Addictive behavior is hard to stop because of the interaction of psychological factors, namely, denial and relativism,  and its impact on physical behavior. This is another reason why you may be experiencing cognitive dissonance. Dulling a discomforting feeling from the tension, stress or anxiety that is produced when you value one thing yet do another is a commonly used strategy for seeking relief, however it does not prove to be an effective, permanent solution. Instead, dulling the uncomfortable feeling with a substance or an activity is a short-term remedy. It may bring some temporary relief to your psyche but this does not identify nor treat the underlying reason that caused the problem in the first place. When this fact remains hidden in your subconscious, behavioral habits form that serves to only deepen your fall into denial.

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Cloudy Judgement Skews Reality

Avoiding the pain of correctly identifying the root problem halts the healing/growth process. Misidentifying the root problem, on the other hand, can drive you to become a workaholic, an alcoholic, or a people pleaser in need of recognition and/or positive reinforcement and leads to being caught up in an endless race for power, fame or fortune leaving you restless and exhausted. This disconnection with cause and effect logic creates a dysfunctional outlook in your mind and leads to a cycle of unproductive behavioral habits. The root of the problem stems from wrong thinking. It could be that you are unaware of the connections because of lack of experience; it could be that you feel insecure because your opinion of yourself is not reinforced by a respected group of trusted friends or family members, or it could be you deny the reality of cause and effect. Whatever the reason, the end result of this thinking is wrong behavior that creates a negative cycle further altering your reality. Consider these examples of dysfunctional behavior:​  

• Someone periodically misses morning work meetings after drinking excessively the night before but insists there's no problem because the work is still getting done and so continues to miss meetings. Eventually this person is fired for this.

• A couple has accumulated so much credit card debt because they made an initial decision to only pay the minimum required on their monthly bill, instead of curbing their spending to reduce the future bill. They have developed a comfortable but unwise fiscal habit of continuing to spend but only look at the monthly minimum due for payment. When the couple looks to buy a house, their debt ratio is too high to get a reasonable loan so they settle on paying the high interest rate.

• The wife of an older man in the end stage of life, refuses to discuss health care directives and a final will with him, insisting instead that he's getting better so she continues to take no steps to plan for the inevitable. The man dies and the widow is unprepared for and overwhelmed by the slew of decisions she needs to make and becomes paralyzed (psychologically) by anxiety causing additional problems.

• A woman has lost herself in work because of the satisfaction she gleans from the accolades of her boss. Meanwhile, she hears complaints from her husband that her long hours of work are negatively affecting their personal life. She struggles with this conflict but finds herself working more and more hours because she gravitates to the place where she gets positive reinforcement. This is a short-term strategy because she is avoiding her priority of "family first", which she had committed to her husband prior to marriage. She is stuck in indecision so her habit of working long hours continues, bolstering her self-esteem. While action intensifies her work-a-holic behavior and provides her with temporary relief, the long-term consequences will intensify as well, likely i the form of a divorce. 

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Family socialization is another common reason for a lack of conscious awareness of how your own decisions are affecting your reality and how this shapes your subjectivity. In generational cases, for example, if unhealthy addictive behavior is modeled and remains uncorrected (a dysfunctional habit of impulse control and lack of consistent discipline applied in the home) a child will not develop the skill of self-control required to choose not to indulge in an unhealthy addiction (Pears, K., Capaldi, D. M., & Owen, L. D. (2007)). If excessive drinking is modeled in the home as a release for anxiety, and if not addressed and discussed openly, this modeled behavior will be incorporated into your own behavior and will become your way of easing your own tension or pain, even though you are aware that it is a dysfunctional coping mechanism that doesn’t work.

 

Sometimes generational addiction may develop because certain basic needs are inadequately met and this could be the reason for the anxiety you may feel but are unaware of its origin. For example, a person who has grown up in an environment where a virtue like love or trust was taught from a subjective perspective, will grow up with a misuse of and a dysfunctional view of these virtues. In other words, the person will not achieve the natural consequences of unadulterated love and so they discount the value they serve in their life which leads to more dysfunctional behavior. In situations like these, an unhealthy addiction develops partly because the addiction has blurred the correlation between how love and trust require vulnerability. Without this trait of vulnerability, a person will gravitate towards an environment without it, and where behavior is superficial, further reinforcing the wrong thinking. When love from others is lacking, your need doesn't go away. Instead, it becomes lost among other unfulfilled needs. To make up for it, you do everything you can to indulge yourself. An overload of self-love further reinforces a subjective reality and cements opinions. Partaking in an unhealthy behavior only delays the development of key virtue for mature, healthy living. (Read more about the development of basic virtues by psychologist Erik Erikson in Appendix 1C). 

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Another possibility for growing up with an altered reality has to do with your self-concept. Knowing you are loved for who you are instead of what you do, creates an internal confidence that results in internal peace. Cognitive dissonance is one reason why people who live in their own subjective reality, say “peace, peace when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). Denial, a defense mechanism, is a common way to protect your self-image from feeling uncomfortable truths that otherwise would have created anxiety because the picture you paint of yourself does not correspond to reality, Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T., Rosenblatt, A., Burling, J., Lyon, D., ... & Pinel, E. (1992), Pearl, D. (1954), Alicke, M. D., & Sedikides, C. (2009)). Sassaroli, S., & Ruggiero, G. M. (2005) say that low self-esteem is a primary reason for mismanagement of stress (p 140).

 

Cloudy Judgement Leads to Relativism

Opinions can be based on what you think about certain issues from what you read, hear about, or what you saw others do, regardless of whether that experience was/is right and factual or not. For example, if your mother smoked and you never saw or heard about the negative consequences of smoking, you would grow up with an opinion of, instead of a truthful account of, the risk of smoking. Cigarettes have health warnings written on every package, but these are ignored because the mother's opinion is that the satisfaction from smoking outweighs any potential health risks, and so she continues smoking. This is an example of decision-making based on opinion and emotion. Smoking may or may not have been an intentional decision at the time she chose to do it but her behavior carries with it not only the risk of illness, but she has made a generational impact. Opinions can be harmful when not checked. To participate productively in society, each person must learn how to merge self-interest with societal interest, and avoid realitivism.

 

Relativism infects decision-making, further skewing your perception. Merriam-Webster defines relativism as ethical truths that depend on the cultural or historical context for it's definition so that individuals and groups of people will hold to their beliefs rather than upholding absolute truths. Thus, a relative reality is when a person is more likely to distort knowledge, truth, and morality by judging information in relation to their own situation and unique beliefs rather than by defining them by the standard established by an objective absolute authority. Consider:

• The overspending couple may take comfort in the statistic that shows the average credit card debt is over $5,000 and so accepts their debt amount as normal rather than deeming their behavior as unacceptable when compared to a cash system of payment.

• Instead of feeling hurt/disappointed by your partner and sabotaging your motivation to try to come up with a solution to refresh/restore the relationship, you decide to overindulge activities or substance abuse and just hope things will work out.

• Being anxious because you are worried about how to pay an outstanding bill and trying to resolve the feeling of anxiety by ignoring it, doesn’t change the reality that the bill will need to be paid.

With this self-focus comes subjective and faulty logic in the form of repression, rationalization and justification which stalls healthy psycho-social development. Instead of allowing pain to alert you that something is wrong in your life that needs a remedy, your numbing behavior continues and becomes a habit that has biological, psychological, and social consequences (Philippians 2:3-6). When this is the case, consequences from action become the only thing that corrects wrong thinking and this is what drives change.

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Hope Tolerates Temporary Performance Tension

In recovery, you are consciously working on breaking the addiction habit. As long as your mind is consistent with trying to learn these new habits you are achieving cognitive consistency. Don't confuse the uncomfortable feelings you may experience during the learning process, for anxiety. Change is accompanied by temporary feelings from performance tension. The length of time this feeling lasts is in correlation to the amount of training it takes before the new tasks is incorporated into your routine habits. This tension is created when there is a gap between action and reward - i.e. a training period. Anxiety takes performance tension coupled with a negative/fearful imagination and blows it out of context.The performance tension involved in breaking an addiction comes from both the thought ("I want permanent relief") and its consistent action (learning new, appropriate behaviors to achieve what you want). The stress from change is your body's way of communicating to the brain that something new is happening. You can (and do) control your own level of tension, stress, or anxiety by the way you think.

 

Training your mind to think and training your body to be conditioned to a new system of rewards sends a shock through you body. If your mind reasons this change as a good thing, you may be able to move through the performance tension associated with learning new information or behavioral skills fairly calmly. However, one big hurdle to being able to do this is the ability to switch from instant to long term gratification. When you have an addicted lifestyle, you have been conditioned to think that any desire you have should be filled immediately. A major skill that needs to be mastered in order to successfully move away from addictive thinking is the skill of "delayed gratification"; sacrificing instant pleasure/satisfaction for the achievement of a long-term plan. For these reasons, you will not feel peaceful in a new reality until the performance tension from the training is over and you have successfully developed new habits in a like social environment which one of the "rewards" for your new routine; enjoyment. 

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Reality Shaped by Truth

Regardless of why a certain behavior pattern formed, it doesn't affect the fact that addictive behaviors are slow to change because your body and soul have been conditioned to repeat those behaviors (Skinner, 1938, Thorndyke 1898). You may have reached the point where you want to stop the addictive behavior, but this realization is complicated by the physiological conditioning that has occurred as a result. Self-determination that is not bounded by the limits set by God and society results in denial that hides the truth and leads to boundary busting behavior (Appendix 2H). At this point, you can try to use your own will power to subdue the addiction (and take the chance of misidentifying the root cause) or change your perception to understand who you are in relation to God and others.

 

Denial negates truth and brings fear. Accepting truth is easy to do when the truth doesn’t cost anything. But when it is going to cause fear, pain, or any type of insecurity, there is a tendency to want to deny the reality of it. The truth to the findings of Skinner, don't really mean anything to you, until you are trying to go through the change process and are failing. Your reality is shaped by what you do with the truth. “The truth sets you free”… but it's only the truth you know and believe that will “set you free - indeed”! (John 8:31-36, 17:17, Galatians 6:1). Any foundation that is not built on truth crumbles and unmasks the inaccuracy of a subjective reality (Matthew 7:24-27, 1 John 3:19). For more on truth, denial and justification see Appendix 1D & Appendix E. 

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As recommended in Appendix 1B, decide to cry out for help to Almighty God and get the strength needed to overcome the grip of addiction so you can set and reach productive, realistic goals. Accepting God’s supremacy and a new identity in Christ will birth a new awareness in you that balances your psycho-social personality. Once you know who and whose you are, you can set worthy goals based on truth and love. Christian cognitive consistency comes when your decisions reflect your values based on the truth of God’s Word and is expressed in both public and private. When you trust the process and stick with it, your new behavior will become an unconscious habit in your new normal lifestyle. Anxiety sparks the awareness that change is needed. The tension from the change doesn't resolve until you have incorporated the behavior into your routine!  

• See Appendix 1F to review the phases in learning. ​​

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If your tendency is to react to the uncomfortable feeling of change (associated with trying to rid yourself of an unhealthy addiction by learning a series of new habits), refocus your thoughts to think faith first!  When your imagination is disciplined with truth (when your thinking and behavior both line up to Biblical truth), cognitive consistency is achieved and peace results (Psalm 7:14, John 17:17). The understanding and use of Christian love brings internal peace and social harmony (Koenig, H. G. (2020), Romans 8:6, 13:8, Galatians 5:6). Harmony ensues when your social environment accepts and/or carries out similar behavior. The fruit of the Spirit empowers you to show self-control and gentleness as you practice the skills that will help you negotiate self-interest within a social climate; you just need to want to do it! The result will be a healthy psychosocial balance, evidenced by all (assuming you are merging into a healthy social environment that shares similar values so the peace and unity of the Holy Spirit will not be disrupted). Read more about merging self into society at the sub tab: Negotiate Rather than Compete.

 

As a Christian, you still need to make right decisions-right from God's perspective. When you do, you are putting on the armor of God and will march on with confidence in Christ because of the consistency you have throughout your spirit, soul, and body to live your new normal lifestyle in Christ (Philippians 2:12-13, 3 John 2, 1 Thessalonians 5:23, Ephesians 6:10-18). However, if you react with fear and doubt, your mind will go into a self-protection mode and your body will fight the change, causing anxiety (and anxiety is what drives you back to addiction, triggering the addiction cycle to win out over the change cycle).

 

A Biblical example of what a subjective reality can do is seen when you study the Old Testament religious leaders that were present when Jesus was alive. Read the description Jesus gave of the Pharisee’s as described in Matthew chapters 12, 23). Their acceptance of Jesus meant the Pharisees would have to change their theology, their traditions, and their actions which is something they had no interest in doing so they blocked the truth from altering their reality. The Sanhedrin, too, were caught up in their own theology. Their motive of being “right” exceeded the value of truth. Some more Biblical examples of denial: