Addictive Personality – Myth or Reality?

If you have lived with an addict, you will know that as addiction progresses for many years, their personality begins to undergo dramatic changes.

Small incident, big response

At first, the symptoms are subtle, and the alcoholic seems only slightly more irritable, nervous, anxious, or depressed. “You’re on edge these days,” a coworker might comment, while the alcoholic’s spouse might say, “You’re working too hard,” or the kids might complain about Dad’s short temper. No one thinks to connect last night’s half bottle of whiskey or the several beers with today’s touchy nerves.

Irritating or annoying events such as a traffic jam, the neighbour’s barking dog, a child’s piercing scream, or a bounced cheque get blown out of proportion. Psychologist James Milam calls this emotional explosiveness “augmentation.” When the brain cells are hyperactive, bathed in alcohol for some time and then left to dry out, even a slight provocation will set the nerves on fire.

“When I had a bad hangover, and the phone rang,” one recovering alcoholic recalls, “it felt like World War Three was going off in my head.” Another alcoholic remembers how she would curl up into a ball and start to cry when her children fought with each other. Only after several months of recovery was she able to deal with loud noises and intense emotional displays.

Augmentation – it makes everything bigger

When a situation that would normally rate low on the irritability scale gets an extreme response, it’s evident that something else is going on. That’s augmentation: The brain is agitated by alcohol, and any stimulus moving through its hyperactive cells is going to seem bigger, stronger, louder, and more emotionally jarring than it is.

Augmentation is a process that happens to everyone, alcoholic and non-alcoholic alike. If you’re exhausted from lack of sleep and a friend looks at you cross-eyed, you might feel like bursting into tears or punching him in the nose. When you have the flu, you might be extremely sensitive to loud noises or certain smells. A week or so before their menstrual periods, many women experience a heightened sensitivity, created by hormonal shifts, to physical and emotional stimuli.

In alcoholism, however, the process of augmentation feeds into the idea that alcoholics are somehow emotionally unstable, nervous, anxious, or depressed. Everyone seems to miss the alcohol connection because the middle-stage alcoholic does not seem to be in any big trouble with booze from all outward appearances. The middle-stage alcoholic is equally confused (that’s the addicted brain at work again) because alcohol is still, at least 70 or 80 percent of the time, friend, not foe.

Later, when alcoholism seems obvious to just about everyone, people will say, “She was always a nervous person,” or “He was born an angry son of a bitch,” in the belief that the personality disorder predated the alcohol problem and contributed somehow to its development.

Even the great pioneering alcohol researcher, E. M. Jellinek, author of The Disease Concept of Alcoholism, expressed some confusion about the psychological state of alcoholics. “Despite a great diversity in personality structure among alcoholics,” Jellinek wrote in 1960, “there appears in a large proportion of them a low tolerance for tension coupled with an inability to cope with psychological stresses.”

Addiction is a very challenging area, and ongoing research is continually throwing up new perspectives.

The addictive personality – cause or consequence?

However, the idea of a preexisting “alcoholic personality” is now under scrutiny by numerous prospective studies, which follow a given population through time, carefully recording changes in behaviour and drinking patterns. The Natural History of Alcoholism revisited by Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant presents the results of six prospective studies, each of which confirms that the alcoholic personality is a consequence, not a cause, of alcoholism.

In another prospective study published in 1973, researchers compared the psychological test results on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) of 38 college students who later developed alcoholism with the MMPIs of 148 classmates. The MMPI profiles for all thirty-eight men who later became alcoholics were within the normal range. Years later, when the men were admitted to rehab for alcoholism, they scored in the pathological range on the test’s depression, psychopathic deviance, and paranoia scales. Their personality profiles at this time revealed, in the words of the researchers, “the neurotic patterns consistent with self-centred, immature, dependent, resentful, irresponsible people who are unable to face reality.”

George Vaillant’s fifty-two-year prospective study, initially published in 1983 and updated in 1995, provides compelling evidence to show that the “alcoholic personality” is actually caused by the disease of alcoholism.

Although many alcoholics in Vaillant’s study rationalized their loss of control over drinking by citing psychological trauma (divorce, sexual abuse, job loss, and so on), excessive drinking typically predated the alleged trauma. Summarizing his results, Vaillant concludes that “alcoholics are selectively personality disordered as a consequence, not as a cause, of the alcohol abuse. “Heavy alcohol use does not relieve anxiety and depression as much as alcohol abuse induces depression and anxiety.” Vaillant points out that although unhappy childhoods, serious family problems, depression, and anxiety do not cause addiction, “these factors will make any chronic disease worse.”

The conclusion is unmistakable: A normal personality is warped by addiction to alcohol and drugs into an abnormal, pathological personality. The “alcoholic personality” is the consequence, not the cause, of alcoholism.

“Just as the light passing through water distorts the individual’s personality, his social stability, and his recollection or relevant childhood variables,” Vaillant writes.

If you or a loved one is struggling with addiction, please call +91 90008 50001 or 78930 03070