psychiatric hospital where I was the medical director. He had a magnificent talent for reaching addicts, and I had the pleasure of watching him develop into a consummate professional. It was actually his frustration with how addicts and their treatments were being portrayed in the press that motivated us to agree to participate in a new reality program that came to be known as Celebrity Rehab. If you’ve seen it, Bob is the cool, smart guy often wearing glasses and a smile, with a fedora parked atop his mop of red hair.
This is the kind of remarkable thing I see all of the time: Someone who seems to be a goner reappears, having come back—way back—from the brink of insanity and death to create a highly productive and contented life for themself. These are not just random success stories. Those who are in long-term recovery are like missionaries returned from an archetypal journey of suffering and loss, self-discovery and redemption.
I still learn something new every day about the disease of addiction. For example, a friend of mine who was eight years sober admitted to me one time that, despite his life having blossomed in recovery, “I haven’t found anything I love as much as drugs and alcohol.” That got me thinking about the insidious power of this disease and how, to give up something you love more than anything, you must be deeply motivated beyond belief. How many so-called normal people could face this sort of dilemma and summon the inspiration to wrestle for the rest of their lives with such a powerful demon until it goes into hiding and stays there?
Now you have a glimpse at why addicts intrigue me so much and why I have spent so much time trying to understand the biology of addiction. Addicts are remarkable human beings, and we all have a lot to learn from them.
Take a look at many great poets, artists, and even some of our most famous leaders. Often they are drug and alcohol addicts. Many fighter pilots, extreme athletes, race car drivers, and others who test the limits of endurance are addicts. They are at their best in extremely intense situations.
Why is that? What makes them better survivors? How can many of them continue to function despite parts of their brains being usurped by this disease of addiction? What life skills must they master and from what emotional well must they draw to finally break free? These are some of the questions you will find answers to in these pages.
When Christopher Kennedy Lawford first told me he was researching and writing a book about the “gifts” of addiction and what lessons society can learn from addicts, I knew this was something I would want to read.
In What Addicts Know, Chris takes a fascinating look at a completely overlooked subject. It is an important, life-changing book, one that deserves to be widely read and long remembered.
—DR. DREW PINSKY
A huge percentage of the recovering drug addicts I know seem to have a few things in common, other than their disease: intelligence, creativity, individualism, humor, and, yes, they all seem to have or have once had enormous amounts of ambition.
—KRISTEN JOHNSTON
in Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster
I’ve dealt with a wide variety of individuals afflicted with the disease of addiction, and in my estimation they are the most interesting, fascinating, and gifted people I’ve come across. They are also the most challenging; addicts are deviously manipulative and self-absorbed. Their illness causes suffering and pain for themselves, their loved ones, and the rest of society. Yet from their struggle comes an opportunity for all.
Recovery is about exposing and healing the darker sides of being human. And honing the skills necessary for sustained recovery from addiction reveals a life-enhancing recipe that can benefit everyone. From the darkness come exquisite, profound gifts.
People who get punched in the face by the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of addiction for decades and who live to tell about it are remarkable human beings on many levels. They are not just survivors, they are teachers. And it’s time we all paid closer attention to what they have to teach us about human well-being.
“What does the word ‘recovery’ mean? What do you get back when you recover? It is yourself,” Dr. Gabor Maté told me. Maté is the Canadian physician who authored In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. “There is always a loss of self before addiction starts, either from trauma or childhood emotional loss,” said Maté.
We lose that sense of self in childhood. A child cannot soothe her own pain and an infant cannot soothe his own distress. That movement outside of our self for answers is a very natural human movement. We always think something from the outside is the answer. So we use more substances, try to acquire more things, try to achieve more and more. A lot of people who aren’t considered to be addicts have the pattern of addicts. Who in our society isn’t cut off from themselves? Who doesn’t use behaviors to give temporary relief from stress and then can’t give up those behaviors? Addiction, or the capacity to become addicted, is very close to the core of the human experience. An addict’s recovery of self is a model for everybody in our culture.
That is what this book is ultimately about. Whether or not you are or have ever been an addict, whether or not you know addicts—in fact, even if you consider yourself hopelessly normal and not prone to any kind of addiction or seriously bad habits—you are still at risk and will benefit from the advice in these pages. Before you snicker with skepticism or indignation, let me tell you why I think this is true.
As a culture we’ve become addicted not only to gambling, drugs, alcohol, and the other usual suspects, but also to technology, the acquisition of material possessions, and every conceivable promise of instant gratification. More is better has become society’s mantra. We eat more, spend more, take more risks, and abuse more substances . . . only to feel more depressed, unsatisfied, discontent, and unhappy. You may know these symptoms firsthand, or recognize them in the lives of the people you care about.
What we are usually left with is the throbbing emptiness that sets in when the fixation on more brings us nothing but more of the same old feelings of want. Consequently, most of us will do or try just about anything to escape the recurrent stress, frustration, discomfort, and boredom. Those are the warning signs on the road leading to the cliff of addiction and social dysfunction.
We’ve entered an unprecedented period in human history, a period where technology dominates our waking thoughts and actions, and even our dreams. Smart phones, tablets, and computers; social media and the Internet—all have given rise to an entire new category of dependency and addiction. “There’s just something about the medium that’s addictive,” said Stanford University School of Medicine psychiatrist Elias Aboujaoude in a 2012 Newsweek interview. “I’ve seen plenty of patients who have no history of addictive behavior—or substance abuse of any kind—become addicted via the Internet and these other technologies.”
Brain scans support the observation that if you are a technology addict, you feel functionally unable to quit. You may not want to believe it, but the brains of technology addicts resemble those of drug and alcohol addicts—their prefrontal cortexes have been fundamentally altered, and abnormal changes are evident in brain areas that govern decision-making, attention, and self-control.1
IS ADDICTION THE NEW NORMAL?
Once you realize that the brains of technology and other addicts are different from those of non-addicts, you can’t rationally continue believing
