6. Rethinking Excessive Habits and Addictive Behaviours
It’s more useful and self-empowering to understand addictive behaviors from a developmental and learning perspective. We learned early on in life how to cope with fear, stress, anxiety, depression, resentment, anger, insecurity, frustration, loneliness, etc, by choosing relationships with people, behaviors, and things, that gave us immediate gratification. By doing so, it became positively reinforcing and allowed us to remove or avoid our emotional distress. We learned our dependency. We can now learn to develop our autonomy.