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www.TheEpochTimes.com COURTESY OF AMY HAUSMAN
That is what addiction does. You find yourself in the same awful situation over and over even though you swear that you will never do it again.
Amy Hausman, L.Ac.
A Personal Journey Through Addiction From cocaine addict to Chinese medicine practitioner By Amy Hausman, L.Ac. I am only able to write these words because of a profound transformation I made in my life, one that started over two decades ago when I was buried deep in addiction and substance abuse. Like many addicts, I used drugs and alcohol to suppress feelings of despair and loneliness. These were feelings I had since my early childhood, which was filled with chaos and instability. In my home, there were always strangers coming around, and I didn’t feel safe or protected. Sometimes they were my older siblings’ friends who’d left their own homes, and I would wake up in the morning to find a total stranger sleeping
on the couch. I often wished I lived with a different family that was more stable and gave me curfews and boundaries like my friends had. My addictive behavior started to express itself around age 13 when I began to use alcohol and marijuana with my friends. At first it was fun and exciting to be doing something bad and not get caught. Almost immediately, though, I realized that using these mood-altering substances made all my fears and self-loathing seem to disappear. This led me to experiment with other drugs, and soon I had a pretty hard addiction to cocaine, which gave me the illusion of being powerful and in control. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I was a true addict.
For the next few years, I continued to use cocaine and other drugs. At some point, however, the drugs stopped working, and I found that I needed more and more to sustain me or the feelings of despair would come back. So I started to use more drugs, unable to look at myself and see that my life was completely unmanageable. Then, on June 10, 1989, I found myself alone, scared, and once again in a precarious situation. I started the day telling myself that I was not going to use any drugs. But by the end of the night, I was miles away from my apartment in Greenwich Village, stranded at the home of a complete stranger with a huge pile of cocaine on the table in front of me. I managed to make it home safely, but after I arrived, I realized yet again that I