People who are addicted have a void to fill. When they can not fill it with Love, community, and a sense of meaning, they fill it with whatever substitutes or substances are available.

Substitutes activate parts of the brain that numb pain, produce pleasure and reward, and create a feeling of Human connectivity.

For anyone suffering from a lack of connectivity and Love in their life, substitutes offer a sweet relief, allowing the user to feel life is worth living – perhaps for the first time in a very long time.

Our Society is sick; our Society is depressed; and mass parts of the population have huge traumas. We do not love ourselves. That is the root of it.

Addiction is a direct extension of the coping mechanisms you develop early in life to deal with stress, trauma, or abuse.

When you are young, you use mechanisms like detaching yourself to keep traumas from overwhelming you.

But as you get older and those traumas are no longer relevant, the attitude still sticks. It is difficult to get close to others, and you do not develop a stable community or identity.

You feel empty or uncomfortable in your own skin. You are told that these problems are yours and yours alone, and you do not know how to resolve these feelings.

So you turn to drug abuse or compulsive behaviors, which temporarily numbs instead of providing lasting relief.

You find substitute identities in subcultures based around drugs or compulsive habits, which seem attractive but only reinforce destructive behaviors.

You can only resolve this emptiness by turning inward. It takes a spiritual, healing experience to undo the detachment and reconnect with yourself. Ayahuasca is a source of treatment for these issues.

Psychedelic therapy – which generally involves conscious communication alongside medicines like ayahuasca – helps you revisit and defuse past traumas that may underlie addiction.

Revisiting, recontextualizing, and coping with these traumas help clear the psyche for the road to recovery.

Without deep-seated sources of pain and alienation, you are free to connect with others without fear and reclaim the community for which addiction served as a substitution.

You can break down your coping mechanisms, reconnect with your spiritual core, and discover new meaning and purpose in life.