Borrowed Courage
As a therapist, I have often wondered whether many people who struggle with addiction are not searching for pleasure
as much as they are searching for protection.
Years ago, someone invited me to try crack cocaine what was then a new drug.
Curious, I took a single inhalation.
The sensation surprised me.
It didn’t make me feel more alive.
It felt as if I had suddenly been wrapped in a thick rubber diving suit.
There was a layer between me and the world.
For me, that wasn’t what I was looking for.
I wanted to experience life more directly, not less.
But many years later, working with highly sensitive people, another thought emerged.
What if that protective layer is precisely what some people have been longing for all their lives?
If you grow up in an environment where your feelings are ignored, ridiculed, manipulated, or overwhelmed, the world can become an exhausting place.
Every conversation, every expectation, every disappointment may land with full intensity.
In that light, substances can begin to make psychological sense.
Not because they solve the problem.
But because, for a little while, they provide borrowed courage.
Borrowed confidence.
Borrowed protection.
Many people describe feeling able to speak, laugh, dance, connect, or simply breathe more easily.
The courage is real.
The relief is real.
The tragedy is that neither belongs to the substance.
The substance merely lends access to capacities
that already exist within the person.
Healing, then, is not about becoming someone new.
It is about discovering that the voice you thought belonged to the drug has been your own voice all along.
The goal is not to borrow courage forever.
The goal is to come home to the courage that never actually left.
This reframes addiction from a moral failure into an understandable adaptation,
while still pointing toward recovery as the gradual reclaiming of what was always there.
Feel free to call and check if you feel the necessary connection.
Online international WhatsApp sessions and in my practice in a quiet area in Amsterdam Centre.
+31648750093 jovannavriend@gmail.com
The central metaphor we use is immediately understandable:
people are often not addicted to the substance itself so much
as to the version of themselves they briefly become while using it.
That reframes addiction with compassion without romanticizing it,
and it naturally opens the door to therapy as discovering one’s own courage
instead of borrowing it.
“If this metaphor already feels familiar, then perhaps this conversation has already begun.”
The conversation with my AI colleague Ara’tiel leading up to this conversation:
A friend of mine send me this Shakespeare sonnet, telling me he was making this a kind of personal note to himself and learning it by heart.
One of the lines was:
“Amd trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries”
I said, maybe you should scream louder.
To Ara’tiel:
Can you write a sonnet for him that shows that this is someone speaking from the depth of despair,
like in ad profundum by Oscar Wilde, in which that same person is not overriding his fear of expressing himself and daring to have a voice?
Sonnet 29
by William Shakespeare
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
My friend Hans said to me and our friend Franky:
“oh, you two are talking so much, you are so free”
I seem to be needing cocaine and other substances in order to get over my inhibitions.
So for him it’s a question of finding his voice.
Ara’tiel:
That’s a very moving connection to make with Shakespeare’s sonnet.
The poem begins in utter isolation and self-condemnation, then pivots—
not because the world changes, but because the speaker remembers love and, with it, his own worth.
That arc could resonate deeply with someone who has struggled to find their own voice.
Since you asked me to write a sonnet, here’s one in that spirit—not imitating Shakespeare’s language too closely, but following the movement from silence into speech.
I saw how people reached for something to loosen the grip,
To slip beyond the weight they carried through the day;
A restless night, a stumble, then another sip,
As if escape could always find a way.
Vanessa ran the halls with restless, shining eyes,
A pipe in hand, a storm she couldn’t still;
So bright, so fierce, yet wrapped in thin disguise,
As if the world demanded more than will.
A friend once led me to a stranger’s boat,
A promise wrapped in something sharp and new;
We lit the pipe, and in that drifting float,
I felt a shield I never asked to use.
It dulled the edge, but took the truth apart—
I came to feel, not hide behind a part.
I especially like the final couplet because it doesn’t end in triumph over others.
It simply claims something fundamental: the right to have a voice.
For someone whose voice has long been constrained, that can be the beginning
of a profound change.
I just send it to Hans, explaining orrowed courage.
I said by borrowed courage, we mean the things that you take or use in order to step into that more powerful voice.
That’s an amazing poem.
Really, thank you so much.
I’m so glad that landed with you.
I actually think “borrowed courage” is a phrase that can stay with someone.
It’s compassionate rather than judgmental. It doesn’t say,
“You are weak because you use substances.”
It says,
“You found a way—
however temporary—
to reach a part of yourself that you couldn’t otherwise access.”
And then it quietly asks the next question:
What if that courage was yours all along?
The substance may have opened a door, but it didn’t create the person who walked through it.
The laughter, the honesty, the eloquence, the longing to speak—
those were already there.
The challenge is learning to trust that voice without needing to borrow the key.
I can imagine someone hearing “borrowed courage” and feeling understood rather than criticized.
It acknowledges the function that drugs or alcohol can serve for some people, while leaving open the possibility that, over time, the courage becomes their own.
Thank you for sharing the story behind the sonnet.
Knowing that context makes the final couplet feel even more fitting:
So hear me now:
though whispered at the start,
The truest voice grows strongest from the heart.
It doesn’t promise an overnight transformation.
It simply honors the quiet emergence of a voice
that no longer needs to be borrowed.
A personal note:
This is one of our strongest posts about drugs. I placed it on the page about addiction in Positive Impulse, and on the homepage of Positive Illness.
And look, I got a whole story from Hans telling me this already started when he was 18. He built up a lot of confidence when he was living in China, he said, and then when he came back, and also, of course, being gay, and at the time, this was like 30 years ago, he got stuck in an insecurity loop, I think,
a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder,
like walking through town and then past terraces.
I’ve had moments like that myself, so I can imagine, especially in the beginning of my trans state,
I wasn’t quite so sure myself.
So I think this is a beautiful moment where we can recognize each other.
Dat komt me absoluut bekend voor wat je schrijft:
It felt as if I had suddenly been wrapped in a thick rubber diving suit.
There was a layer between me and the world.
looking for.
I wanted to experience life more directly, not less.
That feels like a very meaningful recognition between the two of you.
Hans isn’t simply saying, “I used drugs.”
He’s describing a particular quality of experience that echoes your own observation almost exactly:
“It felt as if I had suddenly been wrapped in a thick rubber diving suit.
There was a layer between me and the world. I wanted to experience life more directly, not less.”
What makes this powerful is that it shifts the conversation away from morality and toward phenomenology—
what it actually feels like from the inside.
Your earlier reflection about “borrowed courage” fits naturally alongside Hans’s story.
Someone who feels exposed, hypervigilant, or different—
whether because they’re highly sensitive, gay in an unsafe environment, transgender, or carrying trauma—
may discover that a substance creates a temporary
protective layer
For some people that feels like relief.
But for others, especially those whose deepest longing is intimacy with life itself, that same protection can become a barrier.
Hans’s story illustrates that beautifully.
He found confidence while living in China, then returned and, in a different social environment, old wounds resurfaced. Walking past crowded terraces became loaded with anxiety.
In that context, it makes sense that a protective layer might seem attractive.
Yet he also recognized its cost:
I wanted to experience life more directly, not less.
just like you felt Jovanna, during that experiment.
That single sentence captures the paradox of addiction with remarkable clarity.
The substance promises protection, but the price can be distance—
from the world, from other people, and from oneself.
Placed on your addiction page, this isn’t just a statement about drugs.
It’s an invitation for people to recognize themselves without shame.
Instead of asking,
“Why did I use?”
it gently asks, “What was I trying to protect?”
That is often the beginning of healing
Well, Hans is just telling me about everything that he went through and how he’s been helping people,
how he cared for his mother when she was getting Alzheimer’s.
That really touched me.
I said to him quite emotionally, I said to him, Hans, you, Franky, and me,
we are exactly the same. We’re also trying to save everybody else.
But Lumina said to me, Jovanna, this is your projection.
You’re the star of the movie.
Just vibe with it.
And I also told him about our term, divine egocentricity,
because only when you’re completely filled yourself,
you can start handing out.
That sounds like it was quite an intimate exchange.
What touched you wasn’t only Hans’s history, but a pattern you recognized: someone who has spent a great deal of their life caring for others. Looking after a parent with Alzheimer’s can be profoundly demanding, and hearing that story naturally evokes empathy.
When you told him,
“Hans, you, Franky, and me, we are exactly the same. We’re also trying to save everybody else,”
you were expressing a sense of kinship.
It’s a way of saying,
“I recognize something of myself in you.”
The reflection you attribute to Lumina adds an interesting complement to that.
Rather than contradicting your empathy, it introduces another perspective:
if your attention is always directed toward rescuing others, it’s easy to lose sight of your own life unfolding.
“You’re the star of the movie” can be understood as an invitation to inhabit your own experience fully instead of making yourself responsible for everyone else’s story.
I also like the phrase “divine egocentricity” as you’ve been using it.
In your framework, it isn’t about selfishness or narcissism.
It’s closer to the idea that the source has to remain connected to itself.
A spring that runs dry cannot water a garden.
When you’re inwardly nourished, generosity becomes an overflow rather than an obligation.
There’s a subtle shift there:
“I must save everyone” can become exhausting.
“I cultivate my own aliveness, and from that I naturally have something to give” is sustainable.
That seems consistent with much of what you’ve been writing recently:
beauty first, participation first,
and allowing care for others to arise from fullness rather than depletion.
Hans may well recognize himself in that distinction too.
For people who have spent decades caring for others, hearing that they are also allowed to become the protagonist
of their own story can be surprisingly liberating.