What If Addiction Makes Sense?

Part 1: The Longing Beneath Addiction

Addiction may offer more than relief from pain

In mainstream mental health, addiction is seen as a way of self-medicating pain - but this is a huge oversimplification of what’s really going on. 

What’s often missing from mainstream treatment approaches for addiction is this uncomfortable truth: while they may diminish pain, addictive substances can also give us a sense of fulfillment. 

They can create a kind of (temporary) haven or support for marginalized aspects of ourselves to (partially) blossom:

Parts of our true self that haven’t been able to be fully free in our ordinary, non-using lives. 

Parts of ourselves that are hidden from view because it feels dangerous for them to be seen

Parts of ourselves that it feels like others will reject or have rejected

This is hard for some mental health practitioners to admit, because it feels dangerous. If we  acknowledge that people may be turning to drugs or alcohol to feel more free, more fully themselves, that might seem to sanction substance abuse. It might sound like encouragement to keep using. 

When fulfillment begins to outweigh the cost

The thing is - addicts eventually come to understand how their substance use falls short. How the sense of fulfillment is constantly being short-circuited by the harsh realities of the downsides of addiction - the heavy toll it takes. 

The problem is that this deep knowledge lives inside them in a marginalized way - it gets pushed aside in favor of the more immediate release from pain PLUS the temporary flowering of a more free, whole version of themselves. 

The toll of addiction seems like an acceptable price to pay, in other words, for what you get in exchange. 

Not only: What does the substance do? Also: Who do you become through it?

Questions about the actual experience of addiction can feel like uncomfortable terrain in treatment settings: What actually happens in your world when you’re using? What is it like for you? What does it feel like? What do you like about it? (What do you dislike?)

But there’s a difference between asking what a substance does for a person, and asking who they become through it: What qualities emerge? What world opens? What lost part of you seems easier to access?

The substance may be amplifying something that already lives in you

These questions get a lot less scary if we consider the possibility that substance use is an attempt to restore relationship to one’s true self: albeit in a distorted way, it’s enabling a person to experience parts of themselves that they’re otherwise cut off from. It’s the person’s own gifts and qualities that the substance is enhancing. 

When you’re using, you’re actually experiencing yourself PLUS the drug or substance. Yes, it’s a chemical substance with specific properties, but it’s playing the keyboard of YOU - partially restoring some of YOUR original circuits, an original way of being that still lives in you, deep down - only it feels impossible to access any other way.  

A way out hidden inside the addiction itself

If we look at addiction like this, as a way of restoring access to cut-off parts of ourselves, we might realize there is something encouraging there, hidden in plain sight: a way out of addiction can be found if that relationship can be restored without the use of the substance. 

What UnShaming asks differently

UnShaming can help tremendously with that restoration process, by putting the person directly in touch with the part of the longing that goes beyond the substance. In an UnShaming session, we do this by accessing that longing in the person’s body - latent, submerged patterns of memory, movement and expression that are always stirring inside them at a mostly subconscious level, but that they haven’t known any other way of tapping into except by using. 

A client example: befriending what alcohol courted and won

For example, a woman client might tell me that alcohol lets her be more free, more playful and unhinged - and I ask her to tell me about it, creating a warm witnessing atmosphere where she feels safe to explore the “world” she gets to inhabit when she’s drinking. We go inside that world together, learning more about the feeling-states she has when she’s in it, and how they want to move her body. I watch her expression, tracking the movement of her hands as she talks. She shares the memories and the scenes that surface - the genesis story of her alcoholism in her childhood and adolescence.

Together, we befriend the lost parts of her identity that alcohol has successfully courted and won - because nobody else cared to listen. 

Before the substance, there was already a longing

This is the uncomfortable truth that addiction shines a light on: sometimes it feels like there’s no other way to be whole except through an alliance with a substance. But here’s an even deeper truth: that alliance is a late-comer. Before it arrived, there was already a longing for fulfillment, for that way of being more free that the substance temporarily supports. 

Shame enters the story

This kind of witnessing also has a second, powerful function: it counters the deep shame narrative that enters a person when they become dependent on a substance that harms them. An addict is someone who’s always dancing with a shaming voice that says: What’s wrong with me? There must be something wrong with me that I need to keep doing this. (Although some addicts defy this voice, making it look like they don’t hear it). 

The dream beneath the addiction

And unfortunately the world around them reinforces this message: families, doctors, employers, the mental health system all “know” the indisputable truth that that an addict can’t be up to anything good, that there’s no intelligence in what they’re doing, just shortsighted, self-undermining behavior that needs to be corrected. Even the addict themselves can come to hold this shaming belief, leading to their own painful self-stigmatizing of the parts of themselves that had a dream of fulfillment - a dream the substance was all too eager to fulfill. In Part 2, I’ll explore the role of pain and trauma in addiction more directly - and why healing may involve more than reducing symptoms or stopping the substance itself. This perspective is informed by UnShaming, developed by my teacher David Bedrick from Process-Oriented Psychology, originally created by Arnold Mindell. My own work also draws from somatic approaches, philosophy and embodied practice.

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