Understanding addiction

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be addicted? The words “out of control”

What is an addict:

An addict is a person that devotes or surrenders himself to a substance or vice

What is addiction:

● The state of being enslaved to a habit or practice

● That is psychologically and/or physically habit-forming

● To such an extent that it causes severe trauma, discomfort and shame

● To the person as well as others

Addiction is identifiable by:

● Being powerless to control the behaviour

● Inability to stop the behaviour

● A clear identifiable and predictive pattern

● Chaos and general unmanageability

● Shame, guilt, emptiness, isolation

A person with addiction:

· Acts out occasionally or routinely in a behaviour that is out of control

· The behaviour leaves him feeling empty, guilty and filled with shame

Most common reasons for dysfunctional dependencies:

· To appease or escape life’s pressure

· To appease peer pressure

· To stop or escape from pain

Narcotics Anonymous describes an addict’s life as

· A person’s whole life and thinking being centred around the getting and using and finding ways and means to use more

· And becoming a lifestyle of living to use and using to live

The addictive love affair:

A relationship is developed with their addiction, it becomes their “lover” and it’s hard to break up because they have “fallen in love” with it.

The person with dysfunctional dependencies becomes:

· Physically dependant

· Emotionally dependant (or both)

· A victim to the power of the behaviour / addiction

· Lost in the behaviour /addiction, loses touch with self, God & others

The person with dysfunctional dependencies loses the ability to:

· Produce normal feelings. Feelings are chemically produced and now imbalanced

· Reason & to act rationally

· Obsession driven by chemical & emotional dependency

It’s difficult for the addict, because he’s powerless with his addiction. He loses the ability to think rationally. He becomes obsessed with his drug. He also becomes powerless to reason with his mind and he has lost the ability to produce normal healthy emotions. For example, when a soccer player kicks a goal, he is elated. The addict has lost the ability to produce any emotions without being stimulated by his substance. When an addict has been on drugs so long and numbing his feelings for so long, his body becomes dead to normal feelings.

Part of your brain has become lazy. It cannot stimulate good feelings by itself anymore. Your emotional centre now needs drugs to make you feel good.

The other reason is that your drug has become very much like your number one lover, because it never rejects you. There was a drug bust that once took place. A girl sitting on the floor next to the wall responded to the question: Why are you doing this? She said, I lost everything this is all I have.

Everyone else who wants to have a relationship with an addict must realize

they will be in second place. The addict has a romance and an affair with his drug. The husband/wife/child takes second place.