Week 4 of 7: The Wound Beneath the Drinking ❤️

We've looked at the moral model, the disease model, and the neuroscience. But there's a question none of those fully answer.

Why did it start? What made alcohol feel necessary in the first place?

For many people with addiction, the drinking isn't really about alcohol at all. Psychiatrist Ed Khantzian spent decades working with people who were addicted and came to a striking conclusion. He called it the Self-Medication Hypothesis. The idea is simple but profound: people don't drink to feel good; they drink to make unbearable feelings bearable.

Beneath almost every addiction, he argued, there is unprocessed pain. Trauma, loss, shame, etc. Feelings that were never given a name, never given a safe place to land. And in the absence of anything better, alcohol becomes the solution to a problem the person may not even be able to articulate.

As Eckharte Tolle says - "Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to - alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person - you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain."

Think about what that means for a moment. The person who can't stop drinking isn't weak or selfish. They are, in the only way they've found, trying to survive something.

A therapeutic model called Internal Family Systems offers a striking way of understanding this. In IFS, we all carry different 'parts', inner voices and roles that developed to protect us. The drinking, in this framework, is what IFS calls a 'firefighter', a part that rushes in to douse overwhelming pain by any means necessary. It's not the enemy; it's a protector doing a desperate job.

IFS calls the pain it's protecting the 'exile', the wounded part of the self that was never allowed to be seen or heard. Until that exile is tended to, the firefighter keeps showing up.

IFS is one of the most powerful and compassionate counselling approaches I've encountered, so much so that I'll be running a separate introduction to IFS series soon for anyone who wants to explore it further. Watch this space.

This also helps explain something that families often find deeply confusing, why someone can know their drinking is destroying everything they love, and still not stop. Because stopping doesn't make the wound go away. It just removes the only thing that was keeping it quiet.

Khantzian put it plainly: actively suffering with addiction feels better than passively suffering with an unknowable internal world. That's not weakness. That's a human being doing the best they can with what they have.

What this means for recovery is significant. Treating only the drinking, without ever addressing what the drinking was for, is like treating a wound by hiding the bandage. Real recovery has to go deeper. It has to ask not just "how do we stop the drinking" but "what was the drinking trying to do?"

That question changes everything about how we treat addiction and how we relate to the people caught in it.

Next week: AA, Carl Jung, and the surprising spiritual dimension of addiction.

 Does this resonate? Whether you've experienced addiction yourself or loved someone who has, I'd really value hearing your thoughts.