Does ADDICTION Really CHANGE Your PERSONALITY? | Amber Reacts To Reddit

Welcome back to Put the Shovel Down, the YouTube channel designed to help you understand the science and psychology of addiction from all perspectives so that you can get your life and your family back on track. I'm Amber Hollingsworth, and today we're going to dive into 2 very powerful Reddit stories that highlight the chaos, heartbreak, and transformation that come with addiction. These stories are raw and real, and honestly, they're going to hit you right in the feels. The first story is a husband who's grappling with the devastating changes in his wife's personality after years of heavy drinking and drug use. It's heartbreaking how addiction can completely alter someone you thought you knew and the ripple effects it has on the entire family. The second story is from someone who's been sober for about 3 months and are reflecting on the insane mental gymnastics they used to justify their drinking. It's a brutally honest glimpse inside the mind of someone in active addiction and the lingering echoes of those habits even in sobriety. We're going to unpack these stories together and talk about the deeper truths that they reveal and explore what they can teach us about addiction, recovery, and the resilience of the human spirit. Here's story number 1. Do alcohol and drugs vastly change someone's personality even when they're sober? Please forgive my ignorance when it comes to this subject. Does alcohol and drugs vastly change someone's personality even when they're sober? My wife started drinking heavily about 8 years ago, and it's been slowly getting worse. Drinking more and starting earlier, and then she started smoking. And when they legalized marijuana here, she started smoking pot every day as well, to the point where she now spends anywhere between $1,000 and $1,500 a month on all three combined. In the past, whenever I've approached her about it, she gets mad and says she's in a bad place with her depression, and thanks for not understanding and making her feel worse. She suffered from depression and been on the different meds ever since I've known her. Then about a year and a half ago, I got diagnosed with cancer, and she returned home from a trip and told me she'd had enough and didn't love me anymore and wanted out. But the whole thing was just very out of character for her. We've been married 25-plus years. We had our problems just like everyone else, but there was never any sign she stopped loving me until then. We decided I would stay in the house and live in the basement suite. So I could be around the kids and because we really couldn't afford another place. We live in one of the most expensive cities in North America. Rent is crazy here and houses start at about $1.5 million for a shack. I know it's over, which is fine. I've come to terms with it. She doesn't even want to get counseling or anything. I just can't help but wonder if it was something she thought I'd done or if someone's personality can change that much. She's a totally different person than before she started all this. This is a really great question and honestly a common sentiment from anyone who's ever been married to an alcoholic. It doesn't happen all at once, but eventually you wake up and you realize that this person isn't the same as the person that you married. They're negative, anxious, and when they are drinking, you never know what's going to happen. So my answer to the question, does drugs and alcohol really change someone's personality that much, is a giant yes. And there's lots of reasons for that. Let's talk about just a couple of them. First and most importantly are the biological brain neurochemical impacts that alcohol and other drugs have. When you're drinking or using drugs, you get a flood of neurochemicals that most people like, like dopamine. And in the case of alcohol, you get some like dopamine and GABA and other neurochemicals that make people feel good. But the rebound effect is a backlash of neurochemicals that people typically don't like to feel. They make you feel anxious, irritable, and discontent. Not only that, but you got to layer on the top of the fact that when you're drinking particularly, it basically turns the volume way down on your frontal cortex. Yeah, that's the part of your brain that is responsible for judgment, critical thinking. I like to call it your filter. So the volume is turned way down, maybe even muted on the part, on that part of your brain, which means the emotional part of your brain is running the show and there's absolutely no filter. Can you imagine if you didn't any filter and every thought or emotion you had came right out? Well, that is exactly what happens to someone who's intoxicated. So you've got this person who's alternating between being completely unfiltered when they're intoxicated and then anxious, irritable, and discontent when they're not. Eventually it creates this filter that changes the way they see everything happening to them pretty much all the time because they're either intoxicated, which changes the way they perceive The environment, and it's most certainly going to have an effect on how they feel about the people in their life, especially the main person in their life, like their partner. In almost all of these situations, the partner becomes the villain. They're not really the villain, but the person with the addiction definitely sees them that way because this main person is the one that's seeing the behind the scenes of what's really happening. So they're the ones throwing up all the flags, saying something about it, trying to get you to address it. Which comes across to the person struggling with alcohol or drugs as critical, controlling, and negative. So when you layer on the top the fact that psychologically they put you in the villain role, and that happens almost every single time there's an addiction, and all the neurochemical effects that are going on, you can see how it would completely change someone's personality. If you've ever been in a relationship with someone with an addiction, I would love to hear from you. How did it change their personality? But just before we move on to story number 2, don't forget to subscribe. It helps us spread the message of recovery. All right, let's look at number 2. This story is titled, You Don't Realize How Truly Insane Some Aspects of Alcoholism Are Until You Get Sober. 3 months in after drinking way too much for way too long. Recently, I got sick and haven't eaten much, so I threw up stomach acid because I was nauseous and my stomach was empty. You know, it was pretty unpleasant, and it's crazy to me that I used to do this every single morning when I was drinking. Wake up, chug enough water to dilute the stomach acid, and I know I'm going to throw up. Hopefully I make it to the bathroom before vomiting. Aforementioned stomach acid. Brush teeth, get dressed, and start my day. The mental hoops you have to jump through to brush all that off as if it were nothing and keep getting fucked up every night is insane. Like telling yourself, I need to eat less seed oils. No, brother, you need to stop slamming a pint of alcohol every night. It had me thinking of other insane shit I'd do regularly while I was drinking. My wife and I would be watching a movie on the couch. She would get up to use the restroom. As soon as the door closed, I would practically sprint to where I hid my bottle so I could chug a few sips and hopefully return to my original sitting position before I heard the toilet flush. Effing insane, right? That still pops in my head now while sober. When she gets up, I still think, now's your chance to go, go, go. But I don't act on it because that's insane and because I don't keep booze Who's in the house? This post has no point really. Just thinking about how I used to be and feeling a bit embarrassed. I love this story because it is a, it's this little micro glimpse of what everyday life is like to be struggling with an addiction. To be honest, it's pretty much misery, psychological, emotional, and physical. A lot of times when I'm talking to a new client and they're describing to me what's going on, how they've been living their life, all this stuff, I get this mental image in my head of someone like they're standing on a ball, juggling knives, and got plates balanced on their nose. I call it the addiction tap dance. This juggling act sort of slowly builds up over time and it becomes your new normal. And because it happens sort of slowly over time, you don't really even realize how bad it is. And they mentioned having thought, I need to eat less seed oils. That is so spot on. The rationalizations, the justifications that keep you in denial are so powerful. I've been helping people with addictions for more than 20 years now and Still, every time I sit with a new client and the problem is so painfully obvious and they just can't see it, it absolutely blows my mind. And I've seen it hundreds of thousands of times. If you want to learn more about how denial works and how to get someone out of denial, I'm going to put a couple of playlists up here for you so you can take a look at my videos specifically on that topic. And if you have a loved one that's a functional alcoholic and you're trying to figure out how to get through to them, then check out our Motivation Unlock Challenge. I'll put the link in the description below.