Letter to a concerned friend, a response..
M**,
I am sorry that it has taken me so long to respond.
Ive been in some legal trouble, forgive me.
Yes, addiction is a bitch.
And there is alot to be said for moderated indulgence. I agree with your position.
Despite my struggle to stay away from smack, I still enjoy the occasional foray into other substances.
It's the old principle of the "Golden mean"... stick to the middle of the road, and you will be just fine.
There are so many schools of thought on the true nature of addiction. Many psychologists and the like believe that addiction is a learned behavior, citing Freud's pleasure principle. This theory states that the repeated and excessive use of a positive stimulus (IE drug) creates a dependent pleasure pathway in the brain.. this pleasure pathway becomes a behavioral requirement and thus a behavioral dependency is born. If the dependent stimulus is chemical in nature (IE some drugs) then a biological addiction may simultaneously develop.. thus an addiction is the correlative function of two malfunctions within the brain; a dysfunctional, mistrained pleasure pathway and a physiological addiction.
This is how addiction occurs in humans.
However, it is completely possible that some people are born with a reduced resistance to addiction itself. These 'genetically predisposed' people simply have a biological makeup that allows the pleasure principle to become dependent faster that it would in a "normal" human.
You see.. your use of a certain stimulus has retrained the way your brain contrives pleasure. You have re-programed your pleasure response. This does not make you weak.. not at all. It will happen to ANY organism that over-indulges in any positive stimulus... even sex or TV or food can create a faulty pathway. The key to any dependency is to either 1. avoid the dependent stimulus until the pathway fades over time (difficult) or 2. retrain the faulty pathway with reinforcement and positive conditioning.
You are fully capable of these things.
You see.. our addiction functions on Many, many levels. Mostly, it is a device that seeks to destroy us.
I look at this mess as a sort of "war". I see my true self as what I want to be, what I know to be worth saving, and I see the addicted part of my mind as the enemy, as a cancer.
I choose to face my enemy.. to make war. I want to hunt the cancer down and bury myself in it.. and destroy it. A total mental and spiritual cleansing.
You see, M**.. there is a hidden factor in most of our addictions. Usually, there is some scar in our sub-conscious that drives us to rely on simple, effective pleasure devices. These devices (IE a drug) easily become our addictions, for the reasons mentioned above. To truly cure a disease, we must defeat more than the symptoms.
Knowing this, we see that the dependency is just a symptom of the real disease. it IS important to treat the symptom. You must confront the addiction/dependency and deprogram it with classic conditioning; simply over-write the pleasure response with healthy behaviors, all the while making a decisive stand against the ill-effective behavior (IE drug use).. but this will only treat the symptom; addiction.
If you do not make war on the source of the disease, it will return, or reappear in a new form.
Somewhere deep in your head or your heart, you carry a reason for this behavior.. a device that enables the addictions... a cancer.
For many, including me, this hidden enemy is some form of hideous trauma or pain that we have been unable or unwilling to ever confront directly. As long as this twisted defect remains a part of your soul, you will continue to hurt, and you will continue to medicate by abusing the classic pleasure principle.
The only way to fully heal, to truly become strong.. is to eliminate the source of the problem altogether.
It isn't easy, in fact.. it's terrifying.
Only you can sort through your past and learn to understand yourself, and then find the source of the pain.
You seem to be an intelligent person.. this shouldn't be too hard... maybe you already know what drives your behavior?
it may be some sad event in your life's past.. or it may be a collective of events or behavior from your childhood or recent past that are haunting your fragile sub-conscious. it is up to you to identify your cancer.
Once you know what it is, you will find a way to kill it... to make it gone.
You may need therapy, you may find an amazingly direct answer as soon as you find your demon.. only you will know.
This, as far as I have learned.. is the nature of addiction.
This, as far as I have learned, is the process of healing form ill behavior.
If there is anything you find unclear.. I will be happy to expound on it for you.
I hope I was not too wordy, I am trying to help as best i can.
M**,
I am sorry that it has taken me so long to respond.
Ive been in some legal trouble, forgive me.
Yes, addiction is a bitch.
And there is alot to be said for moderated indulgence. I agree with your position.
Despite my struggle to stay away from smack, I still enjoy the occasional foray into other substances.
It's the old principle of the "Golden mean"... stick to the middle of the road, and you will be just fine.
There are so many schools of thought on the true nature of addiction. Many psychologists and the like believe that addiction is a learned behavior, citing Freud's pleasure principle. This theory states that the repeated and excessive use of a positive stimulus (IE drug) creates a dependent pleasure pathway in the brain.. this pleasure pathway becomes a behavioral requirement and thus a behavioral dependency is born. If the dependent stimulus is chemical in nature (IE some drugs) then a biological addiction may simultaneously develop.. thus an addiction is the correlative function of two malfunctions within the brain; a dysfunctional, mistrained pleasure pathway and a physiological addiction.
This is how addiction occurs in humans.
However, it is completely possible that some people are born with a reduced resistance to addiction itself. These 'genetically predisposed' people simply have a biological makeup that allows the pleasure principle to become dependent faster that it would in a "normal" human.
You see.. your use of a certain stimulus has retrained the way your brain contrives pleasure. You have re-programed your pleasure response. This does not make you weak.. not at all. It will happen to ANY organism that over-indulges in any positive stimulus... even sex or TV or food can create a faulty pathway. The key to any dependency is to either 1. avoid the dependent stimulus until the pathway fades over time (difficult) or 2. retrain the faulty pathway with reinforcement and positive conditioning.
You are fully capable of these things.
You see.. our addiction functions on Many, many levels. Mostly, it is a device that seeks to destroy us.
I look at this mess as a sort of "war". I see my true self as what I want to be, what I know to be worth saving, and I see the addicted part of my mind as the enemy, as a cancer.
I choose to face my enemy.. to make war. I want to hunt the cancer down and bury myself in it.. and destroy it. A total mental and spiritual cleansing.
You see, M**.. there is a hidden factor in most of our addictions. Usually, there is some scar in our sub-conscious that drives us to rely on simple, effective pleasure devices. These devices (IE a drug) easily become our addictions, for the reasons mentioned above. To truly cure a disease, we must defeat more than the symptoms.
Knowing this, we see that the dependency is just a symptom of the real disease. it IS important to treat the symptom. You must confront the addiction/dependency and deprogram it with classic conditioning; simply over-write the pleasure response with healthy behaviors, all the while making a decisive stand against the ill-effective behavior (IE drug use).. but this will only treat the symptom; addiction.
If you do not make war on the source of the disease, it will return, or reappear in a new form.
Somewhere deep in your head or your heart, you carry a reason for this behavior.. a device that enables the addictions... a cancer.
For many, including me, this hidden enemy is some form of hideous trauma or pain that we have been unable or unwilling to ever confront directly. As long as this twisted defect remains a part of your soul, you will continue to hurt, and you will continue to medicate by abusing the classic pleasure principle.
The only way to fully heal, to truly become strong.. is to eliminate the source of the problem altogether.
It isn't easy, in fact.. it's terrifying.
Only you can sort through your past and learn to understand yourself, and then find the source of the pain.
You seem to be an intelligent person.. this shouldn't be too hard... maybe you already know what drives your behavior?
it may be some sad event in your life's past.. or it may be a collective of events or behavior from your childhood or recent past that are haunting your fragile sub-conscious. it is up to you to identify your cancer.
Once you know what it is, you will find a way to kill it... to make it gone.
You may need therapy, you may find an amazingly direct answer as soon as you find your demon.. only you will know.
This, as far as I have learned.. is the nature of addiction.
This, as far as I have learned, is the process of healing form ill behavior.
If there is anything you find unclear.. I will be happy to expound on it for you.
I hope I was not too wordy, I am trying to help as best i can.