Addicted to Your Pleasure and Pain are You? Come on Break Free!

I remember when I was in eighth grade in school years ago and listening to Pink Floyd. I heard a song way back then that became a favourite of mine at the time and still is today. It was called Comfortably numb. At the time of listening to it back then, I thought it was all about heroin abuse.

A year or so later I heard another song by an Australian band called the Choirboys that had lyrics that said: “You don’t need anyone, no you don’t need anyone; when you run the paradise.” Once again I saw this as the paradise that is found by the injection of heroin.

In the movie Pulp Fiction, just a few years ago, I saw the absolutely mind blowing rush one can get from the injection of a needle, and how heroin really is like the big daddy of them all. For even the name itself boasts of its awesome ability and power and how it should be worshipped. We all know about branding and the power of a brand name, if it’s used properly. Just think of Coke, Mc Donald’s, and Disney and suddenly you have an emotion and hopefully a positive emotion come to mind. The word heroin is no mistake. It’s available when you need the ultimate peace and numbness, and you put the father of all drugs into your arm like a doctor gives medicine, you go and put the Hero in.

I am fortunate in one way. I am sure it was an act of God and nothing short of it. As I was growing up, our house was a halfway house for recovering heroin addicts. They came around to our house on rainy Sundays for lunch and when they were healed often stayed with our family until they could find a permanent place of accommodation. They came to us raw and fresh out of rehabilitation. It was their words, and their tears that showed me heroin had its costs on a personal life and wasn’t just the hero in these guy’s life, but their master for many years. They who worshipped the drug and fought, begged borrowed and stole to inject it, were broken individuals who readily cried and told of the horror the drug demanded of them.

Yes, heroin is a powerful drug and I’ll admit that it will make you leave this world we are in, and you will float and kick back into a comfortable numbness. Yes. You won’t need anyone when you run to paradise. But it comes with a price.

I thank God I saw the pain in the drug and never injected it myself. Oh boy I came close and yes I mixed in all the right circles, but I never succumbed to its tantalizing beckoning. And how glad I am that I didn’t! But that isn’t to say those who do are bad people. I just found a better way for myself to find a release.

If it’s comfortable being numb…how can there be comfort in pain?

This was the confusing part for me to work out. How could I enjoy the release which was very pleasurable sleeping with prostitutes, and yet still enjoy the pain of it all in eating breakfast cereals and milk for days because I had no money left?

I read an interesting article once in a psychology magazine. I had never picked one up before that day and have never picked another up since. But in this magazine on this day, whilst I sat in some Doctors surgery for half an hour, I truly learnt the key to the whole puzzle.

We who have addictive tendencies, don’t get a choice in what we become addicted to.

What? I hear you say. Yeah well its strange isn’t it? It’s not all that hard to grasp really. You know that song that you hear and you just can’t get it out of your head. Every time the radio plays it, you spend half a day singing it to yourself. Even years later when “Run to paradise” comes on, I still get caught up with the emotions I was feeling that day. I absolutely love that song.

Well that’s how a habit is formed. Repetition. The more I hear it, the more stronger my emotional response, the more I am addicted to it, or attracted to it. Even if it’s a not so pleasurable experience. Even if that experience is being beaten by your father in a fit of rage. The more he does it, the more I emotionally respond, the more I begin to crave that negative emotion. You become addicted to the pain. And in some ways when life is going along fine, if you are missing that pain in your life, you actively seek it out.

It's sad really. That’s why a woman stays with a man who beats her up. That’s why a junkie sells his soul for the junk he puts up his arm and that’s why a person will ritually cut themselves to feel the rush of pain. We are addicted to the pain, just as much as to the pleasure. And just like light follows darkness, after the pleasure we seek the pain, and when we are in pain we seek the pleasure, and we continue to exist.

We all enjoy feeling comfortable. We all enjoy being safe and secure where we are. Take us away from what we know, take us to another state or city suddenly and tell us to deal with it and we have a problem. We need to change slowly, but given the choice we like to stay with what we know. Why else would a country approve of a president who blatantly lies to his people? We don’t like change and we only do it if forced upon us. It’s only when a wife is beaten so very badly that the authorities step in and keep her from her husband by locking him up, that the wife accepts separation. But she has no choice in this matter. So she quickly goes out to a pub and finds another guy to beat her up.

She can’t help it. She doesn’t like getting beaten up. And her friends can’t understand her for going back. But that’s the only sort of love she knows and that’s the only love her daddy taught her. He regularly beat her mother up and in between beating her he made love to her mother and brought her presents home from work. And if he was a fine example of an alcoholic father he even made special visits to his daughter’s room to comfort her and run his filthy hands over her and molest her.

Oh yes She remembers the love, and she remembers the pain, and somehow they melded into one, and that was called life. To her, or to the heroin addict or to you the reader, life is all about feeling comfortable with our lot and coping as best we can in the circumstances.

How do I know about pain….

Have you ever had a man shove his penis up your behind? I mean shove it right in there so you can feel the tears flowing down your cheeks. Have you ever had to lay down and push your bum in the air and let a beast put it into you with all his might? It’s not fun. Its not love, and if you’ve been there, it’s not something you forget real easy. Worse still is the guilt you feel for putting yourself in the position that allowed it. Oh what a fool you were. If only you weren’t so craving pain in your life, things like this wouldn’t happen. And soon you believe it is all your fault. And then you begin to take comfort in the pain.

One day you are seeking the pain. One day you become comfortably numb. You go through the motions, you allow the lightning pain, and you switch off to it by a sheer act of will power. It seems as you lie there and let a man rip your insides with his penis that Pink Floyd may have been singing about this pain when they were singing. Maybe it wasn’t heroin, but the pain, and you’re switching off to it all, that makes you numb. Maybe you weren’t as smart as you thought you were when you are young, and the wisdom of a life half lived has served to give your life a richer and more rewarding tapestry.

It’s a sad cycle. The addicted are addicted to the week of poverty and no food after one night down at the pokies or one night with the prostitutes. We feel lonely, hopeless and we have no hope in life, so we confirm what a sad person we are when we live in poverty and prove with cheap clothes a free charity meals that we really are a loser like everyone things we are. It’s not fun eating cereal for a week. It’s not fun nursing a black eyes once very few weeks, it’s not fun having to go up the street everyday saying can people spare you change for a bus fare, it’s not fun, but we are so useless and we are so lacking in self worth we just love the feeling of shame, guilt and stupidity and we beat ourselves up with it. We make all our promises. If he beats me up one more time I will leave. If that girl does not kiss me this time I am never going to see her again. If this jockey does not ride that horse in next week that is it for me and punting. We are weak, we are hopeless and we are addicted to feeling that way.

The hardest thing about not sleeping with a prostitute for three months is not feeling the week of guilt after we have partaken of that sin. Especially when you are a Christian. It’s fine not to get the high, but how am I going to get that rush of guilt each week that I am in love with and addicted to?

And then there is the high. It’s in the paper ringing private escorts working in their own rented apartments and interviewing them one by one a few days before you get the money. You narrow it down and pick one and then five hours after you have been paid you are in bed with her. No matter how much you cry to God about your wicked sin, here you are trying to bring pleasure to a professional so that you can feel like a man and have a good time, and if she’s a professional she’ll have you convinced you did bring her to orgasm. If this is all to crude for you, you can jump to the next paragraph. In twenty years of this addiction, I have only been convinced of about three orgasms of the prostitutes I have been with. And boy, twenty years worth of once a week, or once every two weeks of seeing a sex worker, you do the maths, that’s why I don’t own a house.

You see I am poorly dressed and poor in assets and have never had any reason to really write a will because most of my life my addiction kept me broke.

Boy I can relate to people in addictions. The only way I came out of my addiction the time the original of this piece was written in 2005 and now in 2006 my two successful times of reprieve from the addiction was when I repented with many tears before God with all my heart and not wishing with all my heart to ever go back to these ladies. I had to love the girls and stay away and not abuse them, I had to love God enough not to break His heart with my sin with sleeping with a girl I was not married to, and I had to love myself enough not to degrade my self esteem by becoming a sex starved brute.

The only way out of my addiction was to hate it.

The problem with many of us is this addiction to the highs and the lows.

Oh I know about the rush of horse racing I did that for many years. There’s nothing like buying a car from your winnings one week. There’s nothing like seeing your horse win the race and it’s because you were a smart little punter watching all of that horses races since it first started racing and knowing that it can only win certain races at certain distances according to the track, the rider, the breeding and the time in the current campaign it is in. There’s a skill of knowing which race the owner and trainer are wanting to win with the horse and what races the horse is only racing to stay fit. There’s knowing which jockey will ride the horse when the horse has got to look like its trying to win the race and it’s the race favourite, but the owner, the trainer and the serious in the know punters connected to the stable want it not even to run a place and definitely at all costs do not want it to win the race. There really are so many factors to consider as a horse punter, it’s no wonder big high profile people in the business world are kings and respected for placing million dollar bets.

Racing stroked my ego on the high side when I won, and when I had a big loss on a big punt it made me feel like the loser I was when I lost. So how could I lose? lol

And what about today five years on?

I am comfortable and I am not addicted any more. I attend a church where I am loved and I have began to preach in a few churches. My Lord Jesus trusts me today to help strangers find their way to Him and to healing and I am in love with myself. I am quite impressed with what articles I have written five years ago and a lot has happened in my life since then. I have been Baptised and now have some giftings that Jesus has given me so that I can better witness to people. He has given the ability to "Know" a person's pain and their struggle and know things about them that they haven't told me. He gives me the ability to give strangers a message from Him and that just makes me so happy to be out and about doing that.

I have not seen my son in six years and that is sad but it was his mother's wish and I didn't fight it. I have had another breakdown and now am wiser and have stayed on my medication for four years without a serious incident. It seems the more hard balls life throws at me the more confident I am in the power and the love of Jesus to pull you through anything.

I really enjoy sharing a message with a person through prophecy when Jesus speaks through me as I really enjoy seeing Him speak. He is such a magnificent, wonderful, caring and patient God that was man. It is so good to have a God in heaven called Jesus who thinks and reasons like a man but with all the power of God behind Him.

Jesus is just so real to me. I have seen Him in visions close to ten times now and some of them have been so very memorable. He told me once that I was his hidden treasure and if you are reading this I am sure He would tell you the same also. He is so sweet, I do not need another person to sustain me. He is my everything and He is such a loyal and honest and caring friend.