Ancient Sins . . . Modern Addictions

A Fresh Look at the Seven Deadly Sins

Sullender

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621897378
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

There is a virtual epidemic of addiction in the United States, both traditional addictions to drugs and alcohol but also newer addictions, like sex, gambling, rage, work, and food/eating. Some authorities have labeled addictions the number one mental health problem in America. We are spending millions of dollars annually trying to prevent, understand, and treat this epidemic--and yet by any measure of success we are losing this war. In this cultural context Dr. Sullender invites us to look again at the spiritually based scheme of the Seven Deadly Sins, which originated at the dawn of Western civilization. He suggests that what our spiritual forebears meant by deadly is best captured in the modern concept of addiction. Based on this thesis, this book explores what is addictive about the sins of pride, envy, anger, greed, gluttony, sloth, and lust, and suggests that these sins are all obsessive, and as such become the mental component in the addictive cycle. Each chapter concludes by offering some spiritual resources, practices, and insights that can help us win the battle against addiction, which is ultimately won or lost on a mental or spiritual plane.

1

What Is Addiction?

An Overview

Over the past seventy years or so, the number of people struggling with one or several kinds of addiction has exploded, especially in Western culture. One can certainly argue that addictions have been around since the dawn of humanity. Yet, the incidence and severity of addictions in recent decades are so high that in most professional circles addictions are considered to be the most significant mental health or behavioral problem in the United States, with the possible exception only of depression. In some ways, addiction has become the disease of our times. Every year millions upon millions of dollars are lost due to decreased productivity, medical costs, law enforcement expenses, and treatment programs related to addiction. Yet these costs pale in comparison to the human tragedy of lost lives, destroyed families, and abused and neglected children resulting from addiction. In my view, our children are the true and most tragic victims of this epidemic—the abused, neglected children, the mentally and developmentally disabled children, the emotionally deprived and abandoned children. In the face of these circumstances, our political, religious, and academic leadership seems to be helpless, clueless, and/or prone to simplistic answers that have failed to stem the growing tide of addictions. At another level, the very culture that decries drug abuse with one voice promotes it with another voice. The United States has embraced a culture that promotes addictive processes, in part because addiction feeds the economic system.

In the last twenty-five years, the problem of addictions has increased in both quantity and quality. The incidence and severity of addictions has increased and, at the same time, the variety and scope of addictions have also expanded. One hundred years ago, the primary addictive problem was alcohol abuse. Alcohol addiction received considerable national attention, as manifested in the temperance movement and the eventual enactment and repeal of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Addictions to substances other than alcohol were relatively unknown or were confined to a subculture or minority of the population. Today, substance abuse and drug addiction have become commonplace across the entire spectrum of society. As I already noted, alcoholism and drug addiction currently border on being the largest mental health or behavioral health problem in our nation. The only addiction that has substantially decreased in the last generation is nicotine addiction, largely due to investment of the medical community in the anti-smoking campaign and to a massive educational and media program.1 It is an oddity of our times that one can watch an American television advertisement promoting beer drinking, only to be followed by an advertisement warning of the dangers of smoking cigarettes. On the one hand, we promote addiction; on the other hand, we discourage it.

Over the last seventy years or so, the definition of addiction has substantially broadened. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, we were primarily concerned with alcohol and drug addiction. Today, we include in our definition of addicts compulsive gamblers, compulsive shoppers, people with eating disorders, heavy smokers, sex addicts, and rage-aholics, to name just a few. Correspondingly, today we have addiction treatment programs for pathological gamblers and for people with anger problems and sex problems, along with the long-standing and widely increasing intervention programs for alcoholism and drug addiction. The biggest change in the last few decades has been in the recognition of the power of and problems associated with behavioral addictions, in contrast to the addictions that come from the ingestion of a substance. Today we incorporate behavioral addictions along with the traditional chemical addictions into a larger theoretical framework called addiction studies or addictive dynamics.

Addiction studies began with the study of just one type of addiction—alcoholism. Thus, what was learned about addiction was learned in the context of alcoholism. Soon, this knowledge was applied to the treatment of other addictions, first drug addiction and then various other kinds of substance abuse as well. As this happened, our collective eyes opened. We began to see more clearly that one can become addicted to a wide variety of chemicals. Suddenly, addiction problems showed up everywhere. Today we recognize addictions to nicotine, prescription medications like pain pills, illegal drugs like heroin or cocaine, and even commonly available substances like sugar. By the 1980s we came to see clearly that one can become “hooked” on an activity as well as a substance, and the concept of behavioral addictions was born. Behavioral addictions, which is the term I prefer, are also known as “activity addictions” or “process addictions,” in contrast to chemical addictions or substance abuse. Today, compulsive gamblers, workaholics, sex addicts, rage-aholics, and even compulsive shoppers are recognized as having a type of behavioral addiction. Now we can see clearly that alcoholism is but one example of a broader problem: addiction. Some have even pushed the envelope further by suggesting that there are “positive” addictions, addictions that are socially recognized and supported, like addictions to exercise or even to religious activities. Clearly, addictive dynamics are nearly universal among humans, particularly among people influenced by Western culture. So, now clinicians wonder if the difference between psychologically well people and addicts is not that the latter are addicts and the former are not, but rather that some people just can’t manage their addictions while others can. In the very broadest understanding of the term, no one is addiction-free.2

Since the definition of addiction problems has expanded so widely, the term “addiction” has lost some of its meaning. Drug addiction and compulsive shopping have many common dynamics, but clearly drug addiction is far more addictive and far more powerful than compulsive shopping, as destructive as the latter problem might be for some people. Thus, some scholars have argued for a more narrow use of the term addiction so that it refers only to those addictions that are primarily, but not exclusively, physiological in nature. Some refer to these classic addictions as “true addictions” because they build a physiological tolerance. The term “compulsive behaviors” has come to be employed to describe addictions that are primarily, but not exclusively, behavioral in nature (these are also called activity addictions or process addictions).

Addictions can be classified along a continuum (see Figure 1) based on the relative mixture of behavioral or chemical components. At one end of the spectrum there is drug addiction, which is probably 90 percent chemical and 10 percent behavioral. Probably the most physically addictive drug on the planet right now is methamphetamine. At the other end of the continuum there are addictions like compulsive shopping and workaholism, which are 90 percent behavioral and 10 percent chemical. Because addictions exist along a continuum, even the most physiological of the addictions have behavioral components, and even the most behavioral of the addictions are characterized by chemical changes in the brain. Addiction is always a whole-person disorder. Addictions always include physiological and behavioral elements, as well as mental, relational, and spiritual components.

Professionals who work with addicts of all kinds, as well as people who have personally struggled with addiction issues, often reach the same conclusion: the addiction dynamic transcends its substance/activity. They notice, for example, that most people these days are poly-addicted, using and abusing one or several types of substances and/or activities at the same time. Further, they note that addiction problems run in families. The grandfather was an alcoholic, but the son is a drug addict, while the grandson grows up to be an over-achieving workaholic. The drug of choice has changed over the years, but the addiction dynamic remains, passed from one generation to the next generation. Similarly, many recovering addicts go from drug to drug or activity to activity. For example, a recovering alcoholic has not drunk alcohol for years but smokes heavily and drinks coffee by the gallon. Another person stops smoking, only to gain weight. Another takes a forced vacation from their addiction to work and withdraws into depression. And still another person stops gambling, only to take up compulsive day trading on the stock market. The once over-eater becomes a compulsive jogger. Even the recovering alcoholic can become addicted to AA meetings! We have seen it all. Dr. Gerald May called this substituting of one addiction for another “reforming our behavior” instead of “transforming our desire.”3 The latter approach, in his view, involves addressing the real problem, the addictive process or the displaced desire. This realization, that the addictive dynamic transcends the drug of choice, raises certain questions: Is addiction a larger disease, a larger problem than the particular substance or activity employed? Or, to rephrase the question, what do all addictions have in common and in what ways is each addiction unique?

So, the relevant question in the literature on addiction studies is this: Is there such a thing as an addictive personality? In other words, are some people just vulnerable to addictions, regardless of the type of addiction? If we bring together people representing all of the various types of addictions and analyze their personality traits, would they be similar in certain ways? If so, did those similarities exist prior to the onset of the addictive behavior or were those dynamics created by the addiction itself? The term “dry drunk” speaks to this issue. Dry drunk refers to an alcoholic who has stopped drinking but still behaves like an alcoholic, still has an alcoholic personality. I tend to be of the opinion that there is such a thing as an addictive personality—that some people are by temperament, genes, or family upbringing more vulnerable than other people to addictions. Some people have, as the phrase goes, the psychological and physiological “soil of addiction.”4 We might say that the seeds of addictions grow easily in certain psychological soils. The particular kind of addiction depends on the availability or popularity of particular drugs or activities in one’s social and cultural environment. Once an addiction-vulnerable person starts abusing a substance or an activity, he or she gets hooked much more easily than most people and, correspondingly, has a much more difficult time getting clean and sober. Furthermore, once a person becomes hooked, the features of the addictive personality are intensified and reinforced by the addictive process itself.

This wider vision of what constitutes addiction has also enabled us to see that we have thought too narrowly about the “high” associated with the addiction. Highs can come in varied forms. We recognize the buzz people get when they drink. We see the intense highs that speed users get when they pop pills. But gamblers get a high, too. Sex addicts get highs. Even runners talk of the runner’s high. Granted, some of these highs are more powerful than others and thus more addictive, but all involve the same or similar chemical changes in the brain. We now know that chemical changes in the brain, or mood changes, can be triggered by a variety of factors or processes. In 1985, two researchers in brain chemistry, Harvey Milkman and Stanley Sunderwirth, proposed three different types of highs—arousal highs, satiation highs, and fantasy highs.5 An arousal high is associated with excitement, as in an adrenaline rush, and with activities such as gambling, engaging in sports, or using drugs such as methamphetamine. A satiation high gives a person the feeling of being full, relief from pain, and escape from stress. Many people feel contented and relaxed when they drink alcohol or smoke marijuana. The fantasy high, according to these authors, comes later, when people relive their addiction rituals in their minds. A typical example of a fantasy high would include a sexual fantasy or a triumph high. Personally, I think that fantasy highs are just a vicarious arousal high. A more legitimate third type of high, in my experience, is the trance high. Typically, a trance high is induced by a computer or television screen.6 Prolonged viewing creates a mental condition we describe as being zoned out. This high functions like other highs, providing an escape from a reality that is otherwise painful or boring. (The rapidly growing problem of cybersex is a unique mixture of both a trance high and an arousal high.) Trance highs are certainly habit-forming at the very least and can be addictive under some circumstances.

So our eyes have been opened. What began seventy years ago as a focus on the perils of alcoholism has evolved into a much wider, more diverse, and more serious study of addiction. This broader approach to the subject of addiction has led to research to identify the core elements of addiction. Are we dealing with one disease or many diseases? Why does addiction affect some people more than others or look different in different people or across the spectrum of addiction problems? Craig Nakken has suggested a helpful metaphor.7 He has likened addiction to cancer. There are different forms of cancer, just like there are different types of addiction. Yet all of the various cancers have common dynamics, common stages, common traits, and maybe even a common origin. So, what are the common traits, common themes, and common dynamics shared by all addictions, across the board?

Common Features of Addiction

Mood Change

What do different addictive substances or activities have in common? The first answer is that they all have the ability to produce a positive and pleasurable mood change. Any substance or activity can become addictive if it creates a positive mood change in the individual. Substances or activities that do not cause mood change...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: What Is Addiction?
• Chapter 2: Pride
• Chapter 3: Envy
• Chapter 4: Anger
• Chapter 5: Sloth
• Chapter 6: Greed
• Chapter 7: Gluttony
• Chapter 8: Lust
• Chapter 9: Some Concluding Thoughts
• Theological Postscript
• Bibliography