If addiction is intelligent, why does it ruin lives?

Someone asked me a similar question recently in our webinar on intelligence.

It’s a fair question – and an important one, because the assumption behind it is this

Intelligence must be constructive.

But what if that’s not how the body works?

In the deepest moments of dysregulation, trauma, overwhelm, and shame…The body isn’t trying to evolve or grow or heal.

 

It’s trying to survive.

Addiction isn’t intelligent in a moral sense.

It’s intelligent the way a tourniquet is intelligent.

A last resort or a life saving reflex.

– The child who dissociates to survive abuse.
– The teenager who self-harms to feel something, anything.
– The adult who drinks, binges, escapes – just to numb what never got to be seen.

Not one of those choices is rational.

But all of them are intelligent.

Because in that moment, the system only knows one thing: ‘Get me out of this.’

And it does, until it stops working, and the cost of escape becomes too high to bear.

Most models still treat addiction like a malfunction – a brokenness to be managed.

But what if it’s more accurate to say it’s an intelligent adaptation?

Not a pathology…
but, a pattern.

Wired through experience and held in the body.

Fueled by unprocessed pain.

And solved not by willpower – but by presence. A safe relational other.

That’s the paradigm shift, the one more professionals are beginning to feel – but still don’t have language for.

….I used to help others with addiction while secretly hiding my own.

I ticked the boxes, had the qualifications, knew the scripts, but something in my body always felt off – like I wasn’t actually free, because really, I wasn’t, I wasn’t free at all and I didn’t even know it.

It wasn’t until I stopped treating addiction as a broken thing to fix…
And started listening to what it protected me from…that something changed.

That’s the shift I teach now…
That’s the shift I live by.

If you’re in this space – as a therapist, coach, or clinician of any type…

I’m curious what you think…

Is addiction still being treated as a malfunction in the systems you work in?

AND

Can you remember a time when something destructive in your life was actually protecting you?

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