If the question alone was enough to make you recoil in horror, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the term can’t apply to you. You may not have heard the term before, but your reaction may be because you are a closet hopium addict.
What is the definition of a hopio addict? “A hopium addict is someone who puts their own emotional needs on hold while waiting for their partner to kick their addiction, whether it be to drugs, alcohol, gambling, or emotionally and physically abusive behavior, despite all the evidence otherwise”. .
Drug, alcohol and gambling addiction are fairly easy to identify. The addiction to emotionally and physically abusive behavior is generally much less identifiable, at least to the woman receiving it.
You see, women don’t intentionally fall for a bully. They will fall for someone who is strong, masterful, in control, masculine, powerful, witty, confident; in short, someone to complete them, someone who seems to embody all the outdated stereotypes of what a man is. (Or, at least, what a man was before feminists began challenging the stereotype.)
Now, the man who seems to embody all these stereotypes, behaves in a particular way that allows his conquest to slide into: ‘I’m-a-princess-and-I’ve-finally-been-rescued-by-my- prince mode. Suddenly, all the burdens of going it alone have been lifted from his shoulders. Suddenly, he will never have to ‘do’ life alone again…
By right, these couples should simply walk happily together into the setting sun, the man knightly keeping his sword slung over his right hip to protect his lady from danger… Except not really.
Abusive men start out being very charming, chivalrous, and in control. They tend to be quick courtships, because the veneer of confident masculinity is actually quite thin and brittle. Behind the appearance is a deep feeling of personal inadequacy and a fundamental dislike of women. (If you listen to them long enough, they’ll tell you that the key female figures in their lives have wronged them. Deep down, they mistrust all women.)
Once the fog of hormones, pheromones, and lust begins to lift, things play out quite differently. Abusive men seek commitment but hate the demands it places on them. They encourage their partner to depend on them, then become deeply resentful of the dependency they see.
This resentment increasingly reveals itself in blame, fault-finding, withdrawal from intimacy, and increasing outbursts of anger. Whether or not physical violence is used, the nature of these outbursts is violent, in that it destroys trust and undermines the woman’s feelings of self-worth.
The man may or may not threaten to leave. He will almost certainly point out to her partner how fundamentally flawed and valuable she is. The woman is likely to have a hard time reconciling this stranger, who is incandescent with self-righteous fury, with the prince who courted her.
Such an attack is devastating and, at least in the first few days, the woman is likely to reveal the depth of her distress. When she does, the man’s fury will subside and she will once again be her loving knight…at least for a while.
The point is: an abusive man restores his own feelings of self-worth by cutting ‘the little woman’ down to size, regardless of what happened to make him feel small in the first place.
But there is also a calculation involved: Whether he loves her or not, he desperately needs her, because he uses her to reinforce his feelings about himself. So, he has to do everything possible not to drive her away; that’s why he goes back to love mode… until next time. And there will always be a next time, which will always be worse than the last, because to get the reward from her, he has to “up the ante.”
Over time, as he continues to tear her down (psychologically and perhaps physically as well), he becomes more certain that she won’t leave. With all the conflict, he loses the energy and sense of independent self that he needs to let go of. Then love interludes become less necessary for him and less frequent.
And that’s where hopio addiction comes in. He can still ‘mostly’ love her enough of her to keep her locked up; or she may be so hungry that she stays, when he should be long gone, still trying to get the ‘fix’ he needs; the solution, which she mistakenly believes, only he can provide.
The hop addict is the woman who believes that her partner really loves her, it is only difficult for her to prove it because she has had a bad time. She believes that somehow everything will work out, they will find a way to live together happily ever after, the children will not be affected.
Unfortunately, hopium addiction is degenerative; Like any other addiction, unless you get treatment, it will destroy you.