This New Theory on Addiction Will Blow Your Mind 🤯

What if everything we know about addiction really is wrong? That's a big problem. Because if what we know about addiction is wrong, then that means all of our solutions are wrong. Or at least mostly wrong. Or at best sort of minimally effective. Well, according to Bruce Alexander, who is the author of a theory or a different viewpoint on addiction called dislocation theory, that is exactly the case and we are going to talk about it in this video and sneak peek. I'm going to tell you, I think that he is probably right about everything that he's saying. So stay tuned and find out why. For those of you who are new here, welcome to Put the Shovel Down. I'm Amber Hollingsworth and this YouTube channel is all about helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can get your family and your life back on track. Get back out there and live the life that you want to live. I want you to know you are not powerless. You do not have to hit rock bottom. And there are many things you can do to help an addicted loved one. If you want to be back in control of your life, subscribe to this channel and I'll make sure you are always five steps ahead of addiction. And don't forget, hit the little bell if you want access to the bonus episod. Okay, I think the best way to start really explaining this is to explain it to you the way Mr. Exam, Mr. Alexander would explain it to you. He talks about the old story of addiction which is kind of our historically like our, our set of ideas and beliefs and theories about what addiction is and how to fix it and, and the new story of addiction. So let's start with the old story. You see, the old ideas about addiction would be that addiction is this sort of disease or illness that you can get because of your genetics and also because these certain chemicals that when you put them in your body, they have these chemical hooks that cause you to become addicted to them. And all of that results in our sort of modern day way of dealing with it, which is by and large the medical model, which is like treatment and medications and mental health therapy and all of that kind of stuff. That's, that's generally the, the widely accepted viewpoint on what addiction is and how to go at it. But Mr. Alexander says that it's really not disease, that the issue of being addicted to heroin isn't because of these chemical hooks involved with the drug itself. It's about something totally different, which actually makes a little bit of sense if we think about it. Right. Because we can get addicted to substances, right? Drugs, alcohol, all that stuff we know. But you can also get addicted to pretty much anything else, right? Like your phone or social media or gambling or gaming or sex or exercise or praying. You can get addicted to all kinds of things. So most of us pretty much already know that and believe that. So that kind of disqualifies the idea that addiction comes from these chemical hooks involved with certain substances. Now, yes, there are. When you put certain substances in your brain, it changes related to those substances, and it causes sort of a domino effect of brain changes that gets you hooked even more. But that's really not what addiction is. It's just not a broad enough definition to really explain the phenomenon of addiction. So Mr. Alexander had or. Yeah, so that Mr. Alexander has this theory that he calls the theory of dislocation. And that's how he explains what addiction is. All right, so you're gonna have to follow me here. This is a whole different way of looking at it. And most of this comes from the rat park studies in the chat. If you have heard of the rat park studies, either give me like the little mouse emoji in the chat or like a thumbs up, or if you're on a desktop and you can just type, just let me know. Have you heard of the rat park studies? I'll give you just a super quick overview just in case you haven't. Okay? So most of us have heard of these studies, maybe took psychology or whatever in high school or college, where they put these rats in these little boxes, and the little rats pressed the lever and got cocaine or heroin or whatever it was until they basically died. Like they chose the drug over food. Well, it's not a great experiment, right? And that experiment really is a big piece of. Where we come up with this idea of these chemical hooks inside of the drug that makes you where you can't stop because you got these little rats in these little boxes and they press the levers and they choose the drug over food, water, and everything else until they die. Here's the problem with that experiment. You got a rat in a box that's barely bigger than the rat like this, right? And there ain't nothing in that box except a lever. What do you think the rat's gonna do, right? Rats are mammals. They're social creatures. They have other emotional needs. If you put people in isolation, guess what happens to them? They go crazy. In fact, all throughout history, like one of the meanest, most cruelest things you could do to a human being is put them in isolation, is outcast Them from society. And in, when you're in jail, which is already the biggest punishment of all punishments, if you're bad in there, what do they do? The ultimate highest level of punishment is to put you in a box with nothing else. That is the ultimate, highest punishment. So if putting rats in these little boxes and giving them nothing but a lever, that's going to give them some drugs, I don't think that's the best way to figure out if why that addiction is happening. Right. Because this is just a big piece of the story missing, which is where the rat park studies come in. So looking at the Skinner box studies, which is the, the rats and little boxes with the leverage, you, you look at that long enough and these scientists, they look at it and they figure out, well, this is a problem because there's nothing else in that box. The rats needs aren't being met very effectively or appropriately. Wonder what would happen if we put rats in, in a more normalized rat environment and then gave them access to drugs? What would they do? So they created this whole elaborate research project and they created these, what they call rat parks, kind of like rat amusement park is what it means. And there's other rats in there and they're social creatures and there's like exercise wheels so they can get their exercise. And there's fun rat toys, all kind of like fun rat things to do where in a normal environment, what it might be like for a rat. And then they introduce drugs. Now they put it in there kind of like if you've had a hamster, you know how the little water bottle hangs on the side of the cage. They put two different water bottles in there. One just has water in it and one has water mixed with like morphine. And the rats could choose to, to use the drug if they wanted at any time, or they could choose to just have the water and the food and all the other stuff. And it really wasn't one or the other. It's like it's all there. You choose. Guess what? Most of the rats didn't even choose to take the drug. Some of the rats still chose to mess with the drug, but none of them did it like ridiculously addictive style. Like they didn't kill themselves because they wouldn't eat or drink or do anything else because they just wanted the drug. So that one study really showed, and it's been replicated over and over again. It's not just like this one time phenomenon thing. It really, really shows us that it's not this chemical hook inside of this drug that's causing addiction, it's something else. And if you, if you just stop to think about it with a little common sense, maybe that something else is what's missing from, for the rat. And then you have the availability of this thing over here, this drug, which does make you feel better. So the drug essentially becomes this coping skill to cope with the lack of everything else. It needs to have a happy, fulfilled rat life or people life. Right? So just looking at that study will change the way you think about addiction. It just sort of turns it upside down. Now, why isn't that study talked about? Well, because you can't really make a lot of money off of that study. And it really challenges the idea of the medical model, treatment of addiction or even the medication assisted treatment models, all that kind of stuff. Because it's, you know, with all that there's easy ways to make money to provide services for people and solutions that are more straightforward. When you look at it from the medical model, when you look at it from the social, emotional, psychological model, it's a lot more complicated. And there's not a lot of money to be made in that by, you know, big pharma treatment centers, all this kind of stuff. Because if it's not just this easy solution, if it's not just this genetic disease, illness, mental illness, it's really a psychosocial problem. That's essentially what Mr. Alexander is saying. And he even goes as far as to say addiction doesn't even occur in certain kinds of situations, like in tribes. And the reason why it's occurring so massively in our current society is because our current society does a. It's like a breeding ground for addiction because it does a terrible, terrible job of allowing humans to get their psychosocial emotional needs met. Now, all right, now you got sort of the big picture, right? Let me introduce a few words for you. I feel like I'm back in my teacher mode. We're going to learn some little vocabulary words here. Okay, so. And I have the link in the description for you. But if you want to really learn about this, you can get Mr. Alexander's book, which I have linked in the description. It's the Amazon link. And that book is called the Globalization of Addiction A Study in the Poverty of Spirit. Now, poverty of spirit, that sounds kind of deep, right? So let's talk about that. What does that mean? It means that poverty means lack of. Right? And spirit is kind of like when a human is not getting their psychosocial or spiritual needs met. We all know humans need Food, water, shelter, air, clothing, right? We learn that in grade school, right? But what we don't learn in grade school is humans actually have a lot more needs than that. We have a need for connection with belonging, meaning and purpose. And when humans don't get those needs met very well, they get sick, they behave differently. And that is what leaves the room for addiction to come and take over. Now, if you think about that makes kind of some sense, right? Because why do some people get addicted to alcohol and some people don't? Why do some people get addicted to pain pills and some people don't? There's a formula that happens. Why do some people get addicted to video games and some people don't? If you take those people who are what. What Mr. Alexander would call dislocated and. And what that means is. It's a. Let's see. I'm going to show. I wrote it down for you because it sounded all fancy. It's a lack of. Lack of, or loss of psychological integration that leads to unbearable despair, emotional anguish, bored bewilderment. Now, you read that definition and you're like, okay, what does psychosocial integration mean? Psychosocial integration is how human beings reconcile or merge our need to belong and have the social part of our life with our needs for autonomy and achievement. And when those things can kind of come together and mesh in harmony, we have psychosocial integration. When it doesn't do that, then we have what is called dislocation, which leads to what he calls poverty of spirit. Are you following me? I know I'm giving you a lot of, like, big, fancy psychology words here, right? But you can follow along, basically, if you're not getting your spiritual needs met as a human being, things don't go right, and it leaves you wide open for addiction to occur. And even in his definition, addiction, he says addiction is a great persistent obsessive desire. Doesn't have anything to do with drugs, alcohol, doesn't have anything to do with disease, illness, nothing. It is this obsessive desire that is the one thing that you can look at any kind of addiction and it is there, right? You can have addiction and not have any substance involved, but this obsessiveness is always there. It's really the cornerstone of what addiction is. And looking at it through this model, what you sort of come to realize is that that obsessive desire, it serves a purpose in your life. And the big purpose it serves is to distract you or help sort of self medicate you or soothe you from the lack of something else. In your life. And in fact, he even goes on to define how that the addiction fills in the gaps for what you really need. Because when you first engage in an addiction, it usually helps you feel more connected and part of a social community, the social community of other users, drinkers, gamers, gamblers. You feel more connected because you're like, oh, this is my tribe of people. So it initially helps you feel more connected to meet that need for belonging. Your purpose in life when you have an addiction is obtaining or engaging in the addictive substance or behavior. That's your whole purpose, your whole life revolves around this addiction. Getting it, having it, recovering from it, withdrawing from it. That is literally your purpose in life. And the meaning comes in with the, with the temporary euphoria or calmness that this addictive behavior or substance brings you. So it actually does sort of meet those human needs. It just does it very, very effectively. Because in the beginning it does meet those needs kind of okay. Like it does an okay job of it. But as the addiction goes on, it, it does that less and less. Because as an addiction goes on, you feel disconnect, disconnected from a social group, from your family, even from other people you know that are like, maybe you're, you're using friends or whatever, that you feel more and more socially isolated and disconnected. Therefore magnifying the whole problem that sets you up to be vulnerable, to have an addiction in the first place. Are you following along with me? Give me a thumbs up in the chat or in the comments if you're following along and if you are in agreement with this way of looking at addiction. Now going back to the old story of addiction, if you follow the old model, which is the disease model, the chemical hooks model, all that kind of stuff, then let's look at that model and how that leads into how we've historically viewed. How do you fix addiction or how do you treat addiction? Well, I'm going to put it in stages for you. Stage one of this old way of thinking about it is we gotta basically punish this person enough until they figure out they need to stop doing that and they're being bad. Now how do we do that? We do that by isolating them, detaching from them, alienating them, shaming them, lecturing them, scalding them, punishing them, allowing the consequences, throwing them in jail. And if throwing them in jail isn't enough, so you throw them in full isolation. Now that is literally what we do to get people to realize that they have a problem. Now think about those things for a second. If I wanted to come up with a formula for how to cause someone to experience dislocation or poverty of spirit. That would be the formula. So everything that we do to help make someone, like, get out of denial or admit that they have a problem is actually worsening the underlying problem. And that's why these techniques or methods are so doggone ineffective. We talk about that on this channel all the time. You know, how do you get someone out of denial? It's not by screaming at them that they have a problem. It's not by reminding them of how they're ruining their life and your life. Because all of those things that we sort of instinctually want to do and even have been told to do most of our lives and even still now by other people, it is. It doesn't work. It makes the problem. Not only does this work, it's just making it worse and worse and worse. Now we do all of those things first in an effort to try to get someone to go to treatment. That's essentially what we. We're going. I'm gonna make your life really, really, really, really hard until you admit it, until you agree to go to treatment. Now let's look at the treatment thing. The treatment thing isn't completely wrong or off. There's a lot of things about treatment that works. But honestly, the working parts aren't really what we think the working parts are. You know, we think the working parts are the doctors and the nurses and the counselors and the social workers and stuff. And. And I'm not saying that those roles are not helpful. But what really happens in almost all of addiction treatment, almost all of addiction treatment is done in groups. Whether you. Doesn't matter what kind of addiction treatment you go to. There are different sort of philosophies or religions, I call it. But almost all of it is done in groups. Now, what's happening in the groups. Being a part of the group in and of itself, literally just being in the group does a better job of resolving this dislocation issue. Right? Because now you are a part of a group now. You belong to this group now. You have a sense of meaning and purpose, Whether that's to conquer your own addiction in the beginning or help other people conquer their addictions. It is literally written into the 12 steps. Why is that working? It's creating a sense of belonging. It's creating a sense of meaning and purpose and connection. It is that community process that's really causing the healing or helping to heal the addiction issue. It's not what is taught in those Groups in the like, where the fancy doctors, they come in, they teach you all the brain stuff. That's not what's fixing it. It's not even the following exactly. Learning all about the 12 steps and doing all the stuff. It is the sense of community, meaning and purpose that's being created as a result of this process. So it's not so much the treatment gets it completely wrong, but if you think about it, that can be done without sending people to $300,000, you know, year long programs too, right? That can be done. That whole sense of community, meaning and purpose. There's easier, more effective, efficient ways to get that job met. Right? We can do that. Not only that, but the other big problem with treatment is you go 30, 60, 90 days, six months, whatever, and then you're done and you out. And then you got to go back out there into the environment that you came from and you're supposed to be fixed and better and you're supposed to make it work. Can you see the whole problem with this way of going about it? It's a problem, isn't it? Right, you're in, we put you in the community, we give you a sense of meaning and purpose. You have a role, your responsibilities. You have consistency. You know, treatment does a lot of good things. Inpatient treatment, residential treatment does a lot of good things to solve some of those problems. It gets you out of the habit, it forces you to stop using that old coping skill. It gets you connected, all those things. But then it has to end. So then it puts you back out, like I said, with your old environment. And you have all the habits, the routines, the temptations to fall back into your old patterns. You don't know where you belong again. Yes, you could find the meetings in your community, but that's kind of intimidating. It's like being the new kid at school. You don't even know where to sit at lunch. And yeah, it can be done, but it's difficult and, and there's just a lot of cracks that people tend to fall through in that process of leaving treatment to back out and creating that whole, all those really important things in their life by themselves. A lot of times people just aren't strong enough yet to be able to create, create those things. And they need some help. And that's why treatment works. You literally are handing it to them on a platter. Here you are, show up right here. You don't have a choice. Talk in this group, do these exercises and it's, it's, it's road mapped out for you, you literally just go through the motions and. And it's. You're doing all the right things that are fixing the issue. But having to do it on your own at home is difficult, especially when you don't even really understand what it was about treatment that worked. If you're a family member and you're watching this and you've ever had a loved one that was in, like, a residential treatment program, you can see it when you show up. Now, the first couple of weeks, you're not going to see it. They can be screaming, fighting, begging, threatening, trying to leave and all that. But after that, you can see it's like, oh, my gosh, they're back. They're great. Like, literally the best version of themselves. You. You visit them and you're like, wow, there they are. That's my son, there's my wife, there's my husband. Like, they're still in there. And you see that they, like, literally come back to life. And then when they go home, you slowly start to see a fall right back into those old patterns. And that's why it's because in the treatment settings, those needs are being met so much more productively. And when they're not in that setting, it's just so easy to fall back into the old ways just for 100,000 reasons, right? So that's how that treatment model just doesn't work. It's not that there's not important sort of pieces of that, but we need to figure out what are the pieces that are really working there. Whether that's in a treatment place or in some kind of community support group. Let's find the pieces that are working and find other ways to give that to people who are struggling with addiction. And even better, even better than that, not only does this give us a way of looking at it and understanding that will help us help people who have addiction help ourselves, but it also, if we can take this information about what is causing addiction, we could do a much, much, much better job if we really change things, of preventing it now, right now, what do we do to prevent addiction? We have people go into schools and teach kids about drugs and how they're bad and all that kind of stuff. Guess what? That's not working. It never worked. It's still not working. It's a waste of time and energy. If we did a better job of helping people to have a sense of community, belonging, meaning and purpose, that right there, the helping people connect and belong, that is what is really going to prevent people from developing an addiction. You're really going back and you're looking at the precursors, what's making someone vulnerable to developing the addiction. So you're like, you're going back further than just looking at the drugs, the alcohol, the gaming, you know, which parents are like, only let your kid have, you know, this much screen time and don't let them play these videos games and don't let them hang out, you know, go these places because they can get drugs. It's, it's like you're trying to prevent addiction by preventing access to the things that they could get addicted to. When a better way to prevent addiction is to address the issue that might make the person vulnerable to addiction. Now, when you think about this, this, all this goes hand in hand, fits perfectly with everything that I'm trying to teach you on this channel about how to help yourself or how to help a loved one, right? Because what do we teach? We teach you to have empathy for your loved one. We teach you how to help connect that relationship back. When you can help a person resolve some of these underlying issues, then they have less and less need to cling to that addiction, which gives them the room and the space and the ego strength to be able to admit that, yeah, this probably isn't the most effective thing for me actually doing this is not helping me anymore. They can begin to see that that thing that they're doing, that behavior or that substance isn't all that great and it's not helpful. But as long as we're pushing this person away and we're screaming and we're isolating, we're doing all the things that we're told to do, they're going to cling to that because it is literally their only life wrath when they feel like they're drowning. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that there is. We, we should never disconnect from someone has addiction. There are points in this process that if you don't disconnect, you're just going to drown with them. And I have videos on that. I think the video that came out just this past week is, you know, when do I need to disconnect from someone that has an addiction? There are times when we need to do that, but it's not really based on we have to do that because that's what they need in order to get better. Which is historically the thinking, right? It. The historically the thinking is this is like this tough love model, this like push the person away model. And that's going to make them wake up and get it. No, it is not going to make them wake up and get it. It is going to make them cling to the addiction even harder. Punishment does not cure addiction. Alienation does not cure addiction. All of those things only make it worse. However, there are times when you do need to do that. Otherwise you are going to drown with them. Because not only does the addiction create more of the problem that left the hole there to begin with, but it. But their addiction starts to create all of those same things inside of you. Right then you feel a lack of connection, meaning, purpose, belonging. And your whole purpose then becomes trying to get this person fixed. And it can make you really, really, really sick. And that's where we get into all these sort of ideas of addiction as a family, you know, issue and codependency and all that kind of stuff. All that kind of stuff is true. So I'm not saying that you should never disconnect. At some point, if someone is drowning and you can't help pull them up, and all that's going to happen is you're both going to drown or one of these going to drown, you gotta. You gotta choose to get yourself in the lifeboat. So I'm not saying that you should let someone treat you terribly, because when you have an addiction, not only you hurt yourself, but you hurt everyone around you. That's just the trut truth of it. That's not like blaming or judging. It's just the truth of it. And that's why it's such an ineffective way to get your needs met for belonging, meaning, and purpose. All right, everybody, thank you so much for joining me. If you would like to help this channel continue with its purpose, then check out. If you're watching on Facebook, check out the description below and it will show you all the helpful things that you can do to help us continue to reach other people. Our goal is to spread recovery faster than addiction. Addiction is spreading. And as always, there are additional resources. For those of you who are new here, welcome to Put the shovel down. I'm Amber Hollingsworth, and this YouTube channel is all about helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can get your family and your life back on track. Get back out there and live the life that you want to live. I want you to know you are not powerless. You do not have to hit rock bottom. And there are many things you can do to help an addicted loved one. If you want to be back in control of your life, subscribe to this channel and I'll make sure you are always five steps ahead of addiction. And don't forget, hit the little bell if you want to.