[I started to write about how being an addict is like being LGBT. Actually, being an active addict is like being a closeted attacked member of the LGBT community; being in recovery has a lot in common with being out and proud. But before I could explain all that, I got into this digression and I'm going to share it as its own post....]

Addiction seems very complicated. In reality, it’s incredibly simple. Simple like gravity. You drop a ball, it falls to the ground. Sure, you can get all obsessive and detailed – what’s the ball made of? How heavy is it? Are we outside? How far away is the ground? What’s the ground made of? Is there wind? Is the ground level? Am I dropping it, or sort of throwing it a little bit? – but ultimately none of that stuff really matters. The bottom line is still that the ball is going to hit the ground. (And I once took a class called Physics for Liberal Arts Majors, which I thought would be all about the lyrical splendor of the universe and which in fact was basically physics for people who hadn’t yet noticed that things fall when you drop them. So I know what I’m talking about here.)

Here is what happens. People are abused. (“How” and “for how long” matter, but so does “by whom.” Pretend I drew you a little graph here where intense infrequent abuse is high up on the chart, and so is living with people who have ever abused you in any way – and living with people who frequently abuse you intensely is especially crazy-making – and we’ll move on.)

More specifically, children are abused. And, since they are children and developmentally are supposed to think everything is about them, are in fact in a molten crucible of diverse experiences which are constantly creating and re-creating their vision of the world, what they learn from the abuse is that they are not worthy human beings. They learn that they deserve shame, pain, and disrespect; often, the bottom line to them is that they are not worthy of life. That’s the message of abuse, after all; that’s what distinguishes abuse and trauma.

Trauma, like falling out of a tree and breaking your leg, or losing your house to a hurricane, is genuinely random and obviously not about you. The only time that people take messages like “I’m not worthy” from trauma is if they’ve already been set up with those messages by abuse. Abuse, on the other hand, carries those messages whether it’s done on purpose or not – and it’s rarely on purpose. Most adults who abuse children think that they are doing their best, that yelling at their kids, hitting their kids, raping their kids, is an example of their shining love and excellent boundaries. Most adults who abuse children are kind of crazy. (Sidebar: it’s not always adults. Sometimes it’s the classmate or neighbor kid or babysitter, acting out their own abuse. Doesn’t make a huge amount of difference, in terms of its effects.)

So, abused kids melt that down. Their molten worldview hardens around “I am not good enough.” It can be conscious or subconscious, but it is there, rock-hard and deeply embedded.

And they do two things with it: dissociate, in any way they can, and choose more pain, because they think that is what they deserve. Which becomes a vicious cycle: more pain brings with it more need to dissociate, which means choosing more pain in an attempt to feel anything, which means dissociating from the feelings, which means worse choices because we can’t really make good choices if we can’t feel the effects of what we choose, (not to mention if we think that we don’t deserve good things), which means dissociating harder, which….

That cycle is addiction. That’s all that you need to know about addiction. It means doing something to check out of our feelings, or our lives. The popular perception is that it has to be something inherently harmful – but the reality is that checking out like that is the most harmful part. (All right, yes, there are drugs that will kill your body and soul faster than checking out. On the other hand, you could argue that people can’t really choose to keep doing drugs that harmful without checking out in the first place.)

Addiction doesn’t necessarily mean beer, pot, heroin, cigarettes, nice recognizable drugs. Just about every addict (abuse survivor) has a whole lot of options for what lets them check out. That’s why Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, has an implicit rule against “thirteenth-stepping,” hitting on newcomers: because so many people put down the alcohol and switch right over to the sex and love addiction that they don’t even realize is a problem. That’s also why there is so much caffeine and cigarette consumption at a lot of meetings. People quit things in the order that those things are killing them, or at least in the order of most to least immediately painful killers. Not everyone can even stand to use drugs to check out: substance addictions have a genetic switch that gets flipped on by abuse, and lots of people lack that genetic component. But process addictions (codependency, emotional eating, sex addiction, compulsive debting, et cetera) are available to everyone who’s been abused. Isn’t that great? In fact, every addict, every abuse survivor, is a codependent, because codependency is all about trying to control the uncontrollable (like trying to control our emotions and histories) – and what else are these other addictions there for but the illusion of control?

There are more details. (Wind velocity. Density of the ball.) On another level, checking out is a way to try to avoid the emotional pain of the abuse, and of beliefs like “I am not good enough.” The flipside of that is that pain tells the body to check out – it presses the same “oh no, terrible things are happening and I have no other options – dissociate!” button that is installed by abuse. And seeking out pain is also a way to try to control the abuse. That’s why people date people who are like their parents – why they choose jobs and relationships and situations, over and over, that don’t work for them. Our brains, deep down, think “If I can get THIS one to treat me right, that will stop all the pain! It’ll erase all the abuse I ever experienced!” Maybe it’s a lizard-brain thing. It seems fine until we get it out into the open and actually give it some conscious thought.

But once you know all this, it boils down to something deeply simple. Abuse a kid, and they learn to harm themselves in order to check out. Abuse kids, and they become addicts.