@The_Myth, I can’t reconcile these statements,
And I think maybe I’m simply misunderstanding you. To not cause further confusion, I want to emphasise that by,
I mean “do you ever find yourself unemphatic, or unable to comprehend, addict-behaviour without having to actively remind yourself of what it is like to be in that state?”
I’d imagine having lived with addiction through 40 years that your default mode would be emphaticness, and that at most you’d occasionally be pulled out of that state.
The reason I asked was: I myself have found that I’ll regress into a state of “not understanding” sometimes and that this seems to be a consequence of being further removed from my own struggles that I had in the past.
I.e., when I myself was actively unwell, then when presented with the behaviour of someone who was also struggling, all of their behaviour was readily contextualised without any conscious effort on my part. Now though, I sometimes have to remind myself of what life is like at those stages. Now, I occasionally have the initial response of “Oh, no, why would you…?” And then I take a breath, re-align myself, and it instead becomes “Of course you would”.
And it is here that I believe that my confusion is simply me paying the price for not posing the question without a clear context, and that you meant: that you have to be mindful to recognize addict behaviour in yourself, as that was your default mode for so long and that during that time you did not actively question said behaviour (or just accepted it). Because if that is the case, everything you wrote makes sense to me.
So, in the context of everything I’ve written, could you please let me know if your meaning and understanding of the question were as I described in the previous paragraph rather than the ones preceding it?