A Quote by John Bradshaw

The drivenness in any addiction is about the ruptured self, the belief that one is flawed as a person. The content of the addiction, whether it is alcoholism or work, is an attempt at an intimate relationship. The workaholic with her work or the alcoholic with his booze are having a love affair. Each alters mood to avoid the feeling of loneliness and hurt in the underbelly of shame.

John Bradshaw

Quote Topics

About Addiction Affair Alcoholism Any Attempt Avoid Belief Booze Content Each Feeling Flawed Having Her His Hurt Intimate Loneliness Love Love Affair Mood Person Relationship Self Shame Whether Work Workaholic

Quote Author

John Bradshaw
American - Philosopher

I think stress is an addiction. It can be tied to work addiction or busyness addiction or success addiction.

Gabrielle Bernstein

I would say I work very emotionally: I have a very compulsive way of working, where I love something to the moment I am sick of it. I have no addiction outside of work, so my addiction is that process.

Jonathan Anderson

When I talk about drugs and alcohol, I'm talking about sex addiction, gambling addiction, eating addiction, throwing-up addiction. I'm not talking about mental illness.

Abel Ferrara

Addiction is more malleable than you know. When people come to me for therapy, they often ask me whether their behavior constitutes a real addiction (or whether they are really alcoholic, etc.). My answer is that this is not the important question. The important questions are how many problems is the involvement causing you, how much do you want to change it, and how can we go about change?

Stanton Peele

It was an addiction. A pointless, self-destructive addiction. But really, is there any other kind?

Rachel Vincent

This is our most dangerous addiction - our addiction to things. For it is this addiction that underlies the materialism of our age. And nowhere is this addiction more apparent than in our addiction to money.

Russell Peters

My view of addiction, whether it's drugs, food, alcohol or any list of other things, is the same reason I asked my mother why I wasn't a drug addict or alcoholic, which is because when you're not loved, often people become an addict and self destructive. Now the opposite of love is indifference and even worse is rejection and abuse, and I meet those people.

Bernie Siegel

The worst thing you can do for your loved one caught in alcoholism or addiction is to help the person continue in the deception that he or she is OK. Your best course of action is to speak the truth in love (see Eph. 4:15) and don't allow him or her to escape the consequences of wrong behavior.

Neil T Anderson

Work addiction seems to be an addiction we are proud of. We almost seem to brag with mock displeasure that we are "overwhelmed" with busyness, sometimes as an excuse for not really being able to do what we really want to be doing. Work addiction is a symptom not of working your brains out but of your brain working you out. Why are you doing what you're doing for a career and how do you like doing it? Do you like your answer?

Paul Pearsall

I went public with the alcoholism, very early on... the early '70s. Mercedes McCambridge, the actress, I think was the first recognizable person that went before Congress and talked about it, and I thought that was a good idea, to take some of the stigma away from it and say "Normal, average people can fall prey to it." So it's been public for me. I did a movie about an alcoholic. And today, you're nobody unless you've been to rehab. It seems like everybody has some kind of an addiction.

Dick Van Dyke

The work became like the drug addiction, the clothes, anything in my life. It became - it's become an addiction. I'm addicted to working.

Elton John

A Rescuer isn't always a person. Addictions to alcohol or drugs, sexual addiction, workaholism-all the ways we numb out-can rescue the Victim from feeling his or her own feelings.

David Emerald Womeldorff

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who enjoy bird walks enjoys theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new 'attempt,' differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

E. B. White

I knew as a young boy that addiction and alcoholism afflict people - good, loving people - in profound ways, and that some people - usually from those rare "normal" families that I longed for as a child and as an adult wonder if they even exist - didn't understand this and sort of looked down their noses at people suffering with addiction.

Brian Lindstrom

People don't get that being a musician is a job, they don't get what the work takes. And that's just because you're living a dream, so everyone who's observing it from the outside can't really empathize with how much work it is because you're fortunate. And it's a kind of competition with yourself to stay away from all of the excess, whether it's booze or drugs or just the late nights with the addiction to watching the sun rise in some weird part of the world. But when you meet the other musicians, there's generally a spiritual exhaustion that you connect with.