22 January 2014

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What is Addiction?

Addiction is in the news a lot these days, particularly if you live in Toronto as I do. In the last decade we have opened up the way we understand addiction – a term we used to reserve only for chemical substances – to include such non-chemical things as internet porn addiction, retail consumption, video game addiction, even an addiction to acquiring money.

Some feel that we risk watering down the idea of addiction by straying away from those things – like alcohol and drugs – which have a direct chemical affect on our bodies. However, more and more, neurobiology shows that people who are found to have addictive behaviour who don’t use alcohol or drugs experience a similar effect in their brain chemistry when coming into contact with their chosen “substance”.

One of my chief concerns is how there is also a lot of judgement involved in addiction: self judgement as well as judgement by our social environment. Much of the stigma around addiction comes from two sources: a society which sees the individual (particularly our independent control over our life and faculties) as sacrosanct, and the idea of addiction itself falling into some sort of religious disfavour (in other words a corruption of self, an analogy for which the Ring in the Lord of the Rings trilogy represents).

Note: I believe shame is the last thing anyone who wants to change their behaviour needs. It is the root of so much unspoken harm in our society. (For more on the preponderance of shame in our world, I would recommend reading Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly)

So how should we see addiction? I see it as a relationship, the same as any other relationship in our lives. Relationships are dynamic: they ebb and flow. They can be healthy but can also stray into unhealthy territory as well. When a relationship is unhealthy – in that it causes harm to us – we have to renegotiate its place in our lives, and part of that is exploring how this relationship became unhealthy in the first place.

We fall into addictive behaviour if not by conscious choice then by unconscious reasoning, and this reasoning is sometimes influenced by our family environment when we were growing up, our parents’ relationship with substances, the ways we were able (or allowed) to socialize with others, the ways we learned to handle stress and hardship.

Addiction is complex and our understanding (and acceptance) of it in society is evolving. Your therapist should be able to work with your concerns around addiction without judgement or blame, or the promise of quick fixes. Understanding addiction – your relationship with something – is a long-term process that pays dividends.