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tweet by Johann Hari: The core of addiction is not wanting to be present in life, because pour life is too painful a place to be. This is why imposing more pain or punishment on a person with an addiction problem actually makes their addiction worse.
I’d agree but feel the need to highlight a difference between chemical addiction and addiction for the sake of escapism. Though both can absolutely be present at the same time. I am neither a psychologist or neurologist, but have some experience. I’ve largely dealt with addiction in the forms of self harm, as well as an addiction to sugar.
Self harm absolutely was about escapism. And the addiction was not chemical other than the brain creating a need for it in order to soothe negative thoughts and feelings (anxiety, trauma, stress, sadness etc…).
Sugar on the other hand was a mix of escapism and chemical addiction. When I felt worse I naturally craved more sugar. But even when I felt glad or elated I would still crave it.
I can’t speak on addiction to drugs like heroin, opiates, cocaine, among others. But in my experience of addiction to self harm and sugar. Punishment would only end up deepening the addiction as I sought to escape the punishment through addiction as well. Even if that punishment was self-inflicted.
I appreciate your response and hope you’re well.
The language keeps evolving, but this is also described as the difference between substance use/abuse/dependance. Anyone that falls into any of those categories could identify as having an addiction, but each have different issues to be addressed when seeking recovery.
I’ve worked in substance use disorder treatment and have some challenges of my own but anecdotally, I think the starting point is almost always escapism whether it’s the persons circumstances or mental health. Occasionally it’s living a certain lifestyle or use being normalized by key people in a person’s life. Dependence comes later, and adds extra layers of things to overcome, as you described.
IMO one of the worst aspects of the punishment is when people who are in the stages of use/abuse are punished (whether criminally or otherwise), and after the punishment their circumstances are even worse.
Those who weren’t dependent before are headed right into the revolving door of hospitalization, jail, rehab, outpatient so on and so on.
We should do better.
IMO the chemical addiction just acts as a mechanism to enact the escapism. Like with a cigarette I could shake my brain like an etch a sketch, switching to a new mental scene, by blasting it with dopamine.
Also, when I was out of cigarettes I had a mission: get cigarettes.
That chemical dependency thing just adds a new magnet to the mental filings so they align less along the lines of feeling bad about my life.
A drug habit is like a video game for your emotions. You assign yourself this arbitrary quest, and a whole set of missions and adventures come out of it, and it kills the time.
Glad someone points out the difference! I did not have to deal with psychological addiction, but during military I developed a (luckily mild) physical/chemical addiction to alcohol.
I did not notice during service. But when i was out, i noticed my body craving for it. This could take many forms like sleeplessness or general physical unsettling. In my experience the physical addiction is less about external pain, but the body giving you pain if it is missing that substance, it got too much used to.
I had a traumatizing amount of pain once. I mean it fried me from the inside and I screamed for three days. Doctors wouldn’t help because they figured I was faking it to get high. Not continual screaming, but screaming for a couple hours at a go, maybe five times a day. And I don’t mean yelling and begging I mean screaming. No words, just incoherent, uncontrollable vocalization from the level of pain.
When I came out of that I was fucking fried. The slightest hiccup in my routine would send me into a panic attack. Any exercise would send me into an anxious state for like a week, full of insomnia, symptoms sort of like dehydration despite me being hydrated, super tense muscles, headaches, foggy mind, irritable as all hell.
It was the worst in the few days after this pain ended. It’s now been four years and I’m like 80% recovered. I still can’t do a heavy workout without re-activating the insomnia, the muscle tension, the anxiety and feeling close to overwhelm. Basically if I do a heavy workout the adrenaline spikes and just stays up and my heart rate doesn’t come down it’s bad.
But not nearly as bad as it was the first few days. Like I’ll give an example. I made a pair of waffles in the toaster. No clean fork. There was a dirty fork in the living room that I could grab and clean. But I’d have to soak it. Meanwhile the waffle’s getting cold.
Panic attack. That situation sent me cowering against the wall on the kitchen floor, crying and wincing and trying to unwind but unable to.
Later that particular day, I went for a drink with my friend. And — I’ve never done this before — when I ordered my beer I just said “and a shot of vodka”, just the cheapest they had. I downed that shot then brought the beer back to my table.
And boy, when that vodka warmth was spreading into my chest, it was the most perfect thing for those nerves I had.
It made me realize why certain guys look at booze that way. I realized that if a guy’s got those nerves, from wherever it is he’s been, he experiences alcohol in a totally different way.
It was like watching a hot water hose melt the ice off a windshield, the way that vodka cut through it all. Just perfect. Don’t know how else to describe it.
It’s not like that any more, at least on a daily basis.
I hope you’ve found a place that makes you feel safe and cozy here.
That sounds like a truly horrible experience to have happen. I’m glad to hear you’re starting to recover, though that is often exhausting on its own.
I avoided alcohol for most of my life simply because I feared becoming addicted to it. Now that I’m in a somewhat better place I’ve carefully joined in on social drinking. And I can definitely see how easily alcohol could become an addiction. It can free your nerves and worries. Not to mention it is widely socially acceptable to drink, as compared to other drugs or behavior.
Hot water melting the ice of a windshield is such a good metaphor. It really gives an understanding of how easy it is to turn to the “easy” solution. Rather than spending 5 minutes scraping the ice off your windshield.
I would say self-harm is akin to restarting your car because it’s making that weird noise again. It temporarily removes the noise but it never fixes the actual issue. So eventually the noise gets worse and you restart more and more until your car gives up and dies.
So it removed the worry and thinking? Is that what your pointing at with the car’s noise? Or more of a visceral feeling of anxiety or some other emotion maybe?
It temporarily relieves the anxiety and emotion. The pain and shock from an injury supercedes the stress and emotion giving you temporary reprieve. If you have a tooth ache and stub your toe. In that monent the tooth ache won’t hurt as much because the brain cannot process both equally.
I hope that makes sense.
I was hoping for a more subjective description of what it did for you.
Sorry, kind of a personal question and you don’t have to answer. Very much a getting to know you question so if that’s too private I understand.
It’s not too private at all. I often times find talking about it helps relieve some of that stigma.
To give a better understanding, the background to my anxiety and other issues come from bullying, a verbally abusive father, social isolation, and being transgender (male to female). All of this caused me chronic depression from a very early age. And a lot of issues in dealing with stress, anxiety, stigma & emotion.
When any if not all of those emotions become too much I have no healthy way of dealing with it. I can’t sleep, constantly fidget, extreme negative emotions and thoughts, withdraw myself, & and become suicidal (assuming I have no relief for some time). The way that self-harm comes into this is that it sort of… releases some of those issues. I’m not 100% sure of how it actually works. But when my self-harm was very active, often times the only way to sleep was to cut myself. I couldn’t sleep while all those thoughts and emotions ceaselessly raced through my head.
Of course it wasn’t just for sleep. When things became too much to bare I cut myself then too simply to relieve it. One of the biggest problems with self-harm is how it easily and quickly escalates. Just like how 1 cigarette a day won’t be enough for a chain smoker, you build up a kind of tolerance. You cut more and cut deeper.
Warning graphic stuff!
hidden or nsfw stuff
I started with simple epidermis or dermis cuts. This depth of cuts are what you might get from day to day life and the scars will eventually fade given 6 months to a year. Then it quickly progressed into open fat cuts (hypodermis), the kind you definitely go to hospital to get stitched or stapled (I didn’t). And at one time I ended up with a fascia cut which is really bad.
The above picture only shows to hypodermis. But underneath you have fascia followed by muscle and then bone. The escalation to hypodermis happened in only 2-3 months. And as such my left leg is entirely covered in thick scars at this point.
In essence self-harm acted as a release valve for everything that was bottled up inside me, whatever it may be.
Sorry for the long post. I hope I was able to answer your question :)