If you or someone you love struggles with addiction, it can be alarming when you begin to notice the behaviors and personality changes that often come along with it. These changes can include self-centeredness, manipulation, isolation, risk-taking, mood changes and irritability, withdrawal from previously enjoyable activities, legal and financial problems, and lying and secrecy. While this can be devastating, scary, and also angering to watch, it is important to remember that addiction is an actual brain disease that causes people to behave and act differently than they usually would. While this is not an excuse for the harm that can be caused during active addiction, it does help to explain why active addicts may behave the way they do. These qualities are typically not a fundamental or deeper character flaw of the person, but rather a symptom and result of the active addiction. One of the most problematic behaviors that can come with addiction is lying and secrecy. A person in active addiction lies both to themselves and to everyone around them to protect their addiction and the secrets that go along with it. As the addiction worsens over time, the lying and secrecy tend to get worse, and with that, a lack of trust forms. At the same time, it can be a common reaction to take it personally or have thoughts such as “why are they doing this to me?” The reason why addicts lie is due to the actual brain changes that occur as a result of the addiction.
How Does Addiction Impact the Brain?
Everyone’s brain has a natural reward system, which is mediated through dopamine, a chemical messenger in the brain, also known as the “feel-good chemical.” When we engage in something pleasurable, dopamine is released in the brain, reinforcing and creating goal-directed behaviors, as well as influencing our motivation to repeat these actions. Evolutionarily, a certain amount of dopamine would be released in response to adaptive behaviors that we needed to do again to survive. Dopamine also impacts the areas of the brain related to movement and memory, which causes us to recall and associate positive memories with these activities/ behaviors.
The problem with addictive substances or activities is that they hijack the natural reward pathway, flooding the brain with dopamine at a level often 10 times higher than a naturally occurring reward. As a person continues to engage in the addictive behavior, the brain becomes overstimulated by this consistent surge of dopamine. To compensate for this, the brain responds by reducing its sensitivity to dopamine, lowering the number of dopamine receptors, and decreasing the amount of dopamine released, thereby creating tolerance. It means the addicted person needs to start using more of the substance to get a similar effect. Additionally, due to the impact dopamine has on memory, the brain associates environmental cues and stimuli with the substance, resulting in cravings for it. The overall lower levels of dopamine in the brain begin to make it harder to find previously enjoyable activities and relationships as satisfying as they once were.
Over time, the addictive behavior becomes less of a choice and more of an automatic, conditioned, and compulsive response. Over time, the brain starts to associate the addictive activity or substance with being necessary for survival, and the addict needs their substance of choice to feel normal and able to function. All of this rewires the brain, focusing all attention on anything substance-related, and the brain begins to prune away nerve connections that respond to other unrelated stimuli. Dopamine also impacts the areas of the brain involved in decision-making, impulse control, and judgment, resulting in the addiction-seeking behavior often seen in addicts (such as lying). If the addict does not have access to their drug of choice, they will often start to have both physical and psychological withdrawal (depending on the substance or addiction.) The addiction becomes the person’s (and the brain’s) main priority, and all of their attention, focus, and energy revolves around fueling it and protecting it.
Common Reasons Why Addicts Lie:
– To Avoid or Reduce Consequences:
If an addict is starting to see the consequences of their addiction (which could be legal, work, financial, or relational), it is common for them to bend the truth about the circumstances to avoid admitting that the problems stem from their addiction. They also may be unwilling to admit this to themselves because the addiction feels so necessary for them to function when they are in it.
– To Avoid Having to Change or Stop:
When an addict is confronted about their addiction, they may try to lie because they are not ready to seek help or change. If they are honest, they may fear that people will react in a way that will force change to occur. If they are not ready for this, it can be terrifying and trigger the need to keep up with the addiction at all costs.
– To Avoid Conflict or Confrontation:
An addict may lie about where they are going and what they are doing and become very secretive to avoid people becoming suspicious or asking too many questions.
There are many surface-level reasons an addict may lie; however, notice that in all of the above, beyond the surface-level reason for lying, beneath it is simply the need to protect their addiction at all costs. When you take away the addiction, the lying becomes unnecessary. It shows that although lying is concerning and hurtful, it is nothing personal against you, and it is also not a result of your loved one’s deeper personality or character. It is an unfortunate symptom of a terrible disease. However, just because this behavior is a symptom of the addiction does not mean you need to enable, feed into, or put up with the lying.
How Does Addiction Impact the Family and Loved Ones?
Oftentimes, when someone is experiencing addiction, their loved ones can clearly see the negative impacts it is having on the addict’s life. The struggling addict’s behavior may seem baffling to family and friends at times, and they may feel powerless in the situation and want to do everything they can to help. It often results in the family and friends of the addict becoming consumed with trying to save them and consumed with trying to mitigate the negative consequences of their addiction. If you are a family member or friend of someone in active addiction, you may find yourself making excuses for your loved one, justifying their behavior, covering up, or trying to take over when things go wrong for them, constantly worrying about them, or turning a blind eye to the truth. The relationships between the addict and their loved ones often become codependent, and the boundaries become enmeshed, meaning the lines are blurred, resulting in over-involvement in one another’s lives (Bacon & Conway, 2023). However, in doing so, you are only enabling their addiction to continue and causing harm to yourself in the process.
What to do if you notice lying and secrecy in your loved one who is struggling with addiction:
- Call it out and hold them accountable. Trust that what you are seeing and noticing is real, and do not allow yourself to get caught up in the lies. You do not have to go along with their dishonesty or contribute to the false belief that there is no problem when you see clear evidence that there is.
- Keep your boundaries firm, and don’t enable them. Avoid getting sucked into the chaos. If your loved one is an adult, they can make their own decisions and have to manage the consequences of those decisions. Don’t lose yourself trying to save them before they are ready. That being said, you can let them know that when they do decide they want help, you will be there to support them.
- Get your own support. Addiction is truly a family disease, and it is crucial to get your own support even if your loved one is not yet ready to get help. There are 12-step meetings for family members and friends of people who struggle with addiction. Or, if you are more comfortable with individual support, you can seek out the support of a therapist to help you process what you are going through and work on boundaries and ways to cope with and navigate this time.
What to do if you are the one struggling with an addiction:
If you are the one struggling, you may start to become alarmed when you step back and recognize the signs of addiction in your behavior. You may be acting in ways that are drastically different from your deeper core values. While it can be hard to acknowledge, the first step to recovery is really to get honest with yourself about the truth of your situation. Once you are honest about the fact that there is a problem, you can then make the choice to seek support. Depending on the addiction, this may require detox, inpatient rehabilitation, and/or partial hospitalization, and intensive outpatient programs, followed by individual and group therapy on an outpatient level. In addition, there are many 12-step meetings for all types of addictions that can provide an extra layer of support from other people who are going through the same challenges. While it can be challenging and scary to decide to address your addiction, it is possible to recover and gain back control of your life.
References
Bacon, I., Conway, J. Co-dependency and Enmeshment — a Fusion of Concepts. Int J Ment Health Addiction 21, 3594–3603 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-022-00810-4
