It begins with a gesture.

Maybe you’ve observed someone else performing the gesture: a celebrity, a writer—a hero of some kind. Maybe you’ve seen it on television or in movies, or between the pages of your favorite book.  Or maybe you saw your parents do it—sneaking around the house, waiting for bedtime to break out the goods.

You are an observational learner, as all human beings are, so you store this information someplace deep inside the mysterious, primordial ooze of your brain, temporarily forgotten. This happens several times. As memory would have it, repetition forces you to pay attention. Suddenly you become aware of it: this is something people do when they are ___, when they feel ___. 

Eventually, you experience the very sentiment you have observed others trying to avoid. Maybe it’s sadness or grief. Maybe it’s anger or jealousy. Maybe it’s the obscure, hollow ringing in your ears, the emptiness inside that seems to afflict all of us at one point or another. 

But there is a solution! You have seen others do it! 

For you, it may be food. It may be cigarettes or spending money, isolation, or over-stimulation. It may be risk-taking or relationships. It may be spirals of negative thinking or saccharine positivity—the sort that insists upon itself so as to eclipse anything else. It doesn’t really matter what it is. And it doesn’t really matter what you choose to call it—or what you choose to call yourself.

Ultimately, you have a habit, and it inconveniences you.

The degree to which it inconveniences you is a good measure of where you are on the journey of change.

Perhaps it inconveniences you only a little bit, just enough to provoke the irritating voice in the back of your head. Perhaps it inconveniences you a great deal—impedes your well-being, even, or your health, your relationships, etc. Perhaps it paralyzes you, disrupts your life completely, and prevents you from experiencing freedom, joy, agency, and motivation. 

If you are anything like me, you may tell yourself it isn’t a big deal.

After all, you have a job. You have a partner. You have money and the choices that money brings. Maybe you have a family, a house, an education. Surely, your habit cannot be so bad if you have these things. Surely, you are not an addict.

But here’s the problem

No material condition or achievement is an apt measure of freedom from compulsion. Your money is not a reflection of your psychological well-being, it is a reflection of the opportunities you have been presented and your reactions to them. Your partner is not a measure of your mental health, though, to some extent, the degree to which he or she has healed may provide some indicator of where you are on your map. Your education, awards, certifications and career—these are metrics that refer only to themselves. You are educated because you persisted through college. You won awards because you performed a task—or a series of tasks—well. You have a career because you possess the grit and self-awareness to pursue a goal. 

Such things are not meaningless. They fill in the structure, the punctuation that lends meaning to the text of our lives. They signal the direction in which the plot is turning. But plot, as we know, contributes only minimally to the rich experience of reading a book. 

The sub-text, the connotations, the implicit, emotional content of your life are dictated not by its structure but by your relationship to it. Should you decide that you are not the author of this book, its contents will continue to appear two-dimensional to you. Should you allow events and behaviors into your life that did you did not authorize to be there, you will adopt this attitude towards everything else. You will begin to live the pages of your life as though they had fallen into your lap and assembled themselves into a story. And this, I can attest, is not how books are written.

When it comes to good writing, everything matters, but nothing matters more than tone, and tone is the author’s attitude toward the content of a story. Every inflection, every subtle hint, influences the reader’s reception entirely. When you allow someone or something else to dictate, your narrative loses its tone, its personality, its meaning. 

The minor behaviors we engage in on a daily basis set the tone in our lives—the morning routines, the scheduled meals and activities, and the little things we do to disconnect or reconnect, depending on our willingness to meet reality head-on. So many of those behaviors, however, go unquestioned. Human beings can acclimate to anything, which is both a blessing and a curse. Over time, we cease to question the impact our habits are having upon our lives—because we cease to notice them at all. 

Some of those habits, we know in the back of our minds, are not conducive to our success. Some of those habits are detrimental to our health, or our finances, or even just our ability to self-regulate effectively. We know better, but we can’t seem to do better. Or maybe we just don’t care. Everyone has a guilty pleasure, we say, and so they do. But what makes a guilty pleasure different from addiction? Where is the line between indulgence and pathology? Is there one?

It depends on who you ask. Miriam-Webster states that addiction is a mental and physical dependence on a substance or behavior—and guilty pleasure is an action performed despite awareness of its detrimental consequences. According to the 12-step model, addiction is a disease that compels sufferers to compulsively seek pleasure and avoid pain. According to Albert Einstein, it is insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. According to the results page of the Big Book’s infamous quiz “Are You An Alcoholic?” any amount of speculation, secrecy, or guilty points to an addiction. 

According to the aggregate of above definitions, addiction is less about the substance or behavior itself and more about motive: did I choose to enjoy a  fifth drink? Or did I fear the deprivation that would take hold if I didn’t?

Addiction, it seems to me, is when fear eclipses even the possibility of desire. The addict consistently and repetitively entertains a thought or performs a behavior despite its undesirable results. I eat candy even though it brings me little benefit. Cavities, cholesterol, weight gain, fatigue, irritability: tall prices to pay for a temporary and superficial dopamine rush. 

My partner eats mostly at night—and then in quantities that would intimidate a competitive hot-dog eater. Does it bring him joy? Fulfillment? Not particularly. Yet he continues to do it because it is what he has always done—and because it would take more work to stop than it does to continue.

I have a client who calls herself a pessimist. She is cruel to the ones she loves. Is it for lack of affection or empathy? No. She feels terrible about it. And yet she continues to repeat this pattern, seemingly compelled to do so. 

We all three boast an excellent quality of life. I am a successful writer and recovery coach, and I—once the worst of cynics—wake up every morning with inexplicable joy in my heart. My partner is an ebullient optimist with several passions that enrich his life considerably. My client is a beautiful marathon runner with a laudable career and relentless ambition.

Are we addicts?

By my definition, yes, but then aren’t most of us? And why should that term—addict—be so charged with pejorative connotations if all of us have unhelpful behaviors with which we cope with the vagaries of life? And if it applies to all of us, does it really apply to any of us at all?

Words matter, but maybe not in the way we think. Words—like habits—are shortcuts, tools we leverage to make our lives more manageable. They describe reality, but only one small segment of it. In Alcoholics Anonymous, each member introduces themselves with: “I’m an alcoholic.” We do this to affirm—to ourselves and others—that our compulsions take primacy in our lives whether we like it or not. In doing so, we also affirm our commitment to recovery.

But the term is also a superficial signifier. 

Some people in the program say, “I’m in recovery,” and others say, “my problem is me,” and we understand very well what they mean without their having to commit to being an addict.

So if labeling yourself is what you are worried about, remember that a label is merely an imperfect signifier for an underlying idea. No words quite capture exactly what we want to communicate. For that, we require tone—the indelible inflection of a human voice.

This is only one of the several reservations that one may have about identifying with addiction. All stem from the cultural connotations that we collectively assign the term. 

No Problem Too Small

You may feel as though your particular issue does not “qualify” as an addiction. Perhaps you pull your hair out or bite your nails—and there are no 12-step programs for that. Perhaps you snap at loved ones when you are stressed or have lost something in the house. Perhaps you avoid conversations about money.

Again, addiction has little to do with the substance or behavior of choice and more to do with the compulsion itself. Addiction is the solution to a problem that precedes it. According to research, over two thirds of addicts have childhood trauma. I happen to think every addict has trauma because every human being has trauma. Few of us escape this life unscathed—and that number is rapidly dwindling. 

Then there are those of us who may have had objectively idyllic lives and still feel hollow inside, chronically dissatisfied. It’s not uncommon, in our era of instant gratification and external validation, for people to feel unfulfilled. Materialism is everything in a false meritocracy.

Is Society Making Us Sick?

We depend upon material conditions to grasp opportunity, and resources seem to be getting scarcer yearly. We depend upon 15-60 second videos for entertainment, and we have only to flick our fingers to change the channel. We depend upon social connection to survive, and yet conditions beyond our control deprive us of the intimacy we so crave. 

As journalist Charlie Smith explains in a profile on addiction specialist Dr. Gabor Mate, our neurology and social conditions have conspired to predispose us—all of us—to addiction. We are increasingly isolated, deprived, lonely, mentally ill, dependent upon money that seems increasingly unavailable to the vast majority of us. We are fed—via devices to which we’ve become addicted—versions of a world that never existed, though that doesn’t stop us from trying to make it real. “Poor attunement can interfere with the development of brain circuitry,” Smith writes, “which can lead to distorted levels of the brain’s endorphins [...] and fewer brain receptors of dopamine—” the two hormones most directly involved in addictive behavior. 

Maté—famous for claiming that the “opposite of addiction is connection—” explains that this poor attunement, combined with our attachment to “externals” —status, beauty, ambitions, achievements, alcohol, followers, likes—represents the alchemy of addiction. Human beings can adapt to anything—but not without cost. Comfort is a fundamental need, and if we can’t find it in ourselves, we’ll invariably seek it elsewhere.

According to Maté’s logic, addiction isn’t a personal problem—it’s an endemic social condition. Addictions, Maté writes, are present in all of us, distinguishable only by degree of gravity. The line grows ever finer. And, addiction, according to the 12-step model, is a progressive disease. 

Though addiction is, indeed, progressive—compulsive behavior rarely resolves itself—the disease model of Alcoholics Anonymous poses some unique semantic challenges. It contends that alcoholism is a disease that some of us have  (presumably at birth, though it is never specified) and others do not. It presumes that there is something special or different about addicts, but again,  I could never get a clear answer on what that something was.

One problem with this definition is that it inherently facilitates the identification of some at the expense of others. If some people are addicts, then others are not. But there is, as of yet, no medically verifiable trait or characteristic that points to this distinction.

Another problem is that it sets arbitrary thresholds of severity. 

A person who “just” drinks one glass of wine a day can’t really be an alcoholic, right? What about half a bottle? What about the whole bottle? What if they just don’t keep track? 

The disease model presupposes that addiction is about the substance itself— or the degree of use and abuse of that substance. But what if it's not a substance but a behavior? Overeating, for example, which millions of people routinely do. Or what if it’s toggling between different substances and behaviors? Overwork? Chronic anger? Compulsive clothing shopping? 

Gabor Maté argues that it doesn’t really matter what your addiction is. What matters is the feeling—or the absence of feeling—that drives it. Take the drink from the drinker and he will find something else to use. Stick an addict in rehab and she will enter into a toxic relationship. Send your kid to military school and they will likely develop compulsions around discipline or exercise. The severity of the behavior is non-consequential. Because the behavior isn’t the problem.

Projection & Rationalization

A third issue with the disease model is that it encourages rationalization. Other people have it worse, we think, how can I be diseased if I’m functioning just fine? When we exercise this particular rationale, we fall back on comparison to determine what is best for us personally. It’s a fallacy of the gravest kind: if my problem isn’t as bad as theirs, it must not be a problem at all. 

But comparing ourselves to others, as we know,is often futile. We are, luckily, a diverse group of complex creatures. Why should it matter if other people smoke three packs a day, when one cigarette is enough to provoke serious health complications?

The disease model also falls short because addiction resists categorization. There is so much variance within addiction—hundreds of support groups dealing with issues like workaholism, sex addiction, gambling, emotional addiction, co-dependency, etc—that standardizing the experience of addiction in the way we would other diseases becomes increasingly difficult. There is no one set of symptoms since addiction comes in varying shapes, sizes, and degrees of severity. And finally, addiction knows no comparison because it is, at its core, an inherently alienating experience. If the opposite of addiction is connection, then addiction itself is isolation. It thrives in secrecy and solitude—relies upon the absence of intimacy to protect itself from well-meaning intervention.

Our traditional conception of addiction—the disease model—makes it hard for people to know—and to admit—when they fit the criteria. And it is perhaps for this reason that it is most damaging. Because it presupposes that there is some objective, measurable truth of what addiction is and what it isn’t—and that we can readily assess ourselves against it. And there is no such thing. 

No one wants to be counted among the unlucky ones. Everyone knows someone who has it worse: an uncle, a friend, a plumber, a neighbor, or a gym teacher. We look upon them—the scapegoats—with judgment or pity—whatever it takes to set ourselves apart—and think I’m not like that person, so I must not be addicted.

This sentiment is often colloquially expressed as not having an addictive personality.

But is there such a thing? Research suggests not. 

In fact, there are few underlying traits that determine who does and who doesn’t become an addict. Certain genes point to possible predispositions, but even science notoriously struggles to separate nature from nurture. 

No two addicts are alike.

Go to an AA meeting and survey the room. You will find the suburban housewife who was fine all her life and began to drink in her 50s. You will find the lifelong heroin user whose habit began at 11 years old. You will find the rich and the poor, the young and old—a sample of the spectrum of human identity.

Besides, there is no such thing as “personality” anyway—at least not the way we conceive of it. Personality is a social construct, dictated by the repetition of thoughts and behaviors. Personalities change—and so do people. 

What most people fail to realize is that admitting addiction—or at least admitting one’s compulsive habits and tendencies—is the start to an invaluable process of recovery, of reclaiming one’s personal power. Because once you get a taste of absolute agency, you come to realize that all that came before—the internal battle, the agonizing struggle, the deafening death rattle—conspired to make this freedom possible. Human beings are stubborn. We typically need to learn lessons the hard way. And we require contrast to decipher meaning from our lives; we need pain to understand pleasure, entrapment to understand liberty.

Healing is our gift to the world.

It is our legacy—the only one that matters. There is little we can do for others but heal ourselves. We may wish to change the world—by dedicating our lives to ending poverty or public education, by donating  to the less fortunate—but eventually, most of us come to understand that the best thing we can do for all of humanity is to heal our part of the whole and let the rest follow.

Those who have healed from their suffering hold the most potential to heal others. In this way, suffering redeems itself. It is not because we dedicate ourselves to lives of service, or because our well-being is contingent upon proselytizing the gospel of Jesus Christ or Allah or Bill Wilson. It’s because each time one of us heals ourselves, we shed a little more light for those who follow in our footsteps. What we have to give to others has little to do with what we have and more to do with what we did when we had nothing.

None of us are free of compulsion. 

The human brain is such that it seeks patterns, shortcuts, a narrative thread of routines and habits to make sense of an otherwise unpredictable and largely traumatizing existence. We all have bad habits, addictions—whatever we choose to call them—and so we all have the privilege of healing and helping those who come after us to do the same. 

Identifying compulsion is half the battle, since recovery is not an equation of addition but one of subtraction. All we have to do to heal ourselves is recognize the obstructions we have placed in our way and release them with compassion. We seek clarity rather than information, awareness rather than knowledge. We have only to identify what is already there.

I always begin working with clients by drawing up an inventory of their habits. 

We write them all down—from brushing one’s teeth to the glass of wine at dusk. 

Then, we read through the list, and I encourage them to pay attention to the connotation of each word, each phrase, and the feeling it provokes in their body. 

Most people have an idea of what their bad habits are. This isn’t necessarily the problem. My clients will come to me and willingly admit that they are caught in cycles of conflict with their partners or prone to pessimistic ruminations. They know that they should exercise or that smoking doesn’t contribute to their goals and long-term health. 

What they typically miss are the patterns that arise across their behaviors. Addiction is a nefarious thread that shoots through the fabric of our lives. It permeates everything, leaving nothing untouched. For example, a client with a smoking habit may also engage in perpetual cycles of self-admonition. She may judge others who smoke—particularly those whose behavior elicits shame: pregnant women, children. She may lie to obscure her behavior, or she may smoke at night when her children are asleep. She may look into the mirror daily and lament her yellow teeth, or shiver in disgust when she gazes upon her stained fingers. Shame sprouts roots deep and wide, ever-expanding to entangle themselves with everything that grows in the rich soil of our minds. One bad habit is rarely just a bad habit: it is an entire mentality that infects all that we do. This phenomenon is often sub-conscious—we do not recognize that our perpetual arguments with our spouses and children are rooted in the shame we feel towards ourselves. We do not realize that our white lies are symptomatic of a far more deeply engrained sense of self-judgment. 

The Process

I work with my clients to uncover all the patterns infected by the behavior and root them out one by one. We examine the feelings in the body for hints—pinches of discomfort, suggestions of unease. Our bodies remember everything: every moment of judgment, every suspicion of worthlessness, of inadequacy. They store this information in every one of our cells, filling our bodies with abstract pain, trying to get us to pay attention, to address the slow poison curdling in our veins. 

Once we have untangled the behaviors that empower the habit, some clients are prepared to admit that they suffer from an addiction. Addiction is not about the symptom or substance, but the thinking that undergirds it all.

If my client remains in a state of non-acceptance, we proceed to the next phase of recognition. We dig a little deeper. We seek the nutrients that have allowed the rapid growth of these pesky roots that keep us stuck right where we are. 

Addiction typically occurs in those who lack situationally appropriate coping mechanisms. As children, many of us did not receive the emotional instruction we need to function as self-actualized, interconnected beings. We comb through the events of the near and distant past for evidence of maladaptation. We identify moments when we did not react as a rational, compassionate being should. We are prepared to admit that we would like to have done things differently. 

Then comes the crucial question:

Would your life be more enjoyable if you didn’t do X?

Of course, the answer is almost always yes, which, in my opinion, is evidence enough. If we can readily admit that we turn to maladaptive coping mechanisms in moments of stress and pain—even though we know, on some level, what an appropriate coping mechanism looks like—then we are addicted. We are addicted because we have lost the ability to choose. It’s that simple. 

Again, what we choose to call it doesn’t entirely matter. What matters is that we recognize it for what it is—a deviation from the full expression of our autonomy as divine beings.

And only once we’ve done that can we begin to envision a life without compulsion.

We imagine what it would be like to have the freedom to choose, to assume all agency over our behaviors and reactions. How would we be different? How would our relationships be different? Our children, our careers, our financial situation? We develop a version of ourselves in real-time that does not depend upon the habit for reassurance and relief. Perhaps we chose someone we know—someone who has freed themselves already—and imagine what it would be like to be that person. 

And then, over time, we become that person—or rather, that person becomes us. It happens slowly and then all at once. Sometimes, it happens in pieces—one step forward and several steps back—but it happens. And before we know it, we look back at the person we once were with the same wonderment and curiosity with which we once regarded the person we are now. 

But the truth is that those two people are more similar than they are different.

We divide the world into sharp binaries,  a monochrome flatland of two-dimensional labels and signifiers, robbed of nuance and diversity, because it’s easier to understand that way. When there’s an Us and a Them, there’s no confusion about which side we belong on. But addiction, like most other measures of human experience, resists dichotomization. Ultimately what matters isn’t the label as much as the experience. 

When I went to my first AA meeting, in the throes of an internal battle over my theoretical use of the term “alcoholic,” a man told me something I will never forget.

He said: why does it matter what you call yourself if quitting drinking would make your life better? Recovery isn’t about the past. It’s about the future.

What kind of future do you want to create? 

If you want to be free of your bad habits and compulsive behaviors, consider booking a free consultation with me <3