To better understand addiction, rat experiments have proved to be powerfully revealing. Put a rat in a cage with two water bottles. One is just water, the other laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time this experiment was run, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it dies.

In the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver, Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. Normally a pack animal, the rat was put in the cage all alone. He wondered what would happen, if we did this experiment differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat needed. After the rat park was built a group of rats were placed in the enclosure again with both bottles of water, pure and drugged water.
In Rat Park, all the rats tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling. The rats as happy community didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users and died, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days — if anything can hook you, it’s that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can’t recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is — again — striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. The full references to this study are in the book: Chasing The Scream; The First And Last Days Of The War On Drugs, Johann Hari. This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It’s how we get our safety. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find — the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about ‘addiction’ altogether, and instead call it ‘bonding.’ An alcoholic bonds with booze because they couldn’t bond with anything else.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

Addiction is a complex condition with many characteristics and underlying causes and conditions. It is why we cannot just treat the physical aspect of addition and hope to be okay, which is often the reason for relapse. Without identifying and treating the underlying issues they will continue to go back to abuse the substances that they had in the past or replace the old addiction with new addictions. It is very common to see alcoholics go sober and replace booze with foods more socially acceptable like gum, sugar, nicotine and caffeine, continuing to deny and numb out from the underlying restlessness. The substance or behavior is not the problem but the need to cover deny and escape from deep seated feelings usually based in stress and or trauma from childhood or a traumatic experience later in life. Many times in the case of severe trauma those memories can be completely hidden and suppressed eventually making their way into the subconscious mind, but still effecting thoughts and behaviors. In essence we need to treat the underlying causes and conditions if there is to be any hope of healthy sustainable recovery. In over 37 years of qualitative personality and behaviors research at CFFH we have found several factors related to the core contributing factors of addiction as interpreted through the iris of the eye:

In our personality typing model there are two primary personality types, Thinking and Emotion. Of those experiencing addiction we between 70-80% in treatment programs have the Emotions based personality type, an astonishing number! This personality type has key characteristic traits:

Personality Qualities: Positive: all forms of creativity, imaginative, playful, spontaneous, unpredictable and a good time waiting to happen. Negative: this type has the intrinsic feeling something is missing inside that they need to fill up. They are naturally lonely and turn to others to take away their pain and replace it with connection. They really just want to be with others, in family or community and have fun.

Needs: to the seen, heard, validated, and to be connected to some one they can trust or rely on. They want to be wanted.

Fears: Abandonment, rejection, unwanted, the terror of feeling isolated like nobody sees them or cares.

Lessons: stop blaming and looking outside yourself for fulfillment. What you need is in your own body and heart, your connection to nature, the earth and to feel nourished and loved, by connecting to the earth, the God within, and the heavens above. When they feel like they fit and they belong they radiate their love and joy as a magnetic attraction that will create healthy sustainable relationships with others.

People with this iris pattern have copious amounts of creative energy don’t necessarily fit into the norm and more often than not have ADHD, ADHD and are OCD. There is nothing wrong with them they are just wired differently and don’t fit into the norm. Let’s not put labels on them and make them wrong, Because they are not intellectuals, but acknowledge them for their gifts and support them to bring them forward where everyone wins. And as we learned with the Rat World, when we are happy and supported we thrive and don’t need substances to escape but can Be free because we are!