Behavioral Addiction

Say No To Traumas

For many teenagers and children, addiction is always referred to drug use and some other substance addiction. Many people think that substance addiction is the only dangerous type of addiction. That is not true. In fact, many other types of addiction cause more complex problems than people can imagine. The most common one is behavioral addiction. Once someone is behaviorally addicted, even to some simple behavior and habits, their life will be occupied by the stress and fear brought by the endless repeating behavior. People with Television addiction spend so much time on TV that they can never release their stress from boring soap operas. People who are addicted to the Internet have fear to communicate with people in real life. Behavioral addiction has become a more and more serious problem to the whole society. Take Internet addiction as an example. According to the Stanford University School of Medicine Study, 1 out of 8 Americans suffer from Internet Addiction; 14% of respondents found it hard to abstain from Internet use for several days; 5.9% said excessive Internet use affected their relationships; 8.2% said the Internet has become a mean to escape from the real world.(Stanford 2006) As our society still tries to deal with bad results brought by behavioral addiction, many people are wondering why there are more and more people, especially teenagers, are becoming addicted to these common habits. By giving some evidence and personal experience, I can confirm that emotional and physical traumas in childhood are responsible for the increasing rate of behavioral addiction. If we want to prevent such addiction and promote recovery, we need to love more and stress less.

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As we have learned in the book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, stress is one of the main determining factors of addiction; people who have stress are at high risk of getting addiction. Teenagers and children also have their own stress, sometimes even more than adults. Because children do not have developed brain and strong minds, they have difficulties in finding ways to release their stress themselves. Mate's words in his book reflect the relationship between children and parents: a child's capacity to handle psychological and physiological stress is completely dependent on the relationship with his parent or parents. (Mate 200) Sometimes a child's stress is just given by the environment he lives, because parents only brought emotional and physical trauma, let alone the smooth words and actions.

The phenomenon of physical trauma in childhood is common in our society. A specific example is the relationship between overeating and sexual abuse. Let us see a series of data of CSA (Childhood Sexual Abuse) and obesity, presented in the book Childhood Sexual Abuse and Obesity. A chart review of 131 patients revealed that 60% of those who reported a history of rape or sexual molestation were 50 pounds overweight, as compared to only 28% of persons matched on sex and age, but without a history of abuse. (Gustafson 3) The data show a relatively close relationship between CSA and obesity. From our life experiences, besides lack of exercise and disease, we can easily connect obesity and overeating. Children who suffer sexual addiction are usually invaded by the ones who they ought to trust mostly. They often have no suspicion to abusers. Once being abused, children will undertake both physical injury and emotional hurt. On the one hand, they cannot control their fear of being abused again. On the other hand, because the abusers are often their relatives, even their parents, they feel powerless and isolated. In their later life, the image which rose in their brain again and again nibbles their minds. They choose the way of overeating to fill in emptiness in their deep minds. When people have the serious problem of overeating, their bodies will take measures to protect the stomach. Often the measure is presented as vomiting, also known as bulimia, People who have the

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overeating habit also have the frequent phenomenon of vomiting. This behavior even causes more harm to people's mind as well as body, because those who frequently overeat fail to fill in their empty mind and to release their stress. They will feel hungrier and want to eat more. From the biological perspective, they do not want to eat so much to fill in their emptiness, but they just cannot control getting more dopamine in their brain that contributes to their need and desire.

My friend once suffered from overeating, along with obesity and anxiety. She always ate food every midnight. She ate everything in the fridge until it was empty. I even found her eating raw meat. Every time she made a promise to me that she would overcome the behavioral addiction, she just overate again next time. She regretted and prayed to be redeemed, but all the action could not defeat her desirable mind and the dopamine's function. I tried to understand her earlier experience and found that she comes from a single-parent family. She lost her father at an early age and had been sexual abused by her uncle. She was afraid of telling her mother the truth because of her embarrassing feelings. Also, she did not want to burden her mother's relationship with her uncle because her