Using chemicals or processes with known addictive characteristics seems safe, easy and sociable for many, while others who use them with the same intentions experience a progressive and self-destructive interaction. Their widespread recreational use, abuse with minimal negative consequences, lack of familiarity with early symptoms of addiction, as well as the denial which "prevents seeing the forest, for so many trees," all make it difficult to recognize an addiction until it is in the later stages.

Eating is like breathing, a non-negotiable need in sustaining life. Food is an essential and central part of our lives. Rejecting need or feeling consumed by it, many become trapped in a vicious cycle of consumption, deprivation and reaction.

Our sex, our gender and our sexuality, all identify who we are. As they become a part of our identities, they shape us and endow our bodies, our brains, our behaviors and our connections with that identity. Sex may become one's most important need, may seem to be unsatisfiable, may feel like the source of love, may become the enemy, or may be rejected compulsively.

We relate to money, possessions, opportunities and objects in our environment as part of our struggle with our development. Spending, stealing, gambling, status, appearances or power over others may consume one's focus. Or, the opposite extremes of dependence, passivity, under-earning, pauperism, or self-neglect may not progress by choice either.

We can depend on contact with someone else's life to the exclusion of care for our own lives. We can compulsively deny our needs for human bonding and real, lasting relationships. We can destructively depend on our position or role with others who take care of us or who are weaker or smaller.

Secondary aspects of any addiction may include a shameful or inflated self-image, apathy or perfectionism, unmerciful judgment of self or others, rage and resentment, acceptance of intolerable situations, compulsive avoidance or enmeshment, and flipping back and forth between extremes.