Drugs and the Deception of the Body:

 Excerpt from the book The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting by Alice Miller from Chapter 13, Drugs and the Deception of the Body:

As a child, I had to learn to suppress my entirely natural responses to the injuries inflicted on me, responses like rage, anger, pain, and fear. Otherwise, I would have been punished. Later, at school, I was proud of the skill I had developed in controlling and restraining these feelings. I considered this ability a virtue, and I also expected my first child to achieve the same kind of discipline. Only after I succeeded in freeing myself of this attitude was I able to understand the suffering of children who have been forbidden to respond to injuries in an appropriate way and to engage with their emotions in a benevolent environment, so that in later life they can take their bearings from the feelings they actually have, rather than fearing them.

 Unfortunately, there are many people who have been through the same thing as I have. Unable to display their strong feelings as children, they have no real experience of them, and later they sorely miss this experience. In therapy, some of them succeed in locating and experiencing their repressed emotions. Then they are able to turn them into conscious feelings they can understand on the basis of their own life history and that they no longer need to fear. But others reject this course because they cannot or will not confide their tragic experiences to others. In our present-day consumer society, such an attitude is widespread. It is considered the done thing not to display one's feelings, or only in exceptional cases, after the consumption of drugs or alcohol. Aside from that, feelings (one's own and those of others) are something to be jeered at. In show business and journalism, the art of irony is a well-paid commodity, so it is possible to make a great deal of money with the suppression of one's feelings. Even if one ultimately risks losing all contact with oneself and merely functioning as a mask, an "as if" personality, there are always drugs, alcohol, and other substances to fall back on. Derision pays well; money is no object. Alcohol helps to keep us in a good mood, and stronger drugs do so even more effectively. But because these emotions are not genuine, not linked up with the true story of the body, the effect is bound to wear off after a time. Higher and higher doses are required to fill up the void left by childhood.  page 139.

 Drugs do not always have the function of freeing people from dependency and maternal constraints. Sometimes legal drugs (alcohol, nicotine, prescribed medications) are used in an attempt to fill the void left by the mother. 

The child was not given the nourishment needed from her and has found no substitute for this in later life. Without drugs, this gap can literally express itself as a feeling of physical hunger, gnawing away at the stomach, which contracts in response. Probably the foundations for addiction are laid at the very beginning of life, as is the case with bulimia and other eating disorders. 

The body makes it clear that in the past it urgently needed something, something withheld from it when it was a tiny baby. But this message is misunderstood as long as the emotions are ignored. Accordingly, the distress of the small child is erroneously registered as present distress, and all attempts to combat that distress in the present are doomed to failure. As adults, we have different needs, and we can satisfy them only if they are no longer coupled with the old needs in our unconscious minds. pages 145-146.