The Uninvited Guest.

On the one hand addiction is a matter of chemical dependence. On the other it’s a need to feel the oceanic bliss of Mother flood long standing aridity just one more time… On the third hand, because these things are always complicated, its good business.

The British East India Company managed to ship 2 million kilos of opium into China in 1833, making loads of cash and disabling their coastal cities, a ploy repeated in America with the proliferation of crack among African American neighborhoods in the nineties and latterly with the more recent Xanax and Opiate epidemics which effectively disrupt community spirit sufficiently to prevent them organizing and then quiet the people whilst bleeding them dry.. Been shut up and had your account cleaned out? It’s okay ….

“..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon…” Aldous Huxley. Brave New World.

Nothing has to be done. Everything is meant to be and perfect as it is. Until it is not. But then preoccupation with your next score serves just as well to narrow focus, the impinging niggles of real life once more cast off.

“Too awful,” she kept repeating, and all Bernard’s consolations were in vain. “Too awful! That blood!” She shuddered. “Oh, I wish I had my soma.”ibid.

So addiction works whether you are loaded or not.

How considerate…

and yet addiction is one of those things we are most likely to vilify, to construe as something simply to be got rid of, something that can only be thought about in negative terms. Its like the curse of the uninvited fairy you find in Sleeping Beauty, or the impossible task visited on Paris by Neris who he foolishly left off the guest list to his wedding. She revenged herself by tossing a golden apple into the midst of the proceedings with a note.. , ‘to the most beautiful’.. Of course every Goddess present but one was in a strop by the end of the day and expressed their pique all through the disasters and devastation of the Trojan  wars.

But if Addiction is simply cast as a bad tempered witch and the rest of the story just given over to fixing the terrible situation by heroic action, it glosses over how things got that way and, unlikely as it seems, how the curse might also hold any meaning.

Despite its debilitation, addiction persists because the fact that the world may be made to stand still for a very long time means disturbing realities which cannot be managed without way more safety can still be held at arm’s length. Sometimes these are the traumas of childhood but they are also the dangers of our own unique destinies that invite adventuring but re-invent you on the way.

If your world feels a bit rocky then the last thing you need is the destabilization of fresh challenges.

In Sleeping Beauty the curse of the wicked fairy seems spiteful, but earlier versions than Grimm’s reveal details that put this curse into greater perspective and help an understanding of the mythology of compulsive behavior.

According to the older version by Perrault the dark fairy has been banged up in a tower for so long that people no longer recognize her, believing her to be dead. Her curse is way more than the paranoia of being unintentionally slighted. Its justified fury at the betrayal of the Principle of Relatedness that lies at the heart of natural law and the inclusive protection sacrosanct to it that gives everyone the sense of having a place at the table, a place which might then relieve anxiety sufficiently for the fresh adventures of individuation.

The Dark Fairy is not vanquished by the heroic blade. She has to be redeemed, met half way. This begins with the poetic justice of being made to take sufficient time out to integrate what has been going on in the kingdom behind all the velvet and brocade.

Its why teens past playing happy families sleep in till noon.

and are likely to find other means if denied it.

By sleeping on something you give it fair consideration, the fallow time it takes for new prospects or forgotten facts to be identified with sympathetically, without forcing or fancy swordsmanship.

In Perrault’s version the Princess is not woken by rehabilitation’s kiss. She wakes because it’s time. The hundred years are up.

”Her embarrassment was less than his, and that is not to be wondered at, since she had had time to think of what she would say to him.” ibid

Her long slumber had been beguiled with reflective dreams through which she reconnected with the Principle of Relatedness enough to be scarcely able to speak half of what she wanted to say on waking…

The curse is a compromise between the dark fairy’s honor and the Princess’ efforts to try and process how this grandmother could be forgotten, what it means to remember Her, the Ground from which the kingdom sprang.

Marie Louise von Franz said of a dream that made her first take the demands of the unconscious seriously, ‘I put my knees under my chin and stayed in bed all day.’

When this incubation is allowed by the defensive hedge of thorns raised by the ‘good’ fairy to prevent SB from being disturbed, the Princess wakes up by herself. In some versions she has already given birth to twins Dawn and Day, symbols of nascent consciousness. We speak of dawning awareness and seeing things in the light of day, indicating a new development that now superceeds the old pattern.

”The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.. which consists in some wider or higher interest and through this the insoluble problem lost it’s urgency, fading out when confronted by a new and stronger life tendency.” CG Jung.

In 2001 Portugal became the first country to decriminalise the possession and consumption of all illicit substances.

The opioid crisis soon stabilised, and the ensuing years saw dramatic drops in problematic drug use, HIV and hepatitis infection rates, overdose deaths, drug-related crime and incarceration rates. HIV infection plummeted from an all-time high in 2000 of 104.2 new cases per million to 4.2 cases per million in 2015.” The Guardian 5/12/2017

What helped the problem was to stop seeing it as a problem. The language around addiction changed as well as the law. This then created huge shifts in collective behavior. Not by enforcement  but simply because the powers that be had taken the time to include the troubled with compassion, afford them a place at the table and slept sympathetically on the issue.