How to Make Sense of Addiction

Many people who come to me to change their drug-taking behavior carry a lot of shame and self-blame. They are told that there is something fundamentally wrong with them when they develop a drug use problem.

If you’ve been haunted by the question, “What’s wrong with me? I feel your pain deeply But what if I told you that you are fine and that your cravings for alcohol, cocaine, or whatever your substance of choice is makes perfect sense?

Substance use serves a purpose

There are a few things people often get wrong about addiction. People tend to think that substance abuse is either a lack of self-control or an inherited disorder — it’s neither. Substance use is behavior that serves a purpose. In fact, it often serves such a good purpose that it initially makes other options seem inferior in comparison.

To help you get a sense of what I mean, I want to tell you about a girl who licks her paper cutouts. She was 4 when she got her first paper cut and her grandma showed her how to lick the cut to relieve the pain. “Your saliva will take away the pain,” Grandma said. It worked, and to this day, in her thirties, she still puts her finger in her mouth when she cuts out papers.

The same girl was first broken by a boy when she was 15. That night, her best friend gave her a pack of beers and said to her, “Drink this and you’ll feel better.” It worked, and that was the beginning of her decades-long love affair with alcohol. Alcohol had become her faithful lover, dissolving all unwanted feelings within minutes.

That girl is me, and it was only after I delved into the study of human behavior that I saw the similarity between licking my paper cutouts and drinking alcohol. The two behaviors are both attempts to avoid pain and the only difference is that licking my finger over time had no long-term consequences, while drinking alcohol did.

Substance use began as a logical choice

Substance use only becomes a problem when its harm increases and its benefits decrease. As the cost-benefit scale moves more towards cost, the behavior attracts more and more attention. When people around you start labeling your drug use as a “problem,” they only see the second half of the story — where you make “illogical” choices to let the substance rule your life, despite all the damage it’s caused to let. They don’t see that substance use was likely to have produced significant benefits with minimal negative consequences at first. In the case of my 15-year-old self, I traded the unbearable heartache for a mild headache the next day—it was a good deal. If the initial experience is rewarding, it’s natural to repeat the behavior.

Sober Curiosity: Discover your story

Understanding your relationship with a substance is the first step in establishing a different relationship with it. (If you wish to do so, you are invited to join my 8-week group of sober curiosity.)

The answer to how our love affair began lies in our earliest experiences with what has become our favorite substance. The key question is what did you like about it the first time. In other words, what were the initial benefits of using the substance? It might be difficult to see all the initial benefits to an untrained eye at first, but the benefits were there. Otherwise you wouldn’t have brought it up.