They say that the most basic emotions we feel are rooted in the physical world. We feel the lust that drives us to reproduce, and also the hunger that causes us to want to eat. We feel anger when we are threatened and believe that we can defeat the threat at hand, and we also feel a basic feeling of fear when we do not believe we have any real power against something that could hurt us. Every other emotion that we have basically springs out of some kind of natural necessity – we feel love so that we can nurture one another (and be nurtured ourselves), greed so that we can gain more in life, and so on.
The addicted mind is not so much different from that of any other mind. It could even be argued that since we are all addicted to something or other (even if it is love, food, or success), that the mindset of addiction is a common characteristic of all human beings everywhere. But one reason why a great many people who are addicts suffer by themselves is out of sheer, gut wrenching terror of what other people might say or do, if they were to either find out or try to stop them.
Anger is generally the first response you will get when a person’s humor proves an ineffective defense against the truth. At first, we try to play it off. And then, since that rarely works against a determined person, we become angry, and may even get downright violent about the whole thing. But once that is taken care of (and possibly when the person has run out of steam), the real reason for their anger becomes evident. In most cases, the angry addict is just scared of something. The hard part is figuring out just what that fear is of.