Reading Lustig, after Mate’s book, (see book reviews under "more") helped me to see more clearly the biological enemy I was facing, even as I had been in recovery for a year when I first read this book. I had been focusing then most intentionally on the spiritual/moral/psychological enemy I had become to myself. This was important work that continues, to realize the choices I could make with “the courage to change what I can” (from the Serenity Prayer). But Lustig’s book exploring science of addiction also helped me to see how the biopsychosocial habitat (to which I would add spiritual and cultural as part of the social element) was all intertwined in “cause” and in “cure.” Specifically, how my biology was a part of both a cause and cure and an important part of my recovery effort. I put “cure” in quotes because I mean it not as that I got to a point where I no longer need to engage in recovery work to maintain sobriety, but that I have become sober and no longer have
the constant struggle to remain abstinent. It is sad, I suppose, that this site will have so many
words and phrases in quotes, such as I just did with cause and cure. That is evidence of the state of “addiction recovery” today, one in flux and without clear across the board consensus. It is why we will write to justify the use of the word addiction itself for so-called behavioral problems, though not wishing to be drawn into the debate itself over whether something is an addiction or a compulsion; the causes and the cures are the same, so those who prefer to use compulsion are fine with me.
I use the term addiction because it helps to draw from the experiences and wisdom of the
generations who have suffered from all forms of addiction, and my experience resonates with my own experience with substances especially alcohol, and with the stories I have heard in 12 step groups like AA and NA when those working the steps in them have described their root problems with sex, for example. Those who struggle with dual addictions such as with various drugs and sex have said that end result feeling is the same: a drug hit is like an orgasm; sexual release is like a drug, and with masturbation (and now the constant and free availability of porn on a phone easily carried and hidden) it is like a drug we carry with us always, with the additional bonus of being free and available 24-7. In the aftermath we also often feel remorse, and the consequences can be just as destructive to relationships, to careers, and sometimes to freedom or life itself. We know from the history of addiction, Lustig reminds us, how alcohol consumption itself didn’t become a societal factor until the 1700s when it too became cheap and available. Lustig says “…that internal feeling of reward is pretty much the same whatever the trigger. This is why virtually any stimulus that generates reward, when taken to the extreme, can also lead to addiction.” As Lustig and others explain, behaviors that result in the pleasure rewards from dopamine triggers and endorphin releases in the brain can become addictive with over-stimulation that turns our wants into our needs. We stop but can’t stay stopped. Even considering smoking tobacco as an addictive behavior had major resistance for decades.
And a driving force of addictions, more and more each day in our culture he adds, is chronic stress that releases cortisol, changing the habitat of our brain into one increasingly like a war-
zone. Stress can breed anxiety which breeds stress. Cortisol goes into hyper-drive. The brain’s natural defenses against this, such as the hippocampus and memory and the pre-frontal cortex with its emotional regulating function, begin to wither over time with constant assault. Or, since so many addictions begin in childhood and adolescence when the brain has not fully developed, these brain areas inherently don’t have the resources needed to counteract the rising stress levels.
The result in lives? “Excess and chronic stress impacts your ability to reason.” That is one
answer to the question of “How could you ever do such a thing?” or “What were you thinking?” It is part of the answer anyway. Remember, here I am delving only into the biological. There are also the overlays of psychological, spiritual/moral, and cultural which help us also answer the question, “Well, if stress, adverse childhood experiences, and other factors, even exposure to toxic elements like drugs, processed food, and rising exposure to porn, gaming, etc. appear to be similar in how many of us have lived, why don’t all of us become addicts of one kind or another?”
I would say two things: 1. Here is where perhaps both genes and environment factor in, and
where the differences of the cultural and psychological and spiritual/moral support systems kick in, and 2. We may actually just be beginning to see how close we are approaching to “all of us” wrestling seriously with one kind of addiction/compulsion or another.
Lustig and others who have demonstrated through science how addiction gets progressively
worse, or progressively better, have helped us to see what sufferers of addiction for generations have been telling and showing us with their lives. Whether one’s Higher Power--or Greater Power as it is sometimes referred to and how I like to refer to it—is the classic Theistic God of the Abrahamic faith traditions, or a Spiritual Power from eastern traditions, or a more Humanistic manifestation, and/or The Outer Circle healthy life promoted through SAA, (see blog "The Brief") or the recovery group process itself or some other example that truly works in one’s life, there is a pathway to health that unwinds or reverses what Lustig describes as addiction’s “descent into Hades.” And this healthy pathway has a biological basis too. It finds a balance in ways to promote serotonin instead of overdosing of dopamine and cortisol. The neuroplasticity of the brain works for us as surely as it works against us. But, like the 12 step program mandates, “you have to work it.” We have to use all our resources as thoroughly as we can in order to prevent or return from addiction. “Half measures” it is said every day somewhere in 12-step, “availed us nothing.” For my first nine months of trying, and not trying, to abstain from my main drug of choice by then--porn that
by then had reached an extreme end and had varied forms all leading to the masturbation that was the end result, and overloading work and stress stimulation and burnout as a trigger for the trigger—I lived the truth of that maxim. I did not give myself fully and absolutely to the program, and that included full honesty in therapy or my relationships.
I tried to manage recovery. It became a kind of homeopathic self-treatment; I intentionally took it in small doses hoping it would work magic and require little cost to changing my status quo.
Homeostasis! My homeostasis was so out of whack by then it probably shouldn’t be
called homeostasis as there was very little static about it on the treadmill of getting dopamine rewards and hits of validation that kept me constantly in motion and with fewer and fewer hours of sleep, for example. But homeostasis it was, one where as my wife put it, I was always “distant, distracted, daft, and defensive” while appearing to be high-functioning. Taking on more and more socially approved hits at the same time I was going deeper and deeper, lower and lower in addiction’s deviancy and depravity. The “normal” I kept trying to achieve and maintain every day kept getting more abnormal. Yes, I was a frog that had found, eagerly had searched for, a stove and a pot just waiting for me to fill up with water, turn the heat up, and jump in to stay.
It wasn’t, as I will write about, just my brain chemistry alone causing me to do that. But the
biological pathway for my life descent was real and it was one that over five decades of my mind and actions getting worse (and more extreme in many ways, including some rewarded socially in many ways) I had not encountered or understood. True that I did not venture out of my own comfort zone in this regard in order to seek understanding and change (even while I was going out of my comfort zone in almost all other areas of life) and the longer I was acting out in inner and middle circle behaviors and attitudes the more I was able to blind myself to whatever I might have been able to find to help and change, which at times I did fervently want to do. There is a cognitive dissonance and moral-ethical blindness cycle that is at work too, one where the biological forces within me were keeping me from seeing them and tapping into their correction, the same as there were psychological and spiritual and cultural forces at work and which I cultivated that also had their
own protective blinding cover dynamics, as we shall see. I find now that Lustig’s work is somewhat better on mapping out the brain’s “help” for addiction to take root and grow than it is on the way the brain can help keep invasive “weeds” from ruining the garden called one’s life. But he is helpful in the responses that work to prevent this invasive
takeover of our mental and physical lives, and how we can resist the “hacking of our minds” that has reaped real monetary rewards to corporations and other systems (who, you might say, have become addicted in their own way to the money and power gained from furthering the addictions that are most readily labeled in our society).
In part three, I will talk about his resistance responses and through my own lens how I have
learned to “cultivate healthy soil” of my soul and “do native plantings in my garden of life” that are sustainable and beautiful and help the brain help itself help the authentic me.