Where do addictions come from?

Addictive behaviors serve many purposes, but they all develop through the same four stages:

1. They provide or provided some positive benefit.

2. They become self-reinforcing.

3. They result in negative consequences.

4. You continue to engage in the behavior despite the negative consequences.

Positive Benefit

We become addicted to our own behaviors because at some time, for some reason, we benefited from our actions. Our behavior may have made us feel good about ourselves at some time. It may have boosted our self-esteem and raised our confidence. There are great reasons why our behaviors evolve. They help us to be happier, cope better, improve our performance, decrease our anxiety, or in some way enhance our perception of our lives. These are the reasons the behaviors begin and, if they ended there, they would simply be coping mechanisms, not addictions.

John developed his self-addiction because the behavior made him feel good. Here is how he describes the development of his addictive behavior.

The Talker

I love being around people and making people laugh, but it hasn’t always been that way. I was kind of socially inept as a kid. Then I did a class play one year and it was really funny. With someone else writing the words for me I was able to play the part and capture everyone’s attention. After that experience, I tried out for every play my school did. It was fantastic. There I was, this kid who no one wanted to talk to normally. But once the curtain went up, it was like I had a room full of friends. I think that the whole experience of theater really built my confidence, and that improved my ability to be social. I started to take the same approach to normal conversations that I had taken on stage —I had to be entertaining.

Getting attention gave John a boost to his self-esteem, which was fine in itself. It became a problem down the line, however, when he needed this attention more and more to simply feel good about himself. That led to problems such as not listening to other people and monopolizing conversations.

There are two ways people benefit from their actions: the actions bring pleasure or take away pain. While John’s actions benefited him by making him feel good, other people take action to remove some pain they feel in their lives. Many behaviors are grounded in helping you stop the pain you are feeling. Stopping the hurt can be a very useful action to help you get through difficult times. That’s what happened with Susan.

The Worker

I don’t think I was a particularly serious student when I got to law school. I made sure to prepare for class, study for tests, and write my papers, but I also made sure to go out and have a good time. There were people in my program who lived in the library, but that certainly wasn’t me in the beginning. Then my father was diagnosed with cancer. When he got sick, I simply didn’t find things exciting the way I had before. I would go out with my friends and everyone would be having a good time. All I’d be able to think about was how my dad had taken a chemo treatment that day or how he was getting weaker and weaker.

My only escape was studying. I could look through old cases or work in the library at school for hours. I could sit down and study all day without thinking about my father. That may sound callous, but I think it might have been the only thing that kept me sane during that time. My father got sick when I was in the middle of my first year of law school. I ended up finishing at the top of my class because of my father’s cancer. I only wish he had been there to see me graduate.

As with John, there was nothing wrong with Susan’s behavior when it first developed. It was an effective coping mechanism during a difficult time in her life. It was later that this behavior became problematic, when she used her work to escape from her family and avoid developing deeper relationships with her husband and children.

Self-Reinforcement

Behaviors that outlive their original purpose do so because at some point they become self-reinforcing. When the original purpose or reward for a behavior no longer exists, a new reward can arise from within. This internal reward is strong enough that it can sustain the behavior with or without the original rewards. So even though we may no longer feel the pain and get the praise we once did, those positive associations from our past are enough to reinforce within us that the behavior is good.

Consciously or unconsciously we convince ourselves that the behavior helps us and/or those around us. This pattern persists for long enough that the behavior is cemented in our natural routines. We perform the behavior without even thinking about it. It is our natural response. Even now, it is not an addiction. At this point it is merely a habit, something that is characteristic of who we are. It is only an addiction if we continue to use the behavior in the face of negative consequences.

Negative Consequences

Many behaviors that start out healthy turn unhealthy over time. Sometimes the negative consequences are internal, meaning that we create the consequences for ourselves. These could be physical or psychological and include:

● Stress

● Depression

● Self-criticism

● Self-doubt

● Excessive anger.

Sometimes the negative consequences are external, meaning that they relate to how others react to our behavior. Our behaviors may frustrate, anger, or humiliate those around us. These consequences may affect us in work and/or personal settings and could range from small annoyances to enormous obstacles to our happiness and success. These external consequences could include:

● Poor performance reviews and/or consistently negative feedback at work

● Missing promotion and/or reward opportunities at work

● Shallow and/or unsupportive relationships

● Needless fighting

● Others ending or diminishing once-strong relationships with you.

Let’s take another look at John and Susan and some of the consequences they suffered.

The Talker

remember getting out of a meeting with my team that my manager had decided to attend. I was flying when the meeting ended; I thought it had gone so well. My team was totally united. We came up with some great ideas and everyone seemed to really like the outcomes. Afterwards, my manager called me into his office. I was expecting the best, but the first thing he did was tell me that he was disappointed. He said that during the course of the one-hour meeting he timed my floor time. He said my talking time was over 45 minutes. What’s more, he said that I consistently cut off and talked over my team members when they tried to get into the conversation.

Then he got personal. It hurt a lot to hear, but I think this was what forced me to take it seriously. He said, “Look around. Haven’t you noticed that you’re wearing out your welcome? People don’t want to listen to your 20-minute monologues anymore. It’s not just with your team, either. Senior managers have talked to me about this. Your peers have talked to me. This is a real problem for you and you need to fix it if you have any hope of being promoted in this organization.”

What John heard was upsetting and hurt him personally, but it also helped him considerably to understand the consequences of his actions. When he looked around, he discovered that people who had previously been friendly towards him were always too busy to talk. Discussions would dry up when he arrived. John’s behavior was shutting his coworkers out of conversations and alienating him from his own team.

The Worker

You would have thought that my first ulcer at the age of 32 would have been enough to clue me into the fact that I had created a less-than-healthy lifestyle for myself. In fact, it didn’t even faze me. It was just one more illness in a long list that I had to deal with. It seemed that I was always sick: colds, flu, coughs. I figured if they weren’t keeping me from doing what I always did, which was go to work, then they probably were nothing to worry about. No, I didn’t figure things out for almost 15 more years.

Somehow, a couple of years after my father’s death, I managed to break away from work long enough to meet someone and get married. I even had 2 kids, though I worked through both pregnancies, right up until the delivery. Then, about a year ago, my sister had a dinner party at her house. I wasn’t being very good company. My mind was on a project that would be starting soon at work. I picked up a photo album so I could pretend that my mind was focused on something at least in the vicinity of the party.

At first it was nice. There was a picture of my sister and her husband with their kids and my son. I remembered they had taken him to a professional basketball game a while ago. Then I found another one of them with my kids at what looked like a barbecue at a park. I had always appreciated how close our families were and how much my kids really seemed to bond with my sister’s family. The further I went in her photo album, the more I came across pictures of my kids with her family. I picked up another album and discovered the same thing.

It was one of the saddest things I had ever experienced. As I looked through my sister’s photo albums, I realized how much of my kids’ lives she had experienced and how little I had. The most frightening part of this experience was that in the middle of this epiphany, I was still thinking about work. I still had that project bouncing around in my head. That was the moment for me. That was when I realized that I had to change.

While John was hurting himself at work, Susan was hurting herself at home. She was pushing her own kids out of her life. Your own behaviors and their consequences may not be as apparent to you now. However, we all engage in behaviors that result in negative consequences. These consequences may be small at first, but over time may grow into significant issues if not addressed. Just think about what your spouse, child, coworker, sibling, or parent would say if asked what they would like to change about you.

Continued Behavior

Continuing the behaviors that harm us is the most telling characteristic of self-addiction. We are an intelligent species. You’d think that we’d know enough to not do things that hurt us. Here then is the key characteristic of self-addiction: despite negative consequences for our actions, we continue to engage in the same behaviors. Why do we do this to ourselves? I asked myself this question regularly in the first couple of years of my marriage. Here is a typical dialogue that my wife and I would have:

[My wife and I are in the car. I’m driving.]

Wife: Do you know that you have to make a left soon?

Me: I know. [said with a mildly annoyed tone of voice]

Wife: Why don’t you get into the left lane?

Me: Well, it’s a good thing I have you to navigate for me. [dripping with sarcasm]

Wife: What is your problem? [said with more than mild annoyance]

It was typically around this point in the conversation that I would realize that I was in trouble. A reasonable person would recognize the folly of fighting this fight. If I had even a shred of control over myself during these conversations, I wouldn’t have continued them. Yet, my addiction to defensiveness would push me to respond.

Me: What exactly do you think happens to me when I’m alone in the car? Do you think that I drive around permanently lost and getting into accidents every three miles?

Now that felt good when I said it, but as an outside observer, you can probably guess that the good feeling didn’t last long. My wife got angrier and, as a result, I became more miserable. Neither her anger nor my misery was surprising when it occurred. I knew what my actions would create. After all, I had played out similar scenes many times before. I was so addicted to my defensiveness that I continued to engage in the behavior despite the negative consequences that it created for me and for my wife.

Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Similarly, you could say that the definition of self-addiction is doing the same thing over and over again, knowing you’ll get the same bad results.

Thankfully, I believe I am a recovering defensive-behavior addict. Like Steven, who despite 17 years without a drink considers each day a new challenge, I know that I need to remain vigilant, aware, and in control in order to keep these behaviors from creeping back into my life. Even if I could permanently eliminate all defensive behavior, there are plenty of other changes I’d like to make to myself. Each time I feel as though I’m on steady ground with one self-addiction, I recognize another that I’d like to change.

That is the nature of personal development. It is a lifelong pursuit. This book gives you the tools to develop and change yourself into the person you want to be. Of course, if you are going to take on this challenge, there should be some real rewards.