The Addictive Personality

There is a lot of controversy about whether or not there is such thing as an addictive personality. Like most things in the social sciences, absolutes are hard to come by and direct cause and effect relationships usually account for little, if any, of the variance accounted for in research studies. However, people who work with those day in and day out find tend to find qualitative similarities among addicts. These similarities are not universal but occur common enough that they should be mentioned. Thus, I’ll share some of them with you.

Seeing the Signs

Doctors and psychologists can sometimes tell, just from meeting a patient, that the person has an addiction. It’s sort of a “sixth sense” that comes from long experience. What exactly are the doctors looking for? They may not be able to say just what sets off that sixth sense, but it’s based on certain behaviors and attitudes that people with addiction tend to have.

For example, people with addictions may

• Suffer from anxiety and depression,
• Appear anxious
• Seem awkward, impatient, arrogant, or angry

Traits and Behaviors

Spending time with an addict may help you recognize certain traits and behaviors that tend to accompany addiction.

• Making impulsive choices.
• Constantly seeking excitement and new sensations.
• Feeling alienated from mainstream society.
• Valuing deviant or nonconformist behavior.
• Lacking patience, for example having trouble waiting for delayed gratification.

Other Behaviors We’ve Noticed

In addition to these here are some others we at the Purity Project notice some of these things–for whatever it is worth:

• A desire to people please,
• A desire to look good to others (we want to manage what they see and think of us),
• Over Achievement and over compensation in many of our behaviors,
• Feelings of low self-esteem and inferiority on the inside,
• Over the top behaviors (whatever captures our thinking we really get into into it. If it’s cars or computers we want the best, if it’s a girlfriend we want the hottest babe, etc.),
• Secrecy and hiding of our habits,
• Controlling behaviors,
• Avoidance of problems like difficult conversations, financial worries, personal affairs,
• Addictive like behaviors in one or more other areas as well such as spending, computer usage, sports, etc.
• A belief that our wives were not adequately meeting our needs–especially our sexual needs.

In the end, other than to help us better understand ourselves, it doesn’t really matter if there is such thing as an addictive personality or not. What matters is what we decide to do about our problem. All of us have defects of character that we need to work on and we have no right to blame our compulsions on anything but our own behaviors. We may have tendencies to react a certain way, but our responsibility is to learn how to work with all of them.

http://addiction.lovetoknow.com/wiki/Personality_Traits_of_Addiction