l and more-than-just-behavior-modifying account, without losing touch with the totality that includes and pervades it all.

It’s crucial here to give emotion its due: Overly intellectual approaches to being integral devote insufficient attention to emotions, in part perhaps because emotions are just too messy, too fuzzily boundaried, and too nonlinearly related to the rest of our dimensions to be able to be neatly mapped. Emotions implicate us as a totality. They obviously involve the physical/physiological and the cognitive, but also include social factors, related action tendencies, and perspectival capacity, all of which interact and work together for better or for worse. So to work in real depth with emotions is to work with more than emotions.

Any integral approach that only superficially deals with emotions is only superficially integral.

Emotional work easily tends to get overlooked or to be only superficially considered in many approaches to healing (and it may also be reduced to mere venting, as if emotion is an endogenous entity or kind of mass that can be discharged). Every addict is in pain, and much of that pain is emotional in nature, and must be faced and worked with as such.

Now back to addiction: Treating the symptoms only may be fine for a while, but if the pain that underlies and animates such symptoms is not clearly and thoroughly addressed, healing is unlikely to occur, except perhaps superficially.

Spurned, starved, rejected, or otherwise violated need is the primary seed and soil of addictive behavior. This need must be named, exposed, and expressed in its original form (that is, expressed in fitting context), and infused with an awareness that both honors it and keeps it in healthy perspective.

This means that the pain that originated with the violation of need must be felt in the raw, not necessarily right away, but as soon as possible. Otherwise such pain simply pushes us into and seemingly validates our “solutions” to it, be they erotic, narcotic, or, at the extreme, psychotic.

Addiction is the compensatory and all but inevitable “solution” to survival-crazed need, marooned, orphaned, crushed, starved, or suffocated need, need grown stunted or monstrous. Addiction asks for neither prohibition, as exemplified by the “just say no” preachings of those with socially acceptable addictions, nor for permissiveness or neurotic tolerance, but rather for the timely embodiment of perspectives that make room for an openly felt passage into and through the primal pain at addiction’s core.

And don’t look down upon the addict. We are all addicts.

An example: Egoity is, among other things, an addiction — in our egoity, we are addicted to identifying with our persona, as if we actually are who we think we are. Addicted to a case of mistaken identity (and pretending otherwise, while pretending that we are not pretending). It comes with the turf. It’s not an error in the system, despite those spiritual teachings that pathologize it. It’s just a stage on the way.

In the spirit of the drug dealers we may claim to despise, we are inclined to hook our own innocence or openness with our addictions, pushing — deliberately or not — our most gripping habits.

Furthermore, we tend to be addicted to being addicted, literally occupying ourselves with our most compellingly-appetited habits — the majority of which often get away with referring to themselves as “I” — while rationalizing or even glorifying such desperate wanting, such compulsion, as being genuine need.

So what to do? For starters, name and turn toward the addict in you, and instead of either identifying with or dissociating from that one, practise relating TO that one, like a lovingly grounded parent connecting with a troubled child. Get a dialogue going, and let it be as emotional as it needs to be. Let that child breathe, stretch, unwind and kick loose, rage and sob, pound and reach out, accessing whatever resources were suppressed — and perhaps had to be suppressed — back then in order to survive.

And if at all possible, do this, at least for a while, under the guidance of a competent, integrally-informed psychotherapist.

And don’t get addicted to not being addicted! Otherwise, you may just get busy rejecting your indwelling addicts, reinforcing their occupancy of you through your very pushing away of them — the more you try to escape or get rid of them (or to pretend that they are not there), the greater their desperation to hang on to you, no matter what that does to you, much like those beings, human and otherwise, that you just cannot get away from in your sleep-dreams.

Treat your addictions like children who have lost their way; provide them not just with practical, easy-to-read maps, but also — and more importantly — with enough warmth and parental solidity so that they can lean into you and let their underlying pain and need show without fear of being further hurt, shamed, pushed aside, ignored.

Yes, provide a consistently clear sense of boundaries, but not in a way that obscures or marginalizes your love. A secure child does not have to act-out; a child that is truly protected does not have to seek safety in the oblivion of dissociative fantasy or narcotic promise; a child who is not shamed for his or her needs does not have to find compensatory “solutions” to the pain that results from violated need.

Do more than just look at the addict in you; turn toward that one, move closer to that one, touch that one, until the separation between you and that formerly outcast self is no more than whatever distance is needed for focusing purposes.

- Robert Augustus Masters