How We Are Torn
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Compulsion I
"I am a compulsive drinker." "She is a compulsive eater." "I don't know what made me do it; I just heard a voice." These are the excuses one hears daily, implying that the will is no longer free, but as if under the direction of another.
Is there such a thing as compulsion? Definitely. How does it come about? Generally through three stages: consent, act and habit. Every person has buried in his subconsciousness certain powers, capacities or impulses given for his perfection. One refers to our body, the other to our mind, and the last to things outside the body and mind. The first is sex or the creative impulse; the other is a desire for power, e.g., through a search for truth or the pursuit of a talent or the right use of power. But outside of the body and the mind, there are things. The person is finally driven to possess property. Just as the will is free because a man can call his soul his own, so property is external and an economic guarantee of human freedom.
Each of these impulses is capable of being perverted. Fire on the hearth is good, but fire in the clothes closet is not. The sex instinct can be distorted into license and perversion. In that case, the other person is really not loved, but is used. One drinks the water; one forgets the glass. Hidden in our nature is a lot of flammable material which is not ignited except by some suggestion from without, with the consent of the will. External influences only tempt; they do not compel. There is no inseparable connection between the two. When Joseph was tempted by Potiphar's wife he said, "How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?"
The mind's desire for knowledge and truth can be perverted by each person saying to himself, "There will be no measure of truth or knowledge outside of me. Whatever I decide to be true is true. I make the truth. I make the law. I am my own creator. I am my own savior." The drive for the possession of things can be turned into avarice, greed, selfishness and the refusal to help the poor.
When does the good impulse become tempted? It becomes tempted generally by a solicitation from without. For example, the sex impulse might be perverted by a picture, a book, a person. There is no perversion at this particular point; there is only a suggestion. This is what is called temptation to do something immoral. No temptation to do evil is wrong in itself; it is only the consent which is wrong.
It has been said that it is wrong to repress our impulses. No! Repression is not always wrong. As a matter of fact, every expression of something good, e.g., to give food to a hungry person, is a repression of selfishness.
When an outside evil pleasure is presented, our nature exaggerates the proportions of everything; it shows the pleasure or the profit through a magnifying glass, multiplied by desire and expectation. One can imagine a mountain of gold, but one can never see a mountain of gold. What the imagination does is to present things to the mind not as they are, but as the mind would have them to be. Notice that all love songs are songs of expectation. Nothing cheats a man as much as expectation, which promises high but performs nothing.
The desire to pervert our good impulses means that the subjective and the objective meet; that which before was only within the heart now begins to feel the touch and the allure of something outside. As Shakespeare said:
How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds
Make deeds ill done!
After the consent of the will to do what is wrong, comes the deed. As the boy grows into a man, so the will grows into the act. Once the wrong act is done, there follows the uneasiness and remorse which is actually God calling the soul back to itself. The act repeated many times turns into habits. They are like tiny strands of silk, any one of which can be readily broken, but when woven day after day, they become a great chain which no giant can break. Habits tend to create or strengthen an attitude and disposition. They become so very natural that we are hardly conscious of them, whether good or bad. All the good things lie downstream, and all we have to do is just float like a log. When finally the habit creates a rut in our brain so that we automatically respond to any temptation, we have what is called "compulsion."
Compulsion II
It has been stated that flammable material exists on the inside of every human being. For example, the righteous use of sex could be perverted into grossness; a desire for perfection could turn one into a tyrant; and the desire for property as the extension of oneself, into a miser. The stages by which one advances into compulsion are: first, the consent of the will to any temptation; next, the act which is the result of the temptation; and, finally, the habit itself. It takes many acts to make a habit, as it takes many strands of flax to make a rope.
Habits are good as well as bad. How weary our brain would be if we had to relearn playing the piano each time we sat down to it, or if we had to go through the laborious process of learning to write when we composed a letter. In the case of evil habits, such as alcoholism, the energy which once went into the will to prevent an excess now goes into the habit itself to enforce it. Conscience, which at first registered a protest against an evil action such as hurting a neighbor, becomes dulled from abuse. It is very much like the spring on a screen door during the summertime; it loses its resiliency and ability to close to keep out flies. Good acts make virtue easier, and evil acts make vice easier. The hedge broken down is easier to get through. The drops of water flowing through a dike can eventually end in a flood.
How habits eventually lead to compulsion may be illustrated by the parable of the trees of the forest who had a solemn parliament in which they decided to enact some laws against the wrongs which the ax had done them. They finally agreed that no tree would lend wood as a handle for an ax under the pain of being outlawed by the other trees. The ax without a handle traveled up and down the forest and begged for wood from cedar, ash, oak and elm, but no one would lend him a chip. At last he went to the briars near the trunks of the trees and said to the trees that these shrubs were sucking away the chemicals of the soil, and were also obscuring the glory of the fair trees. The trees agreed to give him a handle to cut down the shrubs, but when the ax got the handle, he cut the trees down also.
When a strong man has a palace that is well defended, he can keep his goods in peace. But when one stronger than he attacks the palace, then he loses his goods and also his liberty. In like manner, there eventually comes to some habitual practice of vice what is known as compulsion. Within the course of one evening, two young mothers in an Eastern city were assaulted by a man who broke down the front door, saying, "I am a compulsive sex maniac." There are five million alcoholics in the United States, most of whom would say, "I can't help it, I am a compulsive drinker. The sight of alcohol triggers me, and I have no power to resist."
It is at this point that psychiatrists and social workers and others say with some degree of justice that such people are sick. Indeed they are sick, but they are not sick in the same way as a person with cancer who never willed that the cancer virus should enter his body or that it should be multiplied within his body as a kind of a habit. But all who suffer from a so-called compulsion have entered into this state as a result of successive reacts, until a point was reached where, as a great Russian writer has said, "unlimited freedom leads to unlimited tyranny."
What must be stressed is that no human will is ever completely ruined by a force on the outside. It can, like a muscle, be cut successively by a knife until the limb drops helpless. What is strange about the compulsion is that although the pleasure attached to the indulgence lessens with each successive indulgence, the power of compulsion increases. The energy that once went into the enjoyment now goes into forging new links in a chain which can be broken only with the greatest difficulty.
Compulsion III
We have explained how successive acts can become habits, and how evil habits can eventually create compulsions in which one justifies himself, saying, "I cannot help it; I am a compulsive drinker," or "I am a compulsive sex maniac," or "I am a compulsive kleptomaniac." What emotions and feelings are associated with those under compulsion? First, almost all generally excuse themselves of any guilt. The blame is outside of them, not inside. This has been the story of human nature from the beginning when Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. It will generally be found that all who are given to some so-called compulsive vice will generally seek out the companionship of those who will never blame them, but rather excuse them; that is, a kind of a confraternity of "innocent babes" is formed by which they insulate themselves from any "moral corruption."
The second effect of the compulsion is the feeling of being divided and torn. It is as if one said, "My name is Legion." The person under compulsion feels very much like the hand when a burning coal is placed upon it; there is no true affinity between the nature of the hand and the nature of a burning coal. This attempt to merge or unite both creates pain. In like manner, it is not the nature of a body to be no longer master of its own fate and destiny. Something is in the mind which is alien to it. Like Macbeth, it asks:
Why do I yield to that suggestion
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair
And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature?
The burning sensation inside of the human psyche means that there is something there which ought not to be there. There is going on inside the one under compulsion something of the struggle of two earthen pots swimming upon the water with the motto: "If we knock together, we sink together." There seems to be a knocking going on in the soul with the prospect of destruction.
A third note of compulsion, and one which closely follows the sensation of duality, is the realization that one cannot be under compulsion except through something other than the ego. That is why a compulsive drinker will say, "I am not to blame! I am under compulsion." No one has better described compulsion than Helmut Thielicke: "I belong to the demonic power, not simply in the sense of belonging to an alien master against my own will. Rather, I belong to that power in the sense that I belong to myself. That is to say, I cannot plead that it simply has control over me and that because of this coercion I incur no responsibility. No, this demonic bondage exists only as I belong to myself, to my ambition, to my self-assertiveness, my passions. The devil lives in the medium of my love of self. I do not love the devil by name, rather I love myself by name and precisely in doing this I deliver myself over to him. Even though I am here dealing with myself, it nevertheless becomes clear that in the very act of doing this, I am dealing with another, simply because I cannot break the bond in which I am held, and am, so to speak, forcibly bound to myself. I see a powerful spell hovering over this bondage."
Goethe's magician's apprentice said, "Those spirits I conjured up, now I can't get rid of them," which is a fairly good description of one under compulsion. But the case is not hopeless. Because there seems to be a power that is overwhelming one who is under compulsion, it follows that only another power is able to master it. In the last analysis, no love is ever driven out; it is only conquered by another love. One cannot overcome a love of alcohol until he finds some other love which is more compelling. One alcoholic told me that nothing and no person ever was able to convince him of the harm he was doing until he saw how it was ruining his wife. It was the love of the wife which eventually drove out the love of alcohol. The deepest mystery, therefore, appears in this final conflict of man's spirit with God's Spirit, and it is only the power of the latter which can drive out and conquer the temporary holder of man's bondage.
Taken from Guide To Contentment by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.
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