The Secret Connection Between Addiction and Personality Disorders
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Addiction and personality disorders have many traits in common that involve behaviors that aren’t related to substance abuse, such as gambling, shopping and sex addiction.
We’ll take a look at how anxiety, narcissism, depression and obsessive-compulsive behavior are connected to addiction from genetic and personality perspectives as well as what psychological aspects appeal to narcissists. Understanding these complex conditions better can help you or your loved ones recover more completely and faster from the debilitating effects of addiction.
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| The Secret Connection Between Addiction and Personality Disorders |
1-Forms of Addiction
Alcoholism, drug dependency and abuse is but one example of a recurrent and self-defeating pattern of misbehavior. People are addicted to just about everything: gambling, shopping, the Internet, reckless and life-threatening activities. Adrenaline addicts are everywhere.
2-Psychological Connections to Addiction
The association of chronic anxiety, pathological narcissism, depression, obsessive compulsive characteristics and alcoholism and drug abuse is common and well known in clinical practice. Not all narcissists, compulsives, depressives and anxious individuals, however, go to the bottle or the needle.
3-Genetic and Behavioral Factors
The media loves stories about the discovery of the gene(s) for alcoholism, or some such thing, and these stories have been repeatedly debunked. Berman and Noble in 1993 proposed that addictive and impulsive behaviors are epiphenomena and may be associated with other, more basic, traits, such as novelty seeking or maybe risk taking.
Psychopaths (patients with Antisocial Personality Disorder) have both in multi-acre lots. We would therefore predict them to abuse alcohol and drugs heavily. In fact, as Lewis and Bucholz showed rather persuasively in 1991, so they do. However, only a small fraction of alcoholics and drug addicts are psychopaths.
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| The Secret Connection Between Addiction and Personality Disorders |
4-Narcissism and Addiction
What we do know is that most addicts are narcisstic personality types. Addictions are his friend. They exalt him above the laws and pressures of common reality and separate him from the humiliating and chastening demands of the real world. They make him a center of interest - but they also set him in "splendid isolation" from the maddening and inferior mob.
5-Psychological Function of Addictions
Compulsive and frenzied activities provide a psychological external skeleton. They are substitute for daily life. They offer the narcissist- addict an agenda, a schedule, objective, and false accomplishments. The narcissist- addict- the thrill seeker- feels that he plans his life, he is awake, alert, excited, alive.
He does not recognize his condition as dependence. The narcissist is convinced that he masters his addiction. That he can disengage himself from it any time and very soon.
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