(Stillness in the Storm Editor) For years, we’ve been led to believe drugs cause addiction. If you give someone cocaine, they’ll become an addict. But newer research and understanding counters this drugs-lead-to-addiction myth.
Human beings are social creatures. Human beings are also value-driven creatures, meaning we measure our success in life based on how many of our values are being expressed.
While everyone develops a unique set of values to govern their lives, there is much value cross over all people share. Some values we inherit from our animal ancestors, like the values that help us survive.
Humans, being social creatures, have social values. These values are hardwired into our biology, wherein certain aspects of our brain and physiology are designed to measure and assess our social worth and status, which psychologists refer to as social dominance. Don’t let the word dominance confuse you, it simply means the ability to get what you want through various social organizational systems, referring to how animals organize their social groups.
In humans, social order is achieved two ways, one rests on animal means of contests of power (conflict) wherein the strongest person wins and exercises power over others. The other is through merit, where people discuss what the best way to do something is, and then use that best way as the guiding force of decision making.
Getting back to the relationship of emotions and addiction, brain centers that manage social status use emotions to inform the individual as to their place in a group. This is why, when you feel embarrassed, you experience strong negative emotions. This is also why, when you feel proud, you feel strong positive emotions.
In short, a person who has properly established social attachments, to themselves (feeling good about yourself), to others (feeling like you’re valued by your community) and to the world (feeling like you contribute to your society) don’t experience negative emotions related to social status.
What’s supposed to happen is that when you feel the loss of social status, experienced as negative emotions, you identify the problem, take an action to correct it, and thereby restore emotional balance.
In order to do this correctly, you would have to accept responsibility and your social group would have to provide a pathway for your redemption. If done properly, your social status is regained by a personal act of contrition (remorse) and a social ritual of restoration of your reputation.
But if a society is unfair, lacking a proper pathway for redemption, or if the individual refuses to take responsibility, no restoration of social status can take place, which means the individual continues to suffer the emotional upheaval of social ostracization. From this place, the individual has an emotional wound that can’t be healed, and therefore, they will turn to drugs or other coping methods to manage the toxic mood.
In my opinion, the above scenario is one of the primary causes of addiction in our modern world.
Without getting into all the points of proof, our culture manufactures abandonment and social isolation, at almost all levels.
This means almost everyone is walking around feeling socially ostracized in someway, translating into negative moods. Those with the strongest sense of internal conflict, with the bigger emotional wounds, will be primed for addiction.
When such people encounter a substance that provides emotional relief, they’ll feel relieved for the first time in their lives, and their brain will associate that relief to the addictive activity. Once this has taken place, the person is more likely to turn to that addictive activity to cope. This is what tends to happen with many addicts, as they have some emotional would they didn’t know how to address, which is relieved when they begin consuming their drug of choice. The problem isn’t the drug, that merely alleviates the symptom. The problem is the core emotional wound.
The following article highlights a study wherein rats were given water laced with cocaine and heroin. In one experiment, rats were isolated, given pure water and drug-laced water to drink. In a second experiment, rats were placed in a cage with other rats along with the drug-laced water. Only the isolated rats, ones that had no social attachments, got addicted to the drugs, eventually dying from an overdose. The socially attached rats never got addicted.
Take a moment to consider the magnitude of what that means.
What is the common thread linking drug addicts, social media addicts, food addicts, sex addicts, entertainment addicts, and so on? In my review, they all share some existential angst affliction, usually related to a life that isn’t fulfilling. In order to manage the pain of an emotion we can’t deal with constructively, we’ll naturally turn to escape.
Thus, addicts aren’t bad people. Nor are they afflicted with some “chemical imbalance” that pre-destines them for addiction—at least not in the majority of cases.
The “chemical imbalance” is that, in most cases, addicts have chronic social attachment issues. Their brains are flooded with negative emotional neurotransmitters, which looks like an imbalance to psychologists who don’t understand the relationship between social ostracization and emotion. They have low-self worth (self-abandonment). They have no tribe or local community that values them. They feel like they live in a world that they can’t relate to or they have no place in. They feel like they’re living in a universe that is cold, dead, and ambivalent to their plight.
All of these are forms of abandonment, all of which trigger neurological centers designed to pump the brain with negative emotions.
Perhaps, we should think about addiction differently.
Perhaps, if we accept the premise that negative emotions exist to alert us to something that needs to change, we can start to look at addiction in a different way.
I would argue, based on my research, and my own personal struggle with addiction, I’m only tempted to indulge when I feel like I can’t live out my dreams or pursue my life values.
What if we lived in a world where we made it a priority for all people to find a valued place in the social hierarchy?
I’ll leave you with this last point.
In the following article, Dr Jordan Peterson and others discuss how a psychopath or mass murder is created. I offer my comments on this, citing research into the effects of social abandonment on the psyche.
Related If Joker Met Jordan Peterson — How to Create a Psychopath Killer
Since the relationship between social attachments and addiction isn’t well recognized, looking to extreme examples of what social ostracization does to people will be helpful.
What’s clear is that the more socially isolated a person becomes, the more likely they are to engage in antisocial behavior, which often requires negative emotions to fuel the justification of criminality. Someone at the end of their rope, with no community to help them, is much more likely to commit a crime than someone who has all their needs met.
When you’re needs aren’t being met, you’re in survival mode. When you’re in that state, higher brain centers shut down. Strong negative emotions overwhelm logic and compassion, which becomes the foundation for addictive behaviors.
Thus, before we look to put an end to addiction, and anti-social behavior, which are symptoms, we should identify and address the primary causes.
– Justin
(Exploring Your Mind) We believe that we become dependent on substances. However, what if the reason for such dependence is how they make us feel? So, is it pleasure or addiction?
Related Addiction Expert Claims: Giving Your Child A Smartphone Is Like Giving Them A Gram Of Cocaine
by Staff Writer, October 4th, 2019
Is pleasure the reason for addiction? Drug dependency is a problem that affects more and more people every day. However, the reason for substance abuse may not be directly related to drugs but to other processes instead. Today, we’re going to make the argument that people don’t necessarily become addicted to substances. Rather, we derive pleasure on the way they make us feel.
To shed some light on the above statement, it’s important to refer to one of the many experiments conducted with rats as it’s quite revealing. It was conducted in the 80s.
Pleasure, addiction, heroin, cocaine, and rats
The experiment we mentioned above consisted of placing a rat in a cage. There were two bottles in the cage: one contained water and the other contained water with either diluted cocaine or heroin. The results were the same every time, regardless of the rat in the cage. Every single one became addicted to the drug and drank the solution until they died. This is a pattern that repeats itself in addicted humans.
However, there’s a variable we haven’t mentioned. The rats were alone in the cage. Thus, what would happen if there were other rats with them? This became the next step in this experiment. Researchers created a small rat “park”. In it, there was food, colored balls and everything they needed to have a good time. The results were amazing!
Many rats didn’t drink any of the adulterated water and those who did drink did so in moderation. Thus, while all the rats in the isolation experiment died of an overdose, the group in the fun rat park didn’t become addicted.
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Isolation and its relationship with drugs
One thing was clear after this experiment. The isolated rats with a poor environment and lack of stimuli were more inclined to addiction and, as a consequence, to basically committing suicide by overindulging on the drugs. The same happens with people. Substance addiction has nothing to do with them directly, but rather with the feeling of pleasure they cause.
When we isolate ourselves from others, be it voluntarily or involuntarily, our brains produce a substance called myelin. It causes changes in our cognitive and emotional behavior that lead to depression, anxiety, and fear. Thus, we feel bad because, just like rats, humans are social creatures who need to bond with others.
When we’re isolated, it’s easier for us to become addicted. This is because drugs increase our secretion of dopamine, the substance that makes us feel happy.
Actually, drugs numb our brain and help us avoid thinking. They’re also disinhibiting and allow us to get away from everything that hurts or affects us, at least momentarily. They’re a form of avoidance behavior.
Family history and drug use
In spite of all that, we’ve explained why we don’t become addicted to substances but on the sort of pleasure we derive from them. However, we also have to mention an important characteristic within addictions: family history.
If our parents are addicts or had a toxic relationship, then it’s possible that we often felt out of place, ignored and isolated.
As we now know, this is an exceptional breeding ground to seek refuge in drugs, since our environment isn’t as fun and full of friends as the rat park was. Instead, we’re more like one of those lonely caged rats.
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Many people feel guilty after falling off the wagon. What they don’t realize is that they’re not addicted to substances. They mainly like the way drugs make them feel. The question is: why do they want to feel that way?
Anything that can affect you emotionally can lead you to find a different way of feeling in drugs. In addition, if you surround yourself with people who also consume them because they also have emotional problems and have to face difficult situations that make them feel unhappy and isolated, then it’s easier to fall into a vicious circle.
Conclusion
If addictions were caused by substances, then why can’t some people live without their cellphones or video games? Thus, the reason for your dependence doesn’t lie in the substance, but mainly in how these make you feel and how they allow you to forget your problems at least for a few hours.
In the end, addictions are nothing more than escape valves and they’ll exist for as long as we continue to live within our vicious circle.
Stillness in the Storm Editor: Why did we post this?
Psychology is the study of the nature of mind. Philosophy is the use of that mind in life. Both are critically important to gain an understanding of as they are aspects of the self. All you do and experience will pass through these gateways of being. The preceding information provides an overview of this self-knowledge, offering points to consider that people often don’t take the time to contemplate. With the choice to gain self-awareness, one can begin to see how their being works. With the wisdom of self-awareness, one has the tools to master their being and life in general, bringing order to chaos through navigating the challenges with the capacity for right action.
– Justin
Not sure how to make sense of this? Want to learn how to discern like a pro? Read this essential guide to discernment, analysis of claims, and understanding the truth in a world of deception: 4 Key Steps of Discernment – Advanced Truth-Seeking Tools.
Stillness in the Storm Editor’s note: Did you find a spelling error or grammar mistake? Send an email to [email protected], with the error and suggested correction, along with the headline and url. Do you think this article needs an update? Or do you just have some feedback? Send us an email at [email protected]. Thank you for reading.
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