Understanding Addiction

Hi All. I just got back from a week in the French Alps. I know: poor me. But I spent the first day trying to snow-board, and fell on my ass with bone-jarring impact about once a minute. And I thought I was past the suicidal thing… But while I was away, my US publicist […] (Read the rest.)

Last post, I emphasized an assumption of incompleteness as the foundation of craving. This feeling was referred to by readers as a hole, or pothole, or just plain lacking something. There is a lot to that, for those of us who put things (like booze or drugs) into us, in order to fill us up. […] (Read the rest.)

I have been thinking a lot about craving lately. What is craving, really? What’s it all about? Craving seems to amount to a fundamental sense of being incomplete. When we crave, we want something to fill us up. We want to fill a hole, by taking something out there in the world and putting it […] (Read the rest.)

Okay, where were we? Ego fatigue. The empty-tank syndrome, losing your resolve when you’ve been trying too hard or for too long or both. The comment thread has been really valuable: Many of you know exactly what this feels like. And we seem to recognize that this phenomenon is critical when it comes to relapse. […] (Read the rest.)

There were a lot of comments on my last post. Any of us who have been there know about the pivot point, and some readers felt that this was a critical moment, a key to the whole cycle of addiction and readdiction. I gave it a name, ego fatigue, from the psychological literature. And I promised another […] (Read the rest.)