INDIVIDUALITY AND ADDICTION
Many potential risk factors put a person in jeopardy for an addiction.
Researchers in the field estimate that in the neighborhood of 40 – 50% of the risk can be attributed to genetic or biological causes; if you have close relatives who have manifested an addiction, you need to take that information seriously.
Childhood difficulties and traumas are also predictive of addiction; the more troubled your childhood, the greater your risk for addiction. But I want to focus in this post on a risk factor that has been largely overlooked and that is of real importance to you: the way in which your very individuality puts you at risk.
What distinguishes the creative person from other people is the creative person’s felt sense of individuality. Many people look to be born conventional and find it quite easy to follow the crowd; only some people are born with a strong desire to assert their individuality.
All of the personality traits that creative people manifest, the more than seventy-five traits that have been described in the creativity literature, flow from this single core quality: the need to assert individuality.
Plenty of research has been conducted on the differences between highly intelligent adolescents and highly creative adolescents. All of the research confirms a basic point: the creative person is not necessarily more intelligent than her peers or more gifted than her peers, but she is more individualistic than her peers.
For example, John Holland found that creative high school students were “independent, intellectually expressive, asocial, consciously original, and had high aspirations for future achievement.” Emanuel Hammer noted that highly creative art students placed an emphasis on “self-directedness, independence, criticality and individuality.” Norma Trowbridge in her research concluded that creative adolescents conform less and exhibit more self-motivation.
This individuality looks to be a genetic orientation. A person is born individual or conventional—and within just a few years of living, she will feel that difference as she looks around her and finds herself unable to understand why the conventional people around her are acting so conventionally. As a result, she is likely to start to feel alienated, out of place, and like a “stranger in a strange land.”
Even if she trains herself to hold her tongue and engage in conventional work, an individual of this sort will already know as a young child that she can’t really conform and that she wasn’t built to conform. To call this budding creator a “nonconformist” is only to call her an individual. They are different ways of saying the same thing.
Such an individual feels her individuality in her bones and begins to recognize that creating, which is already starting to interest her as she falls in love with books, music, or the constellations, is going to put her at odds with the conventional people around her.
Her goal is to be individual, not oppositional; but because she must continually battle her conventional peers for her right to be individual, she becomes oppositional. A certain oppositional attitude naturally and inevitably flows from an individual’s adamant effort to make personal sense of the world.
Arnold Ludwig, in his study of a thousand well-known creators throughout history entitled The Price of Greatness, had this to say about his subjects: “These individuals often have an attitude set that is oppositional in nature. It is almost as though this response set is part of their very nature. This antagonism to traditional beliefs, practices and established forms of authority assumes many forms. What distinguishes these individuals from others is that they do not simply rebel. These are not people who just see that the emperor has no clothes; they offer their own brand of attire for him to wear. They feel obliged to speak out, do what they believe is right, and pursue their own goals, even when they may be punished for doing so.”
You probably sense that you came into the world as an individual, that this individuality is the source of your creativity and your need to experiment and to risk, and that you regularly feel thwarted and frustrated by the oh-so-conventional universe. Creative people then often move as fast as a ski jumper down a ramp toward reckless ways of dealing with the anxious feelings that this alienation and frustration produce. This is not an idle state: the creative person is not only an individual, she is driven to be that individual, a drive that sets her off racing through life.
Nature makes the calculation that, for an individual to truly be individual, it had better invest her with enough power, passion, energy and appetite to manifest that individuality. Otherwise individuality would be a cosmic joke, and nature doesn’t joke that way. So, it invests this individual with extra drive. Just as it makes no sense to produce a creature that enjoys the leaves at the tops of trees without also providing him with a long neck, so it makes no sense to produce a creature that is built to assert his individuality without providing him with the energy of assertion. This nature does.
As a result, many creative people have more energy, bigger appetites, stronger needs, greater passion, more aliveness, bigger “ups,” more adrenaline, more sex hormones, and more avidity than the next person. This is all the same idea and comes from the same wellspring. It is nature’s way of fueling the individual so that he can be individual.
It should therefore be clear how this extra energy and greater appetite often lead to conditions like addiction, mania and insatiability. How can you have an out-sized sex drive and not become obsessed with sex? How can you have a ton of energy and not court mania? How can you have extra adrenaline shoot through your system and not need to race a hundred miles an hour down the road or gulp more than several drinks to “take the edge off”? Nature, by fitting some individuals with enough energy to write novels and to penetrate the mysteries of the universe, inadvertently creates a driven, insatiable, addiction-prone creature. Nice job, nature!
More next time.
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