There is No Addiction, Really!

My last post – “Lived experience can make you worse at helping people” – created quite a reaction!

But underneath it was a much bigger point

There is no universal human experience called addiction 

There are human beings having radically different experiences that we have placed under the same word

Two people can use the same drug

The same amount

For the same number of years

Experience the same withdrawal

Lose similar things

Receive the same diagnosis

And what is actually happening for each of them will be entirely different

Because nobody experiences drugs, relationships, fear, pleasure, loss, shame, their body, themselves, or the world, directly and identically!

Everything is encountered through perception

And perception isn’t some neutral camera recording reality

It is already organised through everything that has shaped this particular human being learning, memory, relationships, biology, culture, expectation, meaning, previous experience and the state they are in right now

Which means the drug itself never has one psychological meaning

– For one person it may create silence
– For another, belonging
– For another, intensity
– For another, distance
– For another, confidence
– For another, simply a way of making the next hour bearable

And even those descriptions don’t tell us why that experience became necessary for that person

This is why I increasingly struggle with statements like

Addiction is caused by trauma

Or dopamine
Or genetics
Or attachment
Or childhood
Or social deprivation
Or an addictive personality

These things may be relevant, often they are

But the moment we turn any of them into the cause, we have taken something discovered across people and imposed it back onto the individual

There is no route from an event to an addiction that bypasses the person experiencing it

And this is exactly why neither lived experience nor education gives us the answer

My addiction taught me about my addiction

A PhD may teach someone an enormous amount about addiction as a field of study

Neither tells us what this behaviour means in the life of the human being sitting opposite us

We have to discover that

Perhaps the greatest mistake in addiction treatment has been assuming that because we gave millions of profoundly different human experiences the same name, we discovered the same thing

We didn’t

We created a category!

The person still has to be understood