Addictive behaviour starts as a maladaptive coping strategy to deal with self dysregulation.

Addiction Is Not A Weakness of Self Will But Rather a Dysfunction of Self Regulation

Addictive Behaviour is a chronic condition whereby you have to take the medicine in order to begin to know what you are suffering from.

For many the medicine is the 12 step programme of recovery.

For me it was and it provided also an insight into my condition that led to further research over 17 years.

The ancedotal wisdom of AA members sharing honestly about their conditions was just as illuminating, if not more so and it was this wisdom that helped me construct much of the understanding of addictive behaviour I outline in this book.

In the last 17 years I have married neuroscientic research with the ancedotal wisdom of alcoholics and addicted individuals in recovery to arrive at a clear understanding of addictive behaviour, it’s pathomechanisms and the the process of recovery from it.

You also have to self diagnose before you get to the stage of taking the medicine. No number of experts, medical doctors, psychiatrists or addiction specialists can diagnose you, it has to come from within.

You have to admit to your innermost self that you life has spun dangerously and, at times, life threateningly out of control.

Admitting to yourself that you are suffering from addictive behaviour is a great start but it guarantees nothing but a fighting chance at recovery, one day at a time.

A clear understanding of what you suffer from will undoubtedly help your chances of recovery.

Initally, we are admitting that a certain addiction to a certain substance(s) or behaviours has led to negative consequences so severe in our lives that we feel we have to act on them.

For many the so-called “thrill has long gone”, with many individuals wondering why they still engage in addictive behaviours when they are only adding to problems rather than “solving” them, as addictive behaviour has been, for many, a “solution” to many and accumulating problems and mental health issues.

When the “solutlon” is having ever-decreasing impact and, in fact, escalates mental health issues, many individuals arrive at “a jumping off point” and many come into recovery for their addictive behaviours. Many do not and either die prematurely, or get committed, sometimes, long term to prisons or mental health institutions.

Many, if not all, people coming into recovery are seeking help with the “solution”, the chronic addictive behaviours whether that be drinking, taking drugs, engaging in behavioural addictions such as gambling or eating disorders.

Many hope and believe their mental health iissues will dissipate by ceasing addictive behaviours, many find out that they improve considerably but do not disappear.

In recovery, we are advised to deal with the former “solution” by learning to develop strategies for helping us not return to chronic addictive behaviour. It is however, more than that. We are recovering from more than manifest addictive behaviour.

How Not Why!

In 12 step recovery we are often actively discouraged to even consider why we became addicted or alcoholic or patholgical gamblers.

It is the how to recovery that matters not why we got ill in the first instance. When I asked why, I was simply told why not?

Recovery is essential a behavioural modifcation programme, changing how you act changes how you feel and think about yourself. Affective and cognitive aspects of this conditon are given less attention.

An ignorance of predisposing factors to later addictive behaviour is also often actively encouraged.

This is the case in many 12 step facilitated treatment centres too. Little is done to address underlying conditons such post traumatic symptomology.

These conditions which are sometimes acknowledged as co-occurring conditions. AA suggests treating these with “outside help” from professionals, not linked to AA.

According to much research, the majority of addictive behaviour is linked to trauma.

Trauma, often attachment trauma or trauma episodes (resulting in Complex PTSD or PTSD) or childhood neglect is rarely addressed in treatment centres or via 12 step recovery.

Other traumas can also occur at any stage in life and have devastating impact on individual lives.

At least 5 out of 6 sponsors I had in AA had trauma and 4 had undiagnosed and untreated trauma. It shaped their behaviour and responses to life.

If it was untreated it continued to have unacknowleged negative consequences in recovery and continued to act as a possible prompt for relapse. 12 step recovery helps in many ways with trauma, particulary attachment trauma, but not completely, so specialist help is required.

Often sitting in a room of AA members we are listening to people share about undiagnosed, unrecognised post trauma symptomology rather that alcoholism. Whatever alcoholism is?

For many it is a condition in itself. Although this condition, in 12 step recovery, relies on rather arcane and outdated definitions in order to gain an understanding of it. Or on ancedotal accounts of suffering from “it”.

Definitions of alcoholism centred on the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, written in 1935. Ironically, at the same time, psychoanalysts were beginning to conceptualise addiction as a means of coping with unprocessed emotions, sometimes as the result of trauma, which is what I am advocating in this book, nearly 90 year later.

This trauma is often from childhood but can occur and have impact on emotion processing and regulation at any point in an individual’s life.

I spent 6-7 years sitting in AA rooms wondering what alcoholism is? I am a person who was physically and mentally addicted to alcohol, drank around the clock but was never convinced by the definitions and understanding of this addictive behaviour I received in 12 step recovery.

I was told this was me being in denial!!?

In 12 step recovery and, in society generally, we seem to be narrowly concerned or obsessed with the substance abused in addictive behaviour, rather than the reasons why we abused alcohol and drugs so chroncially.

We are more interested with out of contol drinking than out of control people and out of control behaviour. Blame the drink and the drugs.

When I started to do research I tried to get around this obsession with substances by sometimes concentrating on behavioural addictions and eating disorders, to try and ascertain if there was some common factor in all addictive behaviour whether substance or behaviour-manifested.

So What is Addictive Behaviour?

I found in my research that most addictive behaviour centred on certain underlying conditions, these are mainly post traumatic symptoms and emotion (self) dysregulation.

When I look at my own alcoholism, addictions and complex PTSD, I see these are my underlying conditions and the areas of my mental health that cause me most suffering in recovery today.

It has led me to the conclusion that if I still suffer from emotion dysregulation (often I am not in control of emotions, they are in control of me) and post traumatic symptoms (such as low self esteem, feeling worthless etc) then it is very possible that these played a part in my later addictive behaviours?

Research has also shown me that the vast majority of alcoholics and people with other addictive behaviours also have emotion dysregulation, with or without post traumatic symptoms. In my case, my emotion processing and regulation difficulties have been partly caused by my Complex PSTD but for a minority of addicted individuals, these emotion processing and regulation deficts can be genetically inherited.

I today suffer more from trauma related diffficulties and emotion dysregulation than anything else, sometimes I feel this is mainly what I recover from and that my alcoholism is like a parasite that fed and still feeds on the distress of these conditions. This I believe is the legacy of decades of maladaptive coping by me in relation to trauma and emotional regulation difficulties.

I believe I have been “fixing my feelings” externally via often pleasureable (mood altering) means (changing how I feel) because I have an impaired ability to process my emotions. I either flee or fight my emotions as I find them physiologically distressing. I never knew how to cope with them. It is as if they haunt me rather than guide me. As if my greatest ally is my worst enemy.

So addictive behaviour started decades ago in my infancy, when my internal inabilty to cope with emotions led to “solving” the resultant distress via external, mood altering means.

This was the start of my addictive (or impulsive-compulsive) behaviour.

What this called then? External mood altering? Impaired coping? Defective self regulation?

Research suggests this is impulsive behaviour, a distress based impulsivity (or negative urgency) caused by impaired emotion labelling which prompts fight-flight reponding to emotions, and this would then redefine addictive behaiour as being on a spectrum of impulsive-compulsive behaviour with chronic addictive behaviour akin to chronic compulsive behaviour.

As the distress of addictive behaviour increases, so does the escalation to more compulsive behaviour regarding substance or behaviour as emotion dysregulation worsens.

Thus as emotion and stress dysregulation escalate, so does distress and this creates more compulsive behaviour, defined as an automatic behaviour to relieve chronic distress.

So when individuals who suffer from addictive behaviour come into recovery, it is because the coping stragies of fixing our feelings over many years and decades have become so pathological it has created a compulsive responding to the distress of negative emotions.

Addiction is thus the automatic compulsive responding to negative emotions (and accompanying obsessive negative thoughts). Addiction has furroughed itself into our emotion and stress networks of our brains.

It has also created a reward dysfunction because we find it doubly rewarding (motivating) to not only escape distress but to gain pleasure (alter mood), which is both a negative and a positive reinforcement combined. In other words, we are motivated to flee aversive negative states to more contollable “positive” or pleasurable states.

Addictive behaviour normally results from a combination of negative as well as positive reinforcement.

Eventually the aversive states become increasingly distressed states and this escalation combines with a depletion of rewarding pleasurable escape states to such an extent that the former “solution” no longer works and actually causes the intial reinforcement to increase in it’s distressful provocation.

This creates an increasingly obsessive-compulsive cycle where we obsess about gaining a solution that not only no longer works but which increases the distress to provoke compulsive responding regardless of the fact the rewarding, positive reinforcement no longer works and instead creates more distress and more compulsive responding. The “solution” thus has ever decreasing returns and ever increasing distress and misery.

A truly viscious circle.

However, this is the endpoint to a maladaptive coping, or survival, strategy going back decades, largely unrecognised, but now urgently compelling as the self is now effectivley spiralling out of control and dysregulated.

The Self is not no longer in control of the Self.

Linked to this reward dysfunction and stress/emotion dysregulation in what is known as the extended reward network in the brain, or survival network, are memory and behaviour networks.

The memory system, intially the explicit memory system, contains images of why addictive behaviour is a good way to survive and through time addictive beahviour recruits more implicit or habit based memory.

The brain learns to act unconsciously, implicity without the individual’s permission, in relation to distress. Behaviour too become more compulsive as the reward and memory sytems act in distress to compell certain addictive behaviour to “resolve” distress. So the brain survival network collapses from conscious to unconscious processes and addictive behaviour or obsessive compulsive behaviour is in charge of how the brain reacts to distress, in an ever decreasing viscious circle.

This is the why I have found of addictive behaiour.

Our attempts at survival are progressively killing us!

All of these brain networks are part of survival and part of what is called self regulation.

We are not in rcontrol of ourselves.

It becomes chronically impaired, to the point that the self is no longer consciously in charge of responding and never was completely in charge of responding, for many, even in childhood, that the societal and ignorant view of addiction as a weakness of self will can easily be reconsidered, in a more enlightened way, as a dysregulation of self, or a disease of self as the self is not fully in charge of self. The weakness is an impaired regulation of self.

The self is out of control. We are driving through life with brakes that are not only faulty but increasingly so.

The Big Book of Alcoholic Anonymous says the all our troubles centre in the self, we are self will run riot.

This sort of ties in with self dysregulation. The only difference is that this self dysregulation acts without permission of self will and unconsciously. Often the best we can do is to reflect on our selfish acts as many of them are the consequence of impaired processing of self regulation.

We do not have a spiritual weakness but neurobiological and neuropsychological impairments than worsen via addictive (obsessive compulsive) behaviour. As these impairments are part genetic and, for many, partly originating in childhood, they represent a developmental delay disorder in emotion processing, a dysregulation often allied to post traumatic symptoms.

Self will is impaired, if you like, from way before addictive subtances are used or abused. It is an underlying condition that these addictive substances make much worse as substance abuse and errant behaviours act on and further impair the emotion regulation parts of the brain. So emotion regulation become progressively impaired via the stages of use, abuse and endpoint addiction.

When we remove the addictive behaviour the underlying impairments are still evident and continue to act on our decision making and behaviours in recovery. Addiction still acts like a parasite on our survival networks especially feeding off the acute distress of emotion dysregulation.

Many of 12 step strategies seem to deal with this, ironcially. In maintaining serenity, we are dealing with this self dysregulation and quelling the distress addictive behaviour lives off.

In this book I will illustrate how 12 step recovery helps with this distress at the heart of addiction. I will also discuss the “outside help” I have had for the co-occurring conditions, that in reality proved to be the fertile ground from which my addictive behaviours grew out of.

So when we relegate “co-occurring” conditions to that of secondary importance we may be not realising that they are of primary importance and that our addictive behaviour starts as a maladaptive coping strategy to deal with trauma and it’s subsequent self dysregulation.

Perhaps we in 12 step recovery or recovery generally need to start to consider “inside help” for the factors that helped cause our addictive behaviour in the first instance.

In this book, I take you on my journey from not knowing I was addicted, to not knowing what what addicted was. Piecing together clues over the years into the nature of addictive behaviour, I have refuted much of what I previously believed but have kept “what works” from various areas of my recovery as all have taught me something important, vital even, about addiction, about myself and recovery.

Recovery is continuing discovery I have found and I hope you will join me on this voyage of discovery, hoping it helps you on your own journey towards healing your Self.