Addiction Redefined
After half a century in psychiatric practice, I know without a doubt that the source of addiction is spiritual deficiency. Irrespective of whether we are religious or atheist, all human beings are spiritual by nature and spirituality is the cornerstone of our recovery.
– Abraham Twerski
Advocates of twelve-step addiction recovery programs typically define addiction as an incurable, chronic, progressive and ultimately — in the absence of immediate medical and/or peer intervention — fatal disease. My own experience with addiction and my observations of other addicts over the years, however, suggest otherwise: addiction is most frequently (but not always) manageable and self-correcting, more typically doesn’t progress beyond a certain point, is rarely a death sentence, and more often than not doesn’t require medical or peer intervention — at least not of the extreme sort we see on reality TV.
Contrary to popular opinion, addiction is not a disease, and there isn’t a shred of credible medical evidence anywhere to suggest it is. Rather, addiction is a common and largely self-correcting lifestyle coping mechanism gone awry. Addictions come and go, depending in large part on circumstance, and tend to travel laterally in our lives. We might succeed in managing addiction at one moment only to have the same addiction (or a different one) pop up later as circumstances in our lives change over time.
The addiction-as-disease advocates argue that addicts are victimized by their addictions in spite of their values, while those who define addiction as a lifestyle coping mechanism gone awry as I do argue instead that addicts are complicit in their addictions because of their values. Typically, those who advocate the addiction-as-disease model embrace abstinence while those who define addiction as a lifestyle coping mechanism gone awry embrace moderation. Seems to me that in the Great Age of Addiction & Loss, an age that promotes almost all behavior in excess by default, abstention is a pretty quaint and terribly inadequate notion, and moderation is a far more realistic alternative.
The fact that the mainstream addiction recovery and healthcare industries still cling to and champion the addiction-as-disease theory despite its obviously fatal flaws is perhaps best explained by the following quote from Upton Sinclair:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,
– Upton Sinclair
In short, hundreds of thousands of salaries and hundreds of billions of dollars each year rely upon our willingness not to understand our own complicity in our own addictions.
In the end, however, it doesn’t much matter how we define addiction. Because in the end what makes us addicts has less to do with how we define addiction and more to do with how we diagnose it. While our definitions of addiction may change over time, the diagnosis of addiction remains a model of consistency. We almost always predicate our diagnosis of addiction on the exact same criteria, the exact same fundamental observation: the amount of time and money an addict invests in the procurement and consumption of his or her favorite drug(s).
The drug itself, however, is incidental. It can be anything: media or food, heroin or sex, cocaine or gambling, cigarettes or easy credit, uppers or downers, or any combination of the above. But addiction is never about the specific drug. Rather, it’s about behavior. It’s about how we spend our time and money. That’s why alcoholics behave much the same way in their addiction as sex addicts behave in theirs. That’s why cocaine addicts behave much the same way in their addiction as compulsive gamblers do in theirs. And that’s why addiction is more typically a lay diagnosis than a medical diagnosis. Doctors don’t usually know how and where we spend our time and money (unless and until we tell them), whereas our friends, relatives and co-workers more typically do.
Speaking of how we spend our time and money, if you haven’t already been there, now would be a good time to check out the very simple Media Addiction FACTs.
And if you’re struggling with addiction yourself, or know someone who is, you’ll definitely want to check out An Uncommon-Sense Guide to Addiction Recovery, a 21st-century approach to addiction recovery, and the perfect supplement to any addiction program for any addiction problem.
Finally, for what it’s worth, I’d like to end this page the way it began, with the assertion that the root cause of addiction is less physical, less pharmacological, less emotional and more spiritual. I believe we turn to addiction as compensation for our spiritual emptiness. We turn increasingly towards addiction as — in the Great Age of Addiction & Loss — we turn increasingly away from our own spirituality in pursuit of endless digital diversion.
