When we are addicted to something... anything... we lose ourselves. We wear so many masks to hide our insatiable hunger for our fix of choice, that we become merely a shadow of our former self. This feeds into the feeling of emptiness and that there is a void which we must fill up with something outside ourselves, because we feel hollow.

For every addiction there is abandonment at the root of the self-destruction and distraction.

We abandon who we are, in search for who we think we need to be. And the cycle that leads to no-where begins.

In our abandonment of self, we tend to present an image of a human being that is not human - that is not relatable.

It comes off as a shell to others, and we become very difficult for others to read.

This is the exact same thing which explains how attraction works: We are attracted to the energy of the person, what they say matters very little, as their body language will tell the story of who they really are.

Energy does not lie.

This is why we must first become that, which we want to attract into our life.

This is the whole paradox of life: that there is nothing we can "get" without first "being it".

They may have loved, who we were once, but the persona of an addict is not very lovable. When we self-destruct, we have no love for ourself, and we have no energy left and little compassion for others, simply because we are in chronic pain and misery and busy trying to hide the very fact that we are, in fact, not happy.

It is all a masquerade: lies upon lies that never ends.

This makes it incredibly difficult to care for an addict as the close family. Our family may want to love us, but they cannot reach past our walls. The very thing we hunger for, we cut off the blood supply to.

We are not open to receive nor give love, when we are in the midst of self-destruction.

This in itself makes it tricky for us to create deep and meaningful bonds with others, because we are hiding behind a shell.

It is not what we say, but how our body talks beyond words that has the deepest impact.

When others can't read us, this tends to trigger their own automatic negative thoughts in order for them to make up reasons for our behavior.

So what does this mean in real time?

People feel uncomfortable around pretentious and people who put up walls, because when they cannot decode their actions with their primitive brain part. Something is off. They will then often try to rationalize the behavior by unconsciously tapping into their own insecurities of self (which we all have - it's just a matter of whether how conscious we are on their impact on us and acting out on them or not).

We feel uncomfortable around people with walls, because they make us insecure.

When we get insecure, our own automatic negative thoughts begin to run in the background.

In essence, this means that we in our self-destruction, will often tend to activate other people's insecurities by the very fact, that we are not being transparent.

What we hunger for - unconditional love and compassion cannot co-exist with an addiction.

You cannot kill yourself while you love yourself. Until we take ownership for our current beliefs, actions and being, we cannot change. the love we think we might have during our addiction is a shallow love which often is complex based on our manipulative ways of needing to get something out of others to not feel hollow. This is not love. We might like to think it is. We might like to think we can still give love to others during our self-destruction.

There is no water to give from a river than runs dry. Don't fool yourself.

Often we have become masters of manipulation - even so that we ourselves believe our own mindgames.

It's a survival mechanism, but it is not sustainable.

Once we take ownership that we are, in fact, responsible for inflicting pain in our own and others lives - the pain of this realization can catalyze change. Not overnight. And in the beginning.

Yes, it will be ever so painful to live out our addiction, while being aware that we are spreading pain and misery; no more sugar-coating it.

The awareness of what we are doing in the now, paves the way for change.

Accepting where we are right now, is the magic pill to understanding how change works. We will only change when the pain of staying where we are becomes greater than that of changing our ways. This is why we need to get comfortable embracing the pain of the current moment to allow for change to happen. Step by step.