Look familiar? Whether you're addicted to Twitter, chocolate, or another compulsive behavior, we all have some sort of addiction plaguing us, like alcohol or other drug dependence, gambling, eating disorders, sex, etc. As a psychologist/author (psycho author),I find addictions positively fascinating, and love to write about them. An addiction can give your characters conflict and depth. Authors, if you choose to torture your characters with addictions, how do you write those behaviors authentically? Readers, how do you explain why your favorite characters continue to engage in behaviors that clearly hurt them? I want to share one simple model of addiction to help answer these questions. 1. This model starts with feeling negative emotion , like anger, hurt, fear, stress, shame. We don't like feeling this way so we try to change the feeling. 2. Sometimes we turn to addictive behaviors to change the feeling. For example, I'm feeling really anxious about people liki