Recovery

We can explain addiction through neuroscience We can explain anxiety through the nervous system We can explain depression through psychology We can explain compulsive behaviour through trauma, attachment, conditioning and childhood experiences We have thousands of books, millions of research papers, countless therapeutic models and an entire industry dedicated to understanding human suffering And yet people can spend 10, 20, even 30 years understanding why they suffer… And still suffer They can explain their childhood Identify their triggers Recognise their patterns Understand their nervous system Name their attachment style Describe their trauma responses And remain just as trapped in the experience they’re explaining! At what point do we ask whether something fundamental is missing? Because knowing why you feel something isn’t the same as no longer feeling it Understanding a compulsion isn’t the same as being free of it And being able to explain your suffering isn’t evidence that you’ve transformed it I’m not suggesting knowledge is useless I’m questioning why we’ve become so convinced that more knowledge is necessarily the answer Perhaps we’ve become so fascinated by explaining the human condition that we’ve stopped questioning whether our explanations are actually changing it And here’s the uncomfortable part Every new model promises to explain what the previous model missed But what if the problem isn’t that we haven’t found the right explanation? What if we’re looking in the wrong direction entirely? I’ve spent over 30 years working in this field, and I’ve had to question much of what I once believed I understood Including my own explanations Because the most important question isn’t whether our theories make sense It’s whether the person sitting in front of us is actually becoming free And perhaps it’s time we stopped measuring how well we understand suffering… And started asking why so much of it continues despite everything we think we know!

How many times must someone try before you believe they want to change? How many promises must they make? How many mornings must they wake up devastated by what happened the night before? How many times must they lose everything, rebuild their lives, and find themselves doing it again? And how many times must they tell us they’re desperate to stop before we actually believe them? We tell people they have to want recovery badly enough But what if wanting to stop has never been the problem? What if someone can desperately want to stop and still experience a compulsion that feels impossible to resist? When someone succeeds, we say they were ready When someone struggles, we question their motivation And when someone relapses, we tell them they must not have wanted it enough But what if we’re wrong? What if their continued behaviour tells us absolutely nothing about how desperately they want their life to change? Perhaps the question was never whether they wanted to change Perhaps the question is What is happening in this human being’s experience that makes wanting to change insufficient? Because if wanting to stop were enough, why would anyone who desperately wants to stop still be struggling? Maybe it’s time we stopped questioning their desire to change and started questioning their desire to change and started questioning our undestanding of why they can’t  Infinite Recovery Project People Not Pathology

What if you’ve been doing the work for 20 years and you’re still suffering? More therapy More meetings More healing More self-awareness More inner work More things to fix And when nothing fundamentally changes? Apparently, you haven’t done enough work!! You need to go deeper You need to be more honest You need to surrender You need to work harder You need to do another step 4 Pray more Go to more meetings Get a new sponsor Can we see the problem here yet? We’ve created an explanation in which the person can never succeed in challenging the approach If they get better, the work is working If they don’t, they haven’t done enough work But what if the entire premise deserves questioning? Who decided you were a project that needed fixing? How much work does it take to become yourself? And what exactly are you working towards? I spent decades trying to improve myself Trying to become someone who wouldn’t feel the things I felt Trying to get rid of the parts of myself I believed were wrong And much of that effort was organised around one unquestioned assumption: That there was something fundamentally wrong with me What if the endless effort to become better is sometimes the very thing keeping us trapped in the belief that we’re not good enough as we are? I’m not suggesting therapy, recovery or personal development cannot help Of course they can I’m questioning the assumption that transformation must be the result of continuous effort Sometimes change happens through an entirely different kind of seeing Not another technique Not another intervention Not another 10 years of trying to become acceptable But discovering that the person you’ve spent your life trying to fix was never the problem you thought they were And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all! If you’ve spent 20 years working on yourself and you’re still suffering, why is the first assumption that YOU haven’t worked hard enough? Why aren’t we questioning the work?

And it tells you almost nothing about my recovery! We love numbers in recovery 30 days 90 days 1 year 10 years 20 years Eventually, apparently, 1,009,497,600 seconds. 😂 And yes, stopping mattered enormously in my life But somewhere along the way I confused the length of time since I last used drugs with evidence of how free I was They aren’t the same thing I could tell you exactly how long I had been clean But the number couldn’t tell you: How frightened I was How much of my identity was organised around recovery How compulsive I could still become around relationships, food, money, sex or work How much I needed certainty How much of myself I still didn’t understand How much of my life was still being organised by things I couldn’t see None of that reset my clean date And that’s interesting Because if our primary measure of recovery keeps increasing automatically with the passage of time, what exactly is it measuring? Abstinence? Absolutely. Freedom? I don’t think a calendar can tell us that Perhaps we have become incredibly good at measuring the easiest thing to count And then mistaken it for the thing that matters most I am grateful for every one of those billion seconds But today I’m far more interested in something I can’t put on a medallion: Am I free? Am I alive? and am I able to respond to life rather than compulsively repeat myself? Can I meet another human being without needing my story to become theirs? Maybe the most important parts of recovery were never countable in the first place. Although I have to admit… “1, 009, 497, 600 seconds clean” looks brilliant on a T-shirt. 😂

You can understand your childhood Know your attachment style Recognise your trauma responses Explain your nervous system Identify every pattern you’ve ever repeated And still experience life exactly as you did before We’ve become remarkably good at explaining human suffering But I’m increasingly interested in something else What happens when the very explanations we use to understand ourselves become the things we defend most fiercely? Someone can spend 30 years in 12-Step recovery, learn the literature inside out, and argue about its principles until the end of time But what if the intensity with which they defend those beliefs is itself worth becoming curious about? Not because the programme is wrong Not because their recovery isn’t genuine But because something that once offered safety, belonging and certainty can become so closely tied to our identity that questioning it feels threatening And the same is true of professionals A therapist can spend years studying trauma, nervous system regulation and psychological defences They can recognise a trauma response in someone else almost immediately Yet when their own understanding is questioned, they may become defensive, dismissive or desperate to establish that they’re right Knowing what a trauma response is doesn’t mean we recognise one when it’s happening in ourselves And being able to explain a psychological defence doesn’t necessarily mean we’re free from it I’m not suggesting every disagreement is a trauma response. Sometimes people simply disagree, and sometimes they have very good reasons But surely there’s something worth examining when our knowledge becomes something we must protect rather than something we’re willing to question This is where I think we confuse information with transformation We can become incredibly sophisticated at explaining ourselves without fundamentally changing our relationship with our own experience We can learn the language of healing while continuing to live through the very patterns we’re describing And perhaps the most uncomfortable possibility is that our commitment to understanding ourselves has sometimes become another way of avoiding what is actually happening I’m not against knowledge, therapy, recovery programmes or psychological understanding I’m questioning whether any of these necessarily bring about the freedom we assume they do Because knowing why you suffer and no longer being compelled to suffer in the same way are two very different things And perhaps genuine inquiry begins when we’re willing to question not only what we believe abour ourseleves, but the part of us that needs those beliefs to be true 

We seem endlessly fascinated by finding the next complicated solution to human suffering Another model. Another theory. Another diagnosis. Another intervention And the more sophisticated the explanation, the more intelligent we feel But what if all this complexity is sometimes serving the ego of the person trying to help, rather than the person suffering? We become so invested in what we know that we’re unwilling to look in a genuinely new direction Sometimes the most radical thing we can do is admit I don’t actually know what’s going on with this human being And begin there Not with another explanation Not with another solution But with the person Perhaps the answers aren’t always complicated Perhaps we’ve made understanding people complicated because we’re so reluctant to question what we think we already know

Someone takes a drug and something changes That much is obvious But we often become so focused on the drug, the diagnosis and how to stop the behaviour that we barely investigate the change itself What happened in that person’s experience? Not what does the disease model say happened Not what does trauma theory say happened Not dopamine Not attachment Not what happened for the last person we treated What actually changed for this person? Did something become quieter? Did they feel more alive? More connected? Less afraid? More confident? Did the world become bearable for a while? Or was it something I haven’t even thought to ask? That’s where I think addiction treatment can make a profound mistake We see the destructive consequences and conclude that the behaviour itself is simply the problem But human beings don’t repeatedly return to something for no reason Something changed! And whatever changed mattered enough that the person returned to it, despite consequences that may eventually have become devastating That doesn’t tell me what addiction is It gives me somewhere to become curious about Instead of beginning with “Why can’t you stop?” Try: “Show me what changed when you discovered this” And then resist the temptation to answer it for them Because the most sophisticated addiction model in the world can still prevent us from seeing the human being standing directly in front of us The person comes before the explanation People, not pathology

We like to think assessment is where we discover what is happening for someone But often, we’ve already decided what kind of answer we’re looking for If I believe addiction is a disease, I look for evidence of disease If I believe it’s trauma, I look for trauma If I believe it’s attachment, I look at attachment If I believe it’s dopamine and reward circuitry, I look at the brain If I believe the answer is the 12 Steps, I look for powerlessness, denial and willingness None of those things have to be wrong That’s not the point The problem begins when my explanation starts organising the conversation before I’ve understood the person Because even apparently open questions can contain answers “What trauma have you experienced?” “What are your triggers?” “What are you trying to escape from?” “What underlying issues haven’t you dealt with?” “What makes you powerless over this?” “What function does the addiction serve?” Each question directs attention somewhere And once we start looking there, we’re likely to find something Then something very subtle happens What we find becomes evidence that we were right to look there Trauma was found, so trauma explains it Triggers were identified, so triggers explain it Attachment difficulties appeared, so attachment explains it The person returned to use, so chronic disease explains it They resisted our interpretation, so they’re in denial We call this assessment But how much are we actually discovering? And how much are we confirming? I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with how difficult it is to ask a question that doesn’t already contain some idea of the answer Even: “Why do you use?” may invite someone to produce an explanation rather than help us discover their experience Perhaps a more honest starting point is I know something important is happening here I don’t yet know what it is Show me! That requires something much harder from the professional than having the right model It requires being willing for our model to be wrong Because the person in front of us should always remain capable of showing us something we never thought to look for If they can’t, we’re no longer discovering them We’re discovering our model And calling it treatment

I’ve been thinking about this word a lot Resistant And the family of words that often sit beside it! – Denial – Non-compliant – Unmotivated – Not ready – Poor engagement – Lacks insight But sometimes I wonder what we’re actually describing Imagine someone enters addiction treatment We already have an explanation for what is happening to them – We have a model – An assessment – A treatment plan – An idea of what recovery should look like Then the person says: “That doesn’t make sense to me” And we say: “You’re resistant” They say: “I don’t think I’m powerless” Denial “I don’t want that treatment” Non-compliant “That isn’t why I use drugs” Lacks insight “I don’t want recovery to become my identity” Not engaging with recovery Look at what just happened!! Every disagreement became further evidence for the framework they were disagreeing with The model couldn’t lose And that’s what interests me I’m not suggesting resistance doesn’t exist I’m asking something much more uncomfortable: How do we distinguish resistance to change from resistance to our interpretation of the person? Because those are not the same thing If someone’s disagreement with our explanation becomes evidence that our explanation is correct, we’ve created a closed loop Perhaps sometimes the person isn’t resisting recovery Perhaps they’re trying to tell us: “You haven’t understood me yet” And maybe the most important thing we can do in that moment isn’t find a better intervention   It’s become willing to be wrong 

Stop drinking Stop using Stop gambling Stop escaping Of course the behaviour may be destroying their life now Yet that doesn’t tell us why they keep reaching for it What if, somewhere along the way, addiction became the thing that made an unbearable internal experience bearable? The thing that brought relief The thing that quietened everything for a moment The thing that helped them survive an experience they didn’t yet know how to carry Then simply taking it away leaves us with a very important question: What happens to the person when their way of staying afloat disappears? This is why I’m far more interested in understanding the function of addiction than condemning the behaviour Don’t just ask: “Why won’t they let go?” Ask “Why do they still need to hold on?”