Written by: Dr. Christopher Ashton, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
There are a few simple adages that are asked of clients. These are the concepts I adopted personally when, at the end of my rope, to allow myself the freedom to explore as unfettered as possible from my prior 15 years in therapy and 12 Step meetings. It’s remarkable, yet fully explicable, how many fractional truths, myths and inaccuracies which seem ‘wise’ along ‘recovery’ journey continue to subvert persons desperately trying to quit. While I have tremendous respect for AA’s mission, principles and members, I needed to quit the program. The constant reminder that I was on thin ice, depending upon my daily relationship with God (who’s existence I’ve always been prone to question at times), as presented ritually at every meeting was highly detrimental. Continually stoking the fires of fear of imminent relapse and the need to stake all on a ‘higher power’ that I barely believed in, helped kindle my continual relapses. I am certain of that in retrospect.
Adage No.1 Try to incorporate this material into a living way
Try to forget, at least temporarily, everything you have been told up to date about addiction because the chances are that it is fundamentally wrong, at minimum inaccurate, even though scattered with some minor truths. In the movie, The Exorcist (1973), the priest warns: ‘the devil will tell you some truths, all in an effort to deceive you.’ Let’s stick to behavioral neuroscience.
Adage No.2 Addiction and alcoholism (which are one and the same disorder) is fundamentally a disorder of decision-making.
The aforementioned ‘switch,’ which is beyond conscious control, is actually making a decision to acquire and consume substances. This fundamental destructive decision over which sufferers and supporters have become powerless, is the neurobiological outcome of a series of preceding deleterious decisions over a lifetime. From seemingly minor to major life decisions over time, the disorder produces progressively worsening life decisions all leading to the seemingly impossible trap from which to escape, addiction.
The sufferer is unable to appropriately assess risk/benefit, costs including energy required to implement, and downstream (hours to days to years) outcomes of ostensibly positive and healthy choices that, somehow, have created a place of hurt in one’s life. One never sees it coming, nor do most persons in the supporting cast of the person who is slowly developing substance use disorder.
This disorder of decision-making casts a wide web encircling the sufferer and accompanying loves, families, friends and often employers in a shared experience of pain and misery. While there may be a notion that something is wrong within the sufferer and persons close, typically, it is only as the disorder progresses to severe that objections are raised in earnest. It is little wonder that many people I have seen with severe addiction have been labeled with a host of other conditions such as borderline or antisocial personality disorder, bipolar disease, depression and anxiety, obsessive compulsive and ADHD.
Only on discovering the immensity of addiction as a primary brain disorder that completely runs the show, can one piece the puzzle together that elegantly explains and is inclusive of all the above apparent ‘concurrent disorders.’
I personally date the intrusion of substance use into my decision-making 15 years prior to actually becoming addicted. Only now do I realize that even though career and family decisions that I made years ago were to satisfy what I believed other people would have praised, not what I truly wanted and suited the person I was and am. People with addiction are full of ‘if I had only’s.’
Adage No.3 There is no ‘one root cause.’
Addiction can be termed a ‘development disorder’ which starts with genetics at birth (and in some heavily afflicted societies such as Native, it could be well argued that in previous generations the genes have already been activated) which are activated over a lifetime. I shall do my best to demonstrate that this disorder is 100% genetic, meaning if one does not have the 35 to 40 genes necessary to create the neural networks which form addiction, it can’t happen.
There is absolutely no sound evidence to pronounce this is 50% environmental and 50% genetic. This implies choice on the basis of the sufferer and asserts blame on others, especially parents, in their early environment. It’s totally incorrect. I’ve witnessed and thoroughly explored the lives of innumerable persons who developed severe addiction. My conclusion: the backgrounds and upbringings vary tremendous from outright traumatic upbrings to near Utopian. Some days I think it’s a miracle anyone survives the savagery of childhood.
In terms of ‘identifying and dealing with the underlying trauma’ which supposedly led to addiction, in some cases this is mandatory but unfortunately detracts for individual understanding of what’s really happening which is a highly complex primary brain disorder.
Adage No.4 Neuroplasticity, the inherent capacity of the brain to change, is the essential principle upon which recovery happens.
It is through deleterious neuroplastic changes that substance use disorder develops and reversion to healthy neural networks in the limbic system does recovery happen. This can, and should, be so dramatic and lasting that addiction can be properly laid to rest as a life experience not a life sentence. Terms in current practice such as a chronic relapsing disease, while often seeming fitting from an observational perspective, are inaccurate.
The process of learning to understand the neurobiology of addiction and what the neuroplasticity of recovery truly means, combined with practical, healthy lifestyle changes is what our program constitutes. Results have exceeded my most hubristic expectations. Follow-up in our program is more about assessing and sharing clients’ life’s new trajectories rather than counting ‘days sober.’
The myriad yet characteristic neuroplastic changes that occur leading to addiction and the path as the brain recovers will form the majority of the remainder of this book. While former clients to whom I am grateful have called it ‘a miracle,’ ‘lifesaving,’ and ‘the secret,’ to me, it’s connecting the scientific dots in a convergent manner which explains virtually every nook and corner of this complex madness.
Dr. Christopher Ashton, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Christopher Ashton is a thought leader and truth seeker in all matters pertaining to improving health in individuals, organizations and populations. Educated in engineering physics, medicine and business finance, Christopher is able to connect the dots in multidisciplinary, complex scenarios in a manner few other persons can. Driven by the belief that answers always exist, he is currently making sense of previously incomprehensible human decisions from an organic, scientific basis. His personal goal, create something so creative and discover new truths worthy of consideration for a Nobel prize.
