petite femme said:Alot of good points here! Understanding addiction is key to overcoming it! If you can break it down and understand it, where it comes from and the purpose it serves, then you can begin to work with the "error of your machine", so to speak. Getting to the "why" behind your addiction is very important, I have learned first hand that abstinence is not the total answer! I am a recovering addict, and I can say from experience that if you do not get to the "why", you will most likely just replace your original addiction with something else! You'll get the satisfaction of accomplishment in putting down the destructive behavior that was your addiction, but eventually pick up something else to fill the space.
Very true, I think. And it applies not just to addictions, but to programs in general.
I am in the middle of this right now, so this thread was an awesome tool for me. I am beginning to understand and break down the why, and working towards a more peaceful approach to my recovery. One that involves understanding my additive behaviors and where they stem from.
Thank you to all that participated in this tread for your insights. I will be checking out this book "Love and Addition", to help me through my recovery!
Fwiw, I do participate in an NA program, and it has helped me a lot. I feel that recognizing your powerlessness over your addiction is an important step. It is the catalyst to taking back your power! Or at least it was for me. I do think that the friends you make in the program and the support is a huge help in recovery as well, since you sometimes find yourself quite alone. You have to distance yourself from friends that you made in your addiction and sometimes you find that those friendships were not really friendships at all, just codependent and unhealthy.
I do agree that the program itself is not the complete answer. It doesn't really talk about understanding the root of your addiction, and there is a lot of talk about asking a power higher than your self to "take away your defects of character". I don't really follow this part of the program. I feel that it is within my power to do this myself. Maybe not remove them, but understand and overcome them. In the end, its all lessons!
Thanks for sharing, petite femme! I wish you all the best in your recovery, and it seems that you have a good grasp on it, plus the intent to reach the root of the problem! Kudos for that. And thanks also for your personal insight about groups like NA. I think you explained their pros and cons very well. And as long as you know the limitations, and you can benefit from all the good parts of it, then it's definitely a plus, IMO!
As promised, here are more quotes for those interested in the topic (I'll keep transcribing some parts as time allows):
Addicts who fail to mature out are those who decide that they are ‘hooked’, make no effort to abandon addiction, and give in to what they regard as inevitable.
[…] Addiction is a pattern of drug use [or habit] that occurs in people who have little to anchor them to life. Lacking an underlying direction, finding new things that can entertain or motivate them, they have nothing to compete with the effects of a narcotic for possession of their lives, But for other people the impact of a drug, while it may be considerable, is not overwhelming. They have involvements and satisfactions which forestall total submission to something whose action is to limit and deaden. The occasional user may have need for relief or may only use a drug for specific positive effects. But he values his activities, his friendships, his possibilities too much to sacrifice them to the exclusion and repetition with is addiction. […] [The latter] doesn’t find life sufficiently unpleasant to want to obliterate their consciousness.
[The addict] is someone who lacks the desire –or confidence in his or her capacity- to come to grips with life independently. His view of life is not a positive one which anticipates chances for pleasure and fulfillment, but a negative one which fears the world and people as threats to himself. [..] The addict is not a genuinely rebellious person. Rather, he is a fearful one. He is eager to rely on drugs (or medicine), on people, on institutions. In giving himself up to these larger forces, he is a perpetual invalid. […] the readiness for submission is the keynote of addiction. Disbelieving his own adequacy, recoiling from challenge, the addict welcomes control from outside himself as the ideal state of affairs.
[…]The difference between not being addicted and being addicted is the difference between seeing the world as your arena and seeing the world as your prison. These contrasting orientations suggest a standard for assessing whether a substance or activity is addictive for a particular person. If what a person is engaged in enhances his ability to live – if it enables him to work more effectively, to love more beautifully, to appreciate the things around him more, and finally, if it allows him to grow, to change and expand —then it is not addictive. If, on the other hand, it diminishes him —if it makes him less attractive, less capable, less sensitive, and if it limits him, stifles him, then it is addictive.
[…] When someone enjoys or is energized by an experience, he wishes to pursue it further, master it more, understand it better. The addict, on the other hand, wishes only to stay with a clearly defined routine. […] when a man or a woman works purely for the reassurance of knowing that he or she is working, rather than positively desiring to do something, then that person’s involvement with work is compulsive the so-called “workaholic” syndrome. […]
The ability to derive a positive pleasure from something, to do something because it brings joy to oneself, is, in fact, a principal criterion of nonaddiction. It might seem a foregone conclusion that people take drugs for enjoyment, yet this is not true of addicts. An addict does not find heroin pleasurable in itself. Rather, he uses it to obliterate other aspects of this environment which he dreads. […] he is driven to used the substance merely to maintain himself at a bearable level of existence. This is the tolerance process, through which the addict comes to rely on the addictive object as something necessary to his psychological survival. What might have been a positive motivation turns out to be a negative one. It is a matter of need rather than of desire.
A further, and related, sign of addiction is that an exclusive craving for something is accompanied by a loss of discrimination toward the object which satisfies the craving. In the early stages of an addict’s relationship to a substance, he may desire a specific quality in the experience it gives him. He hopes for a certain reaction and, if it is not forthcoming, he is dissatisfied. But after a certain point, the addict cannot distinguish between a good and a bad version of that experience.
About “Love as an addiction”
Love is an ideal vehicle for addiction because it can so exclusively claim a person’s consciousness. If, to serve as an addiction, something must be both reassuring and consuming, then a sexual or love relationship is perfectly suited for the task. If it must also be patterned, predictable, and isolated, then in these respects too, a relationship can be ideally tailored to the addictive purpose. Someone who is dissatisfied with himself or his situation can discover in such a relationship the most encompassing substitute for self-contentment ad the effort required to attain it.
When a person goes to another with the aim of filling a void in himself, the relationship quickly becomes the center of his or her life. It offers him a solace that contrasts sharply with what he finds everywhere else, so he returns to it more and more, until he needs it to get through each day of his otherwise stressful and unpleasant existence. When a constant exposure to something is necessary in order to make life bearable, an addiction has been brought about, however romantic the trappings. The ever-present danger of withdrawal creates and ever-present craving.
[…]
[Then there is an entire section on how members of the lower classes tend to get more addicted to drugs or habits that can be achieved without social dependency, while the higher classes are more commonly addicted to relationships, “love” or habits that involve other people. ]
Love is the opposite of interpersonal addiction. A love relationship is based on a desire to grow and to expand oneself through living, and a desire for one’s partner to do the same. Anything which contributes positively to a loved one’s experience is welcomed, partly because it enriches the loved one for his own sake, and partly because it makes him a more stimulating companion in life. If a person is self-completed, he can even accept experiences which cause a lover to grow away from him, if that is the direction in which the lover’s fulfillment must take her. If two people hope to realize fully their potential as human beings —both together and apart— then they create an intimacy which includes, along with trust and sharing, hope, independence, openness, adventurousness, and love. […] man or woman can only achieve love when he has realized himself to the point where he can stand as a whole and secure person. “Mature Love”, Fromm states, is “union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality.” It requires a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life. This permits us, as lovers, to manifest an “active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.”
Unless we have reached this state, and unless we have faith in the persistence of our self, our feeling of identity is threatened and we become dependent on other people whose approval then becomes the basis for our feeling of identity.” In that case, we are in danger of experiencing “union without integrity.” Such a union is a “full commitment in all aspects of life” but one which lacks an essential ingredient, a regard for the rest of the world:
If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. (Fromm, The Art of Loving)
[…] Fromm notes that two passionately attracted people “take the intensity of the infatuation, this being ‘crazy’ about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.”
[…] Fromm is a social critic who wants to alert his readers to the harmful effect which society, particularly modern capitalist society, can have on the individual and on personal relationships. This he emphasizes the materialism in self-seeking behavior toward others, especially lovers —that is, the tendency to regard social partners as commodities. People who show this orientation “fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values.” […]”the marketing character is willing to give, but only in exchange for receiving; giving without receiving for him is being cheated.” […] Fromm therefore stresses that the respect inherent in all love requires a lover to think, “I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me.” […] this altruism encourages the loved one’s growth. […] What misleads Fromm and many others, is the habit of conceiving of love exclusively in terms of the lover’s relation to each other—as if this could be separated from the context of the lovers’ individual lives. This is actually a romantic perspective, and within it judgments of another’s worth can only be viewed as self-serving. Yet a different from of judgment is implied by Fromm’s rejection of sterile, solely self-gratifying interdependency. For if you aren’t just going to use someone else as a dehumanized substitute for tension of — yourself (just like any other addictive object), then you will want to ask whether that person is himself mature and strong. Mature people, concerned with the quality of their lives, engage naturally in a continuing evaluation of their relationships, testing alternatives and questioning their commitments. An independent, open person exploring life seriously will instinctively (if not consciously) consider whether someone has anything of substance to add to his or her existence.
