We should be cautious not to confuse the trees for the forest—the manifestation for the underlying process, the symptom for the cause. There are no new disorders here, only new targets for the universal and age-old addiction process, new forms of escape.

If deprived of the drug, the user goes into withdrawal partly because the diminished number of receptors can no longer generate the required normal dopamine activity: hence the irritability, depressed mood, alienation and extreme fatigue of the stimulant addict without his drug: this is the physical dependence state discussed in Chapter 11. It can

Thus addiction to opiates like morphine and heroin arises in a brain system that governs the most powerful emotional dynamic in human existence: the attachment instinct. Love.

“We need to talk about what drives people to take drugs,” the famed trauma researcher Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has said. “People who feel good about themselves don’t do things that endanger their bodies…. Traumatized people feel agitated, restless, tight in the chest. You hate the way you feel. You take drugs in order to stabilize your body.” That

Carl Rogers described a warm, caring attitude, which he called unconditional positive regard because, he said, “it has no conditions of worth attached to it.” This is a caring, wrote Rogers, “[that] is not possessive, [that] demands no personal gratification. It is an atmosphere [that] simply demonstrates I care; not I care for you if you behave

In the absence of compassionate curiosity, any such admission brings up too much shame.

Although we may believe we are acting out of love, when we are critical of others or work very hard to change them, it’s always about ourselves. “The alcoholic’s wife is adding to the level of shame her husband experiences,” says Anne, a veteran of AA. “In effect, she is saying to the addict, he is bad and she is good. Perhaps she is in denial

The point is that, as in the parenting my children received, our best is circumscribed by our own issues and limitations. In most cases, those issues and limitations originated in our childhoods—and so on down the generations.

Endorphins have been well described as “molecules of emotion.”