It’s amazing how much has changed since the late 1980s and early 1990s when Zack Morris (a character on the TV show “Saved by the Bell”) was given a cell phone the size of a sub sandwich, and phone boxes and antennae were installed in cars so people could have a “car phone.”

It has almost fully become a new world since then. And what’s also most amusing is how much the world revolves around cell phones and their smartphone brethren — phones like the iPhone and Droid. These smartphones are now barely used as phones, but rather pocket-sized computers.

In my work as a therapist, a common theme is people’s desire to repeat the lives they were raised with. For people over roughly age 28, when they think back to their childhoods and pick out the parts they want to repeat as adults, the images that stick out don’t involve computers or cell phones. There was less to be distracted by and more focus on the present.

The ideals that I often see in sessions are very similar (each having its unique variations). The vast majority of people want a spouse or life partner, most (not all) want children, a house or large apartment, vacations with family, family dinners, secure career or job, and friends. But most want one more thing: Connection. Not via a cell phone or Internet, but emotional connection with families, friends, partners, spouses, and children.

This guest article from YourTango was written by Julie Orlov.

There’s been a lot of publicity around the issue of porn and its effect on men, women and relationships. With porn so accessible and free, it has taken on a new fervor in the lives of so many people. As with most things that affect certain synapses in the brain, porn can quickly turn from an occasional supplement that heightens one’s sex life to an addiction that wreaks havoc and prevents real intimacy.

Here are seven warning signs that you have become a victim to the allure of pornography…

In support of National Women’s Health Week (which was May 13-19 this year), I would like to mention a few ways that female sex and love addicts are different from males. Perhaps this will help women recognize which excessive behaviors can be signs of an actual addiction.

Women always have been overlooked or underrepresented in studies of alcohol, drug, gambling or sex addiction. It has been 73 years since the founding of AA and 60 or so years since the American Medical Association recognized alcoholism as a disease.

Yet it was not until the late 1980s that significant findings regarding very powerful gender differences in the development of alcoholism surfaced in research studies for other diseases, such as heart disease or AIDS.

I wake up at the same time every single day. It is 6 a.m. The birds sing outside my single-paned window, and my partner sleeps beside me. I close my eyes and work to will myself back to sleep: It would be nice to sleep until 8 a.m., maybe even 9 a.m. But I get frustrated and I get anxious and soon I have made my way to the kitchen where I make myself strong coffee and sit in front of my laptop.

But I’m forgetting something. It’s important, I’m sure of it.

I sip my coffee, turn on my laptop, and remember: My pills.

I cannot forget to take my pills. Disastrous things happen. Things I try to forget and things that keep me up at night. It’s never easy living with bipolar disorder but the medication keeps me stable, most of the time, and that is invaluable in and of itself.

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.