How Do You Know You Have an Addictive Personality
In her new book Maia Szalavitz recalls her beliefs as a child in school and at home. Anxious, bright and slightly obsessive, she didn't seem to fit the stereotype of the "addictive personality". Nevertheless, in higher she would go addicted to heroin and cocaine, forcing her to reexamine her assumptions nearly addiction and its treatment. The following is an excerpt from Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Fashion of Understanding Addiction, by Maia Szalavitz. Copyright © 2016 past Maia Szalavitz. Reprinted with permission of St. Martin's Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
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A weird piddling daughter on the swings engaging in compulsive beliefs to soothe herself is probably non what you picture when you lot think of an addicted person or her groundwork. Our cultural images of addiction tend to be much less probable to engender sympathy. For one, they are racialized—and then fifty-fifty though black and Hispanic people are not more likely than whites to become addicted, those with dark skin tend to be pictured in American media stories about addiction. And when whites are shown, we are typically described as not being "typical." 2nd, in office every bit a result of the racism that has driven our drug policies, these images tend to depict people with addictions as "fiends" or "demons" whose debauchery is driven by a ravenous hedonism, non a human and understandable search for safety and comfort. The "addictive personality" is seen every bit a bad one: weak, unreliable, selfish, and out of command. The temperament from which information technology springs is seen as defective, unable to resist temptation. Even when nosotros joke about having an addictive personality information technology'southward unremarkably to justify an indulgence or to signal our guilt about pleasance, even if only ironically. To understand the part of learning in addiction and in the temperaments that predispose people to it, we have to examine the relationship between addiction and personality more closely.
Although addiction was originally framed by both Alcoholics Bearding and psychiatry as a form of antisocial personality or "grapheme" disorder, inquiry did not confirm this idea. Despite decades of attempts, no unmarried addictive personality common to everyone with addictions has ever been found. If you have come to believe that you yourself or an addicted loved 1, by nature of having habit, has a defective or selfish personality, you have been misled. As George Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, told me, "What we're finding is that the addictive personality, if y'all will, is multifaceted," says Koob. "Information technology doesn't actually exist every bit an entity of its own."
Fundamentally, the idea of a general addictive personality is a myth. Inquiry finds no universal character traits that are common to all addicted people. Only half accept more one addiction (not including cigarettes)—and many can control their engagement with some addictive substances or activities, merely not others. Some are shy; some are bold. Some are fundamentally kind and caring; some are barbarous. Some tend toward honesty; others not so much. The whole range of homo character can be plant amidst people with addictions, despite the cruel stereotypes that are typically presented. Only 18% of addicts, for case, accept a personality disorder characterized by lying, stealing, lack of censor, and manipulative hating behavior. This is more than four times the charge per unit seen in typical people, simply it still ways that 82% of usa don't fit that particular caricature of addiction.
Although people with addictions or potential addicts cannot exist identified by a specific collection of personality traits, however, information technology is often possible to tell quite early on which children are at high adventure. Children who ultimately develop addictions tend to exist outliers in a number of measurable ways. Aye, some stand out because they are antisocial and callous—but others stand out because they are overly moralistic and sensitive. While those who are the near impulsive and eager to endeavour new things are at highest take a chance, the odds of addiction are likewise elevated in those who are compulsive and fear novelty. It is extremes of personality and temperament—some of which are associated with talents, not deficits—that elevates take a chance. Giftedness and loftier IQ, for instance, are linked with higher rates of illegal drug employ than having average intelligence.
Whether these extreme traits lead to addictions, other compulsive behaviors, developmental differences, mental illnesses, or some mixture depends not just on genetics only also on the surroundings, people's ain reactions to it, and those of others to them. Addictions and other neurodevelopmental disorders rely not just on our actual experience but on how we interpret it and how our parents and friends answer to and label the manner we behave. They develop in brains designed to change with experience—and that leaves usa vulnerable to learning things that create damaging patterns, not just useful habits.
The bear upon of all these factors together can be seen most clearly in studies that follow participants from infancy into machismo (which are rare considering they accept and then long to conduct and are thus very expensive). In these types of data, some stiff patterns emerge. One of the earliest and best known longitudinal studies related to drug use followed 101 children—mainly middle class, two-thirds white—raised in Berkeley in the 1970s.
Conducted by psychologists Jonathan Shedler and Jack Block, then at the University of California, the research was published in 1990 and its principal finding generated much controversy. The authors discovered that the most mentally and psychologically healthy teens were not those who abstained entirely from alcohol and other drugs, but rather the kids who experimented with weed and drinking, simply didn't overdo it. In this study, occasional teen drinking and marijuana use was normal adolescent behavior. Still, while it was common, it was typically not problematic.
Unsurprisingly the teens who became frequent users and drinkers had the issues y'all might look, like depression, anxiety, and runaway behavior. Then again, many of the same psychiatric problems were likewise seen in the adolescents who rejected the idea of drinking and drugs entirely. That's probably considering, in social club to avert any experimentation as a kid growing up effectually the Berkeley campus in the '70s (when nearly two thirds of high school seniors nationally reported at least trying marijuana), yous'd accept to exist either a loner with few friends or a person who was unusually fearful and/or resistant to peer pressure. Not using drugs may well take been a wise option for these youth— but good decisions aren't always made for healthy reasons.
And indeed, that's exactly what the study found. The youth who abstained did not tend to exercise so because they rationally recognized the risks. Instead, they were overly anxious, uptight, and lacking in social skills; some may not have had to say no considering they didn't fifty-fifty become the chance to say yeah. Similar data have been published on teen drinking likewise. Moderate drinkers—non nondrinkers—are the most well adjusted, at to the lowest degree in countries where drinking is a social norm. The healthiest patterns are found in the middle of the curve, not at the extremes.
To empathize how having these outlying traits increases risk for addiction, nosotros have to look at how they bear on development. Critically, in Shedler and Block's data, the traits that marked both abstainers and heavy users could exist seen long earlier drug utilise began. After all, the authors had started following these children in preschool. Once they knew how the participants behaved in adolescence, they could await back and see what early on traits were linked to particular problems.
Longitudinal studies looking at habit risk have institute iii major pathways to it that involve temperamental traits, all of which can exist seen in nascent form in young children. The first, which is more common in males, involves impulsivity, boldness, and a want for new experience; it can pb to habit because it makes it hard for people to control their ain behavior. The 2nd, which tends to be seen more in women, involves being sad, inhibited, and/or broken-hearted. While these negative emotions tin also deter experimentation, when they exercise not do and then, people may find themselves on a "self-medicating" path to addiction, where drugs are used to cope with painful feelings.
Being bold and adventurous and being sorry and cautious seem like opposite personality types. However, these two paths to addiction are really non mutually sectional. The 3rd fashion involves having both kinds of traits, where people alternatively fearfulness and want novelty and behavior swings from beingness impulsive and rash to beingness compulsive, fear driven, and stuck in rigid patterns. This is where some of the contradictions that have long confounded the report of addiction come up into play—namely, some aspects seem precisely planned out, while others are obviously related to lack of restraint. My ain story spirals around this paradoxical situation: I was driven enough to excel academically and fundamentally scared of change and of other people—withal I was also reckless enough to sell cocaine and shoot heroin.
If we expect more closely, however, the paradoxes disappear. All 3 pathways really involve the same central problem: a difficulty with self-regulation. This may appear predominantly as an disability to inhibit strong impulses, information technology may be largely an damage in modulating negative emotions like anxiety, or it may have elements of both. In any case, difficulties with cocky-regulation lay the groundwork for learning addiction and for creating a condition that is hard to understand. The brain regions that let self-regulation demand experience and exercise in society to develop. If that experience is aberrant or if those brain regions are wired unusually, they may not acquire to work properly.
The importance of cocky-regulation is evident in the Shedler and Cake data. From the very start, the children in the written report who grew up to be heavy drug users were, as they put it, "visibly deviant from their peers, emotionally labile, inattentive and unable to concentrate, not involved in what they do," and "stubborn." This is a film of emotional dysregulation—and it could have described me as a child, except for "not involved in what they do."
Simply while such children tin be summed up as having "low self-control" or "impulse command bug"—and in the written report, these kids tended to accept lower grades—this doesn't account for the compulsive side of addiction. In my example, when information technology came to schoolwork, I didn't shirk. Indeed, I was drastic to be a good student and terrified of getting in trouble. Hither, I had problem stopping intellectual date, not starting it.
Obsessiveness like this, all the same, too involves impaired self-regulation—in this case, at the other terminate of the spectrum. It's a problem with stopping what has already been started, rather than starting an activeness that should have been stopped. In other words, while impulsiveness involves as well lilliputian behavioral inhibition and a failure to foreclose reckless beliefs, obsession and compulsiveness is a problem with too much inhibition, a difficulty with getting out of a oestrus, rather than with preventing actions from existence initiated. Further, disability to modulate fear and other emotions likewise involves a reduced chapters to cocky-regulate.
In their studies, Shedler and Block found that the abstaining youth were "fastidious, conservative, proud of being 'objective' and rational, overly controlled and decumbent to filibuster gratification unnecessarily, not liked or accustomed by people," every bit well as "moralistic," "non gregarious," and "basically broken-hearted." Most of that could also have described me as a 3-year-sometime. Indeed, information technology reads now every bit a somewhat judgmental description of the key traits of children with Asperger's.
My own behavior as a young child and elementary school student swung between the poles of being overly controlled to being out of control. Both behavioral extremes, however, result from a failure in self-regulation. And neuroscience now strongly suggests that such dysregulation plays a cardinal role in habit. In fact, similar brain circuits are involved in both addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): whether the problem is failing to end an impulsive activity or declining to end a habitual routine, many of the same regions are engaged. It is here that addiction is learned.
The relevant areas of the brain include the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which imagines possible futures and plans and makes decisions accordingly. Of particular importance within the PFC is the orbitofrontal cortex, which helps make up one's mind the relative emotional and psychological value of your options and, therefore, your level of motivation and your tendency to make particular choices. The PFC works in concert with the nucleus accumbens (NAC), the region famed every bit the encephalon's "pleasure or reward" center. This area is involved in determining the desirability of particular options and how much you lot want to seek or avert them. Another region related to reward and motivation, the ventral pallidum, is also role of this brain organisation, as is the habenula, which seems to be involved primarily in disfavor and disliking.
The insula, which processes emotions similar animalism and disgust and also monitors internal states like hunger and thirst, is some other node in this circuitry. Then is the anterior cingulate, which looks for conflicts and errors and changes emotion appropriately. The anterior cingulate seems to be especially important for obsessive behaviors, perhaps because it creates a sense that things are "not right" until they are perfect or complete. In OCD, information technology may wrongly notice errors, which could crusade constant anxiety. Finally, the amygdala is as well in the loop. While best known for its role in processing fear, the almond-shaped amygdala is too involved in a variety of other emotions, including positive ones.
Together, this whole neural network sets values, priorities, and goals. Crucially, parts of it can also simplify repeated behavior into programs for habits that tin can be engaged or disengaged with little conscious thought. Indeed, research shows that as a behavior is learned and becomes more automatic, it engages different parts of the striatum, which is the broader area that contains the nucleus accumbens. Every bit a behavior moves from existence a conscious choice to a habit, brain activeness changes, moving up toward the height or "dorsal" portion of the striatum and away from the bottom or "ventral" area. In habit and other compulsive behaviors, encephalon activeness that is increasingly dorsal in the striatum seems to be linked with reduced ability of the prefrontal cortex to stop or command the behavior.
One critical aspect of habit, in fact, is an alteration in the balance between brain networks that bulldoze habitual behavior and those that make up one's mind whether or not to execute those routines. Again, all of these regions are made to alter with experience and are, as a result, developmentally vulnerable both in early childhood and boyhood. With any activity, as it is learned, it becomes easier, more than automatic, and less conscious. This is essential when y'all are learning to play the piano or throw a ball—and it allows "muscle memory" to develop and hone your skills. Notwithstanding, information technology'due south not such a great chapters to accept when you lot are learning addiction because, past definition, more reflexive behavior is less nether witting control.
It seems that the aforementioned regions that gave me my intense marvel, obsessive focus, and power to learn and memorize rapidly besides made me vulnerable to discovering potential bad habits and then rapidly getting locked into them.
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-addictive-personality-isn-t-what-you-think-it-is/
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