The Logic Of Addiction

If a little is good then more must be better

Trying to explain what it is like to be addicted to something to a person who has never experienced addiction is like trying to explain physics to a toddler. Beyond having some vague idea of the basics, it is rare if not impossible for a non-addicted person to understand the experience. In a sense, this is the double empathy problem. If you have never experienced addiction, then you cannot fully empathise with the life I have lived.

At nine years sober I still find myself having to explain what it is like to be me, and this is made all-the-more by spurious claims of various things being addictive (no, sugar is not like cocaine, i’ve done both, they are very different). These problematic representation of addiction have resulted in a world where people view addiction as a matter of willpower and moral failure, when in truth, it the way my brain is wired.

Addiction As Neurodivergence

People often mistakenly assume that addiction stops once you stop taking drugs/gambling/drinking alcohol, etc. This would be incorrect. Addiction, from my perspective, is having a brain that seeks relief to the point of self-destruction. Rather than consciously end my life, I insidiously use something that makes the pain go away until that something itself is what destroys me. No matter what horrible outcomes it is causing, I become physically unable to stop doing it.

Imagine holding your breath until you are desperate to breath. That is what it feels like for me not to use drugs and alcohol. I don’t want to, but it feels like a desperately need to. That feeling didn’t go away when I stopped using, I just learned to sit with the feeling and focus on other things. For the last nine years it has felt like depriving my body of oxygen. The main difference is that now I am learning to get that oxygen from different sources, safer sources, in ways that are less toxic.

It is because of this underlying neurological mechanism that I don’t any longer view addiction as a disease. I see it as acquired neurodivergence. The world twisted my bodymind to be this way, and I have had to learn to accommodate it in a way that doesn’t harm myself or others.

Thinking Like An Addict

My Addict brain runs on one simple principle: “If a little is good, then more must be better”. Essentially, if something alleviates that feeling of desperation and discomfort, then my brain tells me to do more and more of it. One of the core features of that Addict thinking is that I find it difficult to regulate those thoughts and accompanying behaviour. At times, recovery has felt like the most intense masking I have ever done.

What I find interesting about my recovery, but I feel really highlights the addictive nature of my own bodymind is that even though I never want to be under the influence again, there are still times when my brain tells me to. The thought of using terrifies me, and yet, if I see opiate painkillers, or cannabis, or alcohol, I still have an instinctual urge to take it. My brain see’s an easy way out.

Addiction itself, for me anyway, was built around a need for instant results. Therapy, counselling, boundary building; these all take time. Drugs and alcohol, or really any addictive thing, provide instant relief, no matter how temporary. In my AuDHD and Schizophrenic (AuDphrenic?) mind there is a constant stream of thoughts, feelings, words, sensory input, worries and paranoia, distoritions- the list goes on. Drugs and alcohol provided a rapid means to switch all that off. It was being high that I wanted, it was oblivion. The irony is that as someone terrified of dying, for a number of years I was really intent not to exist.

Recovery or Accommodation?

I have often referred to myself as in recovery, but I find that a very reductive description of what it is that I do. I accommodate myself. It is not some passive rest state where things get better. It is meeting my needs in a way that allows me to rehabilitate myself from meeting those same needs in a toxic manner.

I’m not clean because I was never dirty.

Sobriety is more about emotional sobriety than not taking drugs or alcohol.

Recovery and rehabilitation is an active choice to meet your needs in a healthy manner.

I hit rock bottom when I was ready to put the shovel down. It’s not that I lacked willpower or was some moral degenerate, it’s that I lacked insight into the way my brain was wired. I didn’t question when my nervous system convinced me to take more and more because to me it was a choice. I gaslighted myself, like so many neurodivergent people do. It has only been through self-reflection and connection to my neurodivergent kin that I have come to see that so many of my needs were going unmet, and that was the crux of my twisted logic as an Addict. A little felt good for a while, but the more I did, the worse it got.