The Problem Is Not Me

A few years ago, a drug addict friend of mine invited me to come with him to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting that was open to friends and family of members.

I could see that the group was helpful to a lot of people, but I was deeply disturbed by one thing.  It had the mantra: ‘The problem is not drugs – the problem is me.’  Not ‘the problem is with me,’ or, ‘the problem is my behaviour, my misuse of drugs,’ but, ‘the problem is me.’

It is an important distinction, as I argued to my friend on the way home.  If you tell me that I have a problem, it implies that I need to seek help in overcoming my problem.  If you tell me that I am the problem, it implies that I ought to rid the world of that problem by committing suicide.

My friend tried to explain that I didn’t know what it was like.  ‘You’re not an addict, so it’s different for you,’ he said.  ‘All of us in there are into really self-destructive behaviour, so it’s true about us.’

I wasn’t sure he was being fair in accusing me of not being an addict.  I might not have any interest in alcohol and narcotics, but at that point I had an overwhelming urge to deal with any stressful situation by punching, kicking, biting and strangling myself.  I knew that my compulsion was putting not just me but other people at risk.  My friend had been threatened with violence from a neighbour who had seen me leaving his flat with a black eye, and assumed that my friend had hit me.

But in spite of this, I couldn’t find any motivation to stop.  After all, if the problem with me was not my self-destructive behaviour but the fact that I existed at all, then surely being self-destructive was exactly what I ought to do?  Unless we believe that there is something in us that is good and worth saving, we have no reason to seek help.

I had never doubted for a second that my friend deserved all the support and therapy he could get.  As an evangelical Christian, I knew that Jesus loved drug addicts, poor people, and anyone with a criminal record.  What I couldn’t believe was that Jesus was interested in white, middle-class, non-drug-users like me, whose problems were psychological and not usually illegal.

The saying, ‘God loves the sinner but hates the sin,’ irritates a lot of people, mainly because it is often used inappropriately, about things that may not be sins at all.  For example, a booklet pushing a literalist interpretation of the Creation story in Genesis 1, asked rhetorically, ‘Can someone who believes in evolution be a Christian?  Yes!  If you repent, God will forgive you for any sin, even believing in evolution.’

But just because saying, ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin,’ isn’t relevant in every context, doesn’t mean that it isn’t true, or that it isn’t important.  God is not someone who has a loving side and an angry side to his character, so that he might be in a loving mood or an angry mood at any given moment.  God is love.  He loves each of us, because it would be self-contradictory for him not to love; it would be a denial of who he is.

So, when we do things that harm ourselves, or each other, or the environment, God hates our harmful behaviour, because it attacks the creatures that he loves.  He hates the behaviour because he loves, not because it offends against an arbitrary list of rules.

This is what I believe, part of the time, when I’m in a reasonably calm and positive frame of mind.  I can’t prove it from the Bible, even though I can point to Bible passages saying so.  If you’re not Christian or Jewish, you might not believe the Bible.  If you’re Jewish, you probably believe the Hebrew Bible, but not the New Testament.  If you’re a liberal Christian, you don’t assume the Bible is inerrant, and most sane Christians of any kind are justly suspicious of ‘proof texts’ quoted out of context.  And if you’re an insane fundamentalist Christian who thinks the way I do, you can probably cite any number of verses to contradict what I’ve said.

But then, you can prove anything from the Bible or any other book, depending on how you interpret it.  Quite apart from the fact that, reading an English translation of a Greek account of what Jesus said in Aramaic isn’t likely to produce word-for-word accuracy, we all assign words different private meanings. 

Where one person uses ‘self-esteem’ to mean healthy acknowledgement that we all have value, another takes it to mean arrogant egotism, and contrasts it with the ‘self-love’ that motivates us to take care of ourselves, and therefore makes us willing to change and learn.  To one person, ‘empathy’ means feeling exactly what another person feels, and completely identifying with them, while ‘sympathy’ can mean simply understanding and caring about people’s feelings even when you don’t agree with them.  To another person, these definitions may be reversed.

I was once turned down for voluntary work in the Samaritans, after an interview in which I argued about this.  I don’t think I deserved to be turned down because what he called ‘empathy’, I think of as ‘sympathy’.  But perhaps I did deserve to be turned down because I couldn’t enter the interviewer’s world enough to speak his language, and therefore might not have entered a caller’s world either.

In the same way, I was insensitive in criticising my friend’s NA meeting.  I should have accepted that the NA members knew what they meant by their sayings, and found them helpful, even if they sounded wrong to me.

So no, the problem isn’t me.  But my problems include many of the things I do, including clinging onto my definition of words instead of trying to understand what other people mean.