My mantra on addiction is, "Not why the addiction, but why the pain."
If you want to look at what causes addiction, you have to look at
the benefit of addiction...
People say, typically, "it gave me pain relief", "escape from stress",
"it gave me a sense of connection", "a sense of belonging."
The addiction met some essential human need that otherwise
wasn't met in that person's life.
So all of these states of lacking connection or being isolated
of having pain or having too much stress in your life,
these are states of emotional pain.
And when you look populations of addicts, what you find is that
the more adversity in childhood, exponentially the greater
the risk of addiction.
Which doesn’t mean that every person traumatised will become an addict,
but it does mean that every addict was traumatised.
In my opinion addiction is manifested in any behaviour that a person finds
temporary pleasure or relief in, but suffers negative consequences
as a result of, and does not give up or cannot give up,
despite those negative consequences.
Tobacco, alcohol, substances of all kinds.
It could also be related to sex, gambling, shopping, eating, work.
Virtually any area of human activity can become addictive
depending on the person's relationship to it.
I had two major addictions in my life.
One was to work, and I also had an addiction to shopping,
in my case for classical music CDs.
One day I spent $8,000 on compact discs.
It doesn't matter how many sets of a particular composer's symphonies
you already have, you have to get the next one and the next one.
In the grip of this shopping fever, I once left a patient in labour
and actually went downtown to get the disc and I missed the delivery.
That’s how impactful it was.
Now you may think that's laughable, "How could you compare your addiction
to those of your heroin-addicted patients?"
My own addicted patients, when I told them about my addictions
they didn’t laugh or they shook their heads and they said,
"Yeah Doc, we get it. You're just like the rest of us."
Well the point is that we're all just like the rest of us.
The greatest myths on addiction, number one, is that it's genetic.
It does run in families, but why does it run in families?
If I'm an alcoholic, and if I yell and scream at my kids
and then they grew up to soothe themselves with alcohol,
did I pass it on to them genetically? Or is that a behaviour they
developed because I recreated the same conditions that I grew up in.
Now there might be genetic predispositions, but a predisposition
is not the same as a predetermination.
The other myth around addiction is that it's a choice that people make.
And the whole legal system is based on the idea that people are choosing
to be addicts, lets punish them for it so as to deter others.
Addiction is not a choice anybody makes,
it's a response to emotional pain.
The other myth is that addiction is restricted to the substance user
or to a few losers in our society.
It's rife and rampant through our culture.
You would think that, with the utter failure of most treatment modalities
when it comes to addiction, we would wake up and ask ourselves,
"Do we really understand this condition?"
But that doesn’t seem to happen. We’re not looking at its real nature
as a response to human suffering because we're not helping people
work through and resolve their traumas.
So we keep saying, "What's wrong with you?"
Instead of asking, "What happened to you?"
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