The Battle of First-Order v. Second-Order Values

10 November 2021

Last week’s blog focused on homeostatic responses in addiction and otherwise.  But it also ventured into newer terrain: homeostasis, for most of that concept’s life, has been considered a physiological phenomenon.  For example, when your body temperature rises rapidly, you start to perspire and reduce activity, while blood rises to the surface of your skin to cool.  All this to return your internal thermometer to a healthy resting state.

The concept was identified in 1865.  Etymologically, the word combines the Greek homoios, meaning similar, and stasis, or standing (Biology Online, 2021).  Think of it as a multifunctional force that brings us home to a steady state. If you consider static and dynamic (still and moving) as opposites, in homeostasis one is standing at a resting place.  To a significant extent, we define and create that place.

My interest in homeostasis is as a psychological phenomenon.  The endpoint of last week’s exploration was finding that, in addiction, the place to which an addicted person returns is a place where normalcy is using drugs to minimize the emotional upset entailed in dealing with life on life’s terms.

People resolve internal conflict (battles within self) “…in ways that avoid or minimize unpleasant affective states (anxiety, in particular)” (Freud, 1961a, 1961b in Alicke, 2020, pp. 573-574).

Even for people not in the throws of addiction, psychological homeostasis involves many daily instances of not dealing with life on life’s terms.  We deny, we repress, and we rationalize.  We do these things for the same reason the person in addiction uses cocaine: to resolve inner conflicts with a minimum of unpleasant feelings.  Like the person with addictive behaviours, we rely on defense mechanisms because we haven’t the psychic strength to deal with life straight up.

As with the person using cocaine, we can (and usually do) habituate some of these defense mechanisms thereby shaping the particulars of our coping mechanisms and personalities.  For a person in addiction, the pain of everyday experience is overwhelming, so defense mechanisms alone won’t cut it.  What I have heard, in many addictive narratives, is the story of the kid who walked into the school dance with a belly full of booze.  For the first time is his life he felt “normal;” he asked girls to dance, he danced his ass off, and he felt like one of the most popular guys in the school—maybe for as long as the lights remained low.  And then he sobered up and suffered a hangover.

For the kid who feels all right about herself and her life, the hangover is enough to minimize excessive consumption of alcohol for some time.  For the kid who felt like a full citizen for the first time, he cannot imagine not wanting to feel that way again. Today.

“Whatever threatens a desired self-view, whether processed consciously or unconsciously, and whether real or imagined, is fodder for intrapsychic conflict” (Baumeister, Dale, & Sommer, 1998; Sedikides, 2012; in Alicke et al., 2020). 

So now it gets sad.  The lad who drank to intoxication and danced the night away was already dealing with some heavy intrapsychic content.  As his intake of psychoactive drugs increases, his friends change, his schoolwork slips, and he’s more out-of-sorts than ever with his parents. 

A first-order desire represents an immediate need or urge, whereas a second-order desire refers to evaluations of that need.  An addict’s immediate longing for a drug represents a first-order desire, whereas her evaluation of this longing defines her second-order desire.  A happy addict, one who is glad to take the drug and has no wish to change, experiences no discrepancy between her first- and second-order desires.  An unhappy addict, one who wishes to defeat both her habit and image of herself as an addict, has a first-order desire for the drug and a second-order desire to defeat this motivation.  Intrapsychic conflict grows in intensity to the extent that the first-order desire overrides the second-order one, that is, with the degree to which the addict fails to overcome an urge that she disvalues (Alicke, et al., 2020, p. 577).

This is the battle that increased drug use, to the point of addiction, fosters.  Most people reading this have probably learned to defeat the vast majority of their first-order urges with their second-order values.  In simpler terms, they have learned to outride the desire to use in favour of a desire for a fuller life of recovery.  (SMART Recovery does not refer to people as “addicts” because that label implies that addiction is the essence of that person, their defining attribute.  It is not.  It is one part of a fascinating and complex human life.)

If you’re in the unhappy camp, in which you’re still fighting a losing battle with your first-order urges, please remember that the millions of people who have learned to live in recovery were exactly where you are today and no stronger, smarter, or more resourceful than you i.e., when you want it, you too can gain recovery. 

Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.

References

Alicke, M. D., Sedikides, C., & Zhang, Y. (2020). The motivation to maintain favorable identities.  Self and Identity, 19:5, 572-589.  Routledge.

Biology Online (4.xi.21). Homeostasis: Homeostasis Definition.  https://www.biologyonline.com/dictionary/homeostasis