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You say:

> I hate this idea that addiction is someone just getting high so they don't have to feel bad feelings, which seems to be the underlying assumption of most discussions.

But then the rest of your comment is a story about your father seemingly doing exactly that. What have I misunderstood here? Not trying to be flippant, I'm genuinely confused.

Yeah, I also found it slightly conflicting. I think the author is probably saying that those bad feels are probably not an answer in themselves but have an underlying cause that often gets overlooked.

I believe the word people generally use is "trauma".

- nightmares and insomnia

- intense negative emotion

both can be caused by trauma.

I have already clarified this detail:

I will also add that suppressing nightmares is about being able to sleep through the night so you can do your job the next day, not necessarily about avoiding negative feelings per se. Plenty of people take sleeping pills and are not characterized as addicts for trying to address their sleep issues so they can function.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28106688

My father worked long, hard hours for a lot of years. He needed his sleep to do so.

suppressing nightmares = avoiding bad memories or past experiences

being able to sleep through the night = experiencing peace artificially

not necessarily about avoiding negative feelings per se = its about avoiding past experiences and not being able to face the 'issues' because you think they will break you or annoy you

I have a serious medical condition that can seriously interfere with my sleep at times. I see absolutely no contradiction in saying "Addiction is not just about avoiding bad feelings" and saying "I think he drank to suppress his nightmares."

Multiple people have told me that's a contradiction and I'm wrong to take that position. It's probably not worth arguing any further and needs to be filed under "We can just agree to disagree on this detail."

I empathize with you and I respect your opinion. You presented a new perspective on this topic.

I really appreciate your comments on this site, this comment and all the other ones that I've seen over the years, because you give a much needed reality check and are articulate and honest.

I do think though, that it is a contradiction to say that. Avoiding nightmares is exactly about avoiding bad feelings. Other people might end up doing it earlier in the day if they don't have anything around them.

> I hate this idea that addiction is someone just getting high so they don't have to feel bad feelings

That's exactly what addiction is. Getting high is just fun.

> I think he didn't need to actively suppress his nightmares anymore after he dropped his retirement papers and no longer had to live in fear

EDIT: There is a sibling comment.

> Avoiding nightmares is exactly about avoiding bad feelings

Why? Perhaps you don't mind the fact that you have nightmares, but they keep waking you up and keep you from being well-rested in the morning? I've had plenty of nightmares that ended with me waking rested in the morning and plenty of ones that made it so sleep was basically impossible after. The latter is worth avoiding, the former might not be. But their nightmare-ness is equally unpleasant.

I struggled with addiction to alcohol and cocaine for a long time. I would not say, at least do feel it’s the case, I was trying to escape. It was fun, and as time when on it was just a thing I did. Eventually my body started feeling it and it took me two years to get clean (I still drink about once a month.) But nowhere along that decade long road did I ever feel like I was escaping my life. I was amplifying it, I can write twice the code on cocaine (I’m already pretty fast) and alcohol is a social thing, I got hooked because it was cool to drink so I drank more than everyone else. I would be the last guy up at a party.

I think the other poster, whether what he said was correct or not, is right that it is a disservice to chalk an addict up to someone escaping life. This removes the majority of drug addicts who got hooked from pain after surgery and now can’t stop, or the ones who could stop but enjoy the feeling it creates. Not all drug addicts are homeless people sleeping on the streets. I have an ex who’s sister runs a chain of stores and she’s a legit meth head, you could never tell though because she does it in moderation and doesn’t look like she takes anything at all.

> write twice the code on cocaine

HN dog whistle? Tell us more.

"Cocaine is a hellof a drug."

Rick James

It wasn’t good code but it worked

My grandfather was similar - he started drinking after he returned home from WW2. He kept the outward appearance of an old-school hard guy, but he was plagued by nightmares and was obviously very disturbed by some of the things he'd seen and done. As kids, we used to love listening to his war stories, but every now and then he had to stop and wouldn't finish a story. As kids, we didn't understand how this seemingly invincible man, who we basically idolised, could have such demons.

He drank heavily for decades - vodka and super-strength lager. As a kid, I don't think I ever once saw him without a can of beer at his side.

One day when I was 16 or so, he ended up in hospital because of his drinking. He decided he would stop drinking - and he just did, having only a single hiccup in the 10 years or so before he died. It was really quite incredible - that must have taken incredible strength and will power after decades of abuse.

I've had my own brushes with drink a long time back, and I fully agree with your reasoning - I think most people that use drink and drugs are able to do so safely and responsibly, and most of those that don't sink into habitual drink or drugs for a reason; trying to ease pain (physical or psychological), make life more bearable, or to escape it altogether.

Someone once told me that just up and quitting alcohol or other things without treatment, drama, etc. was kind of the norm for the generation that fought in WWII. I have also read that Vietnam vets did a lot of drugs while in Vietnam but most of them quit when they returned to the US and did so without any kind of treatment.

Vietnam was really ugly. Women and children were acting as suicide bombers and it was an unpopular war, so we did one-year tours and most people going were about 19 years old (compared to mid twenties for average soldier age in WWII) and you are most likely to die in your first battle. If you survive your first battle, your odds of surviving the war go up.

So there were a lot of people seeing their first battle at a young age and it was a meat grinder. It was ugly even for a war.

>>"I have also read that Vietnam vets did a lot of drugs while in Vietnam but most of them quit when they returned to the US and did so without any kind of treatment."

I have read elsewhere that something that makes a big difference when quitting drugs is change your environment totally. That means, the group of people you spend time with, but maybe, also, work and even home. Moving away to another city or country probably helps.

Frequently, we don't realize to what point we are our environment.

"Change your people, your places and your things" is something I have heard as a recommended best practice for overcoming addiction. I suspect there is some element of psychology involved but probably also physical effects.

It's more or a less a recipe I followed as part of my efforts to address a completely different health issue having nothing to do with addiction. I think we are in the infancy of our understanding of how germs, chemicals, etc. proliferate in our lives and shape them.

And, yes, hopping a flight back to the US and making a clean break with Vietnam -- both the place and the war -- likely helped them make a clean break from their addiction in this case.

Yes but they are really talking about habits/triggers there. They have another saying: "Wherever you go, there you are." The core assumption of twelve-step programs is that the problem is defects of character in the individual.

It's a known best practice. Best practices work well whether or not our ideas about why they work are accurate.

I'm speculating that we don't fully understand why it works and it may be effective for reasons beyond habits/triggers.

> defects of character

Addiction can be a way to deal with problems that you are having, which is incredibly uncharitable to call a "defect of character". There's nothing wrong with using, there's perhaps something wrong with being destructive. Those two things are not at all the same.

That is the terminology used by AA and derived twelve step programs. I didn't say I endorsed their world view.

As these experiments have shown over 40 years ago, animals cease doing opiates when their needs are met.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

The narrative is popular, but if you read the criticism and failure at replication, you'll see the study is far from conclusive.

Not only that but animals can’t fall off the wagon because they don’t control the intake and even if they had the temptations you wouldn’t know

Yup, and imagine seeing all the new people show up and get killed immediately. How that must have effected the way they interacted with people, and how it must have felt to be treated that way when you first show up.

The new people would get you killed if they didn't learn how to avoid dying.

It was apparently an issue in Vietnam, where individuals were rotated in and out of existing units. Units that had bonded over training, death, and suffering - and then a new guy (sometimes a new leader!) shows up. From what I read, people were not always welcoming and this was also a way to avoid becoming attached until after that first battle

> Women and children were acting as suicide bombers and it was an unpopular war.

From my experience with the URSS Afgan war veterans, the problem is not when children and women are trying to hurt you. The post-war nightmares come from you deliberately hurting them in most unimaginable ways. Unimaginable even to the perpetrators after the war finishes.

It was only intended to say in a nutshell "When you have a situation where people think it's appropriate to strap bombs to children, things are extremely ugly."

I didn't really want to go into a whole lot of details. The ugliness of war is not really directly on topic and I try harder than I used to to make my point in a way that shouldn't require trigger warnings.

I think a bigger factor was that we were the good side in WWII and the bad side in Vietnam.

Reminds me of this TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY9DcIMGxMs "Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong", where he asserts that addiction isn't caused by the things we typically correlate with it. I was going to try to summarize, but I don't think I can do it justice. Its not long.

> I think people drink and drug for a reason. We just mostly don't bother to try to figure out what the reason is for this specific person

Absolutely. This is totally in line with what that guy says in the video too.

One thing he says: "The opposite of addiction is connection."

I know that personally, when I have problems that I struggle with and don't feel like anyone in my life can help me with or talk to about them (sadly has happened once or twice in my life), I have a tendency to binge, with anything that provides a brief escape, be it alcohol, drugs, video games, TV series', chocolate. Of course, its never been too bad, severe or long lasting for me, so it hasn't been too much of a problem and I wouldn't claim it comes close to what an alcoholic or heroin addict goes through, but I can at least see how someone might slip into such things, as a distraction from reality. And its usually coupled with a feeling of isolation and loneliness, feeling like you're alone with problems you don't know how to solve. So you hide from them instead. That's the impression I got after thinking about my past situations at least.

> One thing he says: "The opposite of addiction is connection."

Makes a lot of sense - I once read that a defining parameter to determine addiction is how it affects relationships. Addicted people often fight and eschew relationship in favour of their addiction. I am reminded of this often when I see kids fight with their parents about how much time the spend on their phones / tablets / computers instead of doing other activities.

That's interesting and now that you mention it, yeah, that totally makes sense.

"I am reminded of this often when I see kids fight with their parents about how much time the spend on their phones / tablets / computers instead of doing other activities."

To be fair, some parents arent worth connecting with. I'm really happy for you if this isn't your personal experience.

Parental upbringing does obviously affect one's personality, and it is fair to say many addicts do come from dysfunctional families - https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/debunkingaddiction/2020/7... ...

Most families are dysfunctional, to a greater or lesser extent. So many people come from dysfunctional families.

Sure; if the custom in your family when faced with problems is to drink or drug, then it won't be surprising if you take the same approach.

My limited experience of people from flawlessly functional families is that they tend to be - um - boring. I find people's flaws and weaknesses make them more attractive and interesting. YMMV.

I don't necessarily disagree but do you believe most people grow up in a dysfunctional family as outlined in the linked article as you stated?

Like having at least one parent with some issue that leaves the child with trauma? This is most people's experience?

I used to like that video but it hasn’t aged well. The whole opioid epidemic showed how you can make addicts out of lots of people through getting them physically addicted.

Do we know that people affected by the opioid epidemic are not otherwise affected too? For example, given the past experiences that I mentioned previously, I could see how if I had been on opioids at the time, that I could have perhaps become addicted. In general, we're living in a more technologically connected but physically and mentally disconnected lonelier world, I remember reading something here on HN not that long ago about this, it doesn't at all surprise me that many otherwise normal seeming people would be prone to addiction. Most of us don't show our struggles publicly, but we still fight with them. More of us are damaged in some way than we like to admit, we see it often where some person who seemed like they had it together suddenly does something seemingly out of character (like suicide).

Having said that, I don't think its completely contradictory to the video that some level of purely physical addiction can exist too, (I know he doesn't say it, though), just that in the majority of cases there's perhaps a deeper reason. More people on opioids obviously makes a smaller percentage more visible.

But at the end of the day, I'm only speculating either way, I don't know, I'm not a doctor, pharmacist, chemist, psychologist or anyone else who might know, so... grain of salt and all that.

Alcoholism in one person isn't contained to just one person. It affects everybody around them as they need to live with the fallout. An alcoholic will do anything to get their next drink and restricting cash access leads to horrendous consequences sometimes.

When you live with that in childhood then you make sure you don't get exposed to it in adulthood. I drink socially but made sure to marry somebody who hates alcohol. Living with an alcoholic as an adult isn't good for your mental health.

I have a clotting disorder. Factor 5. My blood clots much to easily. Alcohol is a blood thinner. Think long term covid symptoms.

My personal opinion is that many relatives in the family drink themselves to death in effort to feel normal.

On Normal prescription blood thinners my symptoms go away quickly and come back whenever I stop them.

I’m glad you shared this.

A colleague early in my career was badly wounded in Vietnam and was a heavy drinker into the late 90s. It was an escape from physical and mental scars afaik. The experience out a heavy toll on his kids, his 4 wives, and coworkers who had to deal with some of the side effects.

When I met him in the early 2000s, he had turned that aspect of his life around and moonlighted as an addiction counselor. His thought was that he could tell you within 2-3 days who would make it out of a group program — they had to have a reason.

For my friend, his granddaughter’s birth was a wake up call that lit up his motivation. It sounds like for your dad, leaving the army was the trigger.

Several members of my extended family struggled with alcohol - at the time growing up I saw it as a weakness or failure, which I regret. Growing older and gaining more understanding led me to a conclusion similar to yours in the subject.

I'm confused. You wrote both of these:

>> I hate this idea that addiction is someone just getting high so they don't have to feel bad feelings...

>> I think he drank to suppress his nightmares from serving in two wars.

I mean... I thought the dad story was going to contradict that first thing.

I agree with you (I think) that many people use addictions to sooth or avoid unpleasant feelings. I know some people who even admit that's why they do it.

I think my father needed his sleep. I think that was his main goal: Getting enough sleep so he could function.

There likely were other benefits. As another comment here notes, alcohol is also a blood thinner. My father was on blood thinners for many years after being diagnosed with a heart condition and did have a large clot at one point that he could have lost his leg over.

But I think the fact that he apparently began winding down his drinking when he left the military means his primary reason for drinking was likely to manage his fear of being sent back to the front lines. That's not the same thing as avoiding bad feelings per se. It's more like moving stage fright out of your way because your paycheck depends on your performance and you need to perform in the here and now regardless of how you feel.

"Auto-corrupt" wow I'm somewhat upset I didn't think of that first.

Unsurprisingly autocorrect tried to autocorrect it to "autocorrect".

Not sure if it was an autocorrect, but teetotaling is unrelated to tea.

Nope, not autocorrect. My personal deficiency. Thanks for bringing that up. I love learning new things from the many pedants who hang here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teetotalism

Yeah almost closed with a /pedantic tag for a lighter feel. I have enjoyed learning from you also!

There is truth to that. We abuse substances without understanding why. Getting to the root cause of that existential angst is not easy. And I say "abuse" to distinguish between that and physiological dependency. I think the word "addiction" is overused, as most addictive behavior is overindulging and a chronic, negative habit loop.