Comments and reviews on article "Addictions and Self-Judgment"

Users comments and reviews on article Addictions and Self-Judgment by Margaret Paul, Ph.D.

Often, an extreme case of addictive behavior and Self-judgement is evidence of Early Childhood Traumas, where the child's caregivers did NOT accept the child as who he/she was, nor engage in the child's real emotional needs of that phase of his/her developmental phase. Rather, the caregiver wanted specific performances and the child was judged "bad" if he/she didn't fulfill the expectation. Later in life, the child-now-adult continues with the "parent-pleasing" behavior except that at this age, the child-now-adult has fused with and incorporated his early childhood's abusive caregiver-authority-figure, and the child-now-adult condemns, shames and punishes him/herself, even though the parent is no longer present. The unanalyzed child-adult will forever remember and react to the "shaming" he/she received early in life, and will always try to avoid it. This adaptation does not yield "normal" pleasure. The adult-child now resorts to sneaks and "shortcuts" to experience pleasure: over-eating, compulsive sex, porn addictions, drugs, violent fantasy, addiction to violence, cyclical rage attacks, binge-behaviors, etc. The momentary release from the onus of always being the "good-boy", is pleasurable. But, the pleasure associated with that bad-boy, acting-out, "shameful" behavior puts him back in the crosshairs of his internalized abusive parent. It verges on an internal sadomasochist pleasure cycle. This also explains serial killers, 95% of whom came from abusive childhoods. After the "release", then the afflicted goes back to shaming him/herself until the next "release" action, taking drugs, being violent, over-eating, sex-fling, cleptomania, etc.

I definitely think that what you are tlaking about is totally true, and that self-judgment can be very harmful and destructive and I think that's really unfortunate that so many people are hard on themselves. One correction though phillyjoej is that it turns out that most serial killers are actually from fairly stable households and they don't have abnormal childhoods, believe it or not.