"Here’s the thing about withdrawal, from any drug, substance, person, or behavior: The reason it’s so excruciating is that not only do you have to feel the pain of losing access to that thing you desire more than anything else, but you also have to feel the pain of every other loss you have ever experienced along your life’s journey. All the previous failures, all the previous crashes, all the previous disappointments: It’s like a twenty-car pileup of failures on an icy highway—and there’s no way to get away from it. Worst of all, withdrawal forces you to feel your original suffering again—the deepest childhood grief or ancestral wound that started you out on this journey of addiction in the first place. And who wants to feel that? Not me. Not most people, to be honest. My friend the writer and teacher Kemi Nekvapil was once asked by an interviewer, “If you could make everyone on earth do one thing, what would it be?” And Kemi replied, “If there’s one thing I wish everyone would do—one thing that would actually change the world—it would be to heal.”  But healing is hard. Healing is expensive, time-consuming, and painful—whether it’s physical or emotional healing. This is why so many people cannot and will not heal. Instead, they use, in order to not have to feel their suffering. And when using doesn’t work, you can always just blame." ~All the Way to the River