Be prepared for things to get “worse”. Whenever you stop indulging in an addiction, the problems that were being covered up by the addiction come back into awareness and this “emergence” of deep and serious problems can seem like your life is getting way worse.

In fact experience wise it’s exactly the same. Phenomenologically speaking, you life does get worse when you free yourself from an addiction.

So think of it like a magic spell. Think of it like you’re in a magic prison except instead of iron bars surrounding you, you have a magic circle. If you step outside the magic circle, deep bleeding wounds will appear on your body. Stepping back inside the magic circle will make the wounds close up and stop bleeding.

In this analogous scenario, to escape the magic circle you must resolve to accept the wounding of your body. And in real life to escape the addiction you must resolve to accept wounds into your life.

The wounds are already there; they’re the reason you are running the addiction program. But they are hidden, and will reappear, and experientially that’s indistinguishable from them happening to you fresh.

So be ready to be hurt and horrified by the awareness lurking just outside your cloud of addiction. There’s trauma there that you will need to face and process.