Beginning With Fire
The Story of Addiction, Human Nature, and Evolution
Chapter Sketches
Chapter Seven — Indispensable Catastrophe
Hitting bottom. It is perilous, wrenching, deeply disruptive, life threatening — and, profound. Indeed, it is precisely because this state of being is so unsparing — it leaves no wiggle room — that it can catalyze transformations which are otherwise inaccessible. When one encounters the hitting bottom experience, one is fully, completely immersed in an essential truth regarding their life; a culmination of a mode of being which has bankrupted.
We examine the hitting bottom event from three complimentary perspectives; three angles on the hologram. These are:
- » Hitting bottom is the intersection of pain and understanding
- » Hitting Bottom is the ownership of powerlessness
- » Hitting bottom is when you are no longer willing to live with the person you have become.
While each of these renderings sheds a revealing light on this momentous event, the last most successfully conveys the fact that hitting bottom is, above all else, an existential crisis.