As An Addict™ i think i don't really... understand why people are so insistent that x or y addiction "isn't a thing". if someone has a compulsive relationship with something in a way that is negatively effecting their life, even if the negative effect is just "i feel bad about doing this but that has not lead me to stop doing it", i think that sounds a lot like addiction. in my opinion, the problem is not calling something an addiction. the problems start when we start reacting like we react to addiction-- which is to say, badly, & stupidly, & ineffectively.
statements up front: yes, this is inspired by ongoing discussions about "porn addiction" as a concept, but it is also more broadly about "addiction" as a concept. no, i am not dying on the hill of "porn addiction" being "real" as some sort of uniquely true thing about porn. no, i do not at any point argue that porn is inherently harmful. no, i sort of don't care what the DSM has to say about what is or isn't "real", & i'm admittedly a bit surprised by how many people i see treating it as a prescriptive document with the ability to draw material concrete lines around the human experience, rather than a descriptive & constantly-evolving document that is frequently helpful but has a deeply troubled history & is a product of a deeply troubled industry. overall, i am just An Addict™ who is immensely frustrated by conversations around addiction, especially when non-addicts take it upon themselves to define it.
people can form negative compulsive relationships with neutral or even actively-good-for-you things. that doesn't mean the thing is bad. it means those people need support around it, in some form or another. sometimes this means not doing the thing. sometimes it just means doing it differently, which can include "doing it just as much as you do now, but having done the emotional work to feel fine about doing it, or to no longer do it from a place of self-harm or self-hate".
exercising is generally good for a silly little human body (insert all necessary asterisks about different bodies needing different things here). anorexia athletica is not. to my knowledge, treatment of the latter does not focus on making sure you never ever exercise again. it focuses on doing deep emotional work on the root causes of any disordered & compulsive eating and/or body-focused habits. it would be a pretty acceptable end state of treatment to get to "being able to go for a run for fun without the concurrent shame, anxiety, & compulsion of my formerly disordered relationship to going for a run".
when people say "i'm addicted to [non-physically-addictive-thing]", i think a lot of time what they're saying is "i have a lot of shame about my relationship to [thing]", & maybe even "i hold so much shame about my relationship to [thing] that in order for it to make sense to me, i need to feel like it's out of my control how much i'm interacting with it".
if your response is "well, you can't be addicted to that", i think you're not addressing their actual concerns or feelings. if someone saying "i'm addicted to X" means "i'm ashamed of X", saying "you're not addicted to X" means "you're not ashamed of X", but that's clearly not true. maybe, if you knew what they meant, you'd mean "you shouldn't be ashamed of X", but i don't think that translates.
so: someone says "i'm addicted to porn. watching porn makes me feel awful about myself. i try to not do it, but then i do it anyway, & feel worse every time. i'm repeatedly doing something that harms me by making me feel bad & hate myself. the shame i feel over this is eating me from the inside out."
let's say that a lot of the shame they feel is because they've internalised some untrue & awful things about human sexuality, & porn's place in it. does saying "porn addiction isn't a thing" address that? i don't think it does. i think labelling something as an addiction is often a symptom, not a cause. (acknowledging that there are grey areas here, especially in cases where someone is being manipulated to feel shame, but even then, i would argue that the manipulation is closer to the cause than the label of "addict" is, & needs to be addressed directly.)
if you're trying to say "porn is morally value neutral": i encourage you to understand that a lot of stuff-- arguably the vast majority of stuff-- that people can be addicted to is morally value neutral. even the state of addiction is morally value neutral. the shame & moralising around it is constructed, & i believe that it not only can, but HAS TO BE deconstructed.
i also encourage you to remember that human brains are complex & annoying. if someone holds undue shame about their relationship to their sexuality, like, you know that just saying "you're wrong about those feelings btw so just don't have them" doesn't fix it. we know that there needs to be more between "you're wrong" & "not having them" & anything less is pretty dismissive.
if you're trying to say "don't let someone convince you your normal & healthy relationship to porn is actually abnormal & unhealthy": that sounds like it could be totally fair, but i guess, make sure you understand the totality of their feelings? if they're susceptible to that influence, just saying "oh don't worry, porn addiction isn't actually a thing" doesn't... eliminate the underlying feelings as a vector.
if you're trying to say "you shouldn't seek emotional support from shitheads who are going to teach you further shame OR groom you into a misogynist & racist hate cult": yeah. so, earnestly: where should they get emotional support from? bc they do need it. those feelings are real, even if they're based on something you don't think is real. you aren't even listening to them; the shitheads are very very much listening to them.
genuinely: do you understand the relief of admitting you're an addict? frequently, in my long history of drinking, i desperately wanted to just be allowed to say "i'm an alcoholic" without receiving immediate pressure to stop. sometimes i still wonder if i could have forged a healthier relationship to booze if i'd been able to do that before i kept strengthening the habits in secret, which is where i strengthened them, because i was scared & kept it hidden. it's hard to say, because i'm one of those people who kind of thinks they were addicted from the first sip, but like, who knows, y'know? shame will hollow you out. hiding things will hollow you out. believing you are a monster & "knowing" no-one will understand will hollow you out.
so, maybe this person "isn't" "an addict"-- but is it helping, really helping, if that's the thing you push them on? is it worse to just... let people be wrong about themselves while they're figuring some stuff out?
i don't think so. i really don't think so. i think a lot of defensiveness around this subject comes from thinking addiction is Bad, & anything that touches it is Bad, & keeping the addiction-word away from stuff that is Good will make sure that stuff doesn't seem Bad.
but i don't think any of that is true. i think, if we had better frameworks to deal with addiction, it wouldn't give us such heart attacks for people to say they're addicted to something. if we didn't slap "abstention" down as the only answer to addiction, if we instead put resources & time & understanding into other avenues of recovery, i think it would be helpful for everybody, "real" & "fake" addicts alike.
my feeling is that it would be ok to look back & say "i thought i was addicted to something, but it turns out i just had a lot of internalised shame about it". i think we actually see a lot of success stories like that, right? the scary thing is that they often involve a period of indoctrination into a hate group. i think that is... in part because those groups are the only ones loudly offering support.
so sometimes that path instead is "i thought i was addicted to something, & the only people who believed me welcomed me with open arms & told me that i was right but there was a path forward, & that community support really has been helping, so now i'm starting to wonder if they're also right about women being demons", i feel like that's... worse than just letting someone be "wrong" about being a "porn addict" while they get the support they need in detoxifying their relationship to it.
am i saying "fuck it, sex positive treatment for 'porn addiction'"? man, i dunno, sure. i think everyone deserves to be given the option of forging a healthier relationship with a thing that is somehow causing them harm, whether that looks like "still doing the thing but in a new cool unbaggagey way" or "no longer doing the thing but more importantly forging a healthier relationship with yourself so you don't just find another thing to cause you harm".
now, a pivot into alcoholics anonymous that got about 10x longer than i expected & eventually i promise turns into broader talk about addiction as i try to explain better why i feel & believe the things i said up there
stating this more moderately than i first wanted to because i know it has genuinely helped people, maybe even people reading this, & i never want to take that away from them: alcoholics anonymous & the 12 step programs born from it have enormously shaped how we think about "treating addiction", & this is... negative. & they are not, overall, particularly effective.you will find studies that claim AA is "more effective" than other treatments. many of them are funded by orgs with strong pro-AA agendas. less conspiratorially, they are also generally not comparing it to actually effective treatments.
AA is, for instance, generally statistically more effective than individual CBT therapy. this is a low bar, because (again, speaking generally here because everyone's journey is different) individual CBT therapy is not a particularly effective treatment for addiction. both of them are statistically better than not getting any treatment or support at all, but that's... like... well... you'd fucking hope so. lol. AA is rarely compared to other group therapies or even just other support groups because like frankly there just aren't enough of them to run the numbers. AA is a fucking iiiiiinstitution.
a deeply, deeply christian institution. even when they gesture at being secular. they may sort of lazily replace "god" with "higher power", but will still very much push the relationship to that "higher power" that christian institutions have to their god.
the beginning of the twelve steps on the official AA website looks like this:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
they... oh my god they make me so crazy sorry i hate the twelve steps so much. they stop trying after step two!!! some groups will try harder, & replace more of the words. but changing language can only change so much of the entire structure.
in other areas of mental health, would you maybe be suspicious if the only offering for treatment were explicitly christian? would you maybe wonder whether that particular religion's general relationship to shame, guilt, selfhood, punishment, ethics, etc were poisoning that well a bit? personally, i would find that pretty unacceptable, & i find it unacceptable for addiction, as well.
i feel strongly about this because i white-knuckled sobriety with no support, in large part because i couldn't find non-AA groups. it was hard & i don't know how i did it. i get super frustrated knowing that other people certainly face this problem & make the same decision i do to just do it alone & don't have whatever luck i did.
chips, streaks, & more on abstention as the final word in addiction treatment
the chip system, maintaining a "sobriety streak", is a double-edged sword. for some people, it's helpful external motivation, & anything that you can lean on to give you strength in this stuff is kinda fair game in my eyes. unfortunately, it's also a lot of extra pressure in a lot of cases of "slips" or "relapses" or whatever you want to call them.as of today, i've been sober for ~897 days (huh well shit, that's more than i thought, yay me). let's say tomorrow i fuck up, i have a drink. i break the streak. so, i have to weigh the consequences here. i've already crossed the line from "abstaining" to "not abstaining", & i'm back at 0. bye bye, 900 days of work. why bother making tomorrow my new day 1? so i can start clawing my fucking way back to 900 again? it was hard enough the first time. i'll find day 1 again when i feel like it.
but if i'm not returning to 0-- if those 897 days count-- then tomorrow i can start ticking them up again, or whatever. so i should stop. or at least stop tomorrow. or a least, there is less pressure associated with stopping, because stopping no longer means starting the whole thing over again.
a metaphor from a drinking support forum that changed my life: if you were on a roadtrip from PEI to BC, & your car broke down in manitoba, you wouldn't go back to PEI to start again. you'd get the car fixed right where you are & get back on the road. (this was recounted in usamerican geography, but i don't understand how stuff fits together down there & refuse to learn, so i have transposed it.)
some people do need to fully abstain from alcohol forever (fairly sure i'm one of them & it is absolutely not something i'm willing to test, at least for a very very long time, hello!) because they don't have whatever thing lets them stop at just one, or a little more than one. the paths in their brain are different. or were made different.
some people, through whatever combination of therapy, medication, material life changes, situational emotional circumstances, etc etc etc whatever, can get to the point where they're a "one (1) fun craft beer with dinner" type of person. a lot of people... already go through this journey in their life, just without identifying as an alcoholic? maybe they partied too hard in college & even failed a class because of it, or had a few too many glasses of wine after work when they were getting divorced, but then they got their feet under them & now they're Pretty Normal About Booze. maybe they'll say they were a "problem drinker", but now they're not. maybe they just won't think about it.
is there a difference between those people & me? big time, yeah, absolutely. but not, imo, as big of a difference as some of them would want to believe. there's some hereditary stuff, there's some "natural predilection" stuff, but you can teach yourself to be an addict by just doing something too much. brains form paths, & maybe-- big maybe-- there's a world where my brain didn't form the paths it did, & i'm one of them, & one of them is one of me.
everyone is a temporarily non-embarrassed addict
like dis/ability, "not an addict" is not a permanent state. an accident, or catching a virus with longterm effects, or even just aging can shift you from "not disabled" to "disabled". likewise, it might take really big changes in your circumstances, but if you aren't currently "an addict", you could absolutely become one. it isn't something you just inherently aren't. i'm not saying this to be a big scary "don't experiment with shit oh my god doing one drug could flip a switch in your brain forever!!" person. that isn't something i believe. i just want to really drive home the point that addicts are not fundamentally, as a whole, Different from non-addicts.if you started smoking cigarettes (don't do that btw john waters was right that it's like the only thing worth not trying), you would become addicted to nicotine. congratulations, you're now an addict! you did it (don't do it)!
there are a few reasons this matters to me. one, i think a lot of non-addicts could benefit from reminding themselves of it, & seeing if it helps them exercise their empathy a bit. secondly, i think gaining an understanding of elasticity around "addict" as a label makes it easier to conceptualise of how it might happen "in reverse". in some situations, you can have an unhealthy relationship with something, then end up forming a healthy relationship with it. as i keep trying to reiterate, yes, that healthier relationship might be "not interacting with it at all". but i don't think we have to operate under that as a baseline assumption.
which i know is complicated
there are certainly alcoholics out there who are bristling at the idea that some alcoholics can become people who "just have one". bc if that's true, there's no way that they were really alcoholics, right? not like us?but... i think sometimes they were. & they just can. & we can't. & i'm sorry. i know it isn't fair. i really, really am sorry. i'm right there with you. i routinely get angry & sad when i see people posting their one (1) fun craft beer with dinner. i've hated people for it, unfairly. i've sympathised with the prohibitionists of olde. i'm working on it.
like, i know a lot of my fury at our culture's broken relationship to alcohol is fair. dollar store mugs promoting secret wine for stressed mothers, instead of building real support systems. coozies at the cottage that offer beer for breakfast because it's just a fun vacation taboo for the people who use them. every little piece of kitsch that acts like drinking too much is an in-joke we all participate in. but only to the extent it isn't ruining our lives, right? at which point it's our fault. ugh, we always take it too far. it ruins the fun for everyone.
& some of my fury at it is absolutely projection. because it's so unfair. it just is, & i'm sorry. we deserve better. we deserve so, so much better.
i think that one of the ways we get it is to open up how people think about addiction, broadly. i think that we can let it be a bigger term, & through that, start recognising different ways to support people experiencing it. if you are an addict & you think differently, if you think it should be walled up tightly because it diminishes its power, i respect your view. i don't agree, & i'd probably be happy to talk about it with you, if you'd want to talk about it with me. but you've earned more of a right to an opinion on it than i think a lot of people have & i'm not mad at you for it.
if you're a non-addict feeling alienated by me directly addressing fellow addicts, perhaps you should try smoking, so you can be one of us (DON'T DO THIS!!!!!!!! JOHN WATERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
perhaps-contextualising tangent about sex positivity, weaponising shame against shame, & diversity of comfort
when i was struggling the most with my internalised shame & unhealed trauma about sexuality... i was not helped by being shamed for my shame. oh, it made it so much worse. it was awful. i couldn't escape it & no-one would help me, everyone thought i was bad, no-one was as broken as i was, no-one in the world, if they knew that i struggled as hard as i did they'd know i'm a monster, i can never admit it, not really, i have to break it or push it down instead of daring to look at it head-on to try & fix it.i often drank about it, trying to obliterate the multiplying stacks of shame enough to sleep with people i didn't want to, bc if i were a Good Person, without Harmful Beliefs, surely i WOULD want to??? so... perhaps thought will follow action! i should just do it! find a way to do it! Hm! Somehow this isn't helping! I'm irredeemable!!! Fuck!!!!!!!
(to be so so explicit abt why i'm about to invoke "lesbophobia", lest the combination of concepts ring terf alarms: this is not in reaction to the inclusion of trans women, but in reaction to where the circles i was in were at vis a vis like 'monosexual privilege' & whether uhh you know maybe we should seriously consider if the only truly ethical orientation is pansexuality. it's hard to overstate how much more harmful it was to receive shame about being a lesbian from popular feminist queers with cool hair than it was to receive it from society at large. the lesbophobia is too deeply entwined with the general stupid messaging i was absorbing on what it means to be "sex positive" for me to divorce the concepts.)
i never did a lot more than waver on the edge of or try-on-for-size shitty beliefs, but finding refuge from weird & often lesbophobic 2011-era tumblr sex positivity lead to me at least considering the views of some people whose ideas about desire i now find, at best, deeply misguided, & at worst pretty repulsive. it was just... a relief to hear someone say that i wasn't the oppressor for having my own personal complicated relationship to sexuality. that i was Allowed to have complicated feelings. i was not Bad for them. in fact... maybe they were... Good... maybe? maybe i think everyone should feel the same way we do? complicated? doesn't that sound right? other people have been making me feel Bad, but maybe... they're Bad. bc i'm not Bad. i'm Good. fuck it, yeah, maybe all BDSM is abuse, uhm i dunno, that's not really why i'm here, but it seems important to you, & you listened to me, so i'll listen to you. just keep telling me i'm not Bad. thank you.
i genuinely was not trying to make rules or judgments on other people's actions as i grappled with my rules for & judgment of myself, but boy, i sure was being lead to! i definitely absorbed some of it! it took a lot of time to untangle that & i wish there had been a liiiittle more nuance in the conversation so i didn't feel so backed into that corner! oops! tragic but true: online happened to my brain, & i'm not the only one!!
so. then. so. if you're me. if you're lucky like me. you shake it off. learn, grow, heal. spend a decade doing this, more than a decade, keep working on it, every day work on it, find out what is real about you & true to your values & what you can or have to discard. have great sex about it, eventually. have super weird absolutely disgusting better than you could have believed possible sex about it. don't have sex about it, too, & cry a couple times from surprise & relief at how much easier it's gotten to not have sex when you don't want to, & how much easier it is to figure out which sex you want when you're not terrified of what the sex you want might mean about your moral character, & how real the yesses can be now, & get pulled into your lovingly laughing partner's arms while still crying, let your crying turn to laughter too, take some time then settle in to watch a movie before bed, it's all good, it's ok, you're working on it, every day working on it.
all this to say: i think, when i see someone being glib or even a little cruel about, you know, prudes-- not people who are genuinely harmful, not people who are espousing slippery-slope or already-slid homophobia & transphobia, not people who are one rude barista away from agreeing that conversion therapy isn't so bad, not people who have quiet but very real beliefs about the moral character of sex workers & sex work, not people who are actually dogwhistling about "degeneracy"-- i have a tendency to symphathise with the prudes, not the person making the glib remarks.
i'm not saying i think they're always right. maybe they do have healing to do. but if that's true, & if they're not hurting anyone-- i'm going to repeat that for emphasis, because i don't want to be misconstrued as just blanket statement saying "they're not hurting anyone"-- IF they're not hurting anyone, let them work on their comfort on their own terms. let them do it for themselves, bc they deserve to live in their own full truth & have a life that aligns to their real values. just as anyone does. i want that for you, too.
sometimes, even in the best world, in our theoretical utopian future, some of us are going to have different boundaries from each other. i'm a hugger. oh man, i'm a hugger. i'd love it if everyone were a hugger. i'd likely be romantically incompatible with someone who's super touch-averse. i don't consider it a moral imperative that all people become more open to physical touch. i don't think they should judge me for it, as i don't judge them. i don't think they should get to legislate hug quantity, or pass laws about hugging in movies. sorry, getting a little overbearing with the metaphor because it started making me laugh. real "trying desperately to write a children's book abt the hayes code" vibes.
i just think that we are all strong & smart & able to understand that other people are not extensions of ourselves. if we have a tendency to read judgment into other people stating their own comfort levels-- if someone is really truly genuinely not judging us, but we feel judged by what they want for themselves-- we have a responsibility to manage our reactions. we deserve to be in rooms where our comfort level matches the people around us-- frequently! maybe the majority of the time, even. it's fair to want that. but we can't find all of our comfort by expecting other people to be exactly as comfortable as we are with everything.
i probably won't ever be a full-out porn on main person. i love that i have friends who are full-out porn on main people. sometimes i like the porn they post full-out on their main, then carefully & quietly repost it to a locked account. i also tend to reserve a lot of my most intense feelings & most boring life updates for locked accounts. some people hide their thirst traps & proudly display their petty hot takes; i am the opposite. i don't think either of us is inherently wrong or right or worse or better. we're just different. while acknowledging we do not live in a vacuum, i think if we did, many things could be like this. you know?
anyway, back to addiction: smoking is a funny one
people who smoked & don't anymore don't use the current tense in the way a lot of other addicts do. alcoholics, who i think are a fair comparison because they have a relationship to a similarly widely-available substance, often say "i'm an alcoholic", even when they've been sober for years. "sober" smokers say "i was a smoker".smoking is also the... only... addiction that has its number of accessible different types of treatments for. like, so many tools, & so much variety. nicotine patches at pharmacies. tapering vape cartridges at mall kiosks. billboards for specialised therapies & coaching.
there's also, in professional smoking cessation support, wide recognition of the many different reasons that keep people smoking: physical addiction, yes, but also the social benefits, just kind of being in the routine of it, as a de-stressor, etc., & treatment focuses on each aspect. it puts supports underneath each one, often slowly, before pulling the thing entirely. try holding something in your hands to fidget with instead. try chewing gum to keep your mouth busy. try still going outside & just lighting a sparkler (this one's so twee but it gets suggested so much & i would love to know if anyone's actually done it & had success with it). try to stop in pieces: just focus on not smoking in your car, or at home. try getting a job you don't hate so much that smoke breaks are the only escape. try getting medication that treats the mental health symptoms you're self-medicating with nicotine.
we know, & we act like, if you try to just rip it all away at once with a brute force "just stop smoking"... it doesn't....... work. longterm. if you don't address the underlying causes & feelings, the problem might come back. or another problem. we know this. for smoking. we are so fucking bad at putting it in practice when dealing with other stuff.
i guess it's easier for smoking. it's like sort of... black & white bad for you. very few positive effects or neutral applications that can't be gotten somewhere else with way fewer physical consequences. but i still think we can learn from it. you know?
