Paying the Price
Someone has to pay. That is a cardinal rule of psycho-emotional development. In order for us to grow as healthy individuals, someone has to make an investment in us. When that investment is short changed, we ourselves are asked to take up the payment. It seems that the psychological makeup of each of us requires that we learn to deal with emotional trauma. Often the very actions we use to deal with this trauma lead us on a pathway to guilt and shame rather than peace and growth. When that happens, we become the fertile ground for addictive behavior.
Everyone of us has psychological pain in our lives. We are hurt by the insensitivity of others. We feel lack of nurturing as children. Perhaps we were psychologically abandoned or abused. Perhaps we have early experiences where we felt alone, ridiculed, unloved. No matter what the circumstances, we must learn to cope with these feelings. Healthy development depends on finding adequate and enhancing tools to deal with these difficult emotions. But not all ways used to deal with these emotional experiences are healthy even though the choices of behavior may lessen the emotional pain. When psychologically destructive behaviors are used to compensate for negative emotions, the individual becomes susceptible to an addictive cycle. Consider the example of a person addicted to sexual experience. Imagine the teenager who feels inadequate and turns to masturbation to mask the negative feelings with pleasurable sensations. The emotional damage of inadequacy is not removed. The pleasure of sexual stimulation merely numbs that pain. Without constructive tools to deal with inadequacy, the coping mechanism of masturbation must be repeated to cover each new pain cycle. Since no amount of sexual pleasure will pay for the price of emotional damage, the increasing use of sex to overcome negative emotions cannot resolve the individual’s need. But now another difficulty arises. The use of a constructive, pleasurable experience has been diverted to compensate for something that it was never intended to resolve. So the individual begins to feel guilt associated with the misuse of a natural function. You cannot lie to yourself. Your body knows when one area is being misused to anesthetize another. Without healthy coping mechanisms, this misuse continues. But now it brings guilt with it. Each re-enactment of pleasure needed to compensate for emotional trauma is now laced with secondary guilt about the pleasure behavior. Sex used to cover one form of pain begins to produce another form of pain. The more psychological pain the victim feels from both emotional distress and guilt, the more that person misuses the sexual act to compensate, creating another wave of pain. The addiction is now in full force, running on its own viciously circular track. Unless the emotional damage and the subsequent guilt can be dealt with through the intervention of constructive tools, the addiction will run its full course to the final destruction of the self. But no addict has the necessary tools to stop this cycle. The intervention must come from outside.
If we do not let God pay the price of our sufferings, we will have to pay that price. But there is a catch. No matter how much we pay, it will never be enough. We human beings have neither the constitution nor the energy to adequately handle every aspect of life. We are born to fail. That in itself is not unhealthy. After all, the process of learning is always a process of trial and error. The destructive element of failure occurs when any one of us denies our finitude. We are not God, no matter how much we can do successfully. If we are willing to acknowledge that simple fact, and live accordingly, we would find that God is more than adequate to compensate for our inadequacies. But self is our enemy. We not only believe that we should be able to handle our own lives, we are convinced that we can handle our own lives. Thus, we are always perched on the edge of contradiction – the contradiction between what I believe I should be and what I know that I am. Guilt. I am not what I should be. The divide that conquers.
Unless we are willing to let God pay the price of our guilt, we will have to pay that price. And the price of guilt is death.
