Addiction Isn’t a Disease – It’s the Nervous System’s Best Idea

Many of us have been taught to see addiction as a malfunction…

A brain disorder….

A defect in willpower or a failure of character….

And what if it’s none of those??

What if addiction is the most intelligent thing your nervous system could do at the time?

Not intelligent like a strategy, or like, is it a good idea to put my hand in the fire intelligent…

Intelligent like survival….

Like ‘I don’t know how to be with this pain, so I’ll find anything that gives me a moment’s relief’

And the body listens.
Even if that ‘relief’ becomes the very thing that harms us.

– We call it broken
– We diagnose it
– We medicate it
– We build entire systems to fix it

But Addiction is not the opposite of willpower…..

It’s the echo of pain….

When you were young and no one came…
When your system was flooded and there was no safety…

Your biology did not ask for permission.
It adapted, right there and then, in the moment

Addiction wasn’t a choice,
It was a response.

And until we start seeing that, we’ll keep punishing what was once protection.

We’ll keep calling survival ‘sickness’

And we’ll keep missing the doorway that could actually lead to healing.
Because the opposite of addiction is not sobriety.

It’s safety.