You might not believe this or admit it to yourself, but people can be addicted to darkness, misery and negativity. They want to stay sick, they don’t want to get better. This is a very interesting phenomena. It sounds counter intuitive, right? How could anybody want to stay sick? Let’s take a deeper look at it!
One reason people can get addicted to darkness is that it’s all they know and they grew comfortable with misery. It’s easier for them to handle than light and happiness. What you’re used to you find comfort in after some time. We are habitual animals. If you always wear dark shaded sunglasses and then suddenly take them of then you will feel very uncomfortable with the bright light in your eyes, it will even hurt your eyes. It’s kind of the same, the new and undiscovered is frightening.
When it comes to sickness some people want to stay sick because you can gain something from being sick. You can kind of be like a child again, you don’t need to take too much responsibility, and other people might take care of you. Society in large don’t expect so much of you if you’re sick. It’s pretty comfortable if you feel like you can’t handle your life and you’re sick of being a responsible grown up. They’re just not ready to be healthy again.
There’s a lot of shame and guilt around this topic. But it’s very important to speak about this, how can you help someone to recover if they don’t even want to get better? Compare this with a drug addict, if they don’t want to quit, how can you then help them? No, you can’t! For some people this might be too hard to even admit to themselves – that they want to stay sick – and they will wonder why they never get better.
People that want to stay sick build a whole world around them that contains nothing but the problem or sickness. They love talking about different treatments and medicine. They love telling their story about how they got sick and how it feels to be sick. They want people around them to feel pity for them. The problem or sickness is like the sun that all the planets circulates around and the planets are everything in their life. They might seek out people that have the same problems or sickness and they trigger each other to go deeper into this behavior patterns. Actually this just makes them sicker. How can they get better when their best friends are still sick? Then they might lose their friends because they lose the important connection with them and their common interest – the problem and the sickness.
We need to start addressing this very important topic!
This text is inspired from a book by Caroline Myss – “Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can” (1994).