I have long felt that at the bottom of our cultural tendency to addiction, is unprocessed grief. That grief lies at the heart of both individual and social compulsions of all kinds. And what determines an ability to process grief? A sovereign decision to descend into the heart of one’s own repressed painful memories. To feel those memories, all the way through. Slowly moving from painful memory to painful memory, backwards, through time. So that, eventually, the entire panorama of one’s life will begin to clear, and thus to shift, to move, to transform.

One of the treasures that I found during my own battle with addiction to cigarettes (age 17-39; 12 years, a Jupiter cycle), was Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams and Reflections.

RFK Jr. referring to his own 15 year battle with drug addiction, starting, at age 15, with intravenous heroin ( i.e., the second half of his first 30-year Saturn cycle), speaks of Jung, his conviction that the only people who can actually beat powerful addictions are those who undergo a “profound spiritual realignment.”

Searching for more videos on RFK Jr.’s contemplation of his own addiction, I came across all sorts of them. Clearly, part of RFK Jr.’s purpose in life is to present his own seemingly impossible struggle with addiction to others.

Here’s a very short rendition of the same.

Here are two posts I wrote referencing my own struggle with addiction. Frankly, I date the day that I decided to hand over my seemingly impossible desire to for yet one more puff to a “higher power” as the actual beginning of my purposeful life. Before that date, every time I tried, and failed, to stop smoking, the addiction would dig in ever deeper; a little demon inside my soul, mocking my every effort, announcing that no matter what, my entire life was a failure.

How I Stopped Smoking

and

A Metaphysical Approach to Addiction

Interestingly enough, once I had managed to stop smoking, I then went on to spend the next seven years moving through, on a conscious level, the unprocessed grief of my own inner child, to whom I gave the name “Orphan Annie.”

(Origin story: my dad left for WWII when I was nine months old, leaving my mother so bereft that her milk dried up, that very day. No wonder my adult need to suck on a cigarette!)

By the time I began this profound work on myself (with dreams, journaling, co-counseling with two close female friends, Jung, plus another amazing book, The Drama of the Gifted Child), I was already steeped in Jung’s view of the unconscious, and how we need to wrestle with the fertile darkness it holds in order to individuate, to become whole.