Addiction is an Existential Survival Skill
When you suggest to an addict that they abstain or give up their addiction for good, they often freeze, then get agitated, even angry or defensive. This reaction is the result of their brain responding to the suggestion as an active threat to the addict’s life. The brain has one job, to keep us alive. Addiction was the brain’s solution for survival that got so embedded that to suggest it quit is ludicrous.
Addiction is literally coded in the brain as necessary. Asking someone to quit an addiction is like asking them to quit breathing, eating, or drinking water. It is an existential survival skill. To the addict’s brain, addiction is as important as food, water, shelter, and safety. It helps to manage life and regulate the nervous system.
To heal from addiction, we have to approach it with empathy, compassion, and with the purpose to empower the addicted person to regain control of their sense of safety and security without the behavior, substance, or belief. In other words, we have to help them re-teach their brainstem how to respond to perceived threats to their physiological or psychological wellbeing that do not use the disassociation techniques that their addiction gives them.
The process from sobriety to recovery, and ultimately to liberation from addiction takes time and patience; but it is possible to achieve it when we approach healing with understanding and intention rather than shame and ridicule. Recovery is the intentional creation of a meaningful life that makes addiction unnecessary. Liberation is not grounded in avoiding, restricting, punishment, or even sobriety itself.
Liberation is creation. Creating something so beautiful that we do not need to hide it; we want the world to see it.
So many of us are stuck in stagnant sobriety because we are too scared to build something beyond it. We have tried so many ways to stay “sober” or “clean” only to go right back to the substance or behavior. Our brain seeks stability and homeostasis, but that is what keeps us in our destructive cycle.
If we want to experience lasting and joyful liberation from addiction, then we must be willing to go beyond the comfort of stagnation and enter the chaos of life as it is, without escape.
We grow through disruption. It interrupts the cycle, propelling us to create the life we want. That’s liberation.
Creating a liberated life that goes beyond sobriety to freedom from addiction is not just a poetic ideal. It is neuroscience. Neuroplasticity means the brain is capable of changing, growing, and healing, meaning the pathways and processes of addiction are also subject to change.
But change is not passive. If we can understand how the brain works that created the addiction process in the first place, then we can intentionally rewire the pathways. I am not saying the addiction will not try to tempt us back, but I am saying that those temptations do not have any power or control over our next steps. Addiction and all the behaviors associated with it become memories, fleeting thoughts that we release.
The inner work that we do in therapy can help us identify and resolve the conditions that made addiction make sense. A healing community can help us create the conditions that contradict addiction from returning.
Another way addiction is an existential defense is that it allows our hidden parts to emerge psychologically safe, disconnected from reality. Our brains learned these parts were unacceptable, dangerous, or unhelpful in survival, so they got pushed into the shadows for our protection. These parts need to emerge, so our brains created these defenses to protect us from the fear of perceived threats to our psychological wellbeing, allowing them to emerge.
The defenses became automatic, reinforcing neural pathways.
Addiction is a survival skill. To achieve liberation, we intentionally create a new strategy, rewiring neural pathways, allowing us to confront existential threats without its protection. Individual therapy helps uncover these underlying causes to create new, life-giving survival skills.
I do not advocate avoidance or restriction. I advocate using the power we have to create a liberated life we do not need protection from, integrating all our parts, where addiction gets in the way of who we are becoming.
All of us have shadow parts. Throughout our lives we learn that some parts of ourselves are welcomed and some parts are not. We learn to hide our fear, grief, anger, tenderness, or shame. We learn to hide even our greatest gifts, our strengths and interests, our hopes and dreams.
Anything that once felt unsafe, unacceptable, or too painful can find its way into the shadows. One way addiction helped us survive was that it made accessing those parts easier and safer.
The goal of liberation is to bring light into the shadows to replace fear and judgment with understanding and curiosity. What we have hidden may be waiting, not to be condemned, but to be understood.
Because here is the beautiful truth: What we bring into the light no longer needs to hide. One major part of addiction therapy is to learn to access those parts without addiction’s protection.
Knowing something is not the same as living it. We read books and blogs, listen to podcasts and social media influencers, make plans, wait for the perfect moment, then stop short of actually doing anything. Then, we try again; with a perfect plan for big changes. We miss a day, make a mistake, lose interest, or repeat an old pattern.
We quit trying, believing we are doomed to fail, masking our undue shame with self depreciating humor or by leaning into our self destruction. Meaningful change is not usually made in bold moves; but with small, intentional actions lived out.
It is not about doing more or avoiding things; it is learning that every small action shapes who we are becoming. A small step toward the life we want, creates something new. Small actions become habits, and we hardly notice the beautiful life emerging.
Liberation is ever-emerging and ever-creating. Every extraordinary life is created through ordinary actions. Why not yours, too?
