Two Causes of Addictions: You Can Stop
- Garbage Rules will prod you to face the self-defeating thinking that’s keeping you addicted.
- Ego will help you to understand and overcome the underlying problem of your addiction.
Two causes of addictions that you must stop practicing. Fighting an addiction is feeding that addiction. You can do better with better methods.
“Vices are never genuinely tamed.” —Seneca
- Read for a system to manage your mind to manage your life.
- Two causes of addictions will become simple to understand using this book.
2 CAUSES OF ADDICTIONS
- Notice how both of the causes taught here are about trying.
- Why is trying such a problem?
- Because trying relies on you, not God.
Two Causes of Addictions
First Cause of Addiction
Trying to Stop Desire
- Addiction often occurs when you desire to end an urge, hunger, or appetite—because such a desire will only feed the urge, hunger, or appetite.
- The more you struggle, the worse it gets.
Desire Versus Desire Feeds Both Desires
- A simple way to understand this is that “What you resist persists.”
- To understand how a desire to end something can cause an addiction to it over time, read Not.
- When you fight the wrong way, you lose.
- For more on this, please read Nobody Speaks or see the “Book Extras” section for that book.
Two Kinds of Resistance
- There exists a right and a wrong form of resistance.
- If you resist with your ego, you will lose because that is the wrong kind of resistance.
- If you resist with your being, you will win because that is the right kind of resistance.
Two Causes of Addictions
Second Cause of Addiction
Trying to Fix Pain
- Addiction occurs when you seek to control or change pain with pleasure.
- A distraction that you normally use to get away from your pain for a while will turn into an addiction once you start to use that distraction to fix the pain rather than to avoid or escape the pain.
- A distraction such as Internet surfing, shopping, eating, drinking, sexing, drugging, gambling, smoking, working, coffee drinking, etc., can work to avoid or escape pain for a while.
- While you might certainly be abusing or misusing an activity at that point, merely using an activity to escape or avoid pain will not lead to an addiction.
- However, if you take that same behavior and use it to fix, solve, control, or change your pain—then that behavior or activity will become an addiction.
- This crucial distinction needs to be understood in concrete or practical terms.
- If you carry your pain into the activity, then that is a sign that that activity is or will likely become an addiction.
- If you leave your pain behind when you use that activity, then that is a sign that you are using that activity to cope with pain by distracting yourself from it.
- While the activity may still be unhealthy, it is not an addiction at that point but only a coping strategy.
- Two causes of addictions will become simple to understand using this book.
- Read for a system to manage your mind to manage your life.
Two Causes of Addictions
Example: Fixing Pain with Pleasure Loop
- It is a known fact that if you let a horse, it will eat itself to death. When a horse is eating itself to death, the horse is getting both pleasure and pain signals.
- The pain signals from its swollen belly eventually become stronger than the pleasure signals from its tongue.
- However, the horse tries to fix the pain with pleasure and so compulsively eats until it drops dead.
- This is also seen in birds who gorge themselves on insects when there is, for example, a plague of locusts.
- The horse and birds are using the cause of the pain as the cure for the pain, so they die.
- In much the same way, the person with addiction eventually winds up leading a miserable life yet continues to use the drug or behavior that is causing the miserable life as the cure.
Two Causes of Addictions
Summary: Distraction Not Control
- A distraction is just that when you use it to escape or avoid pain for a while.
- This is a useful coping strategy that we all use and need sometimes.
- It is not a great strategy in that distraction does not remove the pain.
- Distraction merely gives us a break from the pain for a while.
- However, when you use a distraction to modify a pain somehow, then that distraction will become an addiction.
- Addiction is when you try to fix pain with pleasure.
Two Causes of Addictions
Related Daily Dose of Discernment
Addiction Causes: 04-17-2021
“Addiction is caused by no-ting (read Not for more information).” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Addiction is caused by human nature relying on human nature because human nature seeks death, destruction, and disintegration as all matter does.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Addiction is caused by seeking to cover (ego pleasure) from sources that provide covering on a variable reinforcement schedule (unreliably).” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
- Read for a system to manage your mind to manage your life.
- Two causes of addictions will become simple to understand using this book.
Two Causes of Addictions
- Information on attachment.
- Two causes of addictions will become simple to understand using this book.
- Read for a system to manage your mind to manage your life.
Two Causes of Addictions
Quotations Various Sources
Listed Alphabetically
“And he said unto his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on.” —Luke 12:22
“Believe in recovery, redemption, and rehabilitation especially when the world wants to punish you instead of to help you.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Correct it or accept it.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Detach with love.” —Al-Anon
“Even though a number of people have tried, no one has yet found a way to drink for a living.” —Jean Kerr
“Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing.” —Chuang-Tzu
“God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it’s me.” —Anonymous
“Guilt is really the reverse side of the coin of pride. Guilt aims at self-destruction, and pride aims at the destruction of others.” —Bill W., As Bill Sees It, p. 140
“I didn’t cause it. I can’t change it. I can’t control it.” —Al-Anon
“I’ve developed a new philosophy–I only dread one day at a time.” —Charlie Brown
“Recovery does not take care of itself no matter how old it is.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Recovery is the process of recovering who you were as a child.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Recovery requires conquering the seven-headed dragon: physical, mental, emotional, social, motivational, renewal, spiritual.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“Resolve to be thyself; and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.” —Matthew Arnold
“Suffering isn’t ennobling, recovery is.” —Christian Barnard
“Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” —Matthew 6:34
“The AA program can be summed up in two words: acceptance and surrender.” —Kevin Everett FitzMaurice
“The attitude of unconditional self-acceptance is probably the most important variable in their long-term recovery.” —Albert Ellis, Rational-Emotive Therapy with Alcoholics and Substance Abusers, p. 71
“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up.” —Mark Twain
“Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?” —Matthew 6:25
“Those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace.” —Buddha
“You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.” —Eleanor Roosevelt
- Two causes of addictions will become simple to understand using this book.
- Read for a system to manage your mind to manage your life.
Two Causes of Addictions
Related Pages of Free Information
- 7 Pillars of Recovery
- 8 Thinking Skills for Detaching
- Blame Issues: List Pages
- Coping Skills: Free Help
- Coping Skills: Weakness Is Strength
- Deconstructivism: The Answer
- Recovery Issues: Free Help
- Use Negation, Not Destruction
- What Is Thinking Good For?
- Read for the best understanding of how crazy your thinking can make you.
- Two causes of addictions will become simple to understand using this book.
- Read for a system to manage your mind to manage your life.