Addiction

There may (or may not!) be people with addictions that are biological in nature.  For the purposes of this post, they will be set aside.  If they exist, their situations are far different than what I will be describing here.

It is my belief that most, if not all, addictions are behavioral in nature, not biological, as is commonly believed.  I say this because of my experiences in working with people with addictions (including myself) that have shown me that there are patterns of behavior that affect addiction.  These patterns come from behavioral choices.  They are not biologically pre-determined.  All of this leads me to the belief that addictions are all the same.  They substitute a behavior in place of emoting.  No matter what addiction you think of, if you consistently replace the addictive behavior with the expression of emotion, the addiction would slowly subside.  It might take years and tons of work, but it would eventually be effective.

So, why?  Why do people do all these destructive behaviors when they could just emote? The obvious answer is that emoting is looked down on in our culture.  People who cry are "wussies" (men) or "hysterical" (women).  

That leads to the next question, which is how?  The answer to that is, any time a person who feels a strong taboo against emoting encounters their emotions, they will look for something else to distract themselves.  So, if alcohol is close at hand and they're all emotional, but don't want to be, then they may decide a shot is easier to take than crying. Maybe the first time a shot is enough.  What happens the next time they have emotions? Well, that shot worked pretty well last time.  This time the emotions are worse (of course, because they didn't express them the last time), so how about two shots?  Three?  And if you're the type of person who's prone to the type of insight that would stop this process at three shots, then you probably wouldn't have taken the first shot in the first place.  So it's likely to just get worse from there.  And usually it does.

Substitute drugs, cigarettes, shopping, gambling, sex, shop-lifting, even healthy stuff like hiking or playing sports and you get the same situation, just a different behavior.  Some worse, some not as bad.  Either way, the only healthy answer is to figure out how to emote again instead of engaging in the addictive behavior.  Obviously, that is easier said than done, which is why so many people struggle with addiction.

One final point.  When you think about how difficult it would be for most people with addictions to find their way back to emoting, then you start to get a picture of how big our national (international?) problem is with emotions.  And that's why I'm writing.  Thanks for reading.