Whitney Houston Too Rich To Suffer

In response to comments regarding the death of Whitney Houston:

I feel nothing but compassion for her. 

I think people too readily condemn her or are harsh because they think that money and and fame are a cure all. 

I also think they let jealousy get in the way. 
Addiction is a terrible affliction. If she had died of cancer or diabetes I don't believe would be mean spirited about her death. the woman died because of an illness, one that causes terrible suffering to all 
concerned.
 
Many people are obese and whilst people are mean about fat people, I don't recall anyone slamming <Mama Cass for her death, or come to think ofit  Karen Carpenter who died as a direct result of her addiction. Elvis? He is practically worshipped.
 
Then there are other addictions-OCD-like constant washing, tidy freaks, etc. Why do we pick out booze and drugs as far worse and also a totally self inflicted problem, when we tend to have compassion for anorexics, bulimics, neat freaks, clean freaks, and a host of other addictions. And yes they DO all have victims. 


We ALL pay the cost of food addiction in tax and healthcare costs for example, children losing their parents too young because they were overweight. 
I think what makes people angry is the that Whitney Houston, thru her life and death, has shown that what we think of as the cure, wealth and fame, is no such thing and that scares us stupid because we all think if we were that rich, our problems would disappear. No they would not.

Rich or poor, we are still who we are. I am sure Ms Houston lived under the same illusion and this would have increased her suffering not lessened it. Then of course there is death itself: our biggest fear and now we are in the business of dealing with the fear of our own death by blaming everyone else for theirs! If we eat right, exercise right, do this right, or that right, think this way or that way, follow the true path et etc etc we will not die.

Bollocks but a very powerful incentive nonetheless for us to continue to find reasons why it is THEIR fault for dyeing. Weak people LOSE their BATTLE with cancer! Or they SUCCUMB to MS. Or, most commonly, they did something wrong and brought it upon themselves. Thus we, who are good, will not suffer so. Bad things do not happen to good people do they?

(not so) FREE WILL

If you are a functioning human being you cannot help but have come across the idea that we all have free will and as a result we are all personally responsible for the outcome of our free will.

Yet just how free is our will?

Generally speaking we are free to choose or so we are told.  If this is the case then our free will is limited to what we know. We cannot choose an option we are ignorant of.

That there were other options open to me other than those options I had been taught was a shock to me.  At first I could not believe that there was a different way to think than the way I had been taught.  I found that seeing what I had been taught as merely other people’s ideas was so revolutionary for me it took me quite a while to accept it as true. Once I did accept it, I began to change and free myself from my past.

I grew and changed just by coming to understand that there were more options available for me to choose from than I had been led to believe.On those days when the memory of my own behaviour in the past causes me shame in the present, I remind myself that I did not know different.  The shame mainly revolves around having people in my life that were damaging to me and my not understanding the concept of boundaries.  This is one of the most damaging aspects of physical and sexual abuse: having no boundaries.  By this I mean that as other people violated my boundaries from such a young age and so frequently, I was not aware of boundaries either for myself or others.

We will never know all of the choices available to us.  If we make what is ultimately a wrong choice how can we be accountable for that as it could well be that all of the choices we were aware of to choose from were wrong?

It is common to refer to addiction as a disease.I do not know if it is a disease or not.I do know that addiction is not a choice. Imagine wanting with all your might to not do something and still know that you will. I have often heard people who smoke condemn junkies as they take yet another drag on a fag. Likewise, fat people bemoaning the people who cannot control their drinking, as they stuff yet another piece of food into their mouth.

If you are addicted to something, stopping on your own without radical change in yourself, is like vowing to never again urinate! Often people who are addicted, appeared to recover to the unknowledgeable, whereas all they have done is switched to a more acceptable addiction.  Usually one that is not especially visible! I have seen alcoholics stop drinking, sitting at meetings saying how wonderful sobriety is, as they grow to 300lbs.

From my own personal experience with OCD behaviour and anorexia/bulimia I know just how powerless one is to prevent the behaviours that cause so much damage.  I also know how much support and love and understanding is needed in order for one to express what is inside.  I also know that generally speaking this is not available.  Again speaking from personal experience, the psychiatric profession seems to think that the expression of pain is an illness worthy of heavy medication.  Dare to express fear anger and rage sadness or grief and you are likely to be locked up and drugged.  Effectively everybody around you wants you to stop doing that which is making them feel so uncomfortable, i.e. addictive behaviour, yet they block the means of recovery.

Fortunately for me, I was able to experience for several months of 95, 99 and finally for six months toward the end of 2007, the letting go of what was inside me without anybody trying to stop me.  Without exaggeration, I cried daily for hours for months.  The final cleansing, in 2007, took five months and was by far the worst.  My GP and John allowed this to happen because they knew that it must.  Previously I had been locked up and drugged up whenever these feelings showed themselves.

As a result, my own addictive behaviour rarely impinges on my life.  I no longer take hours to be able to leave my home because I have to keep checking that everything is locked and turned off.  This used to be so draining that I just preferred not to leave home. I cannot say that I no longer starve myself or eat too much.  Both are coping tools that I learned and are ingrained in me.  Having said that it is rare that either become a problem now.  In stressful times both good and bad I have to be careful and be aware.  I also rarely now have nightmares or night terrors. I was just speaking to John about this at the weekend because in the film we were watching somebody kept being woken by somebody else’s night terrors.  This was my poor John.  It got so bad he spent nine months sleeping on the couch. Not so much so that he could sleep but to save himself from being attacked.

Anyway back to my original thoughts!  I do not believe that any of us are as free in our will as we like to think that we are.  As the quality of our lives pretty much depends upon the choices that we make it behoves us all to learn as much as we can.  Before all other knowledge it is of the utmost importance that we learn about ourselves.  Even the best educated of us can make the wrong choices because we are ignorant of the most important thing: our self.  Much of what we believe and therefore much of how we behave, is not based upon our knowledge, but upon how we feel.  As a minor example but I think the clear one consider the following: there was a man at the dog shows whom I did not like. He was given an appointment to judge our breed and I refused to enter under him up until the last minute. As I have learned to do, I did eventually ask myself what it was about this person that I  so intensely disliked as I could not blame it upon the way he treated me as I have had very little interaction with him. Even then I could not come up with an answer and my feeling remained.  One day he happened to be walking toward me at a dog show.  Instead of actually seeing him I saw somebody from my past who had caused me a great deal of pain, who had almost killed me.  My antipathy toward this man immediately melted away because I understood that it was not him at all that was the problem but myself and my unconscious memories. We all experience such things but generally we do not question ourselves.

If we look at the world that we live in we can see staring us in the face and where our ignorance leads.

FEELING SUPERIOR?

I hate to hear the term 'junky'. It dehumanises people with drug addiction problems. Most often these ill people have backgrounds such as mine. I understand all too well why people resort to any method to kill the pain.

It seems very few, if any, of us see the hypocrisy. Even alcoholics look down upon drug addicts! I know of people who work with addicts/offenders who see them as scum! And they expect a good result to come from their involvement with people they have dehumanised? Do they not have brains?

People who smoke and fat people also look down upon them too but really they are no different.

Ahh, I hear you yell, but junkies steal. Well so do smokers and fat people! They steal time and money. Only it isn't so in your face. They steal time and money through days off work. They steal time and money from the medical system. From you and from me.

I don't get it really. Tell people you have anorexia/bulimia and you are sympathised with 'how awful for you' yet it is an addiction and it steals time and money from others. It is a dreadful, painful addiction, just as drug addiction is. Yet one is treated with care and the other with shame.

Sitting and stuffing your face on ice-cream and doughnuts and hamburgers and chips does not just affect you. It affects those around you. It makes you emotionally unavailable. If you have children, you are not giving them what they need. Just like any other drug addict.

Smoking doesn't just affect those who smoke. It costs everyone.

As far as I am concerned, there is no hierarchy of addiction. There are no better than you addicts, no worse than you addicts. Addiction is addiction. It destroys lives. It steals time and money and life.

ALL addicts steal for their fix, whatever their fix is.

Still feel superior?

I don't believe in the power of evil. Just the power of love. I see all around me what the absence of love does.

I think it quite moronic to believe in an Omnipotent God and at the same time believe in the power of Evil or an Evil being.

Recently, two boys were described by the media as 'evil monsters' because they committed evil acts. It was obvious to me that these two boys would come from abused backgrounds. They did as it was later reported.

I think there is a distinction between evil behaviour and being evil. I don't believe in the latter. It is a lie. It suggests that the evil doer can never be any different. It is no shock to note that mostly religious people believe others to be evil despite the contradictions.

While we brand someone as evil, they were born that way, they are not human, we are letting ourselves off the hook. It couldn't possibly be our fault could it? We couldn't possibly, as a society, have any responsibility for what happens it in could we?

We ALLOW children to go unloved. We ALLOW children to be abused. We ALLOW children to go unfed. We ALLOW children to witness all kinds of pain and mayhem and deny it has any effect. In fact we deny that children have any memory. We say children are resilient, they forget. They are not and they don't but it makes us feel better to think so because we don't want to recognize our own role in the lives of others and we don't want to recognize our OWN pain.

We can then wash our hands of the results.