The Elephant in the Game Room: "Geekaholism" and Anti-Recovery Culture
Know what freaking sucks in geek culture? All of the apologism for dysfunction and all of the anti-recovery enabling.
Also, lots of geeky activities can be addiction processes and there is NO addiction support for them. Many are related to Maladaptive Daydreaming which is recognized by some as an addictive process. People can be addicted to video games and to any escapist activity that provides temporary reward. People can form toxic co-enabling relationships with their fellow tabletop gamers.
There is virtually no acknowledgement of fantasy as a potential addiction (to my knowledge) outside of maladaptive daydreaming, and there’s little acknowledgment of the fact that a large number of geeky activities can actually be process based addictions.
Just as bad, there is a mentality of anti-recovery when it comes to many mental illnesses. There is a somewhat well known tolerance of social oddity (“The Geek Social Fallacies”) but how this sometimes constructs is into a culture of enabling.
There is NO acknowledgment of the enabling of dysfunction and anti-recovery mentality in geek culture.
The problem is, many people join this community having no social support outside of it. The community may be their very first ever experience of a social support system, so they become dependent upon it, and forced to enable in order to remain in it. People end up in codependent relationships with geeks and with the geek community, and many healthier people (who are isolated within the community because of discomfort outside of it) end up forced to enable less healthy people for the sake of membership in this community and preservation of their only friendships.
The choice ends up being: isolation, or further descent into the darker sides of this subculture.
There NEEDS to be a recovery environment for people who are too deeply enmeshed in the more toxic elements of geek culture. And there needs to be acknowledgment of these problems. “Geek Social Fallacies” is a start, but it’s only a start.
But do people who are that far in, even desire to get better? Not when they have so many people they can turn to for enabling, who say they’re just fine?