Addiction?
Insights from psychiatrist Gerald G. May, MD
If there's some kind of behavior or pattern that you want to stop or you'd prefer not to have, and you can choose to stop it and change your ways, that's not an addiction. If you can't stop it, well, there you are. That's addiction. That's the definition. It's something you want to stop, and you can't.
We're all addicts. It's difficult to think of something to which we can't get attached. Partly, it's just sheer repetition over and over and over again. For example, we can be addicted to moods or stress or failure. Fundamentally, our nerve cells get used to it. So, if we have some kind of emotional pattern and it repeats itself enough, it becomes part of who we are.
Our bodies, our minds, our brains have been conditioned to a certain pattern, a certain routine; and when that changes, we react and feel like something is wrong. When you multiply that to something that really has a kick in it, like some kind of behavior that has a particularly strong kind of satisfaction – an immediate satisfaction – you can see how that can become more severe, more pervasive, more ingrained, and much more difficult to change.
That kind of pattern -- seeking satisfaction, gratification, and reinforcing behavior around what we now call addiction, compulsion, or obsession – is what the spiritual authorities over the centuries have called attachment. If one's going to make headway, compassion for oneself -- a kind of gentleness or tenderness about recognizing our weaknesses and not getting bent out of shape or beating on ourselves -- is called for. We have to realize that our addictions, compulsions, and obsessions go along with being human.
If you look at addictions neurologically, you can say that the power of the patterns of nerve cell activity that want to keep the addiction going is always greater than the power of the patterns of nerve cell activity that wants to stop it. It's precisely because of this neurological imbalance that happens in addiction or attachment that we just can't choose on our own to quit the behavior.
Part of our resistance to ask for help is that factor of addiction that wants to keep things going.
Now, just when you're getting a glimpse that you might really be able to give this up, all the subterfuges come in to say, well, you don't really want to give something up.
One of the most primitive defenses is denial. You're probably not even thinking about asking for help if you're in denial, because you're saying, 'Well, I don't have a problem,' or 'If I've got a problem, I can handle it.' That's a big mitigation against asking for help. There's also the humiliation. We're supposed to have it all together, and if we've got a problem, we're supposed to solve it.
It is precisely because of all that, we need to look for something beyond ourselves for help. Maybe it might be a group, or some friends, or counseling. A program where there are brain cells in other people who are willing to align themselves with the part of us that wants to quit is like bringing in reinforcements. Of course, the Divine, the Higher Power, that's the real cavalry coming down the mountain. If we can't do it on our own then, it only makes sense that we'd need to turn beyond ourselves wherever we can to try to find some help.