The Disease of Addiction

Questions and Comments
#1

I see many people in AA (alcohol anonymous) and NA (Narcotics Anonymous) that are healed after years of problems with addiction. One of the key points is that you should accept that you have this disease called addiction. In the same way, someone is allergic to peanuts, other people are allergic to alcohol/drugs. They say to put all your faith in god, go to meetings, and do the 12-step program.

Now, I’m interested in what people think about this philosophy here on this forum. In my opinion, there are 2 ways to look at it:

  • When you agree that it’s a disease, you stop getting angry at yourself when you fall back into addictive behavior. One of the worst behavior you can put on is self-hatred because that is the opposite of self-love, something addicts miss in their life. That’s why they start using again because they feel worthless that they can’t stop using something. When you have a disease that means you can treat it and find a “cure”. The people in AA say it’s a disease that will never go away, you should live with it.
  • On the other hand, you say that you cannot control it and that it’s out of your hand. This is good for the ego, but it also means you identify yourself as an addict, that’s what people do in these groups. In every share, they start with “Hey My name is … and I’m a addict”

As seen before, this program can work miracles for a lot of addicts that went to rehab and did all sorts of things and never got clean. But is it really a disease? Is it maybe old trauma or whatever the case may be?

I’m interested in what you guys think about the topic :grin:

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#2

I cured my ADD by doing the exact opposite

calling it a disease often leads to a path of hopelessness and inaction

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#3

I really do believe trauma is at the heart of it.

I’ve heard heroin described as feeling really good. Content, at peace, warm blanket wrapped around you, etc. It makes sense if you can’t get that in any shape or form outside the drug it would have you craving it. Same for any type of drug.

The sad part is all drugs react with our own biochemistry. That means the potential for feeling good without them is there, but people don’t know how to reach it.

Addiction for the sake of addiction never made much sense to me. It always seemed like there was something underlying it. Some kind of pain someone was trying to escape.

I think accepting it as a disease is a way to cope. But it is inherently limiting. But our entire medical field is very limiting in terms of how they treat this stuff. I remember when I was told that I’ll have anxiety for the rest of my life and I could only learn to manage it better. Ouch. The permanence applied to some of these labels can be harmful.

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#4

Exactly, I was able to cure my depression and anxiety in a similar way. It’s all about the mental frame with which you approach yourself and what you identity with. In my personal experience, the wording was absolutely key.

There is a massive difference between “I suffer from depression” and “I am depressed”/“I feel depressed”, “I am anxious” versus “I have anxiety”, etc.

Now with that being said, this part here

is very insightful and I definitely agree with the argument made here. Nice post @Solomon.

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#5

… On point :+1:

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#6

I can’t speak for what anyone else should do, say, or think… so what follows are my thoughts about this topic for me and me alone.

The second I actually believe that I am powerless to change something about myself, I’ve already lost. It’s one thing give something my best shot and still not succeed, but to admit defeat right up front? f*** that.

For me (again, for me…) beliefs like that are a crutch, an excuse. A way to to make my actions “ok”, and somehow not my fault, even if I’m the one who performed them.

Years ago, I did have a problem with alcohol. It wasn’t a long-term thing, and there was a very obvious triggering factor. I didn’t drink because I enjoyed it, I was trying to shut off my brain to get some relief from the emotional pain I was feeling at the time.

At no point did I ever think any of it was anything other than my own actions (and reactions), and I certainly didn’t feel powerless to get over it, I just needed to get through it. And I did. Was drinking until I passed out a good solution? Nope. Not at all.

But, still not powerless. And not a disease. Just how I dealt with a sh*tty couple of months.

For anyone who wonders how I got past it… I replaced drinking with working out at the gym until I was too tired to move - mixing up lifting, rowing, swimming. I clearly didn’t keep that up for too long, but that’s not the point lol.

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#7

To be fair, there’s a lot more to the 12 Steps approach than simply endorsing the Disease Model of addiction.

And also, any one principle that’s taken too far is going to create more problems than it solves.

Whether that principle is “With enough willpower, I can do anything” or whether it’s “Humbly opening up to my connectedness to other people and to larger Nature can paradoxically be a pathway to greater power”.

Either one of those can be taken too far or can be applied at the wrong times.

The 12 Steps help people to get past pathologically excessive egoism and to recognize that, in addition to being sovereign individuals, they also belong to much larger systems. There are times and situations in which that is exactly what is needed.

But honestly, is there any tool or philosophy in this world that can not be used for both benefit and damage?

Can you find any one specific position or condition that genuinely has no weak points?

If you do find anything that seems to meet those criteria, I’d recommend being quite wary of it. I think the best tools are the ones where you can clearly recognize their limitations. Makes it easier to use them properly.

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#8

Some people seem to love justifying the reasons why they cant give up,

“Once a drinker always a drinker”

Then they laugh turn their head away and open a bottle of beer.

Will power is the key !!!

When one has will power you can crash through the mental barriers of hell and stop

#9

Excellent advice

Please note Bombay Duck is a Muay Thai fighter he has a will of steel. I have seen muay guys like him kicking down trees and punching holes though walls. Dont mess with the Fish !.

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#10

The 12 step is basically a Christian religious type program. The first step is to accept that you have a problem, because the later steps are about surrendering to, and welcoming the healing from God.

Its a specific application of the Salvation Prayer – “accept you were born a sinner, and open yourself to the Lord, the Savior.”

They also include meditation, which is now a popular tool for emotions management.

It’s not a perfect system, but it does work for people with faith.

:pray:t2:

I subscribe to my interpretation of Rat Park and other such Experiments.

If one has a lot of different communities & activities where they get their dopamine hits from, they’ll be fine.

If someone only has 1 or 2 sources of pleasure - be it an activity or a person, he/she risks getting addicted to them.

:hugs:

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#11

Funny that you’re asking this, I’ve been reading :ferris_wheel: The Power of Habit yesterday and the author talked about AA. I’m basically going to go on a tangent here and share things that may not answer your questions directly.

The author notes:-

What AA provides instead is a method for attacking the habits that surround alcohol use. AA, in essence, is a giant machine for changing habit loops. And though the habits associated with alcoholism are extreme, the lessons AA provides demonstrate how almost any habit—even the most obstinate—can be changed.

Take steps four (to make “a searching and fearless inventory of ourselves”) and five (to admit “to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”).

“It’s not obvious from the way they’re written, but to complete those steps, someone has to create a list of all the triggers for their alcoholic urges,” said J. Scott Tonigan, a researcher at the University of New Mexico who has studied AA for more than a decade.

“AA forces you to create new routines for what to do each night instead of drinking,” said Tonigan. “You can relax and talk through your anxieties at the meetings. The triggers and payoffs stay the same, it’s just the behavior that changes.”

And faith, is actually a critical part of recovery in AA.

A pattern emerged. Alcoholics who practiced the techniques of habit replacement, the data indicated, could often stay sober until there was a stressful event in their lives—at which point, a certain number started drinking again, no matter how many new routines they had embraced.

However, those alcoholics who believed, like John in Brooklyn, that some higher power had entered their lives were more likely to make it through the stressful periods with their sobriety intact.

It wasn’t God that mattered, the researchers figured out. It was belief itself that made a difference. Once people learned how to believe in something, that skill started spilling over to other parts of their lives, until they started believing they could change. Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior.

“I wouldn’t have said this a year ago—that’s how fast our understanding is changing,” said Tonigan, the University of New Mexico researcher, “but belief seems critical. You don’t have to believe in God, but you do need the capacity to believe that things will get better.

This paragraph is a key point here, “that things will get better”.

“Even if you give people better habits, it doesn’t repair why they started drinking in the first place. Eventually they’ll have a bad day, and no new routine is going to make everything seem okay. What can make a difference is believing that they can cope with that stress without alcohol.”

So this is my interpretation of it. A lack of self-love or lack of awareness leads one to accidently or intentionally fall into habits that are self-destructive. Once you do fall in to those habits, you need to create a better habit so that you’re redirected to something better when something triggers you. And you need belief, whether in one’s self or a Higher Power to get through the tough times and never fall back into those old habits. Because those old habits are still there, dormant, waiting for a moment of weakness to pounce on you. The habits are imprinted into your brain, they just get weaker over time.

So in a sense, I think it “doesn’t fully go away”. It’s a war that gets easier over time until it’s basically unnoticeable anymore. Like cancer that becomes a benign tumor. You can live your life completely normally, just be ready to kill bugs hiding in your basement once in a while before it becomes an infestation.

I think the “Hey, my name is … and I’m an addict” to be an okay-ish way of acknowledging that one has a problem. Since you can’t get better if you don’t acknowledge that one does have a problem. But it’s better to form it around your ideal identity. I would say it’d be better to say, “Hey, my name is … and I have an alcohol use disorder.”

This is just what I think. I don’t have the personal experience yet of overcoming an addiction to offer a personal viewpoint on the matter, at least not yet. It seems to me that awareness, self-love, better habits and faith are key to ending addiction permanently. Hopefully that answers your questions in some way :joy:

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#12

“I am X” is still a far cry from “I have X” or “I feel X”. To me, it’s the difference between one’s identity vs something being experienced.

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#13

And now we get to the exact reason that the original 12-steps phrased things and approached things in the ways that they did.

The crucial point here is that acknowledging the problem of addiction as a problem and therefore not totally identifying with it was exactly what those profoundly addicted persons were unwilling or unable to do. That inability was actually the crux of the problem.

A person who is intensely unwilling to allow flexibility in his/her identity will not be open to the nuanced suggestions that both of you are proposing. They need a more powerful lever and an experiential “stack of dynamite” in order to shift the calcified fixation of their own identity.

You see, the Faith force works in both directions; for healing or for damage. Sometimes people have an unhealthy and truly intense faith in the power of their own egos, and they therefore are not willing to question anything about themselves. This is usually arising from a foundation of fear, pain, and self-defense. They’re not stupid, but they did need to construct some very powerful walls at some point in time in order to protect their senses of self or to avoid feeling overwhelmed.

A nuanced rational framing of addiction, as a habit-based disorder, may just not get through those walls to reach that person.

On the other hand, if he or she has the capacity to imagine–and to connect to–The Cosmos itself, or some iteration of GOD, (meaning the Great Everything), that is a pretty damn powerful lever and stack of dynamite. Sometimes it can work where nothing else would have. And if it has the force and pressure of a focused, community-based intention behind it, that is very powerful as well.

p.s. Thanks for sharing that information from The Power of Habit, @Beowulf. I felt it really added something useful to thinking about this topic.

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#14

I stumbled upon this thread while doing some research for my planned business. I love the deepness of thought in here and the vast range of experiences. So I decided to add a little from my 20 years of experience with porn addiction.

That detaches the addiction from yourself, your core identity. It outsources the addiction so it’s not part of your inner most being anymore. And that’s a salvation because it’s a first step to acknowledge that you aren’t just a weak, miserable piece of shit. That’s a rather usual thought among porn addicts.

That’s a big problem I experienced as well. I knew, I’m not inherently evil, but now instead, it was a mode of existence.

That’s at least what it was for me. Many old traumas. Porn and Masturbation made me feel good, so it became the copying mechanism of my choice. Whenever there was a situation that triggered negative emotion I wasn’t able to handle, I used porn to feel good again.

I met a friend from school last week. When we talked about porn addiction he mentioned, that he then as well was a porn addict for 3 years. But it stopped immediately after he ended his bad relationship. So it mad me think there’s a difference between a addictive behavior that is used to cope with a special trigger/ situation and an addiction, when normal live activates your triggers non stop.

I agree. And there’s the big BUT. With a weak frame, an unstable personality, willpower is almost Zero. Your subconscious mind is infinitely stronger than your conscious mind. Independent from the person, consciousness:subconsciousness is about 1:45.000.
You can work against you subconscious programming, but if it’s aiming in the opposite direction, willpower can do only so much.

I experienced exactly that. I was clean for months. And then my life turned super stressful for a couple of weeks and I relapsed. Since I as healing the underlying traumas already, the relapse wasn’t quite as big as in the past, but still I turned to pornography to cope with the stress.

I would say " Hey, my name is Earl and I use alcohol to cope with…"would be even better.
On the one hand, it puts the power back in the addicts hand, because he is the one doing something. On the other hand, it fosters thoughts about the own conditioning. And just as with the @Simon Method, just going over your flaws again and how its keeping you small might trigger your subconsciousness to start finding ways to change.

So much on commenting.

I was a porn addict for 20 years. I used porn to cope with everything. I was so unstable, so insecure, everything out of the norm made me fall back on porn. Be it a letter from insurance, a phone call from an unknown number, what ever.
I tried for years to fight it and never won. I beat myself up about it. At one certain point I just accepted it as an addiction, an illness. And that was a salvation. Because I started to understand that I’m not inherently evil. It made life easier on an emotional basis. But it did nothing for the addiction. Except sometimes, the self hate after pmo was so big, that I started another session to cope with it. That vanished after I accepted the addiction.
When I started my journey into personality development I started to understand why I was the way I was. But even that didn’t change the behavior.
Only meticulously grabbing all the triggers, finding the root event and healing the situation brought real freedom.
Now I still have this uneasy feeling with some of my triggers. But I can cope with them in a healthy fashion. It’s still a work in progress, but with SC, it will become a joyride compared to my life a few years ago.

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#15

Same here :slight_smile: One moment at a time. Day by day getting better and better. Different.

My thing is that I believe I learned that Feeling good had its own consequences. Feeling good never lasted. Suffering was natural. I was always waiting for the ball to drop.

I grew up with parents who had addictions to suffering and it seemed my mom resented my success because she didn’t go after her own dreams. I had guilt about being successful and achieving more than she ever did. :flushed:

Suffering meant belonging? Suffering meant connecting? Suffering was familiar? That was the norm?

Upsets and the stories around them became my double addiction.

It became stressful & very exhausting swinging on a pendulum of suffering & feeling good. I got into cannabis and alcohol, smoking cigs and being sexual at the age of 13. I almost died from alcohol poisoning at 14.

I was able to drop some bad habits quicker than others. It seemed to be that I replaced one habit for another less bad habit.

I quit smoking cigs at 16. I quit cannabis multiple times and for almost a decade at 21. I quit alcohol 5 years ago. I quit cannabis again almost 2 years ago.

Now I don’t use any substances. I’m abstinent from sexual activity with others. I see where I still sometimes seek suffering though. It’s natural.

I notice that I am starting to feel good and get scared.

Im so complicated :joy::joy::joy:

Im also in slight recon. But hey, grateful for finding this journal post thingy.

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Riding the Spiral til the End 🌀