Pleasure Unwoven IV: We do Recover!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA8F89537FD4C3FD1

Dopamine is important in the early stages of addiction but it is glutamate, flowing back up the circuit, which ends up key. The brain’s system for emotional attachment, memory, and rationality are all sabotaged. When the cortex fails it is invisible to the addict. There is overactivity in some parts of the brain and desolation in others. This creates denial, personality changes, and poor decision making. It is a disorder of choice and craving. In addiction craving has a specific and intensely severe meaning: it is an intense emotionally obsessional experience. It is genuine suffering. The existence of this kind of craving utterly destroys the choice argument. In an active addict, pre-recovery, there doesn’t even have to be immediate drug use for the disease to be active and for behavior to be hijacked. Blaming the addict, although culturally acceptable, is absurd and ignores craving and the operation of neurotransmitters and neural processing. Full-blown addiction is involuntary and miserable.

WE DO RECOVER!

But this brain state is NOT permanent. THE BRAIN CAN HEAL! People who are successful in recovery have developed the following abilities and traits;

1. They stop/curtail the things which hijack the brain and create craving (if this seems contrary to everything prior stating addiction is a disease where one cannot simply stop then you need to read more about how recovery works, addiction medicine, and social support and spirituality in recovery).

2. They develop strategies (and put them into action instantly) to deal with the residual (and ever decreasing) cravings that occasionally pop up.

3. They become very good at immediately managing stress in a social and spiritual context.

Normal pleasures become pleasurable and, in fact, possibly more pleasurable than the recovering addict ever experienced, even pre-addiciton! Hypo-frontality is resolved and the cortex’s ability to make choices returns. Addiction is a stress-induced defect acting on a genetic vulnerability in the midbrain and frontal cortex. This meets the criteria of the disease model. Now that we know beyond any reasonable doubt that addiction is a disease, addicts become patients equal to all other patients. This may call into question the long-held beliefs of some but this really implies that choice – free will – is a very precious and human capacity that needs to be nurture and, sometimes, repaired so that people again make good choices in accordance with their values.