How to Not Kill People (ch. 1)
Well, I don’t think any of us thought a topic like this needed to be written about. And maybe many of us are still pretty damn sure there’s no point in writing it.
And maybe they’re right.
But this conversation has been in me, and it’s been in me for a while.
So oh well, here it is.
“Uh, just don’t?”
A hundred bucks says one of your first thoughts reading the title “How to Not Kill People” was an obvious answer along the lines of:
“ …Uh, just don’t?”
And I get that.
But if that advice actually worked, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?
Addicts can’t “just stop”
Let’s take a short detour to the world of addiction to help understand this point.
As someone whose life has been spent in the worlds of drug addiction and recovery, I’ve heard the “Just don’t” advice only about a million and three times before. And I’m sure you have, too, and maybe you’ve been the one to say it:
Got a brother addicted to pills? – “Dude, just stop.”
How about an alcoholic mom? – “Just don’t drink.”
That’s the most seemingly sane piece of advice anyone from the normal, non-addict world would probably give.
But there’s something missing in that advice, and anyone who has ever noticed that the intoxicated person doesn’t just stop the second they hear that profound insight from your lips understands this:
Of course they won’t just stop.
You see, there’s a truth that those of us who have ventured into the dark world have come to understand...They can’t. They can’t just stop. If they could have, they would have already.
And I’m sure someone with the sober cousin is screaming out, “Yes they can! Plenty of people get clean and sober.”
After all, it would even seem like my own life of multiple years in recovery serves as a testament that yes, addicts can and do find a way to stop using. Drunks can manage to get sober.
But that’s not really the question here. Yes, they can get sober. But it doesn’t mean they decided and “just stopped.”
Sure, that’s what you probably see on the outside, the tip of the iceberg: “Before he was drinking all the time, and now he’s not. Viola.”
But when you’ve been in that world, you know there’s a lot that goes on between that “was” and “now” part.
It involves 3 key elements:
genuinely wanting to stop,
being open to getting help,
and being willing to do the hard work to stay stopped.
Believe it or not, the hardest, rarest part of that equation isn’t getting help: it’s finding the desire to stop.
People can go to rehab and detox and meetings and all the rest and have access to all the help anyone could ever need.
But if they don’t really want to stop, they’re going to find their way back to it, one way or another. (If you haven’t seen the movie Beautiful Boy, it’s a heartbreaking glimpse into this.)
So then lies the question…why would they not want to stop?
Why they don’t want to stop
In order to understand that, it might help to first consider the opposite question: “Why in the world would they want to keep getting fucked up? It seems miserable, and it doesn’t look like they’re even having fun anymore.”
To explain this, I think no one does it better than addiction and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Mate when he says: “Don’t ask, ‘Why the addiction?’ Ask, ‘Why the pain?’”
In other words, they don’t want to stop because addiction isn’t actually the problem. It’s the solution.
“Huh?” you might be thinking.
Beyond all the problems that addiction has engrained in it– degradation, losing family, relationships, homes, jobs, dignity, health, ambitions, integrity-- it does have a single redeeming quality that outweighs all the bad. It solves the even bigger problem — feeling.
Addiction isn’t the problem
Feeling is fucking hard when you’re an exposed nerve. Everything hurts. Even the good stuff hurts. Everything is painful and scary and to be avoided at all costs.
Of course, if you’re not an exposed nerve with lots of pain and fear and no healthy ways of managing it, you wouldn’t have that problem. Or maybe you’ve found other ways that help soothe and make that pain bearable. Lucky you.
But for some of us, the pain is too much. And the other things either aren’t a viable option, or they don’t do the trick.
Think about it this way: Addiction — using, getting high, getting fucked up — that’s not the problem in of itself. The bigger problem is feeling the pain of existence. Needing to find a way to survive living in your own skin.
In this way, drugs and alcohol are great! They (at least somewhat, temporarily) soothe and numb the deep, core traumatic pain of living.
Curiosity over judgement
Instead of rushing to judgement and criticism and shaming, it’s much more fruitful to understand what happened to cause the pain that then required such drastic measures to medicate from. (A great book suggestion would be What Happened to You? By Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah.)
So once you understand that the drugs are actually serving an important, and vital purpose for the addict, you start to get why just telling them to stop isn’t going to make any difference. Because if you really understood what they were dealing with, you wouldn’t say that. You would understand that to them, stopping = death.
A better approach to help the addict would be to get curious about the pain that they need to escape from.
Ask a better question
Simply saying “just stop” to an addict is much like saying “don’t kill someone” to a person bent on killing someone.
So instead, let’s look at what brings people to that breaking point: whether they are needing drugs to soothe the pain, or to pulling a trigger aimed at someone else’s head.
We can’t just say “Don’t do it” and expect that’ll work. We need to discover what’s going on in their world so that it would make sense to want to take a person’s life.
So let’s get curious—honestly, and maybe even uncomfortably—curious:
Why would you want to kill someone?
Stay tuned for Chapter 2: Why Would You Kill Someone?
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All my writing is human-written and human-inspired.
Feels weird to need to say that, but I take pride in my own thoughts and words. - JH
