ADDICTIONS IN OLD AGE [R, 10-23-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Psychology of An Old Man—ADDICTIONS IN OLD AGE [R, 10-23-25]

 

As a pastor, I had church members who were addicted. Many were secret, but I knew about some of them. Those were the ones who came to me for help. One man—I’ll call him Jake—came not to get help with dealing with his addiction, but to get help with negotiating his sobriety.

He said, “I’ve been sober long enough now that I’ve learned why I started drinking in the first place. The drinking covered up the other problems. Now I have to deal with those problems, and I don’t know how to do it without the booze.”

He had dropped friends he’d had before his drinking. Now his only friends were drunks, and he couldn’t be around them. He felt very much alone. In addition to AA, he looked to the church for help.

That worked for a little while. He liked me. He liked our worship. But our church was too open. He felt exposed in all that open spiritual space, where everyone mingled around with everyone else. He decided to go to a more conservative church, one with narrow and strict expectations about what to believe and how to think and with whom to associate. He needed a more rigid structure.

It worked. For a while. The only thing that really works with an addiction, though, is to stop doing it.

Addiction changes your brain. Not just physical addictions, like dope and booze, but activity addictions, like gambling. Often for old people, it’s thinking addictions. If you rehearse negative thoughts and memories over and over, your brain gets literally grooved in such a way that you can’t think positive thoughts. That’s where angry old men and crabby old ladies come from.

Most physical addictions develop early and simply become more pronounced in old age. That is true with thinking addictions, too. Defensiveness, blaming, criticism, negative thinking—all develop early. Many old people think about all that is negative and hateful and excluding, and have been doing so for so long that their brains are grooved. They can’t think good things.

Psychologists tell us that almost all addictions are the result of unresolved grief over loss, not just the loss of people, but anything else that is important to us. That’s an intriguing insight.

As I dealt with addicts, though, I found that it was never very effective to try to figure out what their unresolved grief was so that they could go back and resolve it. For one thing, it took too long. They needed help right now with dealing with the addiction.

Stop doing it is the first command for addicts. It’s only then that you can see what your real problems are. For negative thinking addiction, the apostle Paul outlined the antidote long ago, in his letter to the Philippians [4:8] Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, think on these things. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.

So, I think about puppy dogs and laughing babies. Works great.

John Robert McFarland