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Old 02-14-2011, 07:40 AM
  # 30 (permalink)  
Thumper
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Join Date: Aug 2009
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How did you feel empowered by it and how did it help in your healing?
I felt fundamentally flawed in many ways. I felt unable to love and be loved in a true sense. I didn't really understand it. While my childhood was not perfect there was not a lack of love so I'm not on any extreme end of the curve.

When I began learning about codependency I was able to see that I was not fundamentally flawed. I was approaching life in ways that were unhealthy. I have thought patterns and coping mechanisms that are not healthy. I was attempting to meet my needs in ways that did not work, at all. I can change those. They are not hard wired personality traits. I can understand myself and set myself free of the roles that I lived in, I can work at and become a healthy person. I do not think I would have ever done that had I not learned about co-dependency and identified myself as being co-dependent.

Yes, addiction can be biological, but addiction is really a side effect of something biologically misaligned.
Whether someone is a food, sex, drug of booze addict, these are all addictions which are side effects from something deeper.
I don't differentiate addictions
I believe that addictions manifest differently in different people. Some people are self-medicating an underlying issue - I do believe that. I also believe some people are just partying to much and find themselves addicted. The addiction itself creates other issues. Some people like the affects of being drunk (or stoned, or high, or whatever) - even if they have no mental issues at all. Others do not. If addiction results from a biological misalignment, then I believe that it can begin with only that for some people. For other people it may be a psychological basis. Certainly non-drug addictions have a strong psychological basis. I don't think there is any one answer.

I truely believe that some people become alcoholics really fast and easy, not necessarily because they have mental issues. It just happens. IME others can drink really abusively and for all the wrong reasons, for a very long time, and escape alcoholism. That more then anything is my basis for believing there is a strong biological basis for some people. You got it or you don't.

I also really believe that some people do have 'mental issues' that put them at extremely high risk of addiction problems, regardless of physical biology, so I agree with you there. Studies proove that.
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