How long are you willing to continue self imposed suffering?

How long are you willing to continue self-imposed suffering? This is a question I have pondered for most of the day. I was engaged in a conversation about "hitting bottom" and the criminal justice population. For most, incarceration would be worse than death, but for a large number of men and women, time spent behind bars has become a natural part of their addiction cycle. We as addicts have the ability of adaptation, the ability to blind ourselves to tragedy, sadness, loss, etc. When it does surface we can use it to do what we want which can include drug and alcohol use. A scenario played out every minute of every day. So what happens to those who use incarceration as an escape from themselves and their problems? For many years I believed and understood incarceration as a consequence of my addiction. I now understand that the true consequence is that you don't get to stay incarcerated. You have to leave; you have to return to the world, your problems, and yourself.  Today I spent time doing interventions with people in the middle of a relapse cycle with the immediate consequence for not changing their behavior was to return to incarceration. It is hard for anyone to visualize what the end of the road looks like. For addicts, this is especially hard. With all the excuses, all the drugs, all the consequences, all the interventions, all the sanctions, all the hands reaching out to help, the root of the issue is suffering. Why would you want to continue to suffer? What kind of relationship is it? We know that everyone suffers, naturally. The death of a loved one, a speeding ticket, a tried relationship, a divorce, and the list is infinite. The type of suffering I am referring to is a type of self-imposed suffering. It continues to amaze me the amount of suffering a person can endure mentally, psychologically, and physically while in an active addiction cycle. Maybe a person simply has to be tired of suffering and have a desire to want to want something different. This is what I wanted…something different.

B

To live is to suffer; to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering –Friedrich Nietzsche