ABSTRACT
Addiction can be a desire to numb out from overwhelming or frightening feeling, a need to escape from the pain of living into a perceived sense of unity. It can be a way of self-harming and taken to its extreme, an expression of finding it just too unbearable to live in this world anymore; a slow form of suicide. Both addiction and depression can be masking a deep unacknowledged, unexpressed deprivation, loss, longing, fear, hurt, or anger. In the book The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff (1989) states:
Of all the expressions of in-arms deprivation, perhaps research will confirm that one of the most direct is addiction to narcotics like heroin. Only research will be able to ascertain the precise relationship between deprivation and addiction, and when it does, the many forms of addiction—to alcohol, tobacco, gambling, barbiturates or nail biting—may begin to make sense in the light of the continuum concept of human requirements.
