What Your Addiction Is Actually Serving...

I wonder if your familiar with this experience...

The scroll that gives you a break from your reality.

The glass of wine that isn't really about the wine.

The shopping cart that always fills, or the delivers that arrive and you can't remember ordering.

The cigarette you didn't even want but your hand somehow ended up with. The way your fingers through your phone without awareness to social media. The snacking that stops when the box is finished.

We've been taught to see these moments as failures of willpower.

As proof that something in us is broken, undisciplined, weak.

So we try to white knuckle our way out.

We get hypnotised. We buy a bunch of online courses.

We do the thirty day challenge.

We cover the mirror in post it notes.

We white board our triggers and promise ourselves this time will be different.

And then, months later, we're standing in the same doorway again.

Here's the myth I want to crack open.

That addiction is the problem.

It isn't.

Addiction is a mechanism we built unconsciously to soothe ourselves. A remarkably efficient one, built by a nervous system that found a fast, reliable way to get somewhere it desperately needed to go, in a world that never taught it any other route there.

Because most of us were never actually educated in how to rest.

How to regulate.

How to come back into our bodies after a day of holding it together.

Nobody sat us down and said here is how you let your system exhale, here is what safety feels like from the inside, here is how you tolerate stillness without it feeling like falling.

So the body did what bodies do.

It found something that worked. A behaviour, a substance, a screen, that could reliably deliver a feeling it had no other access point to.

Quiet. Numbness. Aliveness. Escape. Enough.

When someone brings an addiction into the room with me, I don't spend much time asking about the addiction itself. I don't go looking for the guilt, or the shame, or the reasons it's wrong.

That path might make someone feel seen for a moment, but it rarely makes room for change, it just adds another layer to carry. What actually shows me where change can happen, quickly and clearly, is one question.

I ask what it's serving.

What does this give you, in your body, that you can't seem to find anywhere else?

Most people pause here.

Really pause.

Because underneath the shame, they know. It's the space to take a moment just for you. It's a way to get our of their head. It takes their nervous energy down a few notches. It's the the only thrill the feel allowed to experience. It's the only access they feel they have to feeling desired. It's a doorway out of a feeling that had nowhere else to go.

And this is the part that changes everything.

If the addiction is serving something real, then getting rid of it without replacing what it's serving is asking the body to go without, and that there is unstable ground.

No wonder it keeps finding its way back. No wonder you keep falling back into the same cycle.

You haven't closed the door, you've just asked the nervous system to stand outside in the cold and hope it it would be fine.

Hate to break it to you, but you can quit something and not replace it. And here in therapy, is where we choose, which is replacement is best suitable for that.

People do this all the time, chuck the habit, through sheer force, through cold turkey, through cutting the thing off at the root and gritting their teeth through the withdrawal. But your system still needs what it was offering you.

The need doesn't disappear just because the doorway closed.

So rather than cold turkey, rather than cutting something off and hoping the need goes with it, the work is to create new ways to serve that same thing.

What you actually need is something that can serve you in that same way, that reaches the same place, but is more sustainable for your wellbeing.

A healthier, more supportive way to soothe what was always asking to be soothed.

The deeper work isn't removal.

It's re-education.

It's teaching the body, slowly, experientially, that rest is available somewhere else too. That presence doesn't have to be numbed into. That feels are to be felt, and the discomfort is okay. That the break in your busy day can come through breath, through touch, through movement, that you can be soothed by connection, with people, or massage, or a warm bath or a good book, or nature.

It's building new pathways that can actually hold what the old one was holding, so the nervous system has somewhere else to go when it reaches for relief.

This doesn't happen quickly, and it doesn't happen through insight alone.

Understanding why you scroll doesn't stop your thumb from moving.

The brain is wired to reach for what it already knows works. Which means the new pathway has to be practiced in the body, not just understood in the mind, until it becomes just as available, just as fast, just as trustworthy as the old one.

So if you're someone who has tried to think your way out of a pattern, or shame yourself out of it, or trick your brain out of it, I want to offer you something gentler.

Your addiction was never the enemy.

It was the most intelligent thing your body could find, with the tools it had, in a culture that gave it almost none.

The question was never what's wrong with you.

It was always, what were you trying to give yourself.

With love, Narla