Every person has a spiritual soul which has built into it the desire to feel alive, truly alive, by being in a close relationship with his Creator. This desire to feel truly alive gets distorted as it is filtered through the physical body. The person then imagines this desire for life as a physical desire fulfilled by physical stimuli. He then goes after these desires in attempt to fulfill his inner desire for life. Of course these attempts fail as it is not what his soul is truly looking for. In a nonaddict the drive for pleasure and its failure stays within the norm of, enjoyment and failure, ups and downs (overall more down than up). As we said before, he maintains his basic life structure, with his pleasure-seeking acting as a part of his lifestyle. The addict however has experienced the high of the drug or alcohol not just as a pleasurable experience of feeling alive; rather, he experienced the high as an intense feeling of fulfillment, as feeling his soul is complete, he has found the solution to his lifelong yearning- he has the answer. From that moment and on the drug or alcohol has become the purpose of life, if only he can recapture that moment again.
The addict begins his lifelong chase of that which truly doesn’t exist, because he will never again feel that completion. Now the high becomes the focus of his life, everything else in life becomes secondary to his newly acquired goal. This focus affects him so deeply, as much as he tries consciously to fight it and renew his priorities in life, the chase for the high remains in his sub-conscious as the most important quest. This drive to recapture the high takes over his mind and the addict will do anything and everything for it, it becomes an insanity. The only thing that matters now is his next high. The addict becomes the most self-centered, self-absorbed, dishonest, manipulative individual. Other people don’t matter, only to the extent he can cunningly use them to get to his next high. Their corruption is so deep normal people cannot fathom how dishonest and manipulative they can be. Often it is the parents, teachers of the addict that are the subject of the most manipulation.
The addict is the man of hundred faces and he will exploit those closest to him. His parents, teachers and friends become enablers. Be it financially assisting him in his addiction, with or without their knowledge. Be it emotional sympathy and empathy, giving him the belief that the world has wronged him, closing him up to seeing the truth about himself, blocking him from the only path that will save him.