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with an uncontrollable compulsion to commit murder. He even more closely resembles a behavioral addict, although their compulsion centers on typically acceptable activities, often as innocuous as eating, that they have simply taken too far. We find that addicts, like Dexter, often project an entirely false persona in the pursuit of disguising their true intentions and compulsions, as hiding behind a carefully constructed mask is essential to allow them to continue with the behavior that is often their biggest motivator. Indeed, addicts and their behavioral patterns tend to make us feel uneasy in much the same way that Dexter does. Most people derive their sense of self-reliance and safety from their ability to read and assess others, and addicts, like Dexter, make that work harder by constantly presenting a false outward “self.” And while it is highly unlikely that our inability to properly assess the intentions of that old friend from high school will result in being chopped to pieces and left on center ice at the BankAtlantic Center, the likelihood of losing a car, wallet, or prescription bottle to a desperate addict is far higher.

Most of America’s thirty million addicts have trouble “only” with alcohol (fifteen million) or marijuana (five million), the most commonly abused drugs in the United States. Some addicts fill themselves with powerful pills that flood their brains with feel-good chemicals like dopamine and opioids, while others rely on drug-filled syringes. Still more find themselves compulsively acting out behavioral addictions like gambling or sex. The American Psychological Association (APA) has even begun to review (albeit inconclusively) whether videogame addiction should be included in the 2012 DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), a concept that draws a chuckle until you realize that compulsive video gaming has been responsible for some horrifying deaths across the world, including examples from China and South Korea of addicts playing for fifty-plus straight hours before going into severe cardiac arrest. There’s no doubt that some of these addictions make us more uncomfortable than others, but all addicts share something in common—their compulsions (like Dexter’s) have taken over and hijacked their ability to make decisions for themselves that better, rather than further destroy, their lives.

Although a series of vivid flashbacks to horrific childhood trauma has given us a wider view of the origins of Dexter’s dark compulsions, addicts rarely give us a clear objective view of the demons that haunt them. While no doubt some addicts can point to a particular moment or event that initially drove their addiction (though that moment is unlikely to be on par with the chainsaw-based murder of a parent by Cuban drug dealers), plenty of addicts have no such obvious moment to look to, having instead been deeply emotionally affected by a moment or moments that might seem mundane or inconsequential to an outside observer. Indeed, the subjectivity of trauma, and the subsequent range of possible reactions from and affects on the afflicted, owes much to genetics and biology: factors as minute as variations in the length of the fourth type of the dopamine receptors in a brain can make a person more compulsive and more likely to become addicted, meaning that few addicts can adequately, or accurately, even begin to assess their own lives and choices.

However, we know a few things for certain about addicts, beginning with the unshakably strong connection between addiction and personality disorders that brought Dexter Morgan to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in the first place. The DSM IV, also known as the APA’s diagnostic “bible,” defines personality disorders as “an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the culture of the individual who exhibits it.” Right off the bat, this evokes the “mask” of normalcy that we’ve so often heard Dexter describe. Dexter doesn’t feel what others feel and though he recognizes that his experience is different,