The Psychology of Addiction: A Look Into The Inner Trappings of an Addict's Mind.

For many people in the US, when they hear the word addict or addiction, their thoughts go to some of the most common areas of addiction, such as heroine, meth, alcohol, and cigarettes. But addiction goes beyond just the physical struggles that come with vices. There are psychological aspects that need to be looked at. Things such as definitions, effects, consequences, and most importantly, recovery.

What IS ‘addiction’?

As mentioned earlier, one of the things that needs to be addressed when dealing with addiction is the definition. Addiction isn’t just a PHYSICAL dependency, but a PSYCHOLOGICAL one as well. We can take cigarettes as an example. Nicotine has been proven to be an addictive substance, putting the body into a state of dependency in which a person begins to respond negatively when the craving or need isn’t met. When I was a smoker, I was up to 2 packs of Marlboro Reds a day. When I finally decided to quit, I had no idea that it wasn’t just a matter of stopping, but there was a cleansing process, there was a stabilizing process, and there was a psychological process. Getting past the physical addiction and stabilizing my health took less effort than I feared. I began to use the Commit Logenz, and that did help with the physical craving. But after using it for a month, I began to wonder if I was STILL experiencing a need to take them, or to go back to cigarettes. It would be a little while later that I realized I had not only become dependent on the nicotine, but the physical habit, the routine. I realized that I was actually OVER the physical part of breaking the addiction to cigarettes, what I WAN” T over was the need to light up after eating, the need to light up in a stressful situation, the need to light up when there was nothing else to do. All of these things were connected to the mental conditioning that would establish the PSYCHOLOGICAL addiction, and that was what took the longest to get over. The same can be said about just about any other type of addiction. Now some addictions are much harder to break in the physical sense, such as heroine, ocuvotin, alcohol, and meth, as these can sometimes have dangerous effects when it comes to severing the source. In some extreme cases of alcoholism, some people get so deep that stopping can result in serious injury or, in rare cases, even death. This is where you find what many call ‘functioning alcoholics’. I have seen people so deep with alcoholism that if they stop drinking for just a couple of hours, they begin to get the shakes, experience insanely painful headaches, and violent vomiting. This is a level of PHYSICAL addiction that has a tragic record of sudden death, whether by trying to quit or by impaired judgment.

Then some addictions have less to do with physical dependency, and are more mental, making this type of addiction harder to spot from an outsider perspective, and even being hard to recognize from the addict's perspective. These addictions are usually found in gambling, the need to cause strife in others to hide your inadequacies, or, even more recently, internet pornography. Regardless of what the addiction is, the need to maintain that routine, the sense of normalcy, becomes a driving factor in one's inability to recognize addiction in their life.

Then there is the addictive mindset in which one feels or believes that they cannot function without the habit they have become so dependent on. The easiest one to associate this with is Cigarettes (but it is not the ONLY one). As part of the addictive mindset, it is not just the sense of normalcy or routine, but an actual belief that whatever it is they are dependent on has become so necessary, even to the point of sustaining life or sanity. When I was a smoker, when faced with a stressful situation, the body would demand the nicotine for the calming effect (despite that proven fact that it increases blood pressure), but then the mind would jump in and tell me that IT needed me to smoke to distract from the situation, or to stablize the mind so that I could rationalize it (even though this CAN be done WITHOUT cigarettes). The same can be said about drugs, porn, gambling, or anything that has hijacked the mind and body into a destructive pattern.

The last thing to keep in mind is how we talk about addiction. One of the most common mistakes made when addressing addiction is the overzealous presentation of bad habits. Addiction IS important, and SHOULD be taken seriously. But we sometimes go about it the wrong way, and end up distorting facts and truths, replacing them with shock factors, rather than real, practical approaches. As a former drug addict, I was told that Marijuana was a gateway drug, that I would be almost instantly addicted, or that I would die. But when I looked around, I RARELY saw evidence of that. Instead, I found MORE people laughing, having a good time, not addicted (at least no instantly or outwardly), and NOT dying instantly. So when I tried cannabis for the first time, and saw that I was not addicted, or dying, or losing everything right away, I felt that I was lied to, and THAT would inspire me to try other drugs, more dangerous drugs. The 2 greatest gateways to addictions have nothing to do with drugs themselves (although they ARE dangerous nonetheless), are MISINFORMATION and PEOPLE. I didn’t smoke cigarettes, and developed an appetite for cannabis. I didn’t smoke cannabis and develop a taste for meth. There are plenty of meth users who NEVER even tried cannabis! So it is so important that we at least take the time to talk, and I mean HONESTLY talk about addiction, and recognize the true triggers, roots, and solutions. Intervention and rehab should be about moving forward, NOT belittling someone over choices that have been made (it’s not like they can go back in time and change it).

When it comes to support and rehab, people need to be careful here, as it is so easy to make the sober life sound depressing, it is easy to get caught up in remembering the ‘fun’ times when they were high or in the peak of their addiction, making recovering addicts feel that pull more so than they would if they were to try and get sober/free on their own.

Whatever your addiction is, there IS hope. As for me, I found that Jesus and the power of HIS resurrection would be the key in breaking the bondage of Meth, Cocaine, Acid, Mushrooms, Vicodin, and worst of all, Opium. Without realizing I was in trouble, without knowing that life free from bondage was possible, without Jesus, I would still be deep in my addictions, or worse yet, dead by now.