Addiction & Recovery For Dummies
Explore BookHow to recognize addiction in yourself
- Your substance-seeking behavior is increasing, or your compulsion to do the problematic behavior is increasing.
- Your main focus on living is getting and using the substance or doing the addictive behavior.
- You’re losing touch with the priorities in your life, such as friends, work, school, and family responsibilities, because of your substance use or addictive behavior.
How to recognize addition in a loved one
- Turn up late for functions or dates?
- No longer follow through consistently on commitments?
- Have more trouble with illness than usual?
- Have more problems at work than usual?
- Seem to be withdrawing from intimate contacts, especially with you?
- Have unexplained absences from or inconsistencies in their usual schedule?
- Appear to have a new set of friends whom you don’t get to meet?
- Have major financial fluctuations (for example, spending more or considerably less money than usual)?
- Have lapses of concentration or memory?
- Stay up later at night and sleep in more during the day?
- Have more trouble than usual getting it together in the morning?
- Seem surprisingly secretive about specific aspects of their life?
Approaches to addiction treatment and recovery
- Moral: People will and often do sacrifice anything to feed an addiction.
- Disease: Addiction is a disease that causes unhealthy brain function.
- Pharmacological: Addiction stems from chemical imbalances that some nonaddictive drugs can help with (for example, antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, and some psychedelic medications).
- Cognitive-behavioral: Cognitive distortions drive addictions and can be replaced with “healthy thinking” and healthy satisfactions.
- Learning: Different kinds and levels of learning cause addiction. Conditioning is important as it can be largely automatic and dominant, involving less or little or no thinking.
- Psychodynamic: Difficulties in emotional regulation cause extremes like numbing and emotional flooding — addictive substances can then calm, sedate, excite, and sexualize unhealthfully.
- Biopsychosocial: Physical, psychological, and social aspects of addiction are addressed in combination treatments.