What’s Under Addiction?

 Reflecting on my history, I can see that addiction of some kind has been present through much of my life.

The forms may have changed, but the pattern often remained the same.

And this morning, I found myself asking a question.

What is underneath addiction?

What was I trying to find?

What was I trying not to feel?

And what parts of myself was I afraid to meet?

I hung tightly to my addiction to men. It wasn’t always the same man, but the attachment was there. I wanted someone beside me. Someone who could make me feel loved, protected, and safe.

Looking back, I wonder how much of that longing belonged to the little girl inside me who had spent so much of her childhood feeling alone and afraid.

Perhaps she was still searching for the safety she had never been able to count on.

And it wasn’t only relationships.

I can see how many of my behaviors followed an addictive pattern. There was something I wanted to feel, something I wanted to hold on to, or something I wanted to escape.

I didn’t always understand what was driving me.

I only knew that I wanted to feel better.

So this morning, I decided to trust my intuition and look beneath the behaviors.

What is under addiction?

Pain.

Sorrow.

Fear.

The very emotions I grew up feeling.

Could it be that, in so many different ways, I was trying to get away from feelings that had been with me since childhood?

Perhaps I was searching for relief without fully understanding what I needed relief from.

Perhaps I was trying to fill an emptiness I didn’t know how to name.

Or perhaps I was trying to quiet a frightened little girl who had never learned how to feel safe in her own world.

When I look at her now, I don’t see someone who needs to be judged.

I see a little girl who wants to feel good.

Who wants to feel safe.

Who wants to feel loved.

There is nothing wrong with those needs.

They are the needs of a child.

But perhaps she learned to look outside herself for something she desperately needed inside: a sense of worth, a sense of belonging, and the feeling that she was going to be okay.

I wish I could go back and tell her that she never needed to earn love.

That she didn’t have to hold on so tightly to someone else to be worthy of being loved.

That her pain did not make her weak, and her fear did not make her broken.

She was simply a little girl trying to find her way through feelings that were too big for her to understand.

And perhaps the woman she became continued searching for ways to make those feelings go away.

Today, I am beginning to understand that looking beneath addiction is not about finding more reasons to blame myself.

It is about discovering what was hurting.

It is about meeting the feelings I may have spent years trying to escape.

And it is about learning to offer that little girl something different now.

Compassion

Understanding.

And a love that doesn’t require her to abandon herself.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers.

I am still discovering what lies beneath the patterns of my life.

But perhaps the questions themselves are leading me somewhere new.

Maybe I no longer need to ask only, “How do I stop this behavior?”

Maybe I can also ask, “What is hurting inside me, and what do I need?”

If I am willing to listen for the answer, perhaps that is where a different kind of healing begins.