Who Are We Running Away From?

                                                             WHO ARE WE RUNNING AWAY FROM?
                                                    (Looking for the Illusive Answer to the Emptiness 

                                                      of life)

                                                                                                           BY
                                                                                        Bruce Derman, Ph.D.

               Every day there is another tragic story in which someone has ended up dying or destroying their life due to drugs, food, sex or just plain despair. One week we discover Amy Winehouse is dead at 27. The week before the Olympic skier, Jeret “Speedy” Peterson had violently ended his life. In another story we read about a 700 pound woman who is on a quest to gain another300 pounds. Two years ago Tiger Woods, clearly one of the greatest golfers, went on a sex binge and has pretty much destroyed everything he valued and still hasn’t recovered.
From my perspective in being a psychotherapist and a relationship doctor for many years, I propose that all of these people and many more like them have more in common than you might think. In order to see this commonality, you have to look beneath the usual easy, superficial answers that we typically attribute to these tragedies such as grew up too fast, couldn’t handle fame, depressed, bad parents, or exposure to drugs. There also needs to be a realization that behaviors such as drugs, obsessive eating, and chasing sex in all its forms are not problems, but in truth, are the solutions to what all these people dread and consider worse than any of the consequences resulting from their addictive styles. Yet unless we are willing to face this so-called negative aspect of our humanity, we are left living on an endless treadmill with the same deadly results.
What is our greatest fear or our worst enemy?