Addiction Awareness

As people try to cope with pain and with trauma in life, there are often addictions and in our society, we too often judge addictions based on different sets of morality, different cultural contexts. For example, we may say alcohol addiction is not as bad as sex addiction. Well, both are just as bad because the person has a lot of pain. They have trauma and at the end of the day, they’re numb and what they’re trying to accomplish is a short-term feeling of relief. So, they have an addiction that provides that short-term feeling of relief that dopamine hit that neurotransmitter hit where they feel “Wow, I feel much better. I feel sooo good for a few seconds of my life” and then from there the root cause of the trauma has not been fixed, so, they go back into that cycle again and again and again.

Addictions can take a long time for people to recover. They can also have a substance issue in a sense where people need help withdrawing from different chemicals if they’ve been dependent on different chemicals, which requires understanding and may also require legal accommodations protected by ADA to support the employee’s legal disability (always consult with HR and a lawyer). Addiction can impact the way the brain works. People need to heal and in today’s healthcare setting, often cost a lot of money. Data shows right here that substance misuse is estimated to cost society 442 billion dollars each year so what if we started talking about trauma earlier on, what if we started giving people a place to heal and we started helping them through this human experience and this human journey in the workplace as employers by supporting them with FMLA requests and different things which I’ll talk about later. What would the workplace look like with this cultural shift? Time off to heal and having a whole bunch of resources around to give your talent, far beyond the EAP program, is critical for today’s humans at work.

So, understand that, addictions come in numerous ways; and gossip, gossip is an addiction. Gossip feeds a negative thing. People get a hit when they feel better temporarily like they have more power than somebody else, feeding the ego. Another addiction can be high risk activities.

Social media is a big addiction. People are spending hours of their lives that they will never get back on social media and we are becoming more isolated. As a result of social media, human connection is and always will be the most important thing for humans. Technology is a tool; it is not, not, not the solution so understanding that human connection and actually being with each other having community, being involved in different groups, helping giving back, that is what feeds the human spirit. It always has, it always will so making sure that we are creating different programs in the workplace as well to teach people especially the next generation how they’re being conditioned to be on their phones all the time, and giving them old school tips on how to connect face to face is key for a conscious culture.

Today, the trends are alarming. We’re seeing all these things go up and up and up not trending in the right direction so understand that, addiction is real, and addiction comes in numerous forms – don’t judge somebody’s addiction as better or worse than the other.

Understand that, at the root of addiction is trauma and pain and somebody trying to solve it because that’s the only thing they know how to do; maybe they’ve never been led to counseling or maybe in their culture it isn’t discussed.

If I can tell you anything please do not judge people and please help them and understand there’s a whole heck of a lot of pain behind that.