How to understand addiction as a coping mechanism

Many of us who have been through recovery programs, know the pain and confusion of tackling one addiction only to have another rear its head.

That’s because when we stop an addictive behavior without getting to its root cause, the problem stays. You may have stopped drinking, for example, but the reason you drank remains… so you have to find another way to cope.

That’s why you may stop drinking and develop an eating disorder instead. Drinking itself was never the problem; it was how you coped with the problem.

Addiction & trauma

When you grow up with childhood trauma, the pain you experience is overwhelming. That’s one of the definitions of trauma - it’s too much to bear so we have to find ways to escape it.

Our addictions help us check out and disassociate from our real problem so we can function and do life. Of course, we don’t do well while under the control of an addiction, but we survive.

If you experienced abuse and neglect in childhood, you’d go through life in an almost constant state of pain. You would have to develop an over responsible and hypervigilant inner child tasked with keeping you safe.

This steals your joy and makes you feel as though you are all alone in a dangerous world. If you know the feeling of walking around with your shoulders around your ears and never being able to relax, you understand hypervigilance.

Addictions give you an escape from the tyranny of this type of existence. You use them for the short-term benefits even though the long-term consequences are well-known to you.

For this reason addictions cannot be combatted through logic or reason. Your survival brain feels as though it needs the addiction to survive and you will die without it.

You never learned healthy coping mechanisms as a child. You only learned to defend yourself against threats.

So, you adopted unhealthy coping skills to get you through life the only way you knew how. You did not have the luxury of going to your parents for support which made you believe you couldn’t go to anyone for support.

Why you develop unhealthy coping

You may have been punished for your wants and needs, for speaking your mind, or for having emotions. So, you suppressed all of these, which makes simply living incredibly difficult. Enter an addiction to give you a release valve from all this self-oppression.

You never learned that it was okay to take care of yourself. So, instead you use your addiction to create a complete break with reality or to give you some semblance of control over your situation.

That’s why anyone who quits drinking without addressing the underlying issue tends to relapse. That may be the reason 12-step programs have a poor recovery rate.

Success in these programs is likely due to the support and camaradarie found there. Isolation only worsens our problems and knowing we are not alone is a huge boon to healing of any kind.

However, the classic 12 steps put the blame firmly on the drinker and called them selfish and self-centred for their addiction. Throwing themselves into service to others was deemed the best route to recovery.

The program was first developed for men and ignored the fact women tend to overgive as a result of cultural conditioning. More so if raised in dysfunctional homes with unmet needs.

The last thing women need in most cases is to give more. What they need instead is to focus on themselves and their own needs first instead of abandoning those to care for others.

When overcoming an addiction, part of this focus means paying attention to triggers around your addiction. What feeling arises right before you use your coping mechanism and how can you meet that need in a healthy way instead?