The priest, addiction and the right to ask for help

In Book VIII of the Confessions, a man describes, with an anatomist’s cool detachment, how a chain is forged: from a bent will comes desire; from desire indulged, habit; from habit left unchecked, necessity. Voluntas, libido, consuetudo, necessitas. The man is Augustine, the future bishop, and he is speaking about himself. Sixteen centuries have passed, yet the brain maps of those who suffer from addiction seem almost to retrace his sequence step by step. It is a reminder that the Church possesses, within its own historical and spiritual inheritance, one of the clearest descriptions of the very phenomenon it now struggles to look in the face.

To look it in the face means, first of all, stripping the word “addiction” of the only garment in which we usually allow it to appear in public: reproach. As long as addiction is treated as a moral collapse, the question asked is always the same - how could he? - and the result is always the same: shame in the person carrying it, distance in those looking on, and no care at all. Serious clinical practice has, for decades, been working from a different starting point.

The Canadian physician Gábor Maté, who spent years working alongside drug users in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, reverses the initial question. Instead of asking where addiction comes from, he asks where the pain comes from that addiction is trying to silence. For him, every behaviour that captures a person - a substance, certainly, but also gambling, sex, screens, work, compulsive shopping - begins as an attempt, clumsy and costly, to make suffering bearable, to fill an inner disconnection that he describes with a precise word: dislocation.

That point clears away many misunderstandings. Addiction does not belong only to the visible margins - the syringe, the hidden bottle - it runs along a continuum that also passes through the most orderly and respectable lives. Maté says this of himself, writing about his own addiction to work and shopping, and he has observed that those passages are the ones readers find hardest to forgive. They shift the boundary, and place all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, somewhere on the same line. The dividing line is not the substance. It is the inner relationship a person has with his own behaviour, and one stark question: given the harm you are doing yourself, are you willing to stop - and can you? When the honest answer is no, habit has already closed the ring.