Addiction is a chronic, often relapsing brain disease that causes compulsive drug seeking and use despite harmful consequences to the individual who is addicted and to those around them.
Does an opportunity have to present itself in order for a person to become an addict? In a word, YES. The reason I say this is, each and everyone of us has the ability to become whatever we choose, often times, this choice is for the better. But, there are times when we manufacture opportunities in order to get what we want.
It is during these times of self manufactured opportunities that far reaching mistakes are made, and these mistakes will not be realized until latter in our lives. When we give in to the ease of doing things from home, IE, shopping, communicating, running a business, on line dating, we have a tendency to more and more seclude ourselves and interacting with others less and less. The more we do this, the more we are apt to develop methods of entertaining ourselves by ourselves.
When we run out of ways to do it on our own, we begin to seek methods of doing it by introducing either substance or situations as the opportunity arises, more often than not we manipulate our environs so these situations do arise.
The question then becomes, What is the goal of this manipulation, the answer is not pleasure, although that is part of the matter. The answer lies somewhere between realization and actualization. We realize that for some reason that we don’t know, something in our lives is missing, but trying to find out what that is is a problem of immense proportion, far to great for us to fathom. So the answer then becomes “Replace the missing with something I have enjoyed before, nothing wrong with that.”
When this action is employed, it eventually leads to tolerance which then leads to the deterioration of functions. This deterioration of function then leads to the loss of identity/relevance, which leads to depression, which leads to increased usage or increased instances of participation in situations we have chosen to engage in. Also known as the “Addiction Cycle”.
