Maybe I'm wrong, maybe you know all about addiction. Maybe you're like me and find addiction to be a fascinating topic to explore for creative reasons. I doubt it, though.
I'm going to share my knowledge with you here, not spout my opinions on the matter.
Let's start with the picture above.
The picture above is simply an image I found that I feel is a good visual representation of the "big monster" of addiction.
The big monster is LIES. The big monster is BRAINWASHING
Before I get into it, let me share my credentials. I am not a psychologist. I am not a counselor. I have never worked in a clinic. I have never guided anyone in a professional capacity through struggling with addiction. In fact, posting this on Steemit is the closest I've ever come.
Why should you care what I have to say then?
Because by December of 2017 I was smoking about a pack of cigarettes a day and drinking 2-5 bottles of wine a night. I started when I was around 15. I'm 33.
As of right now, I do not smoke and I do not drink. I have quit both and I did it without the use of willpower, AA meetings(I've never been to one and I believe they are a waste of time), or by cutting back.
Sounds fishy. So how did you do it?
I read a book. Two books, actually, by the same author. One on smoking, one on drinking. There you go. If you want to stop drinking or smoking or both, simply read those books.
I've been trying to research this topic of addiction and man is it hard to find ANYONE who has ANY idea what they are talking about. Most people, psychologists, and doctors alike, think they know what they're talking about.
So why are you interested in researching it? What addictions are you struggling with?
None that I know of. I started to think I was addicted to my phone and social media, but no. I decided I was simply spending too much time on it and stopped. Wasn't that tough, didn't really require willpower, just a logical decision. I'm researching it because I am interested to learn how deeply addiction is entrenched in our way of life.
So then why should I believe you over all the doctors and psychologists and people and information out there that specializes in researching and learning and helping and didn't just read a couple of books and crown himself king?
Because if any of the brainwashing:doctors, media, psychologists, friends, family were right then I wouldn't have had a problem. The beautiful thing about the truth of addiction is that once you really understand it, it's not a big deal.
Let's talk about how addiction really works.
There are 2 parts to addiction:
The little monster.
The big monster.
The reason one is little and one is big is because the bigger one is more powerful, more evil, and more difficult to overcome.
The little monster is the physical dependency. It is the actual addiction. There is nothing else about the substance whether it be cigarettes, alcohol, or heroine that you are "addicted" to. So let's expel our first myth. This one, a long with the others, is going to be a doozy.
There is no such thing as a mental addiction.
If it's not physically addictive then it's not addictive and you're not addicted to it.
Addiction is complicated and specific to each person. To undo someone's addiction they most go through an arduous and complicated process of self-exploration.
Nope. Addiction is simple. You are addicted for two reasons:
Big monster: Brainwashing
Little monster: Physical Addiction
Here's how addiction takes place in your brain. You smoke a cigarette. Nicotine is released into your brain. As soon as you put out the cigarette, your nicotine levels begin to drop. This causes WITHDRAWAL PANGS.
The withdrawal pangs are the little monster.
So a good metaphor is that by putting nicotine, alcohol, or any addictive substance in your body, you are putting a little monster inside you. In the case of cigarettes, that little monster feeds on nicotine.
When he gets hungry he says, "You want a cigarette."
When you try to quit smoking and he realizes you're not listening to him, he goes and tells the big monster.
The big monster then says, "Oh man, you're so stressed out. You need a cigarette to help you relax. They may not be good for you, but you are stressed and you're only going to get more stressed until you have one."
Then you have a cigarette. Then he says, "Isn't that nice? See how much pleasure that gave you?"
If you understand nicotine addiction you know that cigarettes do not provide any pleasure of any kind. All they do is create a system of withdrawal pangs.
That's why it seems pleasurable. The same goes for alcohol, the same goes for heroine. The withdrawal pangs vary, but in the end it's all the same. There are numerous analogies. Saying cigarettes provide pleasure is like saying banging your head against a wall provides pleasure. "Every time I stop doing it, I'm so happy that I'm not doing it anymore, that's real pleasure!"
No...
Most people don't understand addiction and that's why they never escape it. We've all heard of people who haven't drank in years but still refer to themselves as alcoholic.(sober alcoholics)
Do they seem like truly happy people to you? Do they seem like they are truly free of alcohol's hold on their life?
They have killed the little monster, but they never killed the big monster.
They will have to use exhausting supplies of willpower for the rest of their life. Their entire life will have to be centered around them keeping control of their addiction. Even if they are successful, that's a lot of wasted energy.
-Habits are hard to break and hard to form.
-Addictions are fundamentally different for everyone.
-Willpower, support systems, and discipline are all part of kicking an addiction.
-There is such thing as an addictive personality.
-Alcoholic is a scientific objective term.
-Cigarettes taste good/are enjoyable to some people or at certain times
-Doctors, typically, know what they're talking about when they tell you to stop drinking/smoking.
I know I did. I had to go through these different concepts(and many others) and investigate the truth. Once I did that, I realized that none of them are true. The big monster was dead and gone.
This is considerably easier and more straightforward. You will go through withdrawal pangs for a bit, but they're not as bad as you think. I was getting totally trashed for years, and drinking for over 15 years straight, and I can't even remember any withdrawal pangs when I went cold turkey.
Smoking, I just quit yesterday. I've got a headache, I feel an urge to smoke, but I wouldn't say that I'm using willpower. I know that in a few days this feeling will go away. I know that right now the little monster is screaming and begging me to smoke because the big monster is dead and gone. All the little monster can do is say "you want a cigarette."
And my response is, "you're going to starve to death soon."
If you don't agree with anything I've said, that's your choice, but please don't start spouting statistics and information about dopamine and neurotransmitters and articles about how they've discovered the "addictive personality gene."
If that's what the scientists really believe, then I think we need new scientists.
If you believe all that, OK, good luck, you're going to need it. But again, you're only rehashing what I consider lies and brainwashing.
If you want to use logic and have a discussion, I'm all ears.
The last thing I want to share is the number one emotional reason why we have so much trouble realizing the cause of addiction. The reason we haven't all figured out about this big monster and little monster is fear.
is what makes addiction seemingly difficult to overcome. Remove the fear and you realize that your cell door was never locked in the first place.
You remove the fear by exploring the truth:
It's all smoke and mirrors.
I like the way you talk about addiction, and not only because you depict it as monsters ;)
I find the subject really interesting. In fact, I took two courses on addiction (well, one on addiction per se and another one on drugs) and I agree with most of what you say here. Not with all of it, though, and that's completely normal. Now, I know you said not to just disagree, but I think you're being too harsh on scientists: your view and most of the 'scientific' views don't seem that far apart to me.
A great number of researches agree that addiction is a physical reaction (you said not to mention neurotransmitters, so I won't but...) and as much as the big monster/little monster analogy seems genius to me, I had to stop and give think about some points on what you call 'brainwashing'.
I agree with you. Hard is a relative term anyway and the so called professionals shouldn't just toss it around without a quantitative comparative analysis.
Well, I sure don't think addiction is tailored for each and everyone of us. It's the same phenomenon. Yet, I wouldn't agree either if you had phrased it 'addiction is the same to everyone'. Maybe it's just me having a problem with absolutes, but I believe since each person is different, so has to be their reaction to addiction.
I mostly agree with the others. Other thing that I believe is that sometimes beating the little monster - the physical dependency - isn't always that easy. It's just not a matter of logic. As you put it, addiction is physical in nature.
On top of all that, I loved this post (so much that I got excited and wrote an answer this long... sorry hahaha) and again, it's a really nice POV on addiction; made me think and analyse things I thought I knew.
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I'm glad you enjoyed it.
I read a book that was a couple of hundred pages long and went cold turkey on an addiction that I fed for the majority of my life. Does reading one book and quitting something without the use of any willpower sound hard or difficult to you?
I'm not saying it's relative....I'm saying, it's easy. If you believe that you are "doing something that is hard." Then you won't be able to do something that is easy. It's so easy, that you are actually not doing anything. You're simply deciding not to do something.
The idea about addictions being hard to break is the same about habits. They aren't difficult, if you know how.
You form and break habits every day of your life.
If you look in Allen Carr's book he uses the example of driving in the UK and then driving in America. He has to break the habit of driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right. He says that he has no trouble doing this and thousands of people in the UK, don't either. That is both forming and breaking a habit.
When I say addictions are NOT fundamentally different from anyone, let me explain. On a fundamental level, they are not. There's the big monster, the little monster, and it's all held together by the glue of fear. That is the same for every addiction for everyone.
Now, there might be some personal touches. The big monster is brainwashing. So let's say, you're an alcoholic and you believe that two glasses of wine is good for your health. So that's the point that always drags you down. You can't seem to consistently talk yourself out of drinking because you believe and can't argue against this idea.
Take another alcoholic, he drinks because he believes that alcohol in general gives him a boost of happiness. Without alcohol his life will be too sad without that boost.
Both are brainwashed. Both are living in a fear of something that is not true. Fundamentally, it's the same.
Thanks for chiming in with some feedback. Let me know of any specific literature that you found intriguing on the subject.
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Thanks for your answer!
Well, I'm not a fan of psychology as a science. Too much generalisation applied to a subject with too much standard deviation, in my opinion. Even so, I still admit that some behavioural theories make sense, among them, Skinner's operant conditioning. So, while I agree with your statement that an addict indulges in his addiction to quell the negative response the body gives to the absence of the stimulus (commonly, withdrawal) there's also a positive reinforcement in most of the addictions, the reason the addict fell into it in the first place, i.e. an alcoholic (before becoming one) didn't start drinking because he misses the boost of the alcohol but because it did gave them a boost of happiness of some sort.
I'm not saying the negative reinforcements don't play a big part in the addiction cycle, I'm just saying they are not all what's into it. It's somewhat more complex. Not necessarily hard, as you say, but not easy for everyone either. Even if the structure of the addiction can be explained with the same big-monster/small-monster/fear analogy, internally they are different for everyone. Not every addiction can be cured by cutting the stimuli 'cold turkey' (I've always thought this is a really weird expression btw), the phenomenon is physical and sometimes the body needs time to adapt to changes.
Again, I agree with most of what you say, I'm just not too much into the whole generalisation and absolute affirmations.
About the literature, I had a bunch of material pertaining drug addiction specifically, but I lost it along with most of my data last week * tears flow *. Still, for addiction as a subject there's a lot to read on the internet, some really interesting, some... eh... jalados por los pelos (?) I cant't find an adequate translation for that now... not-so-plausible, or something like that. Anyway, some of it is really worth it, some not. I'm sure you'll spot which one is which from afar.
Also, congratulations for beating your addiction! Even if it was easy for you :)
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No, thank you Isa for your input. And thanks for the congrats. It's an odd feeling to suddenly be free of multiple life-long addictions.
The positive affirmations of smoking and drinking like "it gives me a boost," "it relaxes me," "I enjoy the taste," are the brainwashing.
As far as cold turkey or dropping it completely, there is a lot of false information out there that the body "needs" time to adjust. I can't say that I know of any drug where this is the case. Cigarettes and alcohol are not. Allen Carr claims that heroine addicts that he's helped have dropped the habit cold turkey and did not report any actual "pain" during their withdrawal period, just stress.
I have found extremely little on the internet that I find interesting or plausible on addiction.
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I agree, maybe not mental addiction, but there is emotional addiction.
The fear you're talking about is of having to deal with something in your life that the addiction was helping you escape from, hide from, or be soothed about. Things you could ignore now you will face, and it's a great thing - all about healing, growing and becoming more resilient, responsible and self-loving. The doctor I respect on this topic is a compassionate Canadian: Dr. Gabor Mate and he has a book on the topic. You may also like Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav. I think he talks about cultivating your authentic power to deal with addictions and everything else...
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The addictions were not helping me escape from anything. So, for that reason, I wasn't actually using the substances to run from my problems. I thought I was, but that was brainwashing.
When I did quit drinking and smoking, there wasn't a moment of "finally facing my demons."
I made the mistake of thinking that kicking alcohol meant I would have to finally face these huge personal issues that I was running from. The truth was that these personal demons weren't real. These issues were minuscule. My fear of quitting was pumping them up to terrifying proportions. So, if you understand me, I had to recognize the idea of "I drink because I'm running from my problems," to be brainwashing. It's a lie. That's not why I was drinking. It's not why anyone drinks.
The real fear was the fear of being free. It's not something I really felt honestly and intensely until I took the final step. It was kind of like jumping off a diving board for the first time. After you do it, you laugh, it's a cheap thrill but much of the elation comes from realizing that it's no big deal, nothing to be afraid of.
No offense, but you can quote doctors all you want, the term "doctor" doesn't carry any weight with me on this matter. That's due to my own personal experience. They more often say things that make the addiction worse.
If you're finding luck with Gabor and Gary, that's great. I doubt it though. I myself am not interested in reading them because I've already kicked my addiction. If they're wrong, I'd be reintroducing brainwashing that could be potentially harmful. If they're right, then I wouldn't have gained anything because I've already kicked the addictions. I'd also like to point out that my original post has nothing to do with personal growth, healing, resilience, or anything to do with life style. I'm focusing very specifically on ADDICTION. It's not a life style, it's not a habit, it's an addiction. It's a prison built out of misinformation, fear, and physical dependence. If you don't believe that, then you are brainwashed. That is my stance.
As far as the "emotional addiction," I can't say that I really know what that is. I've seen the term thrown around plenty, but to me it's more of a buzz word. "Emotional addiction" was not part of freeing myself from alcohol and cigarettes.
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