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The Psychology of Avoidance in Alcoholism

9 Feb 2024 · 1 min

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Amber Hollingsworth (speaker) explains how people with addiction often avoid conversations about their drinking by deflecting and acting angrily — what she calls the "porcupine effect" or "puffer fish" behavior. She describes this as a learned strategy: the person becomes spiky and aggressive to train others not to confront them, driven by shame, guilt, and a hope to fix things alone.

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They're an addict or an alcoholic, but they deflect it. They're probably not admitting it to you at this point, but they're probably in their own head sort of knowing it, but they're going to deflect it. And a big common way that people deflect it and when I say deflect it I mean like avoid the conversation is that they'll act angry at you if you bring it up. It's like the porcupine effect or the puffer fish. They blow up, they get spiky, they get nasty, they get ugly. And they start to train you that if you bring it up, if you confront me, if you say something's an issue, I'm gonna act so ugly and so nasty that you're gon regret bringing that up. And there's reasons for that. The person feels shameful, they feel guilty. They're probably still holding on to some little bit of hope that they can turn it around on their own.