What is Addiction?
Addiction is entrapment in a negative consciousness vortex – it pulls us in with powerful momentum and can take us right out of our intended lives. Alcohol, because of its combination of stimulating and relaxing effects, feels good to our bodies and brains in multiple ways, at first. Its very direct and intense ability to connect to our pleasure centers and relieve multifaceted pains makes it a deadly trickster of our nervous systems.
In the long term, it doesn’t relieve stress, it causes it. It means that the physical withdrawal from alcohol, the backlash of having used it, hits us with pain in those same pathways – sooner or later it amplifies the opposing pain, the polar opposite of the pleasure it first gave us. Euphoria becomes dysphoria; connection morphs into profound isolation. Therefore, what we perceive as potential benefits is our enemy.
What is Alcohol Addiction?
Alcohol addiction is a complex disease that creates health problems at the physical body level, such as injuries, liver diseases, and cancer. Alcoholism also affects mental and emotional well-being, generating depression, anxiety, obsessions, and sometimes leading to suicide. Alcoholism corrodes social life and relationships, frequently harming marriages, families, and friendships. Importantly, alcohol affects behavior, undermining a person’s ability to make good choices, be their best selves, and treat other people in their lives well.
What is Alcohol Abuse?
Alcohol abuse is one of the most common forms of substance use. Alcoholism can take root whenever an individual drinks alcoholic beverages over an extended period. For some people, addiction begins almost immediately after regular exposure, while for others it builds up over time. While alcoholism has certain hallmark features, each person will experience it in their way.
One hallmark of alcoholism is strong cravings for alcohol when abstinent for a while. Another is the experience of withdrawal physical symptoms when not drinking. Broken resolutions to quit, changing one’s mind, and deciding it’s okay to drink after all, after swearing off, are other signs.
Typically people who have formed an unhealthy pattern of alcohol addiction will continue to drink despite the negative effects that drinking is having on their lives. They are often unable to see or acknowledge that problems in their lives stem from their drinking.
Even in the face of irrefutable evidence of problems being caused by their drinking (such as a DUI, or negative feedback about one’s behavior from a loved one), once alcoholism is at play a person will often struggle to be able to admit the correlation. Even if able to see the connection in moments of clarity, insight alone is usually not enough to override the urge to drink anyway, as the need to drink eventually supersedes all other considerations.
People who suffer from alcohol addiction often try and fail multiple times to quit drinking on their own. The failure happens despite the best efforts and sincere intentions because it is a feature of addiction that a person’s willpower becomes ineffective, making a person physically unable to stop drinking. In other words, it is part of the addiction to lose the ability to stop drinking once started, say no when invited to partake, or “just drink less”.
Symptoms of Alcohol Addiction
The symptoms of alcohol addiction are the following:
- Mood swings
- Sexual dysfunction
- Intense cravings for alcohol
- Trouble concentrating or thinking
- Inability to stop drinking or stay stopped over time, despite good reasons to stop
- Seizures or convulsions
- Nausea and vomiting
- Heart problems
The above list of symptoms may help you recognize a pattern in yourself or another.
Symptoms of Alcohol Withdrawal
- Anxiety or feeling tense
- Trembling hands
- Sweating
- Insomnia
- Fever
Understanding How Symptoms Vary
While alcoholism has signature aspects to it, it’s important to understand that each person may experience alcoholism in a slightly different way, because people are unique. Your experience doesn’t have to be the same as someone else’s for you to also have a problem.
People who are new to drinking may only experience symptoms of what’s called alcohol abuse, while people with alcoholism will also experience addiction to alcohol.
Individuals who are not only abusing alcohol but also doing so because they are addicted to it will have the abuse symptoms as well as more serious, longer-term impacts affecting body, mind, willpower, and behavior.
These will typically increase over time, as tolerance develops and more and more of the substance is required to prevent the body from going into withdrawal.
Those who are struggling with alcohol addiction may be afraid that they have an incurable disease. However, many people can recover from alcoholism when they get the right treatment and make the necessary lifestyle changes to heal alcoholism at its root.
Early intervention is one of the best approaches for preventing alcohol abuse from turning into alcohol addiction. Likewise, if alcohol addiction is already present or on the horizon, then acting sooner rather than later is recommended.
If you or someone you know is experiencing symptoms of alcohol abuse, you are welcome at Villa Kali Ma, where we will help you recover in a very personalized way, with holistic approaches and effective clinical treatment options that address who you are as an individual.
Causes of Alcohol Addiction
The causes of alcohol addiction are the following:
- genetic predisposition
- chronically-stressful living environments
- social factors
- underlying mental health struggles
Genetic predisposition
Genetic makeup can make you more likely to become addicted to alcohol. Some people are genetically predisposed to alcoholism, in other words, a family history of addiction places you at higher risk of becoming addicted yourself.
Even without a genetic predisposition, if you live in a high-stress environment, or experience life events with a very stressful impact, you might be influenced to drink more than you would have in other circumstances, essentially as a way to manage stress.
Social factors
Social causes of alcoholism include a person’s friends and community environment, such as their peers, and social influences on drinking behavior that may lead them to increase the amount they drink over time. If the people you hang out with engage in substance abuse, you are more likely to as well. This could lead to a substance use disorder.
Trauma
Finally, women who have experienced trauma in their lives often turn to alcohol as a way to self-medicate their pain.
Alcohol use that addresses deep pain at the core of a person’s life experiences, such as in the case of trauma, very often develops into addiction, because trauma is tricky to deal with and effective trauma treatment has been not as widespread as it needs to be to prevent this.
When the reason a person drinks is essentially because of chronic inner pain, where the pain just feels like it’s part of your personality (versus caused by something in the environment per se) there may be a co-occurring disorder at play, whether that’s a trauma diagnosis such as PTSD, or another kind of mental health topic.
A co-occurring disorder means you’re struggling with two separate issues at the same time, such as alcoholism and anxiety, or alcoholism and depression. As you can imagine, these are harder to treat because the alcohol problem sits on top of a deeper issue that also needs healing, so both situations have to be addressed at once for lasting recovery to stick.