Dopamine & Desire: Understanding Addiction with Anna Healy Fenton

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:04]Welcome back to the Sexy Time Podcast.

[00:00:05]I'm Belle and today's conversation is one that touches many lives but still carries a lot of stigma and misunderstanding. I think today we're joined by Anna Healey Fenton, an addiction and relationship counselor based here in Hong Kong who works with individuals and couples navigating substance abuse, sex and porn addiction, compulsive behaviors, betrayal, trauma and relationship recovery. Welcome to the pod, Anna.

[00:00:30]>> Thank you, Belle. It's very nice to be here with you guys.

[00:00:33]>> This is my sister, Ava.

[00:00:34]>> Yes. I was telling her Anna, when she got here, I said, you know, my sister has been talking about Anna for years now, and I'm finally so honored to meet you because she always quotes the things you say. She's like, you have to meet this girl. She's brilliant. You learn so much from her. And finally, we can share this with our audience, hear it firsthand from you, how to deal with people going through addiction, trauma, even just the support system around these people.

[00:00:55]>> Yeah, absolutely. And you hit on a really good point there, Abba, which is that for most people, this is a family issue, a family disease. And it really, you know, one person with a compulsive behavior that's negatively impacted the impacting the family will throw the whole family offkilter. Really, it's like, you know, those little mobiles that go around above a baby's crib. If one piece is out of sync, you know how they lurch trying to balance and and that's what the family system looks like. All the other members of the family will have to change and adapt their behavior to try and accommodate the person who's completely out of kilter. The well, let's call it for this purposes of this conversation, the addict.

[00:01:34]>> Are you against all of these altogether?

[00:01:36]Or is it because you have been dealing with people who get addicted? And how can you classify a person as an addict?

[00:01:42]>> Great question. I'm not against any of it. Addiction is fundamentally a brain disease. Your brain is behaving in a compulsive way about a behavior that for many people is not problematic. Just take alcohol. 12 to 15% of the population will already have or will develop later in life a problem with alcohol. That leaves 85 who can be heavy drinkers but never cross that line as we say goes from being a cucumber into a pickle. They never do. They remain a cucumber. They can always just put down the drink and go home. Yeah, an alcoholic not so easy. They'll want to finish it and then have another one. And so that compulsivity is what we're talking about. So you can label addiction any which way you like. It doesn't really matter. The test is this and it's three or four questions that you just ask. Do you continue with a behavior or a substance like alcohol, food, or drugs >> assuming sex, porn? Yeah.

[00:02:36]>> Uh or a behavior like sex, porn, online activities that causes your friends to say, "We think you should cut down." Do you have many attempts to manage, moderate, and control which don't work?

[00:02:48]And do you also have attempts to quit which fail? So, you could stop, but you can't stay stopped. But the really big one, and it's just simple, is do I continue with this mood and mindaltering behavior or substance despite negative life consequences?

[00:03:04]>> Yeah, that's it there.

[00:03:06]>> Okay. I want to give context for our viewers who are listening and and watching. Anna, I met her a couple of years back during COVID and we had such an interesting dinner conversation and I swear all the guests just surrounded her and were asking her questions. It was like a private counseling session and she said a few things to give them the reference of the cucumber and the pickle. Um, basically Anna says that when you're an addict or addicted to alcohol, it's like a cucumber becoming a pickle, right? You become that pickle and that addict can never go back to being a cucumber. So when you're addicted to alcohol, for example, you're never not an addict anymore. You're just always fighting to be sober daily. And that's something you don't understand as a person. Number two, the thing that you told me that still has stuck with me till this day is people don't just wake up and they're addicts. Nobody wants to wake up and be an addict. It creeps up in the little moments. So she was giving an example. It's like, you know, yeah, maybe you want an alcohol at 700 p.m. to wind down, right? And then maybe now you're looking for it at 5:00 p.m. And then all of a sudden at lunchtime you're like, I want a whiskey. And then you wake up and you put some vodka in your coffee. And that's how the addiction happens. And it's it slowly creeps up on you. And I think what's important for a lot of listeners right now is to understand how to recognize that addiction creeping up on people, whether it be gambling or whether it be like porn, drugs, consumption. Let's go to what are the symptoms that a person can recognize that they're becoming addicted to something.

[00:04:37]>> Well, let's back up. Back up a little bit, Bel. Where does this all start?

[00:04:41]Well, I'm afraid it starts in your family of origin. If you're an alcoholic, it doesn't mean that you inherited it. But if you have the genetic predisposition to become dependent on that substance, you might live your whole life and never meet any alcohol and it would never be a problem for you. On the other hand, if you're surrounded by alcoholics in your family, mom, dad, brothers, sisters, grandparents, there's a 60% chance, I would say, that you've probably got the gene. But that's not enough. Unless you're exposed to it through environment, through stress and trauma, small T, what we call ADES, adverse developmental experiences or ACEs, adverse childhood experiences, you will not necessarily go on to develop what we call the disease, the brain problems that come with dependency on that substance. So, it's not a simple story and you may never turn on the genes.

[00:05:33]Just having the gene isn't enough. You have to be in a situation where maybe there's a divorce or emotional upheaval or an attachment wound or there's a neglect or cruelty in the family or abuse which will make you feel so uncomfortable and as a child so unnurtured and so not cared for and neglected that you end up looking for ways to self-medicate. And what do you go for? Well, the easiest thing that changes the level of dopamine in your brain and makes you feel different, makes you feel okay. It soothes your pain. And for many kids now, food is of course the first thing we encounter in life. That's easy sugar, right? We have a sugary snack and we feel uplifted temporarily. So that's an easy one that most people can recognize. But of course, if you're say take how does sex addiction start? There's certain points in your life where you make developmental choices. And a pivotal one is whether I learn to connect with people to get my interpersonal needs met for emotional, physical, and sexual connection. And then I learn from my parents who teach me how to attune to other people, how to connect, how to relate. Now, if that bit's missing, the child needs help with that, how to regulate their emotions. They will learn quickly that, oh, porn, sex, masturbation. That fulfills the same function. I feel stressed, I feel uncomfortable, I feel unhappy, I turn to porn, I feel okay, I masturbate, I feel fine, I feel distracted. Now I'm teaching myself to escape from my own emotions, not to get get them dealt with in a healthy way. And that's the beginning of the problem. I discover a substance or a behavior that makes me feel better that isn't turning to people because addiction is fundamentally a disease of isolation. And connection is the cure. Learning to feel happy and make connections with people is what recovery is.

[00:07:19]>> Wow, that's so true. Everyone I know who's had to deal with this disease, you we were like, we're sure that this he or her is going through it because they're isolated from us. We don't know what's going on in their lives. Um and then the cure you say is connection.

[00:07:33]>> Yeah. And the big problem there is shame. Supposing you're a kid. A natural boy's thing is to learn about their body and become experimental with masturbation at a young age. They all do it. But then if you have a secret now, you've got, of course, um a porn machine in your pocket. It's called a phone. And that was never there before. You had to get your dad's porn stash or your big brother or something and it was a diff difficult thing.

[00:07:54]>> Now any kid can access porn, but you get the message this is shameful and secret and bad from an early age and you must do it with the door locked in the bathroom. And then if someone catches you, they probably shame you. So it becomes linked with shame. It's my guilty secret. And that's what drives it underground. You're not going to tell your friend, "Oh, by the way, I do loads of porn every day." Because you're afraid of what they'll think of you. Is that the same when it comes to drugs and alcohol that hiding it and you're it's still you're looking for that connection? Would you would you say it's all interrelated?

[00:08:25]>> Absolutely. The disease is not I'm an alcoholic or I'm a drug addict. Some people just have one what we call drug of no choice. The problem is addiction is you've trained your brain to escape from reality into another world when it's unhappy, uh stressed, usually stress or just uncomfortable. You have to teach children how to manage their emotions and regulate their feelings.

[00:08:50]Otherwise, we have eight or so emotions every day. And if you've not learned an healthy relationship with your own emotions from your parents, maybe because they have their own emotional problems, you're at sea. You have to figure it out for yourself. So, a kid now has the solution in their pocket.

[00:09:05]They're either Instagram addicts, you know, at 8 or uh porn addicts at 10. And we're seeing it younger and younger now because it takes them to another world.

[00:09:14]It's an escape.

[00:09:15]>> Yeah. It's their coping mechanism.

[00:09:17]>> It's a coping mechanism >> for parents like us. Like do you have any advice on how to help kids with their coping mechanism? Like how how >> don't give them a phone basically that >> don't give them a phone until you absolutely have to and then give them one with all the apps turned off. I'm not kidding. But it starts much earlier.

[00:09:32]It starts with attuning to your baby.

[00:09:35]You know, for nine months, the baby's inside of you being comforted by babies hear your voice even inside of you. Then they're born and they still have that relationship with their mom. They're comforted by being held by her because it's the same heartbeat, breathing voice that they've always known.

[00:09:50]>> And that's attunement. And the baby attunes to a good mother and learns to regulate their own emotions.

[00:09:57]>> And that's why we hold babies because they learn to manage their own emotions by piggybacking off of yours. And as they get older, they hopefully learn relational skills via what are called mirror neurons, which are formed when we, and this is important, when we look eye to eye at each other, our brains are manufacturing mirror neurons, which enable us to be relational and to have empathy. Empathy is a long word for being able to say, I can put my feet in your shoes and imagine how you're feeling right now. And we do it face to face. And this gives us the ability to be relational with one another and get our emotional needs met >> and to connect >> to connect. And we have a deep need as humans. We are social apes wired for connection. That's what we are. And we produce lovely neurotransmitters called oxytocin which is the attachment bonding. Why we love to cuddle, why we love to go out with friends, why we love to be with colleagues. And that's what we all missed during COVID. We were all so lonely because we couldn't get oxytocin. Now, this is really important about the mirror neurons piece because what happens and why porn is such a problem for relationships is that if you're looking a lot of porn, you're having this relationship with this these people who are doing weird stuff on screen that your brain was never designed to see. And you're thinking, "Oh, I'm kind of relational with these people, but you're not." Your brain is not fooled. It knows it's looking at pixels, not real eyes. So, it's not making mirror neurons, but you feel like you're connecting, but your brain's going, "Uh-uh." And it's a case of if you don't use it, you lose it. So, you're actually killing mirror neurons all the time. You're looking at porn.

[00:11:33]And you're not seeing somebody's daughter, somebody's sister. You're seeing, you know, a sex object. And then when you go out in the street, you you'll be learing at women and not seeing real people either because you've killed your mirror neurons. You've killed your ability to be relational.

[00:11:49]And remember, dopamine, which is the neurotransmitter we're talking about, is the one for hunting. It's the one that hunters use to crank themselves up and go hunting. It's very basic and brutal as a as a driver. Primal. Yeah.

[00:12:01]>> So, what you're doing is walking around like a crocodile in the street, like a a sex addict's behaving like a predator.

[00:12:07]And that his wife might be going, "Honey, you're you're ogling women. You know, your your tongue is hanging out."

[00:12:13]And he's going, "Am I really? It's not even aware."

[00:12:16]>> Yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:17]>> He's lost sensitivity. And this is the problem with porn addiction in particular. They can't be relational anymore with real people.

[00:12:23]>> Yes. Yeah. I have a friend who has been married for a very long time and they didn't have intimacy. And it's because he was so addicted to porn that when he would have sex with his wife, it just wasn't enough for him to orgasm. And he was trying to get her to watch it and she was like, I can't do these acts. And another friend of mine had to break up with her boyfriend because he was so addicted to porn that he would stop meetings, let's say, let's say a meeting like this, and be like, "Guys, I have an emergency." He'd go to the bathroom, pretend to be on the phone, and he would be watching like 2-minute porn, and he had to whack off. It disrupted their lives because it was so at one point his co-workers were like, "Why are you always having these weird emergencies?

[00:13:01]What is it?" And then he admitted to my friend that he was addicted to porn and he would stop meetings to watch porn. I have a question. Like you know how they say men are genetically predisposed to always want to masturbate or or ejaculate. Is that true? I mean is that what causes men to always want to watch porn or >> just not genetics?

[00:13:21]>> Diff sex drives vary from person to person but there's no such thing as normal with that. Some people have low sex drive some people have a higher one.

[00:13:29]Bel raises an excellent point about porn is the compulsivity of it. The brain we have now is version 101. It has not changed in 200,000 years. And think before the internet, a guy could probably expect to see in his whole lifetime, if he wasn't hanging out on a nude beach, maybe 20 naked women in the if he was lucky in the course of his life. Now he can see that many naked women in 20 seconds if he wants. Plus, his little brain is subjected to this incredibly stimulating, activating material that it was simply never designed for. This hyper stimulation, it's like giving a Ferrari to a caveman, and his brain's just literally exploding. If you look at a brain scan of someone who's on porn, really addicted to porn, it will look lit up like a Christmas tree. It's inflamed.

[00:14:20]It's really weird. And you imagine then he tries to have sex with a normal woman and his brain's going boring. Nothing's happening. So to your point, what we're now seeing is ED, erectile dysfunction caused by porn. And then at the other end, inability to climax without porn.

[00:14:38]And of course, this is where the family and the partner comes in. The poor wife and partner thinks and he often it's them. And he's often naughty. He often lets her think that because it's the easy way out of it, right? admitting rather than admitting.

[00:14:51]>> Rather than admit, I know I created this problem myself, he just goes, "Oh, well, you know, honey, you know, maybe you're you're not you're not doing it for me."

[00:14:59]She now takes on the responsibility. Not fair, guys.

[00:15:03]>> Yeah. Not at all.

[00:15:05]>> I wanted to talk about the epigenetics of it because you you said that it's the environment and you also have the gene for that. And it is true for let's say drugs, alcohol and potentially maybe addiction to sex. As a parent or you know having parents the question I don't know how to form a question in a way that people won't get offended. It's like a lot of parents blame themselves for when their children become addicts.

[00:15:29]Is that a fair measure of why this happens or is it contextualized? is like it depends on each situ each person like you said you know it could be trauma based it could be his history history could be their genes >> like as a parent what would your what would your advice be to parents who have kids who are let's say addicted to certain things like who blame themselves >> first of all folks don't blame yourselves it's no one chooses to be an addict but if you've got that genetic makeup and the family history is just there or the environment it happens but it doesn't happen to every kid some kids are much more resilient It's very much also personality based and also circumstances. The main thing the parents in the family need to understand is it's always a disease of lack of connection and kids feel they can't go to adults in their circle for support, love and help and no shame. We shame people without realizing and we often have toxic shame in the family.

[00:16:26]>> Oh yeah, that is super.

[00:16:27]>> What does it look like? What does shame look like in the family or toxic shame?

[00:16:31]Uh well, a good example would supposing dad's an alcoholic. The kid now knows this is the guilty family secret, but we keep this quiet. We don't talk about it.

[00:16:40]So, we don't invite our friends over because we don't know which version of dad, drunk dad, nasty dad, happy dad, hung over dad, sweet dad. So, it's too scary. We don't bring them home. So, now our peers, our friends think, "What's wrong with you? You come to my house, but I can't go to yours." We now become ashamed. Why? Why can't I? And we often become hero kids. It's like we will carry the reputation of the family and take take the attention away from what's going on in the family. Like look over here, I'm captain of the football team.

[00:17:11]I'm I'm got a scholarship to to Harvard.

[00:17:14]Anything to take attention off the feeling that there's something wrong in our house. And there's often tension and blaming going on between parents. And then you go to school knowing that there's something going on in our house that's not going on in everyone else's house. And family secrets are very toxic.

[00:17:30]>> Toxic to who? To to the people in the family.

[00:17:32]>> Everybody. And it's all >> it's like a weight that you're carrying.

[00:17:34]You can't, you know, say something.

[00:17:37]>> Oh. And >> what is an example of a family secret that would be toxic or detrimental to kids and even parents.

[00:17:43]>> Oh. Any number of things like where I come from in Ireland and you know the Pope used to run our lives until he didn't. But up until then you we'd often have very big Catholic families. It' be very common that you'd have eight or nine kids and there'd be one that wasn't quite right in terms of age group and it would be being raised among all the other kids, but actually that kid was the kid of the oldest kid.

[00:18:04]>> Oh my goodness.

[00:18:05]>> Right. This would be the family secret.

[00:18:07]That kid would be being passed off as just a very young member of the family.

[00:18:11]But actually it was the nephew and niece and cousin relationships, not brother sister >> going on. That would be a typical one where certain people in the family might know the secret, certain might not, but it would be a big secret that other everyone had to carry and at some point there'd be the big reveal or not.

[00:18:28]Secrets with big amounts of shame attached. Addiction is also or criminals in the family so and so went to prison, but we can never talk about that.

[00:18:37]>> How about adoption? Sometimes >> the secret adoptions are hugely problematic. A lot of people seem to think that you can adopt a kid and somehow keep that secret.

[00:18:46]>> Yeah, right. That's another thing I've been experiencing. I'm like, huh? How do you >> Now, there's there's a special piece there. Any interruption in the attachment bond makes sadly and statistically the child highly more likely to develop addictions later.

[00:18:58]That's right where you're at with adoption is there is an unavoidable rupture in the initial attachment with the birth mother. So, a child who is wired to that lady's physiology is just taken away and put with someone else.

[00:19:11]That's a primary trauma to any child.

[00:19:14]Yeah.

[00:19:14]>> And even if they go into the loving, kindest home, that's just a breach in the attachment bond.

[00:19:20]>> Oh my gosh. I' I've always wanted to ask that. Children who are adopted, is there a link to addiction? Because >> sadly, statistically, I mean, of course, it's research that no one wants to pay to do. You can anecdotally observe that the incidence of addiction or psychiatric problems in general or mental health issues in general with adopted kids would tend to trend higher often because of issues. adopted kids have identity issues and unless handled very sensitively by the parents. It can be a very long adjustment process and they may always have questions about why they were given up and things like that.

[00:19:57]>> Yeah. And there may be questions to which there are no answers and that's that's the hardest part.

[00:20:01]>> I think a big part of our identity comes from our parents, right? Like even the way we stand or we eat or we laugh, it it's connected to that. And so when somebody's adopted and they don't necessarily know their birth parent, it's like a part of them is lost. And like you said, you know, that's a coping mechanism where they try to find that in in different outlets. And especially if there's also siblings where they are not adopted and they they sense the difference even if the parents almost overcompensate to give attention.

[00:20:29]>> Yeah.

[00:20:29]>> It's still there in the room.

[00:20:31]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean is there any advice that you can possibly give people because I I mean I also don't want to discourage you know adoption from happening but is there a way that you can um advise people who want to adopt who possibly can have kids with how they raise that kid you mentioned even if it's a really loving family is it being as open as possible from very beginning um to help the kid not grow into an addict it's all about acceptance and where you came from in your journey that led you to adopt unfortunately I would see a lot of people end up adopting after failed IVF. So it almost becomes like the consolation prize. Oh well, we can always adopt. Now that person did not intend to adopt from day one. They intended to have their own kids. Now if you think about this, part of us wanting to pass on our own genetic code to the next generation is part of the survival of the species. That's what makes us interested in the whole concept of dating and mating, right? I think particularly for men, some much more than others, and I would hate to generalize, but I do think a lot of men want to see mini me. They want to see themselves reproduced, their own DNA running around in a smaller form. And there is a degree of loss also for the parents in accepting that that won't happen when you adopt. You never look at that kid and go, "Oh, that's my eyes looking back at me or you you smile like grandma." It's not going to happen.

[00:21:49]Although ironically even adopted kids take on the mannerisms and funnily enough the face shapes very much >> of the family they grow up in because language shapes your face.

[00:22:00]>> So for example if you're an Asian but you are raised in adopted in a western family you will have far more western facial expressions because that's the face shape where you grew up and language shapes your face as well and the way you use your tongue and your throat as you speak and your accent shapes your face. So, you will have the mannerisms and actually look quite like the people you grew up with, even if genetically you're very different.

[00:22:24]>> Yeah. People tell me I look like my brother and they don't know.

[00:22:26]>> My brother, our brother, we have a brother who's adopted.

[00:22:29]>> Um, people tell me like, "Oh my gosh, you really look like your brother." I'm like, "Oh, okay." But he's also half African-American. It's interesting. And I was like, "Maybe they don't know." But maybe, yeah, we do start looking alike because you talk the same.

[00:22:39]>> We even get the same microbiome as the people we we live with.

[00:22:43]>> Okay. That's like intimate.

[00:22:44]>> Well, it's like how you get your periods at the same time, right?

[00:22:47]>> Yes. Everyone gets in sync.

[00:22:48]>> And I wanted to ask what are the misconceptions or what do people misunderstand about addiction?

[00:22:54]>> Oh, the number one is easy. It's the religious moral failing model. It's the belief that you're weak and all you have to do. The Nancy Reagan just say no to drugs. If only it were that simple.

[00:23:06]>> You're not choosing drugs. They're choosing you because you're in pain.

[00:23:10]Emotional pain. So it's not why the addiction, it's why the pain, as Gabber Mate would say, right? Yeah.

[00:23:16]>> Who is the great great godfather of addiction therapy. It's not weakness.

[00:23:20]It's not, you know, the the the Bible belt version of this in America breaks my heart because it's they they shame addicts even more as if they had control over their decision to be an addict. No one has control over that. What you do have control over is your choice to get into recovery and to get well. That's 100% your choice and your decision. But your choice to become an addict, no. and you will drive people into shame by making them feel weak and morally inferior. And it's unfortunately in many cases the church view of it in many uneducated circles who don't understand the science.

[00:23:54]>> Yeah.

[00:23:55]>> It's always like just pray and it's like it's not enough.

[00:23:58]>> That's that's what I knew growing up.

[00:23:59]>> Yeah. Really.

[00:24:00]>> I watched this documentary by Ava Duivere a couple of years back. It's called 13th. I think we look it up. But basically she talks about the history of addiction and drugs and how when President Nixon in the US came about and he had like this kind of like war on drugs where he criminalized being an addict and that's where it all started.

[00:24:20]in simplified form it's like his marketing was the war on drugs drugs is bad but in the documentary avere and and basically the documentarymentary explains that addiction is actually a sickness and it's like you would not be angry at somebody who has cancer because they have cancer and they had no choice but got it and it's very similar to addiction where a lot of people are angry at the addict because they're like you're an addict you can stop anytime you want but what people don't understand is addiction is a sickness And it's something that will not be um cured by taking that person and putting putting them into jail, right? That's what the that's what the documentary says because Nixon said this war on drugs, we're going to put all these addicts on jail and there was no decrease in addiction.

[00:25:06]>> They still had drugs in jail.

[00:25:08]>> In fact, more criminals.

[00:25:10]>> Yeah. And and he and and the documentary talks about how like you are not treating this patient. you are basically taking what's wrong with them and not diagnosing it properly. They should have be brought to let's say rehabilitation centers and places where they acknowledge that you're an addict whether it be drugs or alcohol or narcotics and stuff like that. The this is the program we're going to not prison. What do you say about that?

[00:25:34]Yeah, >> it absolutely doesn't work. Misses the point. All you do is teach them how to be criminals in jail, which are a wash with drugs, by the way. It's the currency in jails. It never fixed it.

[00:25:45]How could it? Portugal has leads the way with this by decriminalizing drugs and helping them to get help. They're not happy people. They're not bad people.

[00:25:54]They're sad, unhappy people who usually want help >> and don't know how to ask for it or don't know how to get it.

[00:25:58]>> Ask for it. We're simply not available or it's not understood cuz remember also a lot of people would be in denial about what they've got. But it's a game like wacamole. The drug of choice here is dopamine which we get from multiple things. Quick sugar hits for example, junk food, soda, carbohydrates. We all get a big surge from alcohol, most drugs, prescription drugs as well. By the way, you can be addicted to them just as much as the illegal ones. Uh, anything happening on your phone, even YouTubetubes, intermittent reward, which is flicking through your YouTube reels, just going interesting, not interesting, interesting, not interesting. Pause, move on. That's intermittent little dopamine pings. Ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. Highly addictive, right? Uh, likes on Instagram, swipes on dating apps. And I'll get on to that in a minute. It's all highly addictive. Now, your brain's like guacamole. If I take away alcohol from you today, Belle, and if you've told me you have problem with that, tomorrow your brain will suddenly start to find online things much more interesting than usual. And then we might put you on a a detox for your your internet. And then suddenly you'd find that you were maybe in the gym 5 hours a day. Oh my gosh.

[00:27:06]>> Getting a high of exercise. It's playing wacamole with you. So, we have to go for the underlying cause. It's not why the addiction, but why the pain. What are we medicating here, folks? Where's the original discomfort or pain or shame that led you to reach for that solution to escape? Because of the wiring of your brain, you've trained your brain to just always go for that solution over and over again. So in a recovery we have to first of all remove the substance so or the activity or the behavior so that your dopamine levels come down because they they they're they're overstimulated by you come down to something normal. So you'll feel withdrawal and craving for that period. So detox is very painful and uncomfortable but you just have to tough it out. You've all seen train spotting. You can see the worst one is heroin. Although nicotine is pretty close second actually. And you have to go through that period. Luckily, it's short. Then you have a flat period because your dopamine receptors, you've killed them all off all of a sudden. You said, "Right, you guys are on a diet. No dopamine for you." So, they're screaming, "Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me." But you don't. And that's where the value of rehab is. You are prevented from accessing the stuff, right? You simply can't get it. That's the main initial value of rehab is to keep you safe and away from the problem, subject, topic, whatever it is, substance. So after that you have this flat period which is nothing's happening. Well, it takes your brain a while to reboot and recalibrate because you've been forcing it to make all this, you know, turbocharged levels of dopamine, pumping it up to plus 16 every day. Now we need to get used to living in the normal range, which is maybe plus four or five. So it's a bit like driving your car at 70 and then suddenly getting to a 30 area. It feels weird because you're now going really slow. But if you driven around at 30 all day, it would not feel like that.

[00:29:02]>> So the the adjustment to sober life takes some time, years in many cases, because you're retraining your brain now to use the frontal cortex, the thinking part of your brain, which for many reasons, the development of that gets arrested in addiction in teenage years because you numb it or something.

[00:29:18]>> Well, you're not using it. Yeah.

[00:29:19]>> You see, we have gray matter and white matter, which particularly boys develop between about 15 and 24. Now take take marijuana. That just stops the development of gray matter in it and white matter in its tracks. Now what do you need that for? Well, you need that to control your spontaneous thinking urges and also to delay gratification and to learn that if you do something now, actions today have consequences tomorrow. His addiction is basically I want it. I want it now and I want more.

[00:29:49]>> Instant gratification.

[00:29:50]>> Yes.

[00:29:50]>> So it's like a small child. is like an undeveloped brain in addicts who've been at it for many many years. So in recovery, we have to actually train their brain to to think differently. Not to go for the emergency fix, but to go for the slow moderate response. So we're not reacting anymore. We're responding, which means breathing and slowly using this part of the brain to go, hm, what are my options? I'm feeling stress.

[00:30:17]What's happening for me? Mindfulness.

[00:30:19]What's going on for me now? I have choices what I do next. I could go act out, do my thing, or I could go and uh have a little walk or I could go get something like a an ice cube out of the fridge, hold in my hand. The cold shock will snap my brain out of craving whatever it is, and then I breathe for a few minutes, do something else, and then that moment has passed. I didn't act out. Now, that's early recovery. Now, the more you do that and the more you attend group therapy and remember being with other people and talking about your problem and connecting with people who will not shame you is really important.

[00:30:57]That's why all the 12step programs, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, all of those, they work because a bunch of people with the same problem get in the same room, they don't shame each other, they support each other, and then they do a program of healthy change. They get better. You see your therapist who helps you with your trauma and your family also gets help as to how to treat you. Not to be shaming you and be criticizing you but how to support you.

[00:31:24]>> I want to go into that. If you have a family member going through addiction, how can you come in and support that family member?

[00:31:30]>> There's been some evolution in this. My approach is to first of all direct them to their 12step group which is called KOD codependence anonymous. There's a particularly good one out of Canada.

[00:31:40]They have multiple online meetings a day. It's a 12step group where the the first step is we discovered we were kind of addicted to people that our lives became unmanageable. Right? Now the alcoholic one is it's the same wording but to alcohol that our lives became unmanageable because of alcohol. This is because my life's unmanageable because of people. Now a codependent is someone who doesn't know where they end and someone else begins. So they overempathize. They people please. They don't have a sense of self that's very well-developed. And they look at someone else through the eyes of what do I say?

[00:32:16]I have to think how it will land with that person. Will they not like me according to what I say or will they accept me or will they be upset? Will I have a bad reaction? And we manage and moderate our own behavior by filtering it through how someone else might react.

[00:32:30]So we're not showing up authentic. And you often find you're on eggshells with an addict because they're full of guilt and shame. So they're often very bad tempered to be around and difficult to be around. So you're often kind of protecting the addiction by enabling and rescuing the addict and covering it up and protecting it, keeping their secret, not getting help, but just really enabling it. So a typical example would be the wife that calls the the husband's boss on Monday morning and says, "Oh, he ate a rotten um a bad prawn at the weekend. He can't come to work." Instead of saying, "He drank too much. He has a hangover." So she often becomes the first line protection of the addiction.

[00:33:08]Then he says, "Oh, don't tell mom and dad. They'd be so angry with me." So now she doesn't tell people who would support her and help get him help. She doesn't tell significant friends or family members because of course he says, "Don't do that because of shame."

[00:33:22]So now she's carrying the shame too.

[00:33:24]It's very difficult.

[00:33:26]>> Yeah. It's so heavy. Anna, one of the things you told me at that dinner party that I've also stuck with me. See, you you have so you have such a huge profound impact in my life. Um, you said one addict can bring down five people.

[00:33:38]>> It's an AA statistic. One alcoholic can ruin the lives. I bring down takes down five other people with them.

[00:33:44]>> Can you talk more about that? Like what in depth does that mean? Let's say if you have an alcoholic or a drug addict and there are three, four, five people around them. Let's say it could be their dad, their mom, their brother, sister, cousin. How do they exactly take down these people?

[00:33:59]>> If you got say an alcoholic dad who is full of shame and guilt, doesn't relate well, which is often epigenetics, often he wasn't raised by very emotionally responsive parents or maybe mom and dad were working all the time and weren't around much. And that generationally in Asia is often the case because of history. Often mom and dad often kids were given to grandparents to raise and that's still the case in many time many times and that's normal but it's not without its problems. So say let's just take alcoholic dad. There's mom tiptoeing tiptoeing around him. Maybe maybe things have gotten really bad and it escalates to violence when he's very drunk or she challenges him and then he starts to blame her and say you you provoke me. You make me drink. You're the reason I drink. Because most alcoholics until they get recovery won't take responsibility for what they're doing. So they get a big blame thrower out, go into their what we call their pity pot and go, "Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink. It's all everybody's fault except me." Yeah.

[00:34:58]>> Blame, blame, blame. If you were nicer, if you were sexier, better, nicer, kinder, richer, I wouldn't have this problem. So they blame everyone else. So now everyone else is carrying around question marks. If they're not educated in this, and they don't want to believe, you know, that this person who they loved, they married them, is now being horrible to them. Yeah.

[00:35:16]>> So, they start to think, "Maybe he's right." And they're often really good at gaslighting, which is telling you things that you know are true or not true.

[00:35:26]They're just not true. What do you mean you saw me walking out of the pub at 7:00 last night? That wasn't me. I was at the office. Are you crazy, woman? And pretty soon, if they keep this up long enough, you start to doubt yourself, right? And you start to become quite unstable. It mushrooms. Then, if you've got kids, think about them. They're looking at this dynamic of their parents. The adult children of alcoholics have their own 12step group.

[00:35:47]It's called ACOA, adult children of alcoholics. And any of you out there, I suggest you Google and find an online meeting. It will really help you. These kids grow up in chaos. Because what do children need? They need stability, routine, and grounded parents who give them love and consistent emotion. What do you get with an alcoholic? You get chaos. You don't know whether you're coming home to the same problem we talked about before. Angry dad, drunk dad, happy dad, sleeping dad, hungover dad, violent dad, abusive dad. Or the most scary version is super dad is when he decides on Sunday, right, I'm taking everybody off out for dinner and then we're buying presents for everybody and isn't it wonderful? We're a happy family and everyone's anxiously, nervously waiting for him to pick up the first drink. And so kids learn to live watchful, always watching to see is is he about to get so annoyed by mom that he storms off and gets drunk. So they start now to blame mom a bit and go, "Well, maybe dad's right. Maybe you do provoke him, mom." Because my children don't know what's going on.

[00:36:51]>> And then the boys in the family are really conflicted because boys are always trying to model have a role model which is the same sex, the dad. Yeah.

[00:37:01]Now, they want to do this, but they also want to protect their mother. And if they see him being mean or blaming mom, they also want to protect their mom. So, they can end up really divided and split. And it's torture for a boy to have to be in the middle of this because on the one hand, part of him's genetically pulling him to side with dad and be that kind of man. But hang on, that kind of man makes mom cry or maybe he's even violent or abusive. So, that's the boys. Then the girls they can often blame mom if dad is not kind to them.

[00:37:35]The kids all of them but particularly girls will then think why didn't you protect me mom but mom's also a victim of dad. It's very complicated.

[00:37:42]>> It's so layered and complex and I feel like you you can't manage just alone.

[00:37:48]You need the support system. You need to ask for help. And often times a lot of people experiencing that don't know where to start. And like you said, there's so much shame attached to it because you have this kind of appearance that you want to keep up with between your friends, your relatives, like, oh, everything's fine and then you're inside you're crumbling. Is that something you see in terms of patient?

[00:38:09]>> Yeah. And then of course in in to your point, how why does it take down five people? Before you know it, mom's at the doctor's getting tranquilizers and anxiety meds just to deal with the chaos at home. And then those kids are highly likely, I'm afraid, those ones to have addiction problems themselves because the emotional environment at home is so unsupportive and so painful that they often escape into their own world either online or with sex, drugs, rock and roll very early too. We would often see that.

[00:38:37]And there's a very scary statistic around girls, daughters of alcoholics marrying alcoholics themselves. Why? Cuz it's familiar. If I meet love with pain with someone else, that's kind of attractive to me because I know how to do that.

[00:38:50]>> I know what to deal with.

[00:38:51]>> It's like the energy that you were raising.

[00:38:53]>> I have a question. How does it say a person uh recognizes they have addiction, they get the help they need, they have the support. What does an ideal scenario look like? Someone who gets the help, acknowledges they're addicted, and then completes the 12step program. What does life after that look like for them?

[00:39:10]>> You're always a pickle. But let's think of it like this. What could we say about addiction? It's chronic, which means it's not going anywhere. You got it. You got it. It's progressive. It ages with you. It gets worse as you get older. And it's fatal if not addressed. So, it's similar to something like diabetes, which is fatal if you don't deal with it. Gets worse as you get get older. You can't stop being diabetic by magic. Um, but it's manageable. If you fix up your diet or your relationship with your insulin, depending whether you're type 1 or type two diabetic, you straighten out your lifestyle. It doesn't define you.

[00:39:48]You can still run in the marathon as a diabetic and you could does it's not your definition. You're a normal person who happens to be diabetic. Addiction's the same. You're a normal person who happens to be in recovery from your addiction. So your normal life once you're in good recovery is a normal life, but you will be like that diabetic needing to pay what we call daily spiritual action. Have a relationship with your spiritual life because most addicts are in love with or worship their addiction. Not it's not about religion. It's about a relationship with spirituality and a higher power. That's where that word comes from. It's about understanding your place in the world.

[00:40:27]Because at heart, most addicts want the world to fit in with them. Whereas in truth, the world need you need to fit in with the world because the world's not stopping for you. So many addicts get angry and frustrated when the world won't be the way they want it. And that's when they start to deal with those angry feelings by drinking or drugging or doing whatever they do. So recovery looks like this. stopping the the behavior uh which involves some time spent with this in treatment doing their program, learning relational skills, learning life skills, learning how to do intimacy. Now all the kinds of intimacy, intellectual intimacy, financial intimacy, spiritual intimacy, emotional intimacy, physical intimacy, sexual intimacy, and get good at relationships.

[00:41:16]learn relationship skills because you're not going to just have a relationship with a drug anymore. Right now, for many addicts, they skip that bit. Their parents weren't around teaching them how to have good relationships and connect.

[00:41:29]So, that's a big part of it. So, there's often a lot of family therapy involved because there's often a lot of healing that needs to go on in the family because a lot of people have been very hurt by the addict and there needs to be full accountability.

[00:41:42]And this is step eight and step nine of a 12step program where you make amends to people that you have hurt in your addiction. So there's a lot of healing.

[00:41:50]There's a lot of growing up. Most addicts are quite immature people particularly emotionally. And they will be in a recovery calm individuals, slow to anger, very much emotionally sober, i.e. they've learned to regulate their emotions. They're accountable. They don't fly off the handle. uh and they can take feedback from other people without hearing everything as criticism and getting defensive and they learn not to live in shame. They learn to have a strategy for their shame feelings and how to deal with them. Now for family members there's Alanon which is the family part of AA. Most big cities AA fellowships will also have Alanon. Yeah.

[00:42:29]If you Google whatever city you're in for Alanon, it will be there with the AA. There's also KOD codependence synonymous and also adult children of alcoholics. These are super helpful fellowships all free by the way folks and if you can't get it in your country in person Google anything and you'll find it in another country just figure out the time difference.

[00:42:50]>> Yeah. Yeah. before Rian Anna when we met again going back to this you told a story where it was like how do you identify an addict because does it mean the person has to be let's say doing drugs every day or taking every day and you had mentioned you had like this patient who came in and this story was like shocking to me >> you remember I'll tell the story please tell it he's long gone from Hong Kong so I don't think it's ever going to be traced but this chap came in and he sat down and he said I'm not an alcoholic and I said that's Great. Why are you here? And he said, "My boss sent me." So I said, "What what's that about?" And he said, "Well, things happen when I drink." I said, "Well, how often do you drink?" And he said, "Oh, once a month with clients." It was in some financial industries. I said, "Okay, what happens?" He said, "Well, I lose things." So I said, "Uh, lose things."

[00:43:40]He said, "Yes, phones and wallets." I said, "How many in say the last six months?" He said, "Oh, six phones, six wallets." So I said, "Uh, okay." Yeah.

[00:43:50]Uh, and he said, "Do fiances count?" I said, "Have you lost one of those?" And he said, "Yes, this is this is like a Monday." He said, "Well, on Friday night, this is what happened, right? I was out drinking and the next thing I know, I'm back at the flat that I share with my fiance." Unfortunately, I brought two sex workers with me. in the commotion when my fiance wakes up and all hell breaks loose. Yeah. And we're trying to get the prostitutes, whatever we want to call them, sex workers, out of the door, they go. But then afterwards, we find that the beautiful designer watch and the engagement ring I just bought my fiance, which were kind of on the table, were missing. So now I don't have a fiance. But I'm not an alcoholic.

[00:44:30]>> Oh my gosh. Yeah. So the message here, Belle, is it's not the definition of an alcoholic that I get up and I have beer for breakfast and then I drink all day.

[00:44:39]No, it's really simple. It's when I drink, do things happen that have a really negative impact on my life or not. And that's yes or no.

[00:44:50]>> Yeah, it's just yes or no. It's not there's no gray area.

[00:44:53]>> It doesn't matter how many if it's one day a year, it doesn't matter if you show up in my office and say, "But Anna, I don't drink 364 days of the year." And I go, "What happens on days 365?

[00:45:03]You could blow up your life that day.

[00:45:05]It's no good saying to me that alcohol's not a problem for you."

[00:45:08]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I think that's what people need to recognize that when you are an addict idea of it's like constant every day. It's like no, it's this one time per month where your behavior changes and you lost your fiance. This guy, you know, brought home two prostitutes. Like the consequences that was like ridiculous and he was not even aware of that. I mean, >> well, just think if he hadn't been extremely drunk, it would not have happened.

[00:45:33]>> Yeah.

[00:45:34]>> The common denominator here is folks, alcohol.

[00:45:37]>> Exactly.

[00:45:38]>> Anna, please tell our audience where they can find you, how they can contact you for an online session or in person.

[00:45:44]>> Well, I think if you Google Anna Fenton um addictional counseling for Hong Kong, my private practice called Counseling Confidential and it's in Hong Kong. I see patients online there, clients. I also work at a clinic called OTNP Mindworks which to most people in Hong Kong is a well-known very large medical practice and I see clients there in person and online also. I also see couples, families, individuals, friends of people with compulsive behaviors. We don't always label it addiction folks. I will do assessments. I also uh am the one-stop call person for a rehab called The Hills in Chiang Mai. If you want to get an assessment, contact me. I'll do that for you and we figure out the best form of treatment for you. I also see people with relationship issues because, as we've discussed today, people with compulsive behaviors and addictions tend to leave a relationship big mess in their wake. So there's often, you know, very upset, unhappy people surrounding everyone with an addiction.

[00:46:48]>> Just want to say thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And to the viewers and listeners, if you or somebody you know is experiencing, I highly suggest booking a session with Anna because the nuggets of wisdom will basically change and help save a life.

[00:47:02]>> And that's it. And sadly, this is a fatal illness really depressingly often and it's so avoidable.

[00:47:09]>> Rampant. Yeah. Avoidable. and it's very rampant right now. Thank you so much, Anna.