All addictions, whether to substances or harmful behaviors, have an emotional component. You can become addicted to almost anything, and recovery is about being able to establish and maintain quality relationshipsboth with oneself and with the environment.
Do you feel unable to change certain habits? Have you ever wondered why you keep using a substance or doing a behavior that you feel is hurting you? What makes us addicted and how can we overcome it?
In this connection, Enric Corbera analyzes the different forms of emotional addiction. Some manifests itself in the form of toxic relationships, be it in any field, in the family, or at work.
The real cause of addictions is in the difficulty to connect with oneself and with the environment. In this video, Enric Corbera shares the keys to learn to relate healthy with ourselves and with others.
What are addictions?
Sometimes we can see each other repeating behaviors, without knowing exactly why we are doing them. Whether it’s smoking, overworking, , or look at the mobile every two minutes.
There is a great variety of ways of acting whose motivation is often not evident, much less conscious.
Usually, the cause of addiction is attributed to external factors. For example, to different addictive substances such as opiates, nicotine or alcohol.
However, the reaction that substances or behaviors generate in our body is nothing more than the stimulation of different neurotransmitters associated with pleasuresuch as dopamine, serotonin or endorphins.
We have the ability to generate these neurotransmitters naturally, however, addicted people seek to overstimulate these neurological centers through substances or actions that end up becoming compulsions.
Studies on addictions
The psychology professor has studied addictions for decades, reaching revolutionary results that contradict everything popularly thought about addictive drugs.
Do addictions depend on the person or their environment?
Let’s see one of his. Professor Alexander studied the behavior of a rat locked in a cage with two containers from which he could drink: one for drinking water and one for heroin-laced water.
in this environment the rat consumed the water adulterated with the drug until he overdosed and died.
However, in order to validate this experiment, it was proposed to carry out the same study with a larger group of rats, both male and female, living together in what could be called an “amusement park” for rats.
Curiously, in this environment, in which they could play, interact with each other and reproduce, they only drank drinking waterand none consumed heroin-laced water.
The cause of substance addiction may not be chemical
In subsequent studies tried to try this same influence of the environment on humans. The soldiers who returned from the well-known and bloody Vietnam War were studied.
In that warlike environment, 20% of the soldiers in the US Army used heroin recurrently. According to the classical theory on addictions, it was assumed that when they returned home they would have already developed the addiction and would continue with these harmful habits.
The surprise was to discover that 95% stopped using heroin once the environment in which they lived had changed.
In the same way, people who are treated after an operation with diamorphine – a drug even more powerful than heroin-, do not develop addictions once dischargedsince they return to an emotional environment from which they do not have the need to escape.
There are many more studies and meta-analyses that support the hypothesis that addiction is not caused only by substances, but by feelings of isolation and disconnection. It is not the drugs, but the “cage” in which we find ourselves
Ultimately it is not the drug itself that causes the problem, but the dependence on the state achieved through it. For this reason, we can affirm that the emotional environment is a determining factor in the development of addictions.
Why do we become addicted?
Addictions serve people to escape from a conflictive situation or environment that they do not know how to face, because they do not have the necessary tools or capacities.
In the same way, we can consider that there are also through which a person becomes dependent on another personwhich serves -like the rest of addictions- as a palliative for its own discomfort.
Drug use or addictive behaviors they try to alleviate the psycho-emotional pain that was already there before to consume substances or acquire harmful behaviors.
The problem is not the addiction but the disconnection
When we of our environment, for not knowing how to manage it emotionally, addictions emerge as a new form of connectionin this case with a specific substance or behavior with which we establish a dependency relationship.
John Grant, a psychiatrist and director of the Clinic for Addictive, Compulsive and Impulsive Disorders at the University of Chicago states that:
“Any reality that reports an excessive reward, any element of euphoric or calming effects, can create addiction. Whether or not he manages to create it depends on the vulnerability of the person, influenced by genetics, anxiety and depression, among other factors. Not all of us develop addictions.”
Addictions and Bioneuroemotion
Importance of the emotional environment in addictions
The proposes, in these cases, the study of and to understand what predisposes a person to have an addictive personality.
In addition, it will be extremely useful to know the context where the addiction has developed to understand how to overcome this emotional dependence, finding a way to reconnect with oneself and with others, establishing genuine and healthy forms of connection.
«All addictions, he told her, were nothing more than ways of treating the same problem. Drugs, excess food, alcohol or sex, everything was a simple way to find peace. To escape from what we know. Of our education. It was our bite of the apple.”
Chuck Palahniuk, “Suffocation” (2001).
How to overcome addictions
when we are able to interpret and react in a more adaptive way to our environmentwe manage to connect in a healthy way with others, in this way addictions stop making sense.
Through this and the development of those skills that allow us to function with a greater we modify our way of seeing and experiencing reality.
So we can choose, this time without conditioning, a healthier way of relating to ourselves and the world.
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