You Can Never Get Enough of Something That Almost Works
Imagine walking up to someone smoking a cigarette and saying:
“You know those are bad for you, right?”
What exactly do we imagine is going to happen next?
They'll look at the cigarette in horror?
Wait. What? These? I thought these were vitamins.
They know.
They know smoking increases their risk of disease. They know it's expensive. They know they smell like cigarettes. They probably know exactly how many times they've promised themselves this pack would be the last one.
So we haven't given them information.
But we may have given them something else.
Shame.
I shouldn't be doing this.
Why can't I stop?
What's wrong with me?
I'm weak.
I'm failing again.
And now something interesting has happened.
We may have intensified the very internal state the cigarette helps them regulate.
What if the problem began as a solution?
Someone says:
“I have a drinking problem.”
And there's a strange way of looking at this that initially sounds almost absurd:
Maybe you're actually really good at drinking.
You know exactly how to change your internal state.
You know how much it takes to quiet your thoughts. How to make yourself more comfortable around people. How to soften anxiety. How to sleep. How to temporarily silence shame, grief, loneliness, memories or the relentless noise inside your own head.
That doesn't mean drinking isn't causing problems.
It can destroy relationships, bodies, careers, families and lives.
But there is an important distinction between saying something is harmful and understanding why someone keeps doing it anyway.
Because the drinking may not have started as the problem.
It may have started as an attempted solution to another one.
And for a while, it worked.
The question beneath the behaviour
We tend to name addiction after the thing we can see.
Alcohol.
Cocaine.
Opioids.
Nicotine.
Gambling.
Food.
Sex.
But naming the behaviour doesn't necessarily tell us its function.
So instead of only asking:
“What are you doing?”
perhaps we need to become much more interested in:
“What happens inside you when you do it?”
Maybe everything gets quieter.
Maybe your shoulders finally drop.
Maybe you stop remembering.
Maybe you become someone who can talk to people.
Maybe the relentless self-monitoring disappears.
Maybe loneliness becomes tolerable.
Maybe you stop feeling afraid.
Maybe you stop feeling anything.
Maybe, for twenty minutes, you get to leave yourself.
That last one matters.
Because if being inside yourself is painful, escape can become extraordinarily valuable.
Eventually, it may not even be about feeling good
We often imagine addiction as an endless pursuit of pleasure.
Someone experienced something pleasurable, liked it too much and kept chasing it.
There can certainly be pleasure involved, particularly earlier in substance use.
But addiction can involve something far more complicated.
Over time, motivation can increasingly shift from positive reinforcement—I want this because it feels good—toward negative reinforcement:
I need this because it makes something bad stop.
Now we're talking about relief.
Relief from withdrawal.
Relief from anxiety.
Relief from agitation.
Relief from emotional pain.
Relief from an internal state that has become increasingly difficult to tolerate.
And repeated substance use can eventually contribute to the very state from which the substance subsequently provides temporary relief.
That's one of the cruelest loops in addiction.
The solution begins creating more of the problem.
And then offers itself as medicine.
“But they know what it's doing to them.”
Yes.
That's precisely the point.
Human beings don't always choose between something harmful and something healthy.
Sometimes they experience the choice as:
Something harmful, or suffering right now.
Tomorrow's consequences are competing with today's relief.
And today's relief is immediate.
That's why simply explaining consequences often isn't enough.
The person may understand the consequences better than anyone.
They are living them.
They may have lost relationships.
Money.
Trust.
Health.
Years.
They may lie awake despising themselves for what happened yesterday and genuinely promise themselves they will never do it again.
And then tomorrow arrives.
So does the internal state they haven't learned how to tolerate.
And there sits the fastest strategy their brain has ever learned for changing it.
Shame pours gasoline on the fire
This is also why shame can become such a devastating companion to addiction.
A person uses because they are suffering.
Then they hate themselves for using.
That self-hatred creates more suffering.
And now they need relief from that too.
Use.
Relief.
Consequence.
Shame.
Suffering.
Use.
The behaviour that temporarily relieves the pain eventually becomes another source of it.
Then the person looks at the evidence accumulating around them and concludes:
See?
I knew there was something wrong with me.
Which generates exactly the emotional conditions from which escape becomes even more appealing.
This doesn't mean shame causes every addiction. Addiction is far too complex for a single explanation. Biology, genetics, trauma, mental health, environment, chronic stress, social connection, learning, availability and countless other factors can contribute.
But it does mean that humiliating someone out of addiction makes very little sense.
You cannot shame someone into having a safer relationship with themselves.
Understanding isn't permission
There is an important distinction here.
Understanding why someone uses doesn't mean pretending their behaviour isn't destructive.
Compassion doesn't require dishonesty.
Someone can be deeply wounded and still hurt people.
A behaviour can make perfect psychological sense and still need to stop.
Addiction can simultaneously be an understandable adaptation and a catastrophic one.
Understanding simply allows us to ask better questions.
Not:
Why would you do this to yourself?
But:
What does this do for you?
Not:
Why can't you just stop?
But:
What happens when you do?
Not only:
How do we remove the substance?
But:
What will this person be left alone with when we do?
Because taking away someone's only strategy for escaping unbearable internal experience without helping them develop another way of meeting that experience isn't the end of treatment.
It's the beginning.
The deeper work
Recovery therefore cannot only be about learning how not to drink.
Or smoke.
Or use.
It must also involve becoming increasingly capable of inhabiting the moments in which those behaviours once felt necessary.
Learning how to experience anxiety without immediately escaping it.
How to feel grief without anesthetizing it.
How to survive shame without turning it into identity.
How to experience discomfort without interpreting it as an emergency.
How to have a thought without obeying it.
How to have a feeling without needing to make it disappear.
How to ask for help.
How to regulate.
How to connect.
How to remain.
And perhaps, eventually, how to become someone whose own company doesn't require anesthesia.
Because underneath the question:
“How do I stop using?”
there may sometimes be another one:
“How do I become somewhere I no longer need to constantly escape from?”
Something that almost works
There's a saying I return to often:
You can never get enough of something that almost works.
Maybe that's one of the most heartbreaking ways to understand addiction.
Because it does work.
Until it doesn't.
The cigarette gives relief.
The alcohol quiets something.
The drug changes the state.
The behaviour accomplishes its immediate task.
It works beautifully at one job while slowly destroying everything around it.
And because the relief is real, the nervous system remembers.
There.
That.
Do that again.
So perhaps addiction isn't evidence that someone doesn't understand what is hurting them.
Perhaps sometimes it is evidence that they discovered an incredibly effective short-term strategy for something they didn't yet know how to carry.
The tragedy is that eventually the strategy becomes another thing they have to carry.
And recovery begins when the question changes.
Add comment
Comments