Problems with drugs and alcohol affect millions of Americans’ lives each and every day. Many people live in relationships with others who have a drug or alcohol problem, and don’t know where to turn or what to do. Others have friends or co-workers they’d love to help out, but don’t how to help them.

Alcohol and drug problems don’t go away on their own. And they rarely get better just with the passage of time, unless the person has made a concerted effort and pledge to change.

Do you know someone who has an alcohol or drug problem?

If so, this week’s video from Psych Central’s Ask the Therapists Daniel J. Tomasulo, Ph.D. & Marie Hartwell-Walker, Ed.D. may be able to help you.

Today, as I was walking across the Rite-Aid parking lot at my local strip mall, I saw something peculiar.

Peculiar to me, at least.

I saw three boxy red cars in a row. Two SUV’s an an old Geo Prism.

Now, let me explain: red cars are everywhere. There’s nothing remarkable about them and there’s truly no good reason to stare at them, almost achingly, when they’re parked in perfect alignment in a parking lot.

Unless you play Bejeweled.

In his insightful book, The Addictive Personality: Understanding the Addictive Process and Compulsive Behavior, author Craig Nakken explains why, even after an addict has given up the bottle or the weed, she will never be done with recovery:

Addiction is a process of buying into false and empty promises: the false promise of relief, the false promise of emotional security, the false sense of fulfillment, and the false sense of intimacy with the world….Like any other major illness, addiction is an experience that changes people in permanent ways. That is why it’s so important that people in recovery attend Twelve Step and other self-help meetings on a regular basis; the addictive logic remains deep inside of them and looks for an opportunity to reassert itself in the same or in a different form.

Nakken brilliantly explains the addictive cycle that I merely call “the exploding head phenomenon”: the process by which I continually seek relief from uncomfortable feelings, a “nurturing through avoidance — an unnatural way of taking care of one’s emotional needs,” as he says. The addict, he clarifies, seeks serenity through a person, place, or thing.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Paldrom Collins. 

In the land of the strange but true, as a former Tibetan Buddhist nun I fell in love with and married a man who counsels sex addicts and who is a recovering sex addict himself. Joining him in his counseling practice has allowed me a look into the lives of many people who have struggled with sex and relationship addictions.

These relationships have also impelled me to contemplate how the grace and teaching that I received from my Tibetan teachers can supply guidance in how to work with the compulsions or addictions that manifest in our world today. A young woman called tonight, crying.

Her husband had promised he would stop accessing Internet porn. She had recently given birth to their first child, and on their home computer she discovered that in the previous few days her husband had visited dozens of porn sites.

What should she do?

Recovering from an addiction is probably one of the most difficult tasks a person can do in their lifetime. There is a whole industry that specifically addresses helping people overcome an addiction, whether it be from a drug, alcohol, or now, even a behavior.

Drug and alcohol addiction remain a serious problem in this country, as well as many others. Surprisingly, nearly 75 percent of all adult illicit drug users are employed, as are most binge and heavy alcohol users, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In the United States, it’s estimated that companies and organizations lose up to $100 billion a year due to employee alcohol and drug abuse, according to the The National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information. The destruction to a person’s private life, relationships, friends and family is often immeasurable.

Substance abuse and alcohol abuse treatments are effective and do work. Not only does it help the abuser, it also begins the recovery process to help them repair their relationships with others.

A “peer” in the world of mental health and substance abuse lingo means a fellow person who has also been diagnosed with a mental health or substance abuse disorder. Peers come together on their own in self-help support groups (both in the local communities and online) to help one another with emotional support and the knowledge that can only come from having been there themselves.

Benedict Carey writing in today’s New York Times details the impact of peers who go one step farther and act as peer counselors, helping people with mental disorders or substance abuse disorders with training that exceeds that of another layperson patient.

Peer counselors are an important component of America’s fragmented mental health care system, filling in the many gaps (especially in the public mental health system). These gaps are especially prevalent in the U.S. because there are usually two different public systems: one that treat mental disorders and one that treats substance abuse disorders. Few public community mental health systems have integrated these two components in systematic, comprehensive “dual diagnosis” programs.

Among addiction experts and researchers, there’s been a long-running debate as to whether drug or alcohol addiction, and even “behavioral addictions” such as compulsive gambling, are actual diseases or not. It’s not just a matter of semantics — if researchers can trace addiction’s root causes to an actual medical malfunction in the brain, perhaps that disease could be directly treated.

Who am I to disagree with a “four-year process with more than 80 experts actively working on it?”

Their result? Addiction is a “chronic brain disorder and not simply a behavioral problem.”

I suppose if we wanted, one could argue that all mental disorders can be viewed as “brain disorders” and not “simply behavioral problems.” After all, where does thinking and emotions come from, if not the brain?

But does this change anything? Does it help us in really getting to the heart of addiction? I’m not so sure.

You may know that Sigmund Freud, the famed founder of psychoanalysis, had a fascination with cocaine and abused it for many years.

But you might not know these three facts that relate to Freud’s longstanding interest in cocaine. Howard Markel, M.D., Ph.D, professor of medical history at the University of Michigan, documents all this and more in his comprehensive, beautifully written book An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted and the Miracle Drug Cocaine.

1. Freud was initially attracted to cocaine because he wanted to help a close friend.

One of Freud’s dearest friends, Dr. Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, was heavily addicted to morphine, and Freud initially believed that cocaine could cure him. A brilliant man and talented doctor, Fleischl-Marxow had an accident while doing research at the age of 25. He “accidentally nicked his right thumb with a scalpel he was applying to a cadaver,” according to Dr. Markel.

This seemingly minor wound turned into a horrible infection and the thumb had to be amputated.

As a recovering drunk myself, I was especially interested in the new memoir, Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety by Sacha Z. Scoblic, a writer in Washington, DC, and a contributing editor to The New Republic.

I thought I’d ask her more about what she thinks about life without booze.

1. If you knew all that you do today, what would you have done differently your first year of sobriety?

Sacha: The first year of sobriety is riddled with basic epiphanies most adults have sooner than do addicts (like: Paying bills is not optional and I don’t have to drink just because it’s Arbor Day) as well as turbulent emotions rising to the surface after years of self-medication through alcohol, drugs, and denial. And then there’s this feeling that no one understands your loss, cravings, or anxieties, because all of your friends and acquaintances are drinkers and users, which leaves you alone in the harsh glare of sobriety — chain-smoking and mainlining Diet Coke. So, if I could do my first year differently, I’d go to rehab.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to appreciate the link between sugar and depression.

Anyone who doubts the relationship need only to spend a night in our house and see what type of behavior happens when two kids consume 12-ounce cans of Coke or Sprite — and the demonic demonstrations that happen after a 7-11 slurpee, especially if it’s red or blue, or God forbid, a mix.

People who suffer from depression are especially vulnerable to sugar’s evil power. I am so sensitive to white-flour, processed foods that I can practically set an alarm to for three hours after consumption, at which time I will be cursing myself for inhaling the large piece of birthday cake at the party because I am feeling so miserable. That doesn’t stop me from eating dessert at the next gathering, of course, but the awareness between sugar and mood does help me better understand some of my crashes.

What, exactly, is going on inside our brain when we take a bite of that fudge cheesecake?

Betty Ford, the former First Lady of the United States died Friday at the age of 93. Dr. William Van Ornum gives this succinct summary of her life in a tribute on the website of the American Mental Health Foundation (AMHF):

Mrs. Ford was born in Chicago, grew up in modest circumstances, became a dancer, and married Mr. Ford shortly after he returned from the Navy in World War II. She thought she was signing up for a life with a mid-western lawyer; instead he chose politics and she was thrust into the role of a political wife, all the while raising 4 children and trying to keep her own interests as well.

Political life became difficult for her and she felt an emptiness inside from which she sought solace in alcohol and prescription pills. She was open about her addiction at a time when others weren’t. This courageous outlook gave others the encouragement either to seek help themselves or to be open about it with their families and communities.

Today I have the honor of interviewing a friend of mine who has just written a compelling memoir, The Interventionist, about addiction from the perspective of both an addict and an interventionist.

You begin your book with the quote from Khaled Hosseini’s book, The Kite Runner: “And that, I believe, is what true redemption is … when guilt leads to good.”

Do you believe your work with other addicts is partly what keeps you clean and sober? Why compels you to enter into such hopeless situations and try to fix things?

Joani: I think as the quote infers “when guilt leads to good,” my work with addicts and alcoholics assuages my own continued ambivalence about my responsibility about having this disease. It is not at all logical. There is no “choice” about having this disease. That has been proven by medical science.

But the behavior that is manifested during the active state of addiction is not pretty and I think that is where the lingering guilt comes from. So sometimes my frenetic work with other alcoholics is an atonement of sorts, turning guilt into good!