Cary Tennis gives advice to someone with an addiction to porn, and ends up writing a essay on addiction in general, from the standpoint of his own experience as an alcoholic.

"I drank compulsively and in secret, and I felt shame about the amount of alcohol I was consuming, and about the effect it had on my relationships and on the rest of my life. I snorted speed in bathroom stalls. I drank alone in darkened rooms in the middle of the day. The manner in which this compulsion would arrive was terrifying and heartbreaking. It would arrive seemingly out of nowhere.

It did not arrive out of nowhere. It only seemed to.

It arrived, in fact, out of somewhere. It arrived out of certain fleeting moments of barely conscious anxiety. It arose out of buried feelings that I rejected before I even knew I was rejecting them. The feelings were so deeply buried I could not even know them as feelings. I could only know them as the compulsion to drink. By the time I became conscious of the urge to drink the translation had occurred -- the way a computer system will do a redirect, or create an alias so quickly that we are never aware of the coded transactions that precede the appearance of the alias. The manifestations of our compulsions are the visible and knowable forms of an earlier coded transaction.

In this way, our compulsions take the form of metaphors, and those metaphors take on social meaning that we concentrate in futility, applying value to them in one way or another. By the time our compulsion has led us to its metaphor, we are already unaware of what has just happened. The code has run. We have to somehow slow down the code so we can see it. So we turn to the various technologies of human consciousness, of meditation and psychotherapy and 12-step work, of religion and so forth."

Although fascinating and informative, I wonder how helpful it really is, especially if you're tired and weary from facing your demons in real time, no slowing down of the code (as Cary puts it) necessary. From my experience, there's nothing quite like hitting rock bottom depression and giving up all hope to make you put aside crutches and just sit there, feeling unbearable things -- because nothing will ever make you feel better again, not even the bottle or whatever you were using to crawl out of your skin. The bottle has no power over you, because nothing does. You continue to do things that help keep up an appearance of functionality, like bathing, and putting on clothes, and playing with the food around your plate. The bottle can be picked up as any occasional toy, or put aside forever with all childish things, like expectations. Terminal depression, it's great for your health!