First Quest: See the Spell casters
Your undertaking on this journey is to gather knowledge about the ones who cast the spell on you. Casually and gradually, with every word and deed, they have wound their spells tighter around you. We are going to turn the spell casters back into humans. Where they once were mighty and magical, we will bring them down to their true size through love and understanding. After completing this quest, you will create your own magic spell and undo the power they hold over you.
See the Spell Casters
The spell casters captured her and wrapped her in a cloak of secrecy and silence. They knew not what they were doing; they were acting out of the spells cast on their own selves. Fighting their own Taniwha, or monster, named Waipiro – the Maori word for alcohol. In the first task, she learns about the ones who cast the spells.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, I had never heard of the word alcoholic. Addiction wasn’t a word that was well-known in New Zealand at the time. It was a peaceful life for most: Men worked at their jobs, while women stayed home to have babies, look after their little ones, keep the house clean and feed the family. After work, men would stop for a beer at the local pub before going home to the little woman and the kids. On Saturdays there would be rugby, racing and beer. On Sundays, there would be either hangovers or church, or often both. Men were men, women were women, and children were silent witnesses.
During the Christmas holidays, bored children would congregate at the school grounds to play, or go hang out at the school pool to enjoy the warm summer days. The lucky ones would go away camping for weeks at a time. But I didn’t do any of these things. All I knew was that life was scary most of the time. I was usually hungry, and I didn’t know basic hygiene. I was sad and lonely and different. I didn’t have friends, and I kept to myself and read a lot. I felt so different, like everyone else knew something that I didn’t. I knew that sometimes Mum was very, very happy, but sometimes fights broke out. When the fights started, my brothers and sister and I would go and hide. It took me a long time to be able to tolerate loud voices. Sometimes we had food, and sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes Mum was at home, and sometimes she wasn’t. There would be a new man in our house, and then suddenly he’d be gone again. Or we would have to leave because of the shouting and bruises. Now, as an adult, I know that my home life was the same as that of millions of other children, but we were ashamed. We hid the shame⎯and still do⎯by trying hard to be like everyone else.
I now somewhat understand somewhat how Mum’s drinking affected me. Life revolves around the addict. The addict’s life revolves around their addiction. As the addict’s relationship with their addiction grows, all other relationships shrink. There is no room for children.
Understanding Alcoholics
In recent years, there has been a shift away from the idea of alcoholics being weak and deficient in some way; deserving punishment for their deficiency. It’s taken 100 years of making drugs illegal and punishing addicts to discover that this won’t stop them from being addicts. One way of thinking about addiction is that alcoholics and other addicts are opting out, because they cannot cope with their pain. This is simplified of course, because there are many factors that ‘cause’ alcoholism and addiction. Katie McBride writes:
Certain people are more vulnerable to addiction than others; many people can use any array of drug without becoming addicted. But although addiction experts disagree slightly about where certain drugs should be on a spectrum of most to least addictive, almost all agree that there is indeed a spectrum. It would be willfully ignorant to say that a person is equally likely to become addicted to cannabis as they are to oxycontin or fentanyl. Of course the drug in question matters. So do a plethora of other factors. In reality, there are many factors that lead to addiction, including environment, stress, genetics, life-circumstances, and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). It is not uncommon for people with addictions to have any combination of the above factors, nor is it an exhaustive list. These factors also have different effects on different individuals. For example, people who suffer from a mental illness are twice as likely to struggle with addiction.
If punishment doesn’t help, what does? In the late 1970s, Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, conducted a series of famous drug addiction studies, which they published between 1978 and 1981. One of their earlier experiment on rats consisted of a single rat living in a cage, containing only two bottles. Nothing else. One of the bottles contained water only, the other was water laced with morphine. The rats loved the morphine water, proving that morphine was addictive. Professor Alexander’s hypothesis was that living conditions caused the addiction, not the drug. He then created ‘Rat Park’, which was heaven for the rats. He put 16–20 rats of both sexes in a huge cage with fun things to do. They had balls to play with, loads of food, and they could hang out together; which meant plenty of sex. The two bottles of water—one with morphine, one without —were also present.
Guess what happened?
The rats preferred the plain water to the morphine water, proving the hypothesis. Further studies with mice also supported this finding. Rats and mice who lived in Rat Park for a period of time, and were then taken away and isolated, showed an increase in use of the morphine water. Isolated rats that were transferred to Rat Park preferred water, whereas in isolation, they had preferred morphine water. Connection is the opposite of addiction. When the rats connected with each other and had fun things to do, they didn’t need to escape their lives. What we can take away from this study, is that it shows environment plays a big part in how we cope with the world.
Professor Peter Cohen agrees with the connection theory. He calls an addiction a ‘bond’. We have an imperative to bond with something. We all need to connect with something, otherwise we are adrift. Bonding to one thing at the expense of everything else is a problem. We need balance in our lives to be whole. We need to look after the physical as well as the spiritual, mental, and emotional. We all know people who have bonded with a sport, food, a person, exercise, sex or a hobby. It’s like they become obsessed or possessed. It’s all they talk about, all they do. They tie their identity to it. They call themselves the name of whatever it is they have bonded with, like yogi or climber. Unless it is socially unacceptable. It’s okay to be an athlete, but not okay to be an alcoholic.
Alcohol is an easy addiction to fall into; partly because it is cheap, easy to get hold of, and when taken in moderation, socially acceptable. It’s an easy way for a person in a shitty cage to escape that cage. And once a person has formed a strong bond to alcohol, they do not bond well with others. On average, alcoholics affect up to 20 people per person in their lives, including workmates, friends and family. Including you.
Breaking the bond with alcohol is as hard as breaking a bond with anything else.
Alcoholics Bond with Alcohol
Remember your first breakup? The world ended. You thought you would never be happy again. Maybe you took to your bed for days. Until one day, said ‘no more’, and you started living again. Or remember after your dog died? You still saw that dog everywhere; heard his paws on the floor. You even caught yourself thinking about having to take him for a walk. People were sympathetic; you may have had a funeral or marked the breaking of the bond in some other way.
Getting over a broken bond is easier if you have support. Without support, it’s hard—almost impossible—to recover. Maia Szalavitz, author of Unbroken Brain, agrees:
People are actually more likely to recover when they still have jobs, family, and greater ties to mainstream society, not less. Indeed, the more “social capital” someone has—friends, education, employment, job contacts, and other knowledge that promotes links to the conventional world—the more likely recovery is. As soon as you think about it critically, it’s easy to see why if you had to bet on whether a homeless, unemployed person or a successful physician is more likely to recover, your money would be safer on the doctor than on the guy on skid row.
If we look at the problem of addiction as a bonding problem, we begin to gain insight into our upbringings. This is not an excuse for our loved ones’ behaviour, but it can help us to understand the spell casters. Take note that this is not about forgiveness, but understanding. One of the simplest and hardest ways of healing deep wounds is to understand the person that hurt you. I’d like to qualify this by saying that you are NOT to put yourself in harm’s way. You are not letting them off the hook. You do not need to swallow the hurts and pretend they didn’t happen. Someone hurt you. End of story. I’m also NOT saying that you need to agree with anything that they did or said. You may come to realise that what happened actually had nothing to do with you. Or you may realise that they hurt you on purpose. That’s their shit, not yours.
There is only one way to understand the ones who hurt you. Get to know them. This is your first task on the quest for knowledge. Your loved one may be a shadowy figure in your life; you may not actually know much about them. You may know some objective facts, like where and when they were born, where they fit in the family, what their dad did for a job. But you may not know much about them as an actual person—what is their favourite ice-cream flavour, and why? Who is their favourite author and why? What was the name of their first crush? What was their favourite job? What was their family like? It’s so important to see them as actual people, not simply Mum or Dad. They are people first, and alcoholics or addicts, second.
I had this kind of breakthrough with my own mum (unfortunately about five years after she died—isn’t it ironic?). I realised one day in therapy what it must have been like for her to raise three children under five years of age. It was the 60s, she was a single mother and an Adult Child of Alcoholics (AcoA). Times were tough. She had to depend on shady men for support, because who else would take her on with three little kids? This realisation helped me put things into perspective. She was just trying to get by. She was doing her best with the tools she had. She wasn’t trying to make my life hell and mess me up, that was just an unhappy by-product. She had had her own spell cast upon her by her mother in her childhood.
In the next section we are going to see how your spell was cast and how to counter that spell.