Amber Hollingsworth (speaker) explains how addiction keeps people stuck at the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy—focused on physical and safety needs—so they become self-focused to meet substance-related needs. She recommends shifting attention outward (helping others, volunteering, doing daily kind acts) to reduce self-pity and support recovery progress.
Chapters
Addiction forces you into a really selfish, self absorbed place. That doesn't mean, I'm telling you, you're a selfish person. You're probably the opposite of a selfish person. Most of the people that I see that are struggling with alcohol or addiction, they're like super good people. A lot of times they're like the actually the extra sensitive type people or the people that really just want to do a good job or really just want to be helpful or they're just really insecure. It's not because you are selfish, but it will make you selfish. A good way to think of it is I don't know if you ever studied this. If you haven't, you can look it up online. But like in psychology, usually sometimes in high school or college, in early psychology class, they'll show you something called Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And it's this pyramid, looks like the old school food pyramid. And it talks about at the base you have to deal with your physical needs, and then you have to deal with your safety needs. And then you have to deal with your social emotional needs. And then you have to deal with your like, I forget what they call it, but it's basically like your career needs or whatever, you know, like your, your work in life. And then at the very top is sort of what he calls self actualization. That's like becoming your most best form of your most spiritually whole self. Most people don't ever get there. But in addiction, it keeps you down in those very base biological, physical needs. And a lot of times if you get above that, then you're still in the safety zone. So the theory is, is that basically you don't really worry about your social life if you're starving to death. You don't really worry about getting a promotion if you don't feel like you have a safe place to sleep tonight. And what addiction does because of what happens in your head biologically is it keeps you on a physical, biological, neurochemical loop that makes you constantly preoccupied with getting those needs met. Because if you're dependent on a substance, your whole life has revolved around making sure you had the right amount of whatever that was, the pill, the drink, the line, whatever it is. You constantly had to think about, how much do I have? How am I going to have enough? Do I have enough to get through Sunday? It's you're constantly stuck in that meeting, that physical need. Because when you're dependent, you pretty much have to have the substance to function. So we call functional alcoholics, like I function really well as long as I got this in me. And so it's keeping you way down there, which means you're never getting up there to dealing with the social aspects of your life and the career, the work of your life. So now that you've broken that physical pattern of dependency, it's time to move on up in those levels. One of the best things that you can do to get sort of out of this pattern of constantly focusing on yourself and getting your needs met is focus on someone else. Find another person or a cause to help. Now that could be a big thing that you get yourself involved with. Like maybe you get involved with Habitat Humanity or you work at the local food bank or you volunteer at the homeless shelter. But it can just be little things. On an everyday basis. You can decide, I'm going to do something nice for somebody every single day. Because that's the best way to stop feeling sorry for yourself is to stop being so consumed by yourself and think about somebody or something else. And guess what? When you do that, you start feeling a lot better about yourself. And when you feel better about yourself, you're much less prone to feeling sorry for yourself. So this is the key to digging out of all that self pity stuff that we've been talking about.
