Addiction vs. Dependence

Addiction is a very common metaphor for sin (or maybe addiction is just one type of sin).  What I want to do in this post is describe what is actually going on with addiction a little more clearly in a way that will help us with our own and others’ struggles with sin.  I am going to use terms from the psychiatric-medical complex but I’m using them from the perspective of my own experience and observation of sin; I’m not bothering to make them medically or psychiatrically accurate.

This photo of a tree growing out of a ruin is going to tie in at the end.

Let’s begin:  we believers have a folk  understanding of “addiction” as any behavior you have an unhealthy inner compulsion toward, so we call lots of sin addiction.

I think there are actually two different types of sin that match our folk understanding of “addiction.”  Let’s take a look at them.  Let’s call it addiction versus dependence.  Addiction: something that makes you feel really good so you crave it.  Dependence: something that you are going to have a hard time functioning without.  In other words, the one plays a positive role in your life while the other helps you avoid something that feels negative.  In terms of our study of virtues and vices, one is a type 1 vice and the other is a type 2 vice.

Let’s talk about coffee.

Coffee doesn’t make coffee drinkers more alert than normal.  They swear it does but it doesn’t.  So what’s going on here?

Here’s what happens.  When someone who doesn’t drink coffee or other caffeine products wakes up, there is a normal baseline process of wakefulness that occurs.  For most people, it isn’t too bad at all.  However, the first time that person takes coffee, they feel an extra zest or wakefulness that feels pretty cool.  They may pay for it by crashing later in the day or the next morning, but for now they feel awesome.  If they return to drinking coffee from because they want that zest so bad we would call that addiction–a vice based on a craving for a remembered good feeling.  Let’s say they drink it every morning.  What will soon happen is that their body adjusts their wakefulness to compensate for the caffeine. They wake up absolutely trashed and need the caffeine to return them to the baseline level.  This is why all the coffee drinkers make jokes about how dead they are without caffeine.  It’s because they are.  They have moved to “dependence.”  They need coffee for base line function (Again, if a doctor or psychiatrist would agree with anything I’ve said above I don’t know and don’t care).

Lots of vices, not just chemical ones, function like coffee does.  They give us something extra right now even though we know there’s something fake about it or we’ll pay for it after, but they also habituate us and we become dependent on them.  The dependence keeps you attached to the sin, the addiction keeps you escalating the sin for even more.

A while back I had an odd experience where a sin I had just stopped.  I was put in a setting where the temptation was acute, for whatever reason I just decided “nope,” I was done with this sin, the struggle was awful and acute and then, bam, it just stopped, and I have basically not had that temptation since.  Here’s the surprising aftermath, though.  Some basic good aspects of my personality also went away, things I wouldn’t even have thought were related.  I had apparently had this sin for long enough that it had become loadbearing, my personality had grown up with it and grown around it.  I am painfully working to get those parts of me back.  Its hard and its incomplete.

It’s like you have a beautiful tree and also some ruins you are planning on fixing up, and when you get around at last to the ruins you discover the tree is growing out of them.

Or to use a different metaphor we’ve used before,  if you climb to the top of a smaller hill, the only way to get higher up is to start by going back down.