Welcome to the awesome marriage podcast. I'm your co-host, Christina Dodson. This is an Ask

Dr. Kim segment where people submit their questions for Dr. Kim Kim, and he answers them.

Thanks for listening. Today on Ask Dr. Kim, the question is a little bit of a somber hard one.

It is, is any type of addiction that a spouse has that's hurting the family grounds for

separation. So obviously kind of a big difficult topic that we're going to attempt to tackle a

little bit today. First of all, Dr. Kim, how do you know if your spouse has an addiction problem?

Like what constitute it as a true addiction? Yeah, I think just kind of a broad definition would be any time

that the person's engaging in the use of a substance or certain behaviors that they get

rewards out of that, you know, whether it's a high or whether it's adrenaline high or wherever that is.

And it's so strong that it compels them to repeatedly pursue this even though there's detrimental

consequences.

Yeah.

So even though there's consequences, even though I'm losing my job because I'm not coming in

because I've been drunk, even though my kids saw me stumble around in the house last night, it doesn't

stop them from doing it if they continue to do it no matter what these consequences are. And so I think

that's when you know it really crosses over into an addiction. And I think today, you know,

actually my new book that comes out in January and 14 keys to elastic relationship, one of the chapters is on addiction, and we don't spend a whole lot of time talking about

the typical drugs and alcohol, but we talk about things that are unique, I think, into our

culture right now, and that's like video games, it's like social media and the addictions

to that.

And my experience and research I did in this because there comes some adrenaline highs

that come with some of those things like that, those are ever a bit as harmful, ever bit as

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