Escaping The Land of Addiction
“If you’re lost in the land of addiction, get back on the train until you meet God”.
Carole Sawo
This article comes with a warning! It contains information that may be hard to read. For too long have too many ordinary people been left in the dark – lost in the land of addiction. This article and the upcoming online class address that – we turn all the lights on.
Alphaville’s “Big in Japan”, is not just a massive 80’s synth-pop track about fame. Marian Gold, the lead singer, has described it in relation to the dark heroin scene around Berlin’s Bahnhof Zoo station in the late 1970s. In this reading, the phrase “Big in Japan” functions as a metaphor for the ‘loser’s lie’ – the person who dreams of a better life far away, the imagined distant place used to escape their grim reality. The words to “waiting for my man at the Zoo” refer to the drug pushers and pimps, and the song as a whole, becomes a depiction of addiction, dependency, and the psychological necessity of imaginary escape into phantasy, from a life of overwhelming pain and internal obliteration.
In truth, a psychological disorder is simply the name given to a set of symptoms and behaviour. That is it! Nothing more. It does not, and never did, ever explain the cause. Specifically, why the disorder developed in the first place. In exactly the same way, addiction is also just the name given to a set of behaviours that does not, and never did, explain the cause. In other words, what happened to that person for them to become lost in the land of addiction? The reason is not found in the disorder, the symptoms, the behaviours, or even the chosen substance of numbing, but where addiction really begins; in unhealed trauma, in terrifying experiences, in overwhelmed nervous systems, in ignorance, in innocence, and for the most part, in childhood. In analytical psychology, Jung also describes addiction as not located in the substance itself, but in the psychological and developmental conditions of the individual, in conflicting early experiences.
To not have a psychological disorder or feel pain, people desperately take chemicals prescribed by what could easily be categorised in my view, as a contemporary pusher with a pen. GPs are not psychologists. Psychiatrists do not take their own medication and mostly, have nothing else in their bag. Addicts self-prescribe – pornography is the greatest seducer to the lost soul, as well as drugs, alcohol and other toxins of distraction. But here’s one huge stadium light switch. Holding degrees in psychology and psychoanalysis, an honours in statistical analysis, having studied the brain and mind, synapses and thoughts, levels of consciousness, physical and metaphysical elements, energy forces, and taught and written about all of that for many years, I have one sobering question, why is anyone taking chemicals for non-chemical problems? Especially when the private war one is facing is not found in the brain, but in the mind, specifically, in the lived backstory that sits in emotional memory.
Online Class: Tuesday 2nd June 2026 ~ Register Now >