Addiction

In a family with addiction, life revolves around the addict.

The addict’s life revolves around their addiction. 

As the addict’s relationship with their addiction grows, all other relationships shrink.

There is no room for children. 

In recent years, there has been a shift away from the idea of alcoholics being weak and deficient in some way; deserving punishment for their deficiency. It’s taken 100 years of making drugs illegal and punishing addicts to discover that this won’t stop them from being addicts.

One way of thinking about addiction is that alcoholics and other addicts are opting out, because they cannot cope with their pain. 

This is simplified of course, because there are many factors that ‘cause’ alcoholism and addiction.  Katie McBride writes:  

Certain people are more vulnerable to addiction than others; many people can use any array of drug without becoming addicted. In reality, there are many factors that lead to addiction, including environment, stress, genetics, life-circumstances, and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). It is not uncommon for people with addictions to have any combination of the above factors, nor is it an exhaustive list. These factors also have different effects on different individuals. For example, people who suffer from a mental illness are twice as likely to struggle with addiction.

So, we know that punishment doesn’t work.

Is it possible to rehabilitate an addict? Is it possible to find out what they are looking for and fill the void?

There was a series of fascinating addiction experiments in the late 1970’s in Canada performed by Professor Bruce Alexander.

You may or may not have heard of Rat park. One of their earlier experiment on rats consisted of a single rat living in a cage, containing only two bottles. Nothing else. One of the bottles contained water only, the other was water laced with morphine. The rats loved the morphine water, proving that morphine was addictive.

Professor Alexander’s was unsure about this, he wondered if it was the living conditions that caused the addiction, not the drug.

He then created ‘Rat Park’, which was heaven for the rats. He put 16–20 rats of both sexes in a huge cage with fun things to do. They had balls to play with, loads of food, and they could hang out together; which meant plenty of sex.

The two bottles of water—one with morphine, one without —were also present.  

Guess what happened? 

The rats preferred the plain water to the morphine water. Further studies with mice also supported this finding.

The scientists then took away the rats and mice after they had lived at Rat Park for a while. They isolated them again, and provided two bottles.

One with water, one with morphine laced water.

Guess what happened?

They went back to the morphine.

Isolation = morphine, Rat Park = water

Connection is a part of addiction. When the rats connected with each other and had fun things to do, they didn’t need to escape their lives.

What we can take away from this study, I think, is that it shows environment plays a big part in how we cope with the world.

Connection is a part of addiction

Professor Peter Cohen agrees with the connection theory. He calls an addiction a ‘bond’. We have an imperative to bond with something. We all need to connect with something, otherwise we are adrift. Isolates do not survive.

Bonding to one thing at the expense of everything else is a problem. 

We all know people who have bonded with a religion, sport, food, a person, exercise, sex or a hobby. It’s like they become obsessed or possessed. It’s all they talk about, all they do. They tie their identity to it. They call themselves the name of whatever it is they have bonded with, like yogi or climber.

Once a person has formed a strong bond to alcohol, they do not bond well with others. There is no room left for anything else.

Breaking the bond with alcohol is as hard as breaking a bond with anything else. Remember your first breakup? The world ended. You thought you would never be happy again. Maybe you took to your bed for days.

Or remember after your dog died? You still saw that dog everywhere; heard his paws on the floor. You even caught yourself thinking about having to take him for a walk. People were sympathetic; you may have had a funeral or marked the breaking of the bond in some other way. 

Bond with something life-giving

Getting over a broken bond is easier if you have support. Without support, it’s hard—almost impossible—to recover. Maia Szalavitz, author of Unbroken Brain, agrees: 

People are actually more likely to recover when they still have jobs, family, and greater ties to mainstream society, not less. Indeed, the more “social capital” someone has—friends, education, employment, job contacts, and other knowledge that promotes links to the conventional world—the more likely recovery is. As soon as you think about it critically, it’s easy to see why if you had to bet on whether a homeless, unemployed person or a successful physician is more likely to recover, your money would be safer on the doctor than on the guy on skid row.

If we look at the problem of addiction as a bonding problem, we begin to gain insight into our upbringings. Or our loved ones who currently have bonded with something that isn’t doing them any good.

This is not an excuse for our loved ones’ behaviour, but it can help us to understand the spell casters.

Take note that this is not about forgiveness, but understanding. Forgiveness may come later. Or it may not.

How does addiction affect families?

Families of addicts have three things in play, a tripod of stability. Firstly, we have the basic layer of the drama triangle. Secondly, we have entrenched roles. And finally, we have the dysfunctional family rules to keep us in line. Check out how alcohol abuse affects families.

Help - I’ve lost myself in helping others

“I feel like I don’t know who I am anymore. All I do is help everyone else. I am ready to help myself be myself, but I don’t even know who I am. I feel invisible.” If this is you, firstly, how you are feeling is completely normal. It’s so good that you are ready for a change. Today is a new day. Check this out for more.