ADDICTION AND RITUAL: On Saturday, as part of my volunteer job, I was reading parts of a book on Christian counseling for women, and came across some really good stuff about the nature of addiction. It spoke to my experience, what I’ve seen; other people may find this idea less helpful, but for me it really explained a lot. The idea was that addictions are often attended by a cluster of rituals–you go to a particular place, perform particular actions (anything from going out on the balcony and tapping the cigarette on the pack to turning the photograph of your spouse to face the wall so he won’t “see”), and generally enter into a behavior pattern that feels set, ritualized, unbreakable, and attractive.

This absolutely rings true to me. To anthropomorphize for a moment, sins want to be addictions–they want to become first recurring temptations; then habits; then addictions. (I don’t especially want to get into the definition of “addiction” right now–let’s say that it’s an action that you abhor, that disrupts your life and harms you and/or your relationships [inc. your relationship with God], and that you fail to resist time after time after time, to the point that you despair of ever leaving it behind. If you have problems with the term “addiction,” or for using that term for a non-substance-abuse problem, consider it a metaphor, which is how I think of it. Anyway–)

Ritual is a great way for sins to grab you and overcome your resistance. Why? Because a ritual is meant to provoke ekstasis, ecstasy, standing outside oneself. In the Mass, the rituals–the music, the costumery, the familiar words and patterns–remind us where we are, draw us away from distracting everyday concerns, and pull us into an ecstatic relationship with Christ. (Well, OK, so they don’t always do that, but they’re meant to–that’s one reason that being preoccupied at Mass, which I often am, is so awful–you find yourself resisting, standing outside, commenting snarkily on, or otherwise unable to enter into the very rituals that are meant to focus you and quiet the chaos of contending wants. It sucks. The times when I am able to be fully present at Mass are rare, but amazing; more often, I swing in and out of full presence and attention, and it’s often an aspect of the ritual that draws me back.) The rituals of the Church are meant to draw us out of our usual lack of focus and into a focus that sharpens our blurry edges and makes us more ourselves.

In the rituals of addiction, we seek to do the opposite: to sink ourselves and lose ourselves so that we don’t have to think too hard about what we’re doing. I’m not entirely sure if this is the language I want to use, but provisionally I’ll say that there are ecstasies of eros (“the paradoxical desire for union with what is different“) and ecstasies of thanatos, self-destruction; and addiction rituals draw us into the latter. Addiction rituals are meant to fragment the self, muffle the conscience, and blank out the mind.

Rituals also totally play on humans’ love of fate, moira, the inevitable–our flight from responsibility. We frequently hate responsibility and therefore hate freedom. The rituals help make us feel like the culmination of the ritual–the sin itself, the indulging of the addiction–is inevitable. It’s a lot harder to stop a ritual process midway than to avoid the process entirely.

The practical consequences of this idea, therefore, are: 1) Recognize which rituals you use to ease your path to sin.

2) Figure out ways to avoid or disrupt those rituals.

3) Figure out rituals to replace the sin-rituals–for example, if you find yourself getting drunk off the booze you keep around the house for guests, disrupting and replacing your ritual might involve leaving the house, ideally going somewhere far away (thus it’s inconvenient for you to return)–driving out to a park, doing errands that require long bus rides, going to church for prayer in the presence of the Eucharist, that sort of thing.

The same Christian-counseling book included other good points–for example, it noted that seemingly unrelated sinful behaviors may be caused by unacknowledged anger, or by feeling overwhelmed. Habitual sins can be ways we avoid responsibility and the feeling of being unequal to our responsibilities–over-drinking is probably the easiest example to understand, but all kinds of other stuff can be used this way as well, from gluttony to lust. The book’s suggestions included writing up a “who? what? where? when? why?” list describing the circumstances under which you habitually give in to temptation, and coming up with ways to disrupt those patterns and replace them with patterns and rituals that focus you on Christ and help you recall your joy in Christ rather than the frustration and despair that often lead us to collapse into sin. I’ve started doing some of this stuff, and it seems quite helpful though it’s obviously been too soon to see if it’s especially useful.