Urges

When fighting your neural ghosts make sure to surrender!!

Posted on by alcoholicsguide

When I was in early recovery, in the first weeks and months my brain would continually trick me into thinking I was not an alcoholic and it did this via a combination of  stress and memory.

The process went like this – first I would have an intrusive thought about alcohol and drinking which I did not want and had not consciously put in my own head. Which used to annoy me! So what was it doing there then? I must have put it there right? why else would it be there?

So I must still have wanted to drink?

I would find this thought very threatening, frightening and upsetting. I would try to get rid of it by suppressing it, pushing it out of my consciousness. The problem was this didn’t work.

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In fact, it made the situation a whole lot worse. The intial intrusive thoughts about drinking would then proliferate and there would be other thoughts about drinking; where, at what time, who would be there. I would then have a visual read out of all these scenarios. In the bar, the sunlight streaming through the window, the golden glistening pint of lager in the summer sun matched only by the pearly white smile of the beautiful buxom bar maid slowly pulling my pint, looking at me longingly etc. in a busy atmosphere, full of happy your attractive people laughing and enjoying themselves. people dancing and hugging. Sweet music drifting acorss the bar. You get the picture.

Delusion! This was nothing like the last bar I drank in a can assure you!! It was however the image my brain was evoking partly via memory association partly by motivational embellishment.

I have an alcoholic brain which wants me to drink. It uses, still, memories from the past, to whisper sweet nothings. It never casts images across my feverish mind of violently vomiting, bent over the downstairs toilet, or me staring through half blind eyes at my severely jaundiced face in the bathroom mirror. Or being thrown out of various bars onto the hard concrete pavement outside, on my head. Or the tears and violent rows. And the distress and confusion on loved ones’ faces.

No my alcoholism never accesses these images. Ignores them completely. Instead, as my alcoholic brain wants nothing more or else than to drink, it sends memories like neural ghosts into my head to cast a spell of delusional images and suggestive ideas, mainly promoting the idea of how good it was.

This is why in AA it is said we should wind the tape forward a bit to the disgustingly horrible reality of our final drinking. The constantly wretching and living in isolaton in our alcohol induced psychosis and the shivering terror of delirium tremens.

We have a inner voice of alcoholism that quite simply lies. Distorts our memories. The motivational voice of our alcoholism is a pathological liar. It only wants to drink because it is like a psychotic carer who thinks that drinking is the thing to do when we are in full of stress or in emotional distress. It automatically says hold one I have a solution to this distress, DRINK!

This is what the brain has become hardwired to do when distressed enough.  it is a habitual response of our implicit memory which then recruits our explicit memory which paints the picture of why drinking would be such a good idea.

I have a distress based illness, so I do get distressed from time to time. Sometimes over the most innocuous things sometimes.

Not as badly as in early recovery.  No, things have improved beyond belief since then.

The neural ghosts of my motivation were like intoxicating sirens in early recovery. My impaired reward systems implored me to have liquid release. Both combined to conjure an alternative view of myself from that of my recovering self, which was still in it”s infancy. They seemed to have control of my brain!  I suddenly had a problem beyond my own will power, I couldn’t resolve these things under my own steam.

The thoughts would come and I would suppress them and the thoughts would multiply and then the memories would all chain link  and pretty soon I would have an Amazon warehouse store of memories, all providing evidence against those guys in AA, who were not telling me truth about me being an alcoholic, They were wrong…sure I liked to drink, especially given by traumatic upbringing and all?

All these thoughts and memories floating across my mind like edits in a movie to show me as a drinking person who wasn’t an alcoholic. Not many disorders go to such profound trouble!!

I would fight these images, memories and thoughts to such an extent my brain would quite simply end up paralysed, my brain felt like it had become locked and there was nothing I could do about it. It had frozen into a terrifying inertia. Stalemate. No resolution apart from increased suffering.

Fortunately whatever I had learnt in AA even in the early days would rescue me. I had learnt to habitually grasp at something close to hand, my mobile phone. After a few puzzling moments of indecision I realised I could get help from somewhere. Ring my sponsor!!!!

I had to use someone else’s head to help me with my head, my newly recovering alcoholic head. I needed a recovered head who knew what I was going through and could help me through it! I felt all fragile like a jaundiced chick.

Recovery is tough in the early days, let’s never forget that! Life without a sponsor and right from the start is a key to surviving this alcoholic possession by these deluded memories and these neural ghosts.

This is the most vital period, to keeping those who need help in recovery. Saying someone doesn’t want it enough doesn’t cut it for me anymore. Better to show them what they are missing, namely a solution to their problems. Who ultimately doesn’t want that?

If you have never trusted anyone in your life, like me, this is the time to start if you want to recover. Trust at least one person on God’s earth. One, that’s all. This is the start to a new world in recovery. A world beyond your alcoholic brain’s comprehension.

Anyway, remember that in the feverish brain of a person in early recovery who ends up engaged in this neurobiological possession, thought straightjacket and fighting for his or her life against a mnemonic Hydra when it is the last thing they should be doing, the only way to win is to give in. Surrender!

Ultimately, how we appraise and react to naturally occurring alcohol or drug related thoughts and associated memories  will determine if this process of “craving” is activated. If we use strategies such as acceptance of these thoughts as transitory then the thoughts will not affect this process and if we “Let Go and Let God” then the distress which initially activates this process will not do so. How we react to our thoughts and accompanying distress (as they appear be be coupled) will determine whether the mental obsession mentioned above will be provoked.

Also see Cognitive Craving Part 3  and Part 4

Is the “mental obsession” of the Big Book relative to how severe your addiction is?

Posted on by alcoholicsguide

Involuntary retrieval of drug related thoughts is a hallmark of addicted populations.

Intensity of obsessive thoughts about alcohol predict relapse rate (1), with addicts motivated to use drugs to “silence” obsessive thoughts (2).  The idea that abstinence automatically decreases alcohol-related thoughts is challenged by research (3) and supported by clinical observation that among abstinent alcohol abusers, alcohol-related thoughts and intrusions are the rule rather than exception (4).

Modell and colleagues (1992) highlighted symptomatic similarities between addiction and obsessive compulsive disorder with subjective craving for drugs or alcohol characterized as having obsessive elements. (eg, the compulsive drive to consume alcohol, recurrent and persistent thoughts about alcohol, and the struggle to control these drives and thoughts) similar to the thought patterns and behaviours of patients with obsessive-compulsive illness (5).

Modell et al. also point to the potential similarities in underlying neural pathways implicated in the two disorders, suggesting that they may share a similar aetiology. The Obsessive Compulsive Drinking Scale (OCDS) implies that as the severity of this illness progresses, so does the intensity of the obsessive thoughts about alcohol and the compulsive behaviours to use alcohol.

Kranzler et al. (1999) showed relapsers who scored higher in ‘obsessions’ craving measured by the OCDS predicted relapse in the 12 months after treatment completion (6).

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This may also be a reflection of addiction severity too! As addicts and alcoholics become more addictive brain imaging shows a shift in “reward processing” from the ventral striatum to the dorsal striatum. The DS is in charge of more automatic, compulsive reaction.  This shift from VS to DS  may also be marked by an increased emergence of automatic thoughts, which the authors suggested as the cognitive thoughts and images of automatized drug action schemata (2).

In fact, this is demonstrated by correlations indicating that dorsal striatum activation is lowest in participants with low OCDS scores. This means, in simple terms, that more severe addiction may be associated with more intrusive/obsessive thoughts and less severe with less thoughts.  

 

References 

 

1.. Bottlender, M., & Soyka, M. (2004). Impact of craving on alcohol relapse during, and 12 months following, outpatient treatment. Alcohol and Alcoholism, 39(4), 357-361.

2. 6. Tiffany, S. T. (1990). A cognitive model of drug urges and drug-use behavior: role of automatic and nonautomatic processes. Psychological review, 97(2), 147.

3. Caetano, R. (1985). Alcohol dependence and the need to drink: A compulsion? Psychological Medicine,
15(3), 463–469.

4. Hoyer, J., Hacker, J., & Lindenmeyer, J. (2007). Metacognition in alcohol abusers: How are alcohol-related intrusions appraised?. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 31(6), 817-831.

5. Modell, J. G., Glaser, F. B., Mountz, J. M., Schmaltz, S., & Cyr, L. (1992). Obsessive and compulsive characteristics of alcohol abuse and dependence: Quantification by a newly developed questionnaire.
Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 16, 266-271.

6. Kranzler, H. R., Mulgrew, C. L., Modesto-Lowe, V. and Burleson, J. A.
(1999) Validity of the obsessive compulsive drinking scale (OCDS): Does craving predict drinking behavior? Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 23, 108–114.

7. Vollstädt‐Klein, S., Wichert, S., Rabinstein, J., Bühler, M., Klein, O., Ende, G., … & Mann, K. (2010). Initial, habitual and compulsive alcohol use is characterized by a shift of cue processing from ventral to dorsal striatum.Addiction, 105(10), 1741-1749.

 

 

What is craving – do neurobiological accounts explain relapse in recovering alcoholics? Pt 2

Posted on by alcoholicsguide

If you want to drink, you will. It you do not, and depending on your regulation of emotions and stress, you may still relapse, even if one never intended to drink again.

In our previous blog we looked at automatic physiological response to cues that alcoholics appear to experience. These habitual responses are well explained by reinforcement, conditioning or neurobiological models of addiction.

However, do these neurobiological models predict relapse in abstinent alcoholics and addicts? In other words, do recovering alcoholics act and react to cues and have the same attentional bias, i.e. are they lured siren-like to alcohol or drug cues like lemmings to a drink or a drug or are there more  cognitive-affective processes at work in the craving than these models suggest!?

Does the mind play a role in transmuting these physiological urges into “craving”.

When I have seen a new comer to recovery craving they do not seem to walk around like a robot, salivating and rubbing their sweaty hands together. I have seen that when I was in active drinking and was like that innumerable times myself while under the spell of this “fleshy hunger” called having a pathological urge for a drink.

I am not downplaying this urge state, it is quite horrendous, it is like craving a glass of water after days in the desert. It feels like your very life depends on it, in other words. It can be a life or death feeling.

 

PowerPoint Presentation

In recovery, this urge state becomes more complicated and various other brain regions may become involved in this “craving” and there may be a interplay between regions rather than regions simply acting in concert – we will explore this more in series 3 of this theme of “craving”.

For now we examine how well do neurobiological accounts (i.e. accounts which focus primarily on impairments in neurotransmitter and stress systems and brain function in areas which create a cascade of ‘knock on’ impairment and dysfunction in areas of the prefrontal cortex which deals with cognitive control of behaviour with resultant dysfunction in areas which deal with reward, motivation stress and emotional response and more motoric, habitualized action) predict behaviour in abstinent, treatment seeking individuals?

Here we simply consider how well aspects of these theories, such as the ideas relating to craving (urge) via cue reactivity (an attentional bias towards alcohol and drug associated cues in the environment)  and positive memory associations for previous alcohol or drug use, relate to, or are relevent to the experiential reality of everyday recovering alcoholics and addicts.

In simple terms, it is the duty of science to attempt to predict behaviour, so how well do these models, especially the positive reinforcement model, predict the behaviour of treatment seeking abstinent alcoholics and addicts. 

Factors in relapse

Cues, external especially, which is a central part of positive reinforcement models, seem to be only one of various factors in relapse. They are present in a relatively small minority of studies or interact with other variables such as stress and negative affect (NA). So how well does this then validate this theory of addiction, when it is only present in a minor way in relapse and usually alongside stress and NA. Does this mean it plays a role when interacting with these variables of stress/NA. Does it play a role on it’s own?

I forward this question because the looking at an alcohol cue by an alcoholic even in recovery/abstinence invokes stress reactions such as anxiety or negative emotions such as anger, sadness ( ). Can we say there is a non-stress influenced cue-reactivity? Is there a purely dopaminergic cue reactivity? It doesn’t appear so.

In fact moving on from noting this intrinsic stress response in cue reactivity, various studies show that the highest high-risk relapse situations are negative emotions, testing personal control, social pressure, and urge and temptations  (1), that 62 –73% of relapse episodes were due to negative emotion and social pressure. Heroin addicts relapse primarily because of NE and lack of social supports. Mood state, along with social isolation and family factors, was more likely to be related to relapse incidences with a positive correlation between NE and alcohol-seeking behaviour. Thus the most commonly cited reason for relapse was negative mood states, consistent with previous studies of relapse factors (2).  Also reasons for relapse did not differ in relation to the primary drug of dependence (alcohol, methamphetamine, heroin), reflecting the commonality of relapse processes across diverse types of substances.

Marlatt (3,4) , views relapse as an unfolding process in which resumption of substance use is the last event in a long sequence of maladaptive responses to internal or extemal stressors such as negative emotional states, interpersonal conflicts, and social pressures. In fact negative emotional states ….coping, self-efficacy and stressful life events appeared to be of greater import in determining relapse than ‘cues’.

It would appear that cue associated stimuli plays a minor role in relapse, with stress and NA appearing to be a more important determinant of relapse. So conditioning models do not appear to give a comprehensive account of relapse and this may be particularly the case in abstinent, treatment seeking alcoholics.

How does conditioning methodology adequately explain this group?

Attentional Bias

Do treatment seeking alcoholic have the same attentional bias as non treatment seeking active alcoholics?

In fact, studies seem to show a negative attentional bias in alcohol-dependent patients that may be interpreted as an avoidance of alcohol-related stimuli.

Townshend and Duka (2007) propose that treatment seeking individuals have established active avoiding strategies and  are able to disengage their attention from alcohol cues (5). In fact is suggested that a positive attentional bias towards alcohol cues occurs when stimuli were presented shortly (50 ms), followed by a disengagement from alcohol cues in the 500 ms interval of cue presentation. This corresponds with a cognitive model of craving of Tiffany (6) where the 50ms may represent automatic approach before this automatic bias is interfered with by cognitive control, perhaps resulting in ‘craving’.

Does this visual approach–disengagement pattern reflect an  attentional bias which is appetitive or threat based? If there is avoidance are cues similar as  seen as in those with trait anxiety who have attentional bias for threat-related cues (7). A large body of evidence indicates that aversive emotional states are associated with biases in cognitive processing and, specifically, with increased attentional processing of threat-related cues.Is this also how treatment seeking addicted individuals are responding to substance-related cues? It may that stress heightens the salience of attractiveness of the cues so that abstinent individual relapse because of stress based response which makes relapse via internal and external cues a solution to their chronic stress/emotional distress?

Or it may be that relapse is based on difficulties coping with the manifestation of chronic stress, emotional distress and that  relapse  is a more complicated process than simply being lured, siren-like, to relapse via cues.

In most of the relapses we have encountered it has been a ongoing build up to relapse. There has been a period of emotional dyregulation whereby individuals get more and more distressed, often in inter-personal relationships, and have a “to hell with it!” relapse to relieve escalating emotional distress and the distorted thinking that goes with it. It is not due to automatic or motoric proceses, it is mediated via affective-cognitive mechanisms and this is why the information processing model, with some modifications, appears to explain craving and relapse more satisfactorily.

If you want to drink, you will, it you do not, and depending on your regulation of emotions and stress, you may still relapse, even if one never intended to drink again, due to the torturous intrusive thoughts which accompany this cognitive and emotionally based “craving”, more akin to the “mental obsession ” of AA’s Big Book than purely physiological urges.

References

1. El, S., Salah El, G., & Bashir, T. Z. (2004). High-risk relapse situations and self-efficacy: Comparison between alcoholics and heroin addicts. Addictive behaviors, 29(4), 753-758.

2.  Hammerbacher, M., & Lyvers, M. (2006). Factors associated with relapse among clients in Australian substance disorder treatment facilities. Journal of substance use, 11(6), 387-394.

3. Marlatt, G.A. (1978) Craving for alcohol, loss of control and relapse: Cognitive behavioural analysis. In: Nathan, P.E., Marlatt, G.A., and Loberg, T. eds. Alcoholism: new directions in behavioural research and treatment. Plenum Press, New York, 271-314.

4. Marlatt, G.A., and Gordon, J.R. (1985). Relapse prevention: maintenance strategies in the treatment of addictive behaviors. Guilford  Press, New York.

5. Townshend JM, Duka T . Attentional bias associated with alcohol cues: differences between heavy and occasional social drinkers. Psychopharmacology (Berl)2001;157:67–74.

6. Tiffany, S. T. (1990). A cognitive model of drug urges and drug-use behavior: role of automatic and nonautomatic processes. Psychological review, 97(2), 147.

7.  Bar-Haim, Y., Lamy, D., Pergamin, L., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., & van IJzendoorn, M. H. (2007). Threat-related attentional bias in anxious and nonanxious individuals: a meta-analytic study. Psychological bulletin, 133(1), 1.

8.  McCusker CG  Cognitive biases and addiction: an evolution in theory and method. Addiction 2001;96:47–56.