What if addiction were rational?
Gabor Maté argues that we’re all addicted to something. His addictions have been workaholism and internet shopping. For me it’s also been workaholism, but I get no pleasure from internet shopping; Twitter and sports give me that soothing distraction.
These addictions aren’t as disruptive compared to socially unacceptable and self-destructive addictions related to alcohol and other drugs, sex, gambling, and so on. But they all share a commonality: these addictions make rational sense once we get to meet the parts of us that make up our inner system.
The problem is that most of us have only a murky view of what’s happening inside and so addictions appear senseless, irrational, and ultimately unexplainable. It’s why the “disease” model of addiction has been so widely accepted. Why else would someone “ruin” their lives in addictive spirals except that they have some psychological disease?
Thankfully, psychotherapeutic approaches like Internal Family Systems (IFS) give us a framework that actually explains what’s happening in addictive processes instead of the hand-waving that happens when we view addiction as a disease.
IFS shows us that if we slow down and notice what’s happening inside, we’ll find that we have a bunch of different inner parts. A part of me wants a bowl of ice cream and another part of me responds by saying that if I eat that bowl of ice cream, it’ll make sure I work out twice as hard tomorrow. Or, a part of me is really worried about this thing coming up next week, and another part of me is trying to calm me down by distracting me with sports on TV.
Addiction is simply the result of our inner parts working with and against each other, in a totally rational way. Here’s how a typical addictive process unfolds, from the IFS view:
In childhood and adolescence, person X experienced some emotional traumas. Maybe they experienced big T-Traumas like physical/sexual abuse, or maybe less visible traumas like emotional neglect or relational instability.
Sensitive parts of X felt the pain of these experiences and wanted to express this pain by crying, screaming, yelling, and flailing. But X’s caregivers and others gave them signals that these expressions weren’t ok (or that they would result in even more abuse). So, X had other inner parts who took on the jobs of managers who locked away the young, sensitive parts holding all that pain.
Despite the hard work of X’s manager parts, the pain doesn’t go away; it just festers and leaks out in different ways.
X can’t walk around with this pain leaking out, so the manager parts are overwhelmed by other parts that take on the job of firefighters. These firefighters learn different ways of putting out the flames of emotional pain: daydreaming, dissociating, food, and self-harm at younger ages, giving way to stronger medicines like sex, alcohol, and other drugs as X gets older.
Firefighter parts aren’t trying to hurt anyone; they’re trying to put out the pain to make life livable. And the firefighter of last resort is the suicidal part who knows the ultimate solution to make all the pain go away and never come back.
Manager parts rush back in after firefighters take over, and they are PISSED. They often hate firefighters for the mess they leave in their wake. So, the managers fill the system with self-hatred and shame.
This self-hatred and shame just adds to the emotional pain that the firefighters need to deal with, so they have to rush back in to do their job, often with even stronger medicine. And if they don’t do their job, the suicidal part is always waiting in the wings.
It all makes perfect sense. There is no disease, illness, or disorder here. In fact, it’s perfectly ordered!
12-step programs do a wonderful job of loosening up these dynamics and empowering healthy manager parts. But without an understanding of parts and how they’re connected in an internal system, addiction will still appear as a mysterious disease befalling the unlucky few.
So, what’s the answer? Internal Family Systems therapy and coaching. By practicing with someone trained in IFS, people can start working with the overwhelming conflict inside between managers and firefighters. Over time they can bring True-Self compassion, calmness, and curiosity to these parts to help them build trusting, loving relationships inside. Eventually, these protectors will let the person go to the young exiles carrying all the pain and help them heal.
In a healed system, addiction simply isn’t needed anymore, so addictive behavior stops. But until then, addictions will make perfect sense.