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Addictions - your experiences?

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shades of grey:
OCD at work.

On my till everything has its place.  If it is something I use regularly (stapler, till stamp) it has to be in its precisely aligned place.  If anyone borrows something from my till I miss it almost immediatly.  I get twitchy, then annoyed, then upset until it's returned.  People at work have learned that I cannot function unless everything on my till is where it should be.  If I go on holiday and someone else sits on my till they are warned in no uncertain circumstances that it must be as I left it before I get back, otherwise they will suffer my wrath.  And it is old school fire and brimstone wrath.  I don't even realise I'm doing it until I stop ranting, out of breath and emotionally drained.

Luckily it seems to be focused at work and I have very understanding co-workers.  I do get flashes of it at home but at the moment they seem to be under control.

kakodi:
I don't know if this helps but ...

I only just recently quit smoking (as in 2 to 3 months ago). Often I'd quit for a while, but then eventually go back. Usually, it was stress that drove me back. I really honestly felt that I could not function as a normal person without the nicotine. Often, in my bouts of quitting, I'd seek some other substance to "fix" what I felt was broken. It is as Fyrchick stated, a lack of emotional coping skills. Before I recognized it was anything like that, I was constantly justifying the addiction, even to family members who were trying to shame me off the cigarettes.

For what it's worth, it was always to fix my ADD (attention deficit disorder). I was never put on drugs for it growing up, and I eventually turned to self medicating myself to fix my lapses in concentration, poor reflexes, and inability to control frustration. I can't remember the day it dawned on me that this is just who I was, and no amount of drugs would "fix" me or make me normal. I think it was more of a gradual process of making comparisons, and seeing my behaviours exhibited by others, that eventually led me to that conclusion. It wasn't a sudden light bulb turning on kind of a thing. It was just something I eventually knew. Even though it had been stated several times, knowing it in your head, and knowing it in your heart are two different things. The Willpower to quit and turn away for good comes from knowing it in the heart.

Again, don't know if that helps, but there you go.

Snowleopard:
Don't know if this figures into addictions but I have OCD as SoG wrote.
Mine was not good - it wasn't just at work but everywhere.
If I did not go through the rituals I had I just felt (though I knew intellectually that this was NOT so) that
something bad would happen.  What really irked was those who told me to just get over it as though I had
asked for this problem.  I would do something like locking the door and as soon as I was done I'd have to do it
again though I knew I'd done it.  Drove me up a wall with frustration.
The problem was based in a hormone imbalance and when I got that fixed the OCD retreated.
Now I only get twinges when I'm under stress.

Sir Huron Stone:
I used to tap constantly. It was just something i had to do. I didn't feel right if i wasn't tapping. I would just constantly tap my fingers, a pencil, anything. It got to the point where my teacher would snap at me immediately if i started tapping. Finally, i got into wrestling and i was always too tired to tap. But now, with wrestling over for the year, i've started tapping again. Not as bad, but i do annoy everyone in my classes. But i only tap when i have nothing to do or what we're talking about doesn't interest me.

Haru:
I've had clinical depression pretty much since I was 12 or 13 years old (I'm 27 now and after excessive therapy last year where I was diagnosed for the first time I am better but still have to go a long way), and during that time I have developed an eating disorder, that I think would count as an addiction. I am not sure if that goes for every addiction (especially physical addictions), but my mind had replaced every single bad emotion with "hunger", so if I got sad, lonely, anxious, angry, you name it, I got hungry instead and the feeling got away when I had something to eat (after the "fix", if you will). I would keep snacks around to always have something to eat, because the hunger feeling was pretty close to unbearable. Not because I was actually hungry, but because I could not understand the emotion underneath and therefore I could not deal with it. I literally swallowed my anger. One of the worst things was that my mother often enough wanted to put me on a diet, which in return only made me more depressed.

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