Look Inside
Serenity: How to Recognize, Understand
and Recover from Behavioral Addictions
Serenity is divided into four sections.
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Part One: How to Recognize Addiction
Part One: How to Recognize Addiction starts with the true story of one of my clients, followed by my personal experience of behavioral addictions. It addresses old, outdated concepts of addiction and explains the contemporary view of addiction as a disease—a consequence of traumatic insecure attachment and a dysfunctional attempt at affect regulation. Exercises at the end of this section help the reader check his or her own dysfunctional behaviors for signs of potential addiction.
SERENITY
Sanja Rozman
Not so long ago, addiction was thought to be caused by substances: alcohol, nicotine, or drugs. It was believed that these substances had such an effect on people, some found it difficult to control their use. Nevertheless, the fact that addicts continued to use them was attributed to a series of incorrect choices or a bad habit on their part, as in general people thought everybody always did what they believed was best for themselves. As a result, the fact that addicts did things that hurt their families or themselves was considered the result of a flaw in their very personhood, and they were deemed stupid or morally impaired—or so full of themselves that they would choose their own pleasure over their duties and responsibilities to others.
The contemporary definition of addiction is based on the newest research and takes into account both substance and behavioral addictions. Its main features are:
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1. Addiction is a disease. It takes a long time to develop, worsens over time, and exhibits periods of deterioration, improvement, and relapses. Once an addiction forms, the addict’s ability to control the behavior associated with it is impaired—if not permanently, then at least much longer than the addict would hope.
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2. Addicts become obsessed and preoccupied with a substance or behavior, and think, plan, and talk about it all the time.
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3. An addict’s behavior is both compulsive—driven, the result of an irresistible urge—and impulsive—undertaken without thought.
4. Triggers—emotionally stressful states such as hunger, anger, loneliness, or tiredness—can affect an addict by weakening their willpower or prompting them to engage in addictive behavior. (Notice that the first letters of these states spell HALT!)
5. Cues are situations that remind the addict of times when they have indulged their addiction, like meeting a friend in the same bar where they used to drink. Both triggers and cues activate the memory of the bad old times of acting out, and the affected areas of the brain reawaken.
6. When addicts stop using an addictive substance or indulging in an addictive behavior, they experience a set of very unpleasant and sometimes dangerous physical and psychological symptoms like nausea, vomiting, severe headaches, drowsiness, and shivering. These are collectively known as withdrawal symptoms, and all of them can be alleviated almost immediately with just a small dose of the addictive substance—or in the case of behavioral addictions, by undertaking an action related to the addiction, such as receiving phone call from a lover who abandoned them.
7. As their disease progresses, addicts require more and more of a substance or indulgence in a behavior to achieve the same effect: the numbing of anxiety. They develop an increased tolerance for the substance or behavior.
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Part Two: How to Understand Addiction
Part Two: How to Understand Addiction explains addiction on different levels: what happens in the brain, at the level of thinking and feeling, when an addiction is present; how addiction is expressed in a person’s behavior; what effects addiction can have on a family; and what effects it can have on society as a whole. The exercises accompanying this section deal with the shame and consequences of addiction, and encourage readers to construct their own addiction and trauma timelines to enable them to begin to understand and forgive themselves.
SERENITY
Sanja Rozman
Addiction at Different Levels of the Human Experience.
Problems at the level of the brain
Scientists are just beginning to understand the processes in the human brain that enable us to feel, think, love, and judge aspects of the world around us. However, they already know that addiction changes the brain’s neural pathways, which convey and control emotion, pleasure, risk, motivation, memory, and related aspects of the human experience. Different addictions affect these same pathways in different proportions, but the addictive process works similarly in all cases. And while the brain cannot be cured of neurological diseases like addiction, once the damaging behavior has ceased, the brain will slowly and independently recover its normal functioning.
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Problems at the level of thinking, feeling, judgment, and belief
Addicts often possess a set of thoughts and beliefs that help maintain their disease. Typically, these thoughts and beliefs consist of toxic shame, feelings of low self-esteem, cravings, the addiction cycle, and the addictive system. Three years is an optimistic assessment of the time it takes a recovering addict to permanently change such beliefs.
Problems at the level of behavior
To look inside the brain, we need the latest medical equipment; to learn about feeling and thinking, we rely on what addicts tell us. But an addict’s behavior can be seen with our own eyes, and we can trust it to tell us the truth about that person.
Problems at the level of family
Addiction often runs in families. A family is a complex organism composed of many people, each contributing to the whole and all interdependent. As the older family members take care of the younger family members, they also transfer their systems of thinking and values to the younger generation, teaching them what life is supposed to be like—and passing down their addictive systems of thinking as well.
Problems at the level of society
In general, most people seem able to accept that addiction exists, and that people can suffer and even die of it—as long as it stays away from their own families! As a society, however, we seem unaware of how addiction—which is essentially a quest for eternal happiness, free of all pain and suffering—can spring from modern consumerist values, which afford praise and admiration to those with the most money or belongings. We have a pill or a diet for every minor ailment that befalls us, and often strive to make pleasure and happiness the center of our lives. Can you see where such thinking may lead?
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Part Three: Behavioral Addictions
Part Three: Behavioral Addictions explains each of the most common behavioral addictions: addictions to food, work, money, risk (including gambling), modern electronic media (including cyber addictions), and relationship and sex addictions. This section defines the behaviors typical of these specific addictions, discusses some important features of those behaviors, and assesses the scope of each addiction. A real-life example illustrates the theory. This part of the work also offers tips on how addicts can maintain their abstinence, as well as ways their family members can cope and help the addict. The exercises in this section are about achieving and maintaining abstinence and identifying resources that can help in this endeavor.
SERENITY
Sanja Rozman
In Part 3 of Serenity, we discuss what we know about the following specific behavioral addictions:
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1. Addictions to Food
a. Bulimia Nervosa and Compulsive Overeating
b. Anorexia Nervosa and Orthorexia
2. Addictions to Work, Money, and Risk
a. Work
b. Money (Spending, Shopping, Debt), and Risk
c. Gambling
3. Addictions to Electronic Media (Cyber Addictions)
a. Video Games
b. The Internet and Social Media
4. Addictions to Relationships
a. Romance Addiction
b. “Love” Addiction
c. Codependence
d. Relationship Anorexia
5. Addictions to Sex
a. Sex Addiction
b. Co-Sex Addiction
c. Sexual Anorexia
The structure of Part Three
1. Definition and short overview of the five broad categories of addiction listed above, along with a list of associated behavior types—that is, ways in which these addictions can be expressed.
2. Introduction including some information characteristic of the whole category.
3. Chapters on each behavior type, each including the following information:
​• The name of the specific addiction.
• A definition and short explanation of the specific addiction discussed in the chapter.
• List of typical behaviors. This will help you identify the chapters to which you need to pay special attention.
• A discussion of some typical symptoms and behaviors associated with the addiction.
• An examination of the scope of the problem, which offers statistics about the prevalence of the behavior.
• An example featuring a true story from my rich treasury of client experiences.
• Advice for the addict, and for family members and friends who may want to help.
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Part Four: How to Recover from Addiction
Part Four: How to Recover from Addiction is about the process of recovery. It explains the tools an addict needs to recover, the stages of recovery, and the problems addicts can encounter at each stage. It also helps the reader create their own personal recovery plan across the four dimensions of human experience: the body, the mind, relationships, and spirituality.
Different people can use this book in different ways:
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Suppose you are a concerned person—a teacher, a psychotherapist, or a doctor—who wants to be informed about the perils of modern lifestyles and their effect on the youth. You need general information about behavioral addictions, and you’ll find it in Parts One and Two. For thorough, up-to-date information about behavioral addictions, I suggest you read the whole book.
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Suppose you are a family member or friend —a spouse, mother, father, sibling, or child—of someone you suspect has problems with a behavioral addiction. In that case, you should read Parts One, Two, and Four, as well as the chapter about your relative’s specific addiction in Part Three. You should also be conscious of the boundary between helping and enabling an addict. The chapter on codependency will alert you to possible mistakes. Finally, you will find advice on how family members of addicts can deal with the crisis of addiction throughout Part Three.
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If you think or know that you might be addicted to a substance or a behavior, you should read Parts One, Two, and Four—as well as the chapter about your specific addiction in Part Three—and complete all the exercises, which will help you take active control of your addiction and internalize what you have learned. Several of these exercises will help you devise your own personalized recovery plan.—a process thoroughly explained in Part Four of this book—and make the decision to pursue abstinence and step onto the path to recovery. As part of this plan, reading this book will be the first—but hopefully not the last!—step you take along that path toward freedom from addiction.
SERENITY
Sanja Rozman
Recovery is possible! Millions of people have managed to turn their lives around by following basic, simple principles. If an addict meets these essential conditions for recovery, the body will reverse the addictive processes and the addict’s brain chemistry will return to normal:
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1. Strong determination to change
2. Time and energy for the recovery work
3. Abstinence and sobriety
4. Relationships and support
5. Trigger and stress management
Note that the first letter of all these conditions collectively spell START. Of course, starting is the most important step of recovery!
The stages of recovery
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Recovery is a process of change. While recovering from addiction, people go through certain stages, encountering predictable problems in each stage. The timing of each stage is also predictable, though there may be variations as people begin the process of recovery from different positions. Nevertheless, there are more similarities than differences.
For a person to recover from addiction, abstinence and sobriety are necessary. When addicts stop using addictive substances and behaviors, their brains will, in time, recover; and their neurotransmitters will revert to their “factory settings,” allowing them to feel pleasure and reward in ordinary, everyday situations. However, one should not confuse recovery with abstinence from a drug or behavior.
Abstinence is only a prerequisite of recovery—not its final goal. If a person is abstinent, it means they are, at that moment, “clean,” or free of the drugs, alcohol, or behaviors that defined their addiction.
Recovery, however, is the entire process of change, restoring the addict’s body-mind-soul-relationship system to what it would have been if not for the addiction. Considering the amount of time and effort that must be given to do the work to achieve that, the outcome can be even better than the addict’s state before the addiction began.
Sobriety includes abstinence, but encompasses much more than just ceasing to drink or to abuse drugs. The brain can achieve a “high” through various substances and behaviors. To be sober means to be without this influence.