Reasons for some addictions are easily traceable and their effects well known: so you’ll take cocaine because it directly stimulates the areas of the brain that produce positive emotion and you’ll hear people say they felt like Gods, omnipotent and with inexhaustible energy; alcohol and opiates have a similar effect where you’ll basically borrow your happiness from tomorrow for a while and be punished biologically by a crash the next day because you’ve flooded the receptors of feel-good neurotransmitters so much that the normal levels of dopamine and serotonin now feel like depression so you try to level yourself our by consuming more in search of the bliss state and the cycle begins again; social media, cellphones and email act like slot machines with a variable ration reinforcement schedule – if you check them enough you’ll get something good and meaningful here and there – if you pull a slot machine long enough you will win; emotional eating is physically filling up the void of something lacking, burying the yearning; not eating at all is a try to control at least something in the world that seems out of control…

But an addiction is not just the symptoms and behaviors associated with it, it is not purely chemical. The largest problem in trying to overcome it are not the cravings- they are just an extension of a habit – sometimes behavioral, sometimes biochemical. The biggest problem is that each real addiction means also the development of a subpersonality so if you try to get out of it, you’re not just battling cravings but are effectively trying to kill a part of you. This sub personality is a daemon, has a one track mind, its own logic, justifications and value system completely subdued to what it wants, to the object of you addiction. It’s a cyclops, a one eyed monster that sees only it’s goal and will lie, cheat and deceive even the core personality to get it. A gambler will find a way to explain why he’s going back to the casino even if the relational mind understands how much money he’s lost by now and that he can’t pay his rent, the alcoholic will rationalize showing up drunk at a job or a family reunion regardless of what the main personify thinks of it. The subpersonality will not be the one that feels shame for it afterwards, the main one will.

You can’t help addicts by telling them to “Just stop it” from your higher morally superior step, it does not work that way. You will not help them by isolating them into institutions or shunning them because you’re doing all this to the core personality hurting it more while the subpersonality lies dormant until the craving appears and then shifts all its values. Most of what we’ve been doing to treat addiction in the last couple hundred years was wrong. The key is to include them and give them something else to hold valuable – a job, a connection, relationships, family, to give them meaning. That is the only way to prevent the subpersonality from taking over so often, and when it does to find the individual interests and mechanisms to shift the focus onto something better. You don’t ever eradicate the need, once felt it is always there as a shadow but you can substitute it with a better thing. You cannot kill the cyclops, but you can give him something else to obsessively stare at. If you try to poke its eye it will only get angry and blindly go into destruction mode. So stop moralizing and show some kindness. You’re not immune to this, the same cyclopes lurk in all of us.