilling to learn from Christianity to love himself in the right way, he cannot love the neighbor either. He can perhaps hold together with another or a few other persons, “through thick and thin,” as it is called, but this is by no means loving the neighbor. To love yourself in the right way and to love the neighbor correspond perfectly to one another; fundamentally they are one and the same thing.

- Works Of Love, Kierkegaard

This is the state in despair. No matter how much the despairing person avoids it, no matter how successfully he has completely lost himself (especially the case in the form of despair that is ignorance of being in despair) and lost himself in such a manner that the loss is not at all detectable—eternity nevertheless will make it manifest that his condition was despair and will nail him to himself so that his torment will still be that he cannot rid himself of his self, and it will become obvious that he was just imagining that he had succeeded in doing so. Eternity is obliged to do this, because to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession, an infinite concession, given to man, but it is also eternity’s claim upon him.

- Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, Kierkegaard

I urge you my readers, as like a friend, to revisit the three quotes I copied in the beginning. All the answers to questions concerning all kinds of addictions are written there.

Remember: negative thinking or any kind of constant, recurring negativity is an addiction, and it is despair. It is the penultimate addiction that feeds all others. Kierkegaard summarises it perfectly in the third quote.

I cannot think to add anything more to this, for fear that I may detract, or dilute its meaning.

But I will add two prayers. The first is from the end of Plato's Pheadrus, which is a dialogue about the nature of love. It is a beautiful prayer for anyone facing addiction:

The second prayer is from the Liturgy of the Faithful (from the Coptic Orthodox Tradition), which we find in both St Cyril's and St Basil's Liturgies. It is the prayer read silently by the Priest, and it is called "The Prayer of Absolution Addressed to the Father". This I will show, with an added personal prayer which was from one of the priests at my church, and this small addition really touched my heart (this I will italicise).