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 […]
This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here. Addiction Chapter 2 It was only when my wife withdrew from me after she had exhausted all possibilities to try and help me—taking me […]
This study looks at an area close to our research hearts. The role of emotion processing deficits in alcohol dependence and relapse. It is a good overview of some of the literature. The underlying mechanism which prompts relapse is not unearthed in this study. You may have to […]
Loss-Chasing, Alexithymia, and Impulsivity in a Gambling Task: Alexithymia as a Precursor to Loss-Chasing Behavior When Gambling This was the subject matter of my PhD when I was a PhD candidate. Essentially a couple of my experiments proposed to examine if there was a link between alexithymia […]
Throughout many of our blogs we have suggested that people suffering with addictive behaviours suffer from emotion processing (alexithymia and emotional awareness difficulties) and regulation deficits. We have suggested these may not only be genetically inherited but mainly the consequence of adverse childhood experiences or maltreatment. Our sister […]
Throughout this blogsite we have argued that addictive behaviours are rooted in inherent stress/emotion dysregulation and in emotion processing deficits such as alexithymia. These emotion processing deficits give rise to undifferentiated emotion states which are not utilised in reasonable prefrontal cortex based decision making but instead prompt more motoric […]
A Brief History of Treating Addiction as an Emotional Processing Disorder A constant thread throughout our blogs so far has been an assertion that alcoholism and addiction are primarily emotional regulation and processing disorders. So we were thus very interested to find this article (1) which describes […]
Attachment Style, Alexithymia, and Psychiatric Disorders in Alcoholic Inpatients This excellent article (1) presented the idea, formulated by Fonagy et al. (2002) that the way people’s attachment system is organized, corresponds both with their representational capacities and with their style of relating to others. They combine a measurement […]
The principles of the programme of Alcoholics Anonymous are scientific and closely follow all the helping therapies which lead people to emotional well-being.
This study (1) is an excellent one which looks at both emotion processing deficits and also emotional dysregulation in eating disorders. It also importantly demonstrates how these are mediated by distress. This is an important aspect to our conceptualisation of addictive behaviours. We suggest that if emotions are […]
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