Everyone Medicates

Guest post by Michael Kelley

 The following is taken from my book, Wednesdays Were Pretty Normal: A Boy, Cancer, and God, the account of our battle with childhood cancer, and concerns our tendency to medicate our pain:

"Do we turn to alcohol because it tastes good? Do we cheat on our spouses purely out of lust? Do we become addicted, entrapped, and unfocused purely out of desire? Or are we just trying to have the same experience a child can have, if even for a few moments, when a drip of a drug can help us forget about reality?

In the absence of emotional morphine, we turn to other means to help with our pain. These may be substances, but they can also be seemingly benign forms of medication. Take, for instance, a job. When things aren’t going well at home, when a wife grows cold and distant, when a man’s children refuse to respect and listen to him, the best and easiest way to forget about that reality is to forge himself a new one at the office. There he can be valued. He can be listened to. He can be important. He can escape.

Or maybe this one—when a woman looks around one day and finds that her life is slipping away, when she realizes that she’s spent decades doing the same thing and yet has nothing to show for it, when she feels stuck behind car and house payments, then the easiest way to forget about that reality is to escape into fantasy. Pornography, online dating, and extra marital affairs are readily accessible to serve that need.

Or consider this—a man might be completely moral and totally “Christian.” And yet his world is crumbling around him. So he throws himself into church activity after church activity, leading one Bible study and prayer meeting after another, and yet he never confronts the pain he’s running from. Church can be medication, too.

We are, in fact, masters at medicating our pain. And all of these things—whether church, pornography, or drugs—can easily serve the greatest need in the moment—escape. That’s what medication does. It doesn’t take away the pain. It doesn’t ultimately change the circumstances. It doesn’t alter reality. But it does, however briefly, allow the pain of reality to be dulled. We don’t have to think and feel what’s really going on. Medication allows us to escape from reality; it keeps us from having to ask the difficult “what if” and “why” questions of our lives. If the common denominator of humanity is pain, then a valid question we must ask is what we do with that pain. Most of us are trying to escape, even if it’s just for a while. I did it. I do it. But there is another option. It’s a more difficult way, but nevertheless it is the way to approach something akin to healing. And that’s pressing in."

Find the book here.