ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on particular threads of experience and threads of addiction. A connection between spirituality and addiction has been noted since ancient times. Winnicott fingers a particular source of pain that strikes the author as especially significant for addiction, at least certain aspects and forms of addiction. Reactive fear, rage, isolation, or addiction to others can help one get through but thwart fuller unfolding. Addiction, in part, is a response to wounded aloneness and attempts to find an aloneness without wounds, a wholeness of aloneness not subject to damage. Addiction makes an end run around the sense of damage but ends up replicating and often adding to it. Pain and beatific threads intermingle, meld, and become indistinguishable. Injury to the special situation Winnicott conveys can play a role in lifelong recreation of a sense of unachieved or damaged beatitude, a painless state one hopes will last forever.
