The Cycle of Addiction

1) Ordinary life, mundane existence, being alone with one's self and the difficulty of dealing with boredom leads the addictive person to seek some alteration of consciousness. This is not a desire to escape the ego, but rather reinforce it. Some might think that addiction is an attempt to escape the self, while in fact it is an attempt to escape the "other" - all others that is not the self, and is a retreat or withdraw into the self.

(The every day ego is built up of self consciousness, desire, and a perception of the world as filtered through language - all the thoughts that run around our head all day long that we seem unable to stop or control.)

2) In the attempt to escape the world and hide inside the ego, the addictive person finds a substance or falls into a personality habit by which their consciousness is transformed and they forget, or transcend, the boredom or average ness of their life. This transformation of consciousness isn't always dependent upon a substance, but often is. Habits of behavior can also be a means of escaping boredom and the banality of every day existence; for example, the habit of creating dramatic and conflictive situations and relationships whereby a person's ego (the picture they have of themselves, how they see themselves) is reinforced further by placing it at the center of a dramatic situation. These dramatic situations are usually based upon roles in which the ego character plays a specific part, usually based upon unresolved, irrational, or even violent situations in the person's childhood in which the person was in a situation beyond their control.

Or commonly, the person will find a substance, such as caffeine, or alcohol, or cigarettes, which alter the chemical structure of the brain that causes a significant enough change in consciousness so the person feels elated, with a sense that they have moved beyond the boredom of every day life and into a perceived sense of greater meaning. Usually, this sense includes a feeling of pleasure.


3) The person develops a habit of use of the substance or behavior pattern, and their psyche becomes dependent upon this habit; in order to achieve this minor transformation they need to have more and more and so the body develops tolerance. The body & mind begins to expect/think that this state is normal, and without the substance (or dramatic behavior) they will not be able to manage properly throughout the day. The mind has come to depend upon the substance in order to sustain the heightened state of ego. The body too comes to perceive of this altered state as the norm, and if the substance is not obtained and ingested, then it begins to think something is wrong. The person may get sick, or uneasy, or their immune system can falter.