I was a psychology geek before I became a betrayed wife. When I was 7 years old, I was mesmerized when I saw John Bradshaw interviewed by Oprah. It made an impact. I love people. I love learning about how we think, function and behave. If I knew you, I’d love to sit at a coffee shop and hear your story. With betrayal trauma brain, I can’t apply past knowledge to MY situation very well, but somehow I can take what I knew about the human condition before betrayal and what I’ve learned afterward to make some sense of what’s happened in my marriage – to a limited degree. I know most people say you can’t heal this pain with your head, but for me, a thorough understanding must be a part of my healing. My husband and I have been lucky enough to see some excellent therapists and coaches, and I’ve read a lot. I was pretty well read beforehand concerning human development and marriage, but now I’ve added books on betrayal, addiction, attachment, and the like. Understanding addiction has lowered my stress and volatility.

I write as a tour guide, someone who has taken the journey–not as an expert–but as a home cook rather than a trained chef, if you will. Expect personal testimony and paraphrases, as if we were sharing at a coffee shop, more than expert research and quotes. I say this because I understand that brilliant doctors spend decades researching things like addiction and mental illness. Therapists spend thousands upon thousands of hours with couples to perfect their treatment modalities. I respect their work and calling! And yet I also respect the journey of a betrayed wife who is crawling her way out of the woods, step-by-step. She sees another betrayed partner and shares what’s helped like their lives depend on it. I listen to both. I write as the latter. I thank my lucky stars for the former.

While mere understanding doesn’t replace doing the work of creating a new relationship, it gives us hope that there is a real problem with real treatment so we are able to start doing the work of healing. Most couples like us start with sexual acting out. Chaos ensues. Sexual infidelity does not always equate to an addiction. That’s a very important distinction because if addiction is behind the acting out, you can put a lot of work into stopping the chaos only to discover your lives decimated yet again down the road. Addiction requires specialized treatment.

For couples dealing with addiction, there is a separate dynamic that will need serious attention along with the healing of the relationship. Years ago, I heard an anecdote about an old-fashioned farming community who wanted to move their church building. So they screwed handles all the way around the outside of the old church house. This allowed everyone to simply lift their handle and together, they moved an otherwise immovable object. The right education puts handles on things you otherwise can’t carry. It makes a huge task possible. Let’s put some handles on this chaos…. So what is addiction?

The common definition of addiction is “continued use despite negative consequences.” You might be thinking, “well yeah, isn’t that what I do every time I eat those cookies?….” Not exactly, and this blog post will show you why. Addictions come in two broad categories: Process Addictions (behaviors like eating, shopping, gambling, sex, even religion) or Chemical Addictions (drugs, alcohol, etc. – any chemical you put into your body). The simple definition we often use for addiction can lead one to think that all those sweet treats we eat at the holidays, despite the increase in waistline, is an addiction. The difference lies in why you eat the cookies and how that event changes your brain. For those of us who aren’t addicts, we don’t have the same relationship to the substance or behavior (or even our own brains) that addicts do. Addiction is like an aggressive disease of the brain. 

All brains are habit-forming MACHINES! Remember when you first learned to ride a bike? How hard it was? Then over time, the more you did the behavior, your brain habituated it. Now you can never forget how to ride a bike. It’s easy! Our brains do this with everything, given enough repetition, so that we can expedite things. A habit is always formed in this way:

Curiosity to try –> Repeat –> 200 Repetitions create a conscious habit –> 600 Repetitions create a subconscious automated habit

For this category, I always think of typing your computer’s log-in password. Once we’ve done it enough, we can do it without thinking about it! But what if we have to stop because we changed our password? Well, the new password takes more conscious effort…. We will probably slip and use the old one a few times. But eventually, we will type the new one enough that it will eventually, after 600 repetitions, become subconscious and automatic. Voila! Thank goodness our brains are habit-forming machines or it would take us three hours to get dressed every morning! We do these activities without our conscious brain even registering how it got completed!

Addictions are slightly different than habits. Here is how addictions form:

Curiosity to try –> Repeat –> Enjoy it, alters mood — 200 Repetitions form a pleasurable or numbing habit –> 600 Repetitions slide this mood enhancer into your subconscious (now you do it without thinking about it!)

Did you see the added element into that process? Enhanced mood. Somewhere in the midst of those repetitions, a very powerful shift happens in your emotional landscape. An addict’s brain starts doing really strange things in an effort to keep that fabricated “joy” coming. The colloquial term for this feel-good “joy” is high, buzz. Healthy brain functioning starts deteriorating in service to one goal: to get a hit. Which leads us to the most important distinction between a habit and an addiction: you can’t stop on your own without outside help. The parts of the brain that would put on the brakes and weigh options get highjacked because of the brain changes that occur once addiction sets in. Rob Weiss often says that healthy brains engage in activities such as gambling, drinking, or sex simply for fun! It’s a bonus. But addicts engage in these things to feel OK or normal. They have to do these things as an emotional crutch to function.

So you might be wondering if you’re addicted to coffee, for example, because you can’t stop drinking it. Good question! Our brains create dependencies to some things. When we cease to use the substance or do the behavior, we will go through an uncomfortable withdrawal season. That’s different than the brain changes that occur via addiction.

One more technical term that will help us to understand the world of addiction is the concept of tolerance. Tolerance is certainly something that happens with some addictions, but it occurs with some safe substances or prescription medications as well. It’s simply the reality of needing more of a certain item to acquire the same effect. Not all medications, substances or addictions create tolerance in the brain. But, sadly, sexual addiction does require more and more to get the same affect on the brain. If you’ve heard many sex addicts share their stories, you will hear the two tale-tale signs that you’re a sex addict: 1) You can’t stop even though you want to and tried to. 2) You find yourself crossing lines you never thought you would.

1. We habituate everything (typing passwords) given enough repetition. It’s not difficult to stop habits.
2. Our brains go through withdrawal if we are dependent on something like coffee, sugar, or an intimate partnership. But this isn’t an addiction.
3. Addiction is a habit that we can’t stop on our own because of how it changes the brain. Addictions require specialized treatment.
4. Our brains become tolerant to some safe substances or addictions, requiring more to get the same affect. (some pain medications or alcohol, for example)

This helps us to understand why some people have an occasional glass of wine with a nice meal. Others have a habit of a glass of wine every night with dinner, but they are able to stop the habit on their own with relative ease simply because they want to drop 10 pounds. They’re not getting drunk or over-doing it. They can substitute water for the wine with little difference. While others can’t not drink, seemingly completely unaware of drinking too much–Occasional drinker – habitual drinker – alcoholic who is unable to stop or scale back. To be more precise with the definition of addiction, we could say “continued use of a mood-altering behavior or substance that causes significant and measurable brain changes.” If you’ve experienced a loved one losing themselves to addiction, you get this. The old-fashioned word for alcohol was “spirits.” The “high” seems to replace our loved one with the spirit of another person. A selfish person who is willing to throw everything to the wind for a hit. One drink is too many and 500 is not enough. This is the madness of addiction.

In the next post, we are going to take a deeper look at how these processes set up in the brain and one thing an addict can start doing now to reverse these effects.