A habit merits the term “addiction” when it costs you more than it’s worth; when you try to stop it, but find you can only put it “on pause” for a short while; and when you find your thinking (especially your judgment) is distorted by the high priority you place on repeating the habit. Another criterion is perhaps less important because it’s outside you, but it can be very important indeed: when multiple neutral or friendly people tell you they think you have a problem—especially if they haven’t spoken to each other about it beforehand. 

In an excellent book called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (2010), Gabor Mate argued that addictions have their roots in early trauma. He tells the story of the thousands of American soldiers who fought in the war in Vietnam, which at that time was part of the “golden triangle,” a geographical area that produced a large share of the world’s heroin supply. U.S. troops coped with horrific levels of combat trauma, including guilt/moral-injury; anxiety, uncertainty, and fear; bereavement and loss; the shock of seeing so much injury and death; and the various physical wounds, ruined health, lost limbs, and so on. Many became habitual heroin users. But when they came home, it turned out that for the most part, the soldiers who remained stuck in heroin addiction were those who had suffered childhood trauma, long before the war. The others were able to drop the habit, though heroin is perhaps the most addictive substance on Earth. 

Not every addict has a trauma background. But most do, and when you meet one who apparently does not, you can’t be certain they have (or have shared) a full knowledge of their own relevant personal history. While many different kinds of trauma can happen to a kid, the CDC lists a few of the big ones in its online material about Adverse Childhood Experiences (or “ACEs”):

Experiencing violence, abuse, or neglect.

Witnessing violence in the home or community.

Having a family member attempt or die by suicide.

Substance use problems.

Mental health problems.

Instability due to parental separation.

Instability due to household members being in jail or prison.

They add “not having enough food to eat, experiencing homelessness or unstable housing, or experiencing discrimination.”

This painful picture of deep human suffering should not be taken as a portrait of an “average addict,” since there’s no such entity. And what amounts to trauma is not actually the stuff that happens to somebody, but how it’s experienced. The mystery of resilience has to do with the kid’s temperament, circumstances, culture, and especially the interpersonal supports that did or did not keep the situation from being even worse. There are people who endured every ACE listed here, who have never been addicted to anything. And there are others who had only one or two of these to deal with, and in adolescence or adulthood became dependent on one or more substances or behavioral habits that cost them dearly. 

The difference is not a moral one, and there is no rational calculus about who had it worse, or who went on to put up the best fight against addiction or depression or anxiety. These pseudo-questions involve impossible apples-and-oranges comparisons and fictitious quantifications of how bad different childhoods were. The feelings are most important; the facts matter, too; but the measurements of them are largely illusory. The reality of trauma has to do with what happened inside the child: what the bad stuff meant to him or her. If parents are neglectful or abusive, a kid will infer that young person in the mirror is deeply flawed, and deserved the bad experiences. But if the same kid also has a benevolent art teacher, a well grounded mentor, a kind and wholesome uncle who is reliable and interested, sane and warm—the kid may be protected from drawing that toxic conclusion about the self, and grow up less susceptible to addiction, to cults, to swindles, to sadomasochistic attachments, and so on.

The trauma theory of addiction is the profound claim that we mammals, we primates, we human beings, have universal evolutionary needs for nurturance and protection, and when these go unmet, or are met with harm mixed in, addiction often results. The person seeks out whatever will soothe away the pain of neglect and/or abuse from long ago. Usually, it’s pain from very long ago: infancy is the first love relationship we ever have, the mother-baby dyad that sets the emotional foundation for the whole lifespan. Even if things don’t go relatively wrong until later in childhood, it’s the inner baby part-of-self within the older kid that’s most overwhelmed. Freud taught that each of us is all the ages he or she has ever been, so the baby who craves a substitute for the warm and milky breast is actually still active inside the active addict, running the show—which is why the addicted adult can be found making such poor decisions. A brilliant, short book by Abraham Twersky, Addictive Thinking (1997), spells out what that kind of cognitive distortion can sound, look, and feel like. 

But acute or chronic trauma need not be the only reason for addiction, and often there is a very useful significance to the person’s particular “drug of no choice,” as it’s sometimes called in twelve step culture. For example, with or without the expectable ACEs, people who have uncontrolled habits of excessive sexuality may be trying to prove to themselves that they are indeed attractive sexual beings, capable of evoking erotic participation from others. Boys who were repeatedly rejected by the girls they hoped to kiss—and that’s most boys, who mature more slowly than girls tend to do—can grow up with a lot to prove. Many spend their late teens, twenties, and even their thirties struggling to establish that they are not icky “involuntary celibates” who will never find a mate (even if the guy himself is now the only person who sees him that way). If they can do this without deception, and without heaps of gender-based resentment, and without excessive risks to physical and mental health, they may manage to accumulate enough sexual experience to falsify their own worry about it. They can be fortunate enough to realize one day that they have indeed established what they were so desperate to establish. Now they are free to let go of the pattern that looked like, or really was, “sex addiction.”

Shopping addiction can be like that, too. I’ve said “people with uncontrolled habits of excessive sexuality may be trying to prove to themselves that they are indeed attractive sexual beings.” Well, people with uncontrolled habits of excessive consumerism may be trying to prove to themselves that they are indeed successful participants in the world of consumption, including the spells cast by advertising. Ads comprise a powerful technology of conscious and unconscious persuasion that links people’s self-esteem to their capacity to get hold of whatever product or service is being defined as beautiful, validating, and necessary. If I succumb to this, my identity will be bound up with my ownership of the bag, the boots, the car, the designer version of whatever I’ve been convinced I need.

Insofar as this is true of somebody in particular, that person’s sobriety will have a lot to do with identity: achieve an internal locus of value, and you can also build up an internal locus of control that defeats the addiction. When a person suddenly comes into a sum of money, a lot can be learned by watching how they spend it: the speed of the spending, but more importantly, the buying choices they make. If you are making large purchases of “designer stuff,” you might be an erudite connoisseur of fine handbags and their nuanced history since the year 1588. But it’s more likely you are buying an Hermes bag for $9,850 because that is what the surrounding culture told you was important, valuable, and above all, validating for the identity of the buyer. It is, ultimately… a bag.

A designer purse like that “says” plenty, but just what it says depends on the wisdom of the beholder. The message can range from “look, I am successful, you would be fortunate to share sex, love, friendship, or business with me” to “look, I cannot think for myself, and remain profoundly naive about the available better uses to which money can be put.” Those uses include appropriately limited altruism, where you get good feelings by helping others who need help; buying experiences (especially travel, but also course-taking, conference-going, skill-building, etc.) rather than things; connecting to the past and to the globe by acquiring works of art that speak to you; funding ambitious projects that you find fascinating and beneficial to the communities of which you count yourself a part; and so on.

I know brilliant, beautiful, accomplished people who collect high-end designer handbags. I see it as an expression of their aesthetic enjoyment of these exquisite objects. I also see it as a mechanism of compensation for early experiences of having to do without the goods that other kids had. If your peers in elementary school and middle school and high school all wore flashy stuff and drove expensive bikes, while you wore hand-me-downs and walked to school without wheels, you might well benefit from disproving the worry that they are blessed and deserving while you are deprived and unworthy. And the collectors I’m thinking of are at least as psychologically sophisticated as I am; they know all about their own formerly unconscious motivations for spending “real money” on glam and bling. But they do it anyway, and apparently it serves them well. Rather than judging anybody for buying or selling luxury goods, I am commenting on some of the common underlying dynamics that contribute to habitual choices which can come to feel quite unfree.

And that’s the issue with therapy for troublesome habits: is the habit a free and informed choice? Is it an addiction, or would we get better results framing it as a mere habit that needs tending? The more it costs you—in money, time, opportunity, relationships, access, etc.—to continue with the habit, the easier it is to decide that you must stop. The less it costs you, the more reluctant you or I will be to use the term “addiction,” or recommend 12-step programs, or insist that only abstinence will constitute recovery. Mild addictions to substances or behaviors can be addressed with a commitment to “harm reduction.” Someone who drinks a few times a week but does not lie about it, nor have blackouts, nor have a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality change when they’re intoxicated, is probably a person who can reduce drinking by, say, 65% without too much struggle. But if it turns out to be a big struggle, then the language of addiction might be very useful for getting hold of the habit and changing it.

If you’re dealing with repeated behaviors that you suspect are costing you too much in money, time, peace of mind, or otherwise, consider booking a session with me. We can join forces to help you figure out your relationship to the habit in question, and find the best ways to change for the better—guided by your values and goals.

Email me through the contact form on this website, or call 917-873-0292.

This post is addressed to people who (a) currently live in the world of sex-positive dating, which often includes kink and polyamory, and who (b) have begun to feel that all this sex and sociality is fun, but that Romantic Love is missing, and its absence matters more and more. Hence the title: “Moving from Sex-Positive Dating to Seeking a Relationship.” 

Yes of course, those two things can be the same. It is indeed possible to keep on “playing in the scene” and eventually manage to meet somebody within it who also wants to find an enduring, central love. Sex-positive social politics: check. 

Having said that, let’s notice the equally obvious truth that living a lifestyle of erotic adventurism and searching for a Primary Partner can be two very different things. And if you think you might want to attempt a permanent monogamous commitment with somebody awesome who feels uniquely suited to your nature, then they’re very different things.

Let’s draw on Greek mythology for a moment, to explain this in a more vivid way. What you’ve been doing is sampling the erotic individuality of a large number of people, and in pagan terms (which will likely suit you better than the relatively sex-negative monotheist worldview), that’s like living in a valley presided over by Aphrodite, the Goddess of sexuality and thrilling infatuation (also known, in the poly world, as NRE, “new relationship energy”). Since you’re also prioritizing consent, Aphrodite shares the place with Artemis, protector of women and girls. Wonderful.  

But where is Hera? She’s the Goddess of marriage, of long-term reliable continuity, of compatibility and all the wisdom we only really learn by voyaging deep into that other region that includes commitment, time, aging, and death. It’s where you get to really know someone else, and be really known. So it is also the place where someone’s feelings about you mean the most, because they’re based on the fullest knowledge of what and who you actually are: they really know you, and instead of running away, or friend-zoning, or attacking… they bring you acceptance, loyalty, and desire. And they let you know them just as deeply, and if it goes well enough, the whole thing becomes gloriously mutual. Well, that’s where Hera presides; that’s her realm, located somewhere over there, beyond Field and The League and Fetlife, beyond all those apps and “play parties.”  

There are two different metaphorical voyages involved: the second voyage is the LTR (Long Term Relationship) itself. But to reach its starting point, you must make the voyage that comes first, out and away from what you’re now doing and being (the nasty term for it, if you’re a man, is “fuckboy”—but such slut-shaming is quite unnecessary, especially if your Ethical Non-Monogamy has indeed been ethical, not deceptive), and into Hera’s country, where meeting Ms-or-Mr Right becomes much more likely, for inner and outer reasons.  

This first voyage is what I’m talking about, and what makes it difficult are the uncertainty and the rejections. You don’t know how long it will take, or exactly how best to go about each particular piece of it. And each encounter has four basic possibilities: you like them and they don’t like you, which is rejection, your least favorite. Or they like you and you don’t like them, which is disappointment; better than rejection, but awkward and boring. Or neither of you is interested, which is usually a bit better still, since nobody is hurt. Or the jackpot is hit, the gimmel on the dreidl: you like each other. 

Now I’m going to say something you already know. Why? Because the point is not to convey information, but to calm the anxious part of you that dreads rejection and uncertainty. Your head might find the repetition tiresome, but your heart needs it because that’s how emotional reassurance works. Here it is: the person you’re trying to get a date with is living their own life, populated by thousands of factors and people and exes and ailments and plans that you know nothing about. They might not reject you at all, but if they do, these unknowns would probably amount to a robust explanation for why you got turned down, one that has nothing to do with your value, your game, your charisma, or your prospects for finding love and happiness. As I once said to a lonely gentleman who’d just been turned down by a lady he liked: She’s on Planet Her. 

But what if the rejection actually is about you? Well, if it’s got any hostility in it, and you didn’t do much to warrant that, then it ain’t really about you. People’s hostility discredits itself. If they’re the sort of person who would say something hurtful or aggressive just because there were no fireworks between you two, then that’s obviously somebody you don’t want to be around anyway. You “dodged a bullet.”

Between that kind of egregious static, and a better result, there is only a thin band of genuinely relevant personal criticism that is not untrue and not unkind—and therefore worth taking seriously, and difficult to hear. But that’s also the stuff you can actually learn from. For example, people need to feel heard, and listened to—especially women, whose conversational style and expectations make many of them quite sensitive to being interrupted by a man, or spoken to at length without enough turn-taking. When a man is given constructive criticism about this issue it can be quite unpleasant for him, but if he can incorporate the advice into his manner, a great deal is to be gained. “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off…”

In relationship-oriented dating, an interaction that turns out to be a rejection is a bit like a pretty tree that turns out to be one of those stinky gingkos: it’s appealing from a distance, and then, up close, you realize what it is. But remember: they are part of the native foliage of the very terrain you are trying to cross. Be glad those experiences are there, because they tell you you’re in the right region, headed in the right direction. “Where grows the danger,” wrote the poet Hölderlin, “there also grows the power of salvation.”

As the years go by, each of us builds up an ever-growing stock of memories, associations, references, songs, jokes, and anecdotes. When we tell other people any one of these for the very first time, it might indeed have quite a good effect—they laugh at your joke, or they’re gratified by your complement, or your question lands just as you intended it. The story you tell feels apt, relevant, and beneficial. Nicely done! Now, this post is about the way these bits of conversation can sometimes turn out to have a shorter shelf-life than you might assume. And while this pitfall may seem obvious, I’ve never seen anyone mention it, so here goes.  

Precisely because it was so well received the first time around, that same piece of discourse gets added into long-term storage, as part of your growing social repertoire. But it turns out that making new use of tried-and-true material years later can be a bit risky. Suppose a new situation—a meeting, a date, a party, an interview, etc.—presents itself that has some feature in common with that old one where your stored stuff worked so well. Let’s say, the joke you told two years ago amused some people from the very same overseas country to whose other citizens you’re talking now. Or you once deeply moved an elder person with a story about your childhood, and now here’s another octogenarian, so you figure the same story ought to prove just as successful today. Some feature of your audience, or of the situation, is familiar enough to trigger a specific piece of material that proved to be scintillating in the past.  

It might be just as charming or poignant now as it was back then. But think twice before you wheel it out and redeploy it. Why? Because the slightest congruity between past and present can be powerfully tempting: surely this is a chance to validate old good stuff, to prove to yourself the value of what you’ve accumulated, and to be good-with-people without having to make a renewed effort. This temptation can cause you to overlook the important new factors that distinguish this moment from its distant precursor, and these new people from the ones you knew before, and this social context from the one that’s long gone. It can make you forget what you’ve learned, even if you’ve learned it well: all the political shifts, changes in social mores, gender dynamics, and codes of interpersonal presentation that the culture has seen in the meanwhile.  Even apart from that issue of long-term cultural change, individuals are always distinct; these particular Australians are not the same ones you dealt with last week.

The old story, or joke, or comparison, might indeed be a delightful contribution once again, despite the passage of time. But very often indeed, it’s worth slowing down for a moment beforehand, to silently check-in with yourself about just how appropriate such a repetition is likely to be. The world changes every day, and each person you meet is different from the rest. You, too, have changed, and you can indeed thrive without those extra scraps of continuity you might be tempted to snatch from Time’s hand. “Be yourself” is still very good advice—but this self need not be exactly the same as yesterday’s.

People have an evolved need to be part of something – to belong to a family that belongs to a tribe. Anyone who doesn’t have that can become susceptible to whatever offers itself as a substitute, even if the eventual price of belonging is unclear at the outset, and turns out to be too high. We are a profoundly social species, and the more isolated somebody is, the greater their risk for getting absorbed into a company that has cult-like features—especially if these only become obvious after some time has passed, and ties have been formed.  

In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam showed that people in the USA used to be connected to large numbers of neighbors and peers, by all sorts of clubs and civic groups and religious institutions that were larger than the household, but smaller than the state—the Elks Club, the Knights of Columbus, Boy Scouts, B'nai B’rith, and so on—and that since the 1970’s, most of these have shrunk or even vanished. For my MFT internship (2012-2016), I trained in Gestalt therapy at a Los Angeles nonprofit called The Relational Center whose motto was and is: Isolation hurts. We help. See also Johann Hari’s excellent book on this issue, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions.  

Our drive to be part of something larger than ourselves is a core need that’s sometimes fulfilled in wholesome ways, even today. If we’re fortunate, it can arise where we earn our daily bread. Teamwork on the job, if it goes well, feels good and works effectively. It’s not necessary to spoil it with cynicism by deciding that it’s all a swindle, just because management planned it for the purpose of maximizing the owners’ profits and the shareholders’ return on their investment. Yes, management did set up a personnel structure, with its cooperative and competitive dynamics; and yes, they did so mainly with those financial motives. But it’s a wasteful mistake to use this fact to empty-out the value of a collaborative experience. Enjoying your job doesn’t make you the dupe of exploiters—unless your employer happens to be exploitative. So it’s pretty important to have some criteria for that category.  

If the company’s internal communications are laced with the rhetoric of family life, does it feel icky and bogus?  

Prioritize your physical and mental health, and take a close look at the effects of your current employment on those two factors.

Is it a permissive environment, where bad interpersonal behavior has no consequences? Or an over-policed one, where H.R. feels overzealous and unpredictable?  

Do rewards for extra hard (or extra good) work go to everybody, not just the suits in the suites?  

Are you stuck in your current role, or can the leadership be convinced that they could make better use of you in another one where you feel you’d add more value? If you contribute advice for improving processes, products, or practices, does that get rewarded or punished?  

Do you feel misled about important aspects of your role, or are they frank with you where it counts?  

Bonuses and raises are not the only genuine sort of rewards—there’s paid time off, broader choice of tasks and teammates, more control over your schedule and remote work, and so on. Be wary if you put in a heroic chunk of overwork, and they either ignore it, or pay you in symbolism, praise, and thanks, but nothing more.

Consider that the ideal job, the real peach on a high branch, gives you three things:

·      enough meaning

·      enough money

·      adequate work-life balance  (WLB) 

Awful jobs are missing all three, and are way too close to what sociologists have called “social death,” in which one’s humanity is under dire assault by some combination of abuse and neglect. The late Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a poignant bestseller called Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, about such jobs, and the vexing struggle for upward mobility. More recently, in Democracy Awakening, professor Heather Cox Richardson has taken account of the way access to opportunity waxes and wanes cyclically through the history of the United States.  

A good job can provide you with any two of these, but not all three—and if the one you need most is the one that’s missing, the job’s not so good. Sociologist David Graeber made a splash with his Jeremiad on corporate culture, Bullshit Jobs, which he defined thus: “…a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” Bullshit jobs pay plenty, and they don’t take over your whole week—but their lack of meaning takes on a creeping toxicity the longer you work there, because the company culture requires you to fake it. Even if the work is (relatively speaking) socially and environmentally harmless, you still come to feel you are selling your integrity because you have to bullshit other people, and yourself, that the work is not, in fact, the bullshit it really is. This is sometimes called “golden handcuffs.” 

If there’s work-life balance and meaning, but not much money, it may be possible to add a lucrative side-hustle without becoming exhausted. If there’s good money and real meaning, but you’re frazzled and sleepless, that strategy’s not available; you may need to negotiate more time away, or build an exit ramp.  

Aristotle wrote a book of ethics for his son, where he states: Happiness is not amusement, it is good activity. Ideally, work is a form of serious play that gives us a role in the community and compensation for our labor in that role. On your way to a vocation that really suits you, remember that the gatekeepers will be behind you one day; that the stepping-stones are temporary phases of your life with something to teach you, however unpleasant; and that you must steer your life in the direction where you want it to go.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.