We All Have Some Form of Addiction

I read this at troubledwith.com a little over a year ago, when I was looking at the issue of verbal abuse. I found that experienceing different abuses people formulate coping patterns. Some of them become addictions. They may not be neceassarily destructive, but they do exist.

This article gave a great breakdown of addiction and how our mind's fool us and maintain the addiction that is helping us cope with the real issue. The mind is an amazing and deceitful thing at times.

When Coping Becomes Addiction
by Archibald D. Hart, Ph.D.

Some addictions fulfill the function of reducing tension through four sequential steps:

1. The addict experiences an unmet or painful life situation. Boredom, conflict with friends or family, a crisis, pain, or any other negative emotion creates tension or stress. Many different factors may come into play at this point. Constitutional or genetic factors will affect how much stress you can take before negative emotions develop. Modeling from parents and peers will also play a part in determining how you react to certain situations or emotions. Your social milieu will then expose you to possibly addictive behaviors and reinforce your attraction to them. Family factors such as overindulgence, chaos, or conflict can create excessive and distorted needs. A daughter, for example, who does not get adequate love from a father may well spend the rest of her life searching for this missing love in many disruptive male relationships. But since none of these is capable of being her father, her search is doomed to frustration. She becomes addicted to her search for love.
2. The unmet need creates a “pressure” or imbalance that can be relieved only by engaging in some behavior. The “surrender” to this behavior thus becomes the addiction.
3. With the “surrender” to the behavior comes a sense of relief, then denial. The relief in some cases may be profound. With it comes a reduction in need and a denial that the chosen behavior had anything to do with the relief.

Denial plays a formative role in all addictions. In fact, it seems that for a behavior to become addicting, the relief it provides must be denied. The more unconscious the connection between the need and the behavior that brings relief, the more powerful the addiction. It’s as if the mind conspires to keep the addiction “game” secret. Somehow this helps to make the behavior more effective as a tension reducer.

Notice that I am not saying just that the addicted person denies that he or she engages in some addictive behavior. I’m saying more than this. The addict denies that the behavior relieves tension — that it serves any purpose whatsoever. A great degree of rationalization then takes place. “I collect coins because it’s a good investment.” “I gamble because buying lottery tickets benefits our schools and the next generation of kids.” “I work hard because my kids deserve a better start in life than I got.” One could write a book about these “excuses” for addiction.

The connection between denial and the drive to engage in the addictive behavior is so strong that the very presence of denial, and any subsequent rationalization, can be taken as strong evidence that an addiction is present.

4. Once the addictive behavior is completed, the tension reappears. The tension relief that occurs in addictions, like the pleasure they afford, is temporary and ultimately unsatisfactory. Sooner or later the unbearable life circumstance surfaces again and the tension reemerges. This recreates a need for the behavior, and the cycle begins again.

We all use things to fill us to some degree. It may not be a full blown to the point of drug addiction, alcoholism, or an eating disorder, but we use things to cope with areas of our intense, and for some dramatic, lives.

I can easily say I have an addictive personality. I like to call it commitment instead. It can go either way sometimes. But, I can say I'm committed to this or that, but I think somtimes I'm just addicted to the consistency and security of something.

The easy part is figuring out our addictions and what we fill ourselves and our lives with. The harder part is finding out what we are coping with and how to really deal with it.