What Your Addiction Is Actually Trying to Tell You

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I've sat across from hundreds of people who tell me they want to stop.

Stop drinking. Stop the affairs. Stop Gambling. Stop numbing out. Stop the behavior that's quietly eroding their marriage, their health, their sense of who they are.

And most of the time, they mean it... on the surface.

But there's a difference between wanting to stop and being willing to see why you haven't.

After twenty years as a therapist working with high-achieving professionals, I've learned that the people who actually change aren't the ones who white-knuckle their way through. They're the ones who get honest, ruthlessly, vulnerably honest, about what the addiction is giving them.

Because it's always giving them something.

The Hidden Benefit

Here's the uncomfortable truth: every addiction has a payoff. Not a healthy one. Not a sustainable one. But a real one.

That drink after work isn't just a habit. It's doing something for your nervous system, softening an edge, numbing a feeling, creating a buffer between you and something you don't want to face.

That compulsive behavior—whether it's sex, work, scrolling, spending, is managing something. Regulating something. Filling something.

The inner work isn't about having more willpower. It's about finding out what you're actually choosing, and why? And that requires looking in places most successful people have trained themselves to avoid.

The Armor of Success

When you're accomplished, you develop a certain relationship with control. You've built things. You've solved problems. You've proven, again and again, that you can handle what life throws at you.

So admitting that something has power over you? That feels like weakness. Like failure. Like everything you've constructed might be less solid than it appears.

The defense mechanisms are predictable:

"I'm strong enough to handle it."

"It's not really a problem."

"I can stop whenever I want."

"No one's getting hurt."

That last one is almost never true. But when you're in the fog of an addictive pattern, you lose sight of the collateral damage, the spouse who feels your absence, the kids who sense something's off, the version of yourself that keeps getting deferred.

Most people don't face this honestly until the pain becomes impossible to ignore. What famed mindfulness teacher George Mumford calls the "Ass of Fire" moment.  A marriage on the edge. A health scare. A moment of clarity that breaks through the denial.

Pain has a way of getting our attention when nothing else will. I've come to see it as the teacher of the soul.

What I Know From the Inside

I'm not writing this from a distance.

I've been the person using external behavior to fill the cracks in my inner life. For me, it often came back to shame. Self-loathing. A dissatisfaction with my relationships, or with some part of myself I didn't want to look at directly.

The pattern is seductive because it works, temporarily. It soothes the nervous system, quiets the inner critic, creates a moment of relief. But relief isn't resolution.

And that's the core insight I want to offer you:

Addiction isn't caused by wanting too much. It's caused by asking impermanent experiences to give permanent relief.

We reach for the drink, the fling, the distraction, the dopamine hit, and we ask it to do something it cannot do. We ask a temporary experience to fill a permanent need. It can't. So we reach again. And again. The loop tightens.

The Body as Map

Your body is a window into your nervous system. And your nervous system holds the map to the wounds that need attention.

When I work with clients, I often frame this as energy work: not in a vague, abstract sense, but in a very practical one. Unresolved pain leaks energy. Addictive patterns leak energy. The constant cycling between craving, acting out, and shame is exhausting precisely because it's hemorrhaging your vitality without building anything.

The body will show you where you're dysregulated if you're willing to listen. The tightness in your chest. The restlessness that won't settle. The way your system reaches for something external the moment discomfort arises.

These aren't failures. They're information.

The Truth About Sexual Addiction and Power

Of all the addictive patterns I encounter, sexual compulsivity may be the most misunderstood, and the most revealing.

On the surface, it looks like it's about desire. About appetite. About wanting too much. It's not.

At its core, sexual addiction is about power. Or more precisely, the absence of it.

Gary Zukav, in his book The Seat of the Soul, offers one of the most unflinching descriptions I've encountered: the experience of addictive sexual attraction is a signal that in that moment, you are experiencing powerlessness. The pull toward another person isn't really about connection or even pleasure, it's about an unconscious attempt to fill an inner void through external intensity.

This runs counter to how we usually think about it. This is hard to look at. But it's essential.

This isn't about blame, it's about seeing the mechanism clearly enough to step out of it.

When someone is sexually out of control, they are simultaneously out of control with their own power. These two things cannot be separated. You cannot be grounded in your authentic self, in your center, and be dominated by compulsive sexual energy.

The attraction we feel in these moments often has little to do with the other person. It's a response to our own internal emptiness, scanning for someone who might temporarily fill it. And here's the painful part: that dynamic is mutual. Two people caught in this pattern are both seeking something neither can provide.

The way out isn't suppression. It's recognition.

When you feel that magnetic pull—that charge that seems bigger than the situation warrants—pause. Ask yourself: What am I actually feeling right now? What am I hoping this will give me?

Usually the honest answer isn't sex. It's power. Safety. Validation. Relief from the unbearable feeling of not being enough.

The Difference Between Attraction and Addiction

It's natural to feel attraction. To admire. To experience warmth and magnetism toward another person. That's part of being human.

But there's a qualitative difference between attraction and addictive pull.

Attraction can be satisfied and left behind. You notice someone, appreciate them, and move on with your day.

Addiction cannot be satiated. There's a charge to it, a combination of magnetism and fear and urgency that's disproportionate to what's actually happening. And no matter how many times you act on it, it returns. Because you're not addressing what's underneath.

If you find yourself repeatedly drawn into intensity that destabilizes your life, that's not passion. That's a wound asking for attention.

The Tests We Create

There's a pattern I see in my private practice, and it's one of the more uncomfortable truths about addiction: we create our own temptations.

Not consciously. But somewhere beneath awareness, we engineer situations where failure feels inevitable. We put ourselves in proximity to the thing we're trying to avoid. We "accidentally" find ourselves in circumstances where acting out seems like the only option.

Why would we do this? Because it gives us permission.

If the temptation is overwhelming, if we've constructed a test we cannot pass, then we're not responsible. We can say, "I tried, but it was too much." We get to act out and preserve the story that we're really trying to stop.

This is painful to recognize. But recognizing it is the beginning of freedom.

When you catch yourself moving toward familiar danger, toward the bar, the website, the person, the situation—pause and ask: Am I creating a test I don't actually want to pass?

That question, asked honestly, can interrupt the whole pattern.

When the Cost Gets Higher

Here's something that might reframe the pain you're experiencing:

If your addiction is starting to cost you more, if the consequences are getting harder to ignore, if things that used to slide are now falling apart—that may not be punishment. It may be response to your own readiness.

There's a way of understanding this where the severity of consequence reflects the depth of your soul's desire to heal. The universe isn't cruel. But it is responsive. And when part of you is genuinely ready to change, life has a way of making the old path increasingly unbearable.

Your marriage in the balance. Your health on the line. Your self-respect hanging by a thread.

These aren't signs that you're broken beyond repair. They may be signs that you're closer to transformation than you've ever been.

The question is whether you'll let the pain do its work.

The Moment Between Craving and Action

There's a space between stimulus and response. Between the urge arising and the behavior following. That space is where your freedom lives.

This is what mindfulness practice actually trains—not the suppression of desire, but the capacity to be present with discomfort without being controlled by it. To feel the pull and not be pulled.

Addiction is not the presence of craving, it's the absence of capacity to stay with discomfort.

In that pause, something remarkable becomes possible. You can observe the craving without becoming it. You can notice the urgency without obeying it. You can ask what's really happening instead of being swept into automatic reaction.

Every time you make a conscious choice in that space, you accumulate power. The addiction doesn't disappear overnight, but its grip loosens. What felt like an unstoppable force starts to feel like something you can work with.

This isn't about perfection. It's about practice.

Reframing the Return

The craving will come back. The urge will resurface. This isn't failure, it's the nature of the work.

If you interpret each recurrence as evidence that nothing's working, you'll spiral into discouragement. But if you can see each return of the urge as another opportunity to choose differently, something shifts.

You're not fighting a losing battle. You're building a muscle.

Each time you meet the pull with awareness instead of automaticity, you're rewiring something. The addiction loses a little power. You gain a little ground. Over time, what felt impossible starts to feel possible.

Be patient with yourself in this. And be honest. Both matter.

Building Internal Ground

Here's what I've come to believe after two decades of this work:

The void is real. The emptiness that drives addictive behavior isn't imaginary, it's a felt experience of something missing, something unfilled. But the solution isn't to fill it with something external. The solution is to discover that it doesn't need filling in the way we thought.

What we call a void is often impermanence felt without support. It's the natural uncertainty of being human, experienced by a nervous system that never learned to tolerate it.

Healing isn't about adding more control. It's about building capacity, the internal resources to be present with uncertainty, to develop a relationship with yourself that doesn't require constant external soothing, to learn to regulate from the inside.

This is why mindfulness works. Why somatic work works. Why attachment repair and therapy and spiritual practice work. They don't fill the void, they teach your system that it doesn't need filling. They help you come home to yourself.

The Truth About Redemption

I want to leave you with something important.

People heal from addiction. Every day. Not by becoming perfect, but by becoming honest. Not by eliminating desire, but by learning to meet it with presence. Not by hating themselves into change, but by finding the courage to choose differently, one moment at a time.

You are not broken.

You are not your worst moments. You are not the pattern that's had power over you. You are not your programming. 

You are someone in the middle of a human journey, struggling with the same forces that have challenged people for as long as we've existed. The craving for relief. The ache of incompleteness. The pull toward anything that promises to make the discomfort stop.

That struggle doesn't make you defective. It makes you human. May we all be grateful for our humanness. 

And here's what I know after twenty years of sitting with people in their darkest places: redemption is always available. Not as a reward for suffering enough, but as a possibility that exists in every moment. The past doesn't disqualify you. The relapses don't disqualify you. The years lost to the pattern don't disqualify you.

You are allowed to heal.

You are allowed joy.

You are allowed pleasure- real pleasure, the kind that doesn't cost you your integrity or leave you emptier than before.

The path forward isn't about becoming someone who never wants anything. It's about becoming someone who can hold desire without being controlled by it. Someone who can feel the pull and choose freely. Someone who fills the inner void not with temporary relief, but with presence, purpose, and genuine connection.

That person isn't a fantasy. That's who you're becoming, if you're willing.

When You're Ready

If something in these words landed for you, I invite you to sit with it.

You don't have to make any decisions right now. You don't have to fix everything today. Sometimes the most powerful step is simply acknowledging what you already know, that something needs to change, and that you're more ready than you've let yourself believe.

If you'd like support on this path, I'm here. Through therapy, through mindfulness-based work, through the deeper modalities that help access what lives beneath the surface. There are ways to do this that don't require white-knuckling your way through alone.

When you're ready to take the next step, I invite you to schedule a free consultation to explore whether working together might be right for you.

The door is open when you're ready to walk through it. May you be well.