Oral stage trauma stays with such a person and finds another way to self-medicate. In this particular situation, the guy also clearly has an addiction to secrecy, to feeling guilty and secretive about the guilt he himself manufactures. He’s not recovering from anything. He’s in the grip of the same problem as always.
This happens because of failures of mother-child bonding during pregnancy and in the first year of life. It’s so typical it could be in a textbook.
The oral addiction makes sense, my older brother might have one since he used to smoke but when he quit that, he still kept drinking alcohol and is overweight since his sense of taste came back and ate more. He’s also a compulsive toothpick chewer and recently took up vaping, as a kid I remember him always eating and chewing on stuff.
My compulsion is hoarding stuff I’m afraid of running out of, so I have loads of boxes of pens, buy stacks of notebooks in bulk from the dollar store, at least 4-5 bottles of seltzer water in the pantry at all times, boxes of my favorite candies in bulk and always at least two bottles each of vodka, whiskey and gin in the cabinet. I grew up hearing Mom get angry at Dad for forgetting groceries when he did shopping and I guess I developed a fear of running out of stuff. Obviously that sounds like a random bunch of stuff to hoard, but that’s what I’m afraid of running out of
Some of this we learn from family, and it persists for a weirdly long time. My grandma was a “string saver”: she’d grown up during the Depression, she saved everything that might be useful later, carefully cleaned and organized (her house was never cluttered): rubber bands, salvaged zippers and buttons, good pieces of string, yogurt cups, fabric scraps… My mother has that tendency also even though she didn’t live through the Depression and isn’t nearly so organized. I have to fight the urge myself, and I have never experienced shortages of anything.
I’m the same with notebooks and pens and seltzer, I’m always writing since I’m always coming with ideas. Plus seltzer is all I drink except alcohol, I go through a liter bottle every two days
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I understand how someone who grew up during scarcity would hoard stuff, that’s a lesson that doesn’t leave people. My relationship with alcohol is because I grew up with a teetotaler for a mother who thinks alcohol is evil and a dad who’d have a drink when he came home from work, she’d be yelling at him to help in the kitchen when he just wanted to relax with a drink after work.
Growing up I thought alcohol was something cool grownups did since dad was a cool guy, that alcohol made people more chill and easygoing. Soon as we turned 21, my older brother and I started drinking and we are gainfully employed, tax paying Americans who’ve never gotten into any legal troubles. I still don’t drink whiskey in front of my mother because she’ll nag me and I would rather not listen to that. So I grew up associating sobriety with nagging and alcohol with a cool dad and rebelliousness and fun
Thanks, it’s a side effect of reading psychology books and not being able to afford therapy. Hearing as a kid that alcohol was evil but seeing adults I admired drink and be normal and chill made me see she was exaggerating, most adults drink in moderation and are fine.
I suppose she’s a teetotaler because our grandma was a barmaid after the family came to the US, I guess seeing her mother work around alcohol made her associate alcohol with her mother working in a seedy bar as a kid. Grandma was a widow with three kids and that was the place that would hire her, maybe other kids made fun of mom for that
Both my parents were very strict teetotalers. No alcohol of any kind was allowed in the house… except for a bottle of blackberry brandy, which for some reason my father thought was a surefire cure for the stomach virus. Anytime one of us kids got sick, all of us were forced to take a dose of that loathsome brandy. As I recall, it never worked as either a preventative or a palliative, but that never shook my dad’s faith in it. Anyway, the result was that I grew up associating the taste of brandy with having the stomach virus, and just the thought of it, let alone the smell, would induce nausea in me.
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I actually like blackberry brandy, peach brandy too. Adults telling kids that alcohol and other substances are evil and deadly just makes these more attractive to kids, this is why so many young people binge drink in college since they grew up hearing alcohol is bad and they had to chug it before their parents got home.
I grew up with the DARE program telling us all drugs are evil, some of my friends later tried marijuana and nothing bad happened so they feel those programs were full of shit. This was before marijuana was legalized so the stuff available was very weak, perhaps these programs inadvertently contributed to marijuana legalization since the program made drugs look like forbidden fruit
I suppose I can thank my parents for not making a neurosis out of that. Neither of them drank, when I was a kid. I think they couldn’t afford it. They both drink socially now, and never expressed any moral opinions on it one way or another. Just a non-issue. Housework, though… if I could afford a therapist, I’d go just to resolve that one.
methylethyl
Therapy won’t help. It is instinct, housework has been there since we came out of the trees — and women have been complaining that men are not helping to clean the nest ever since ;-D
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can this kind of oral addiction ever be cured?
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Oh, absolutely. It’s psychoanalytic bread and butter.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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