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Mind and Body Self-Care
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DISCLAIMER
The information on this website is intended to provide general education only. It is not a substitute for individualized medical advice, and applying the self-care concepts described is a personal choice. The science and strategies on this website are drawn from peer-reviewed research and clinical practice guidelines. However, before making any changes to your medication, starting new supplements, changing your diet, or managing a health condition, talk with a qualified healthcare provider about your specific situation.
Gabor Maté, a Canadian physician who spent years caring for people with severe addiction on the streets of Vancouver, framed the whole subject with one shift in the question: the real question is never why the addiction, but why the pain (Maté, 2010).
Nobody wakes up one morning and decides to have a problem with sex, pornography, or cheating. It gets built slowly, like a road paved one mile marker at a time, and every section was laid down by pain that had to go somewhere.
This guide has five parts: what the behavior is reaching for, the road that leads to compulsive sexual behavior, the Protective Cycle that keeps it running, how that cycle compares with other models, and how each station becomes something we work on in therapy. Looking at where the road came from is not about blaming your family or excusing your choices. It is about seeing clearly, because you can only change what you can actually see.
When a behavior turns compulsive — meaning it keeps happening even after you have decided to stop — it is almost never a story about wanting too much sex. It is a story about an older, deeper need being sent down the fastest road available.
Attachment is a survival system, not a feeling. John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist who created attachment theory — the study of how early bonds with caregivers shape us — argued that infants seek closeness because closeness kept them alive (Bowlby, 1969). That wiring never switches off. Sue Johnson, a Canadian psychologist who created Emotionally Focused Therapy — a couples therapy that works on the emotional bond rather than communication skills — argues that adult love is a survival bond too. Underneath almost every fight sit two questions: are you there for me, and will you come when I call (Johnson, 2013).
Sex and attachment are two different systems. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist who studies the biology of love, found that the brain runs three separate systems, each evolved for a different job: lust, attraction, and attachment (Fisher, 1998). Lisa Diamond, a psychologist who studies desire and sexual orientation, showed the same — romantic love and sexual wanting run on different circuits and can point at different people (Diamond, 2003). Making babies is one job the body does. Bonding to someone is another. They overlap, but they are not the same wire, and either can get pulled in to do the other’s work. That is where the trouble starts.
The confusion at the center. Patrick Carnes, the psychologist who first described sexual addiction as a treatable condition, wrote a book called Sexual Anorexia (Carnes, 1997b). The title borrows a word people usually use about eating: anorexia means starving yourself of something you actually need, and Carnes applied it to sex and closeness. His point is that a person can chase sex compulsively or shut down from it completely, and both grow from the same belief: that sex is what proves you are loved and wanted.
That is an understandable mistake, because sex delivers touch, attention, and the feeling of being chosen, all on demand. But what the body is actually asking for is safe harbor — one person who knows all of you and stays anyway. Sex can carry that feeling. It cannot create it. When sex stands in for the bond instead of expressing it, the relief is real and short, and the hunger comes back stronger, because the real need never got met.
If the deepest need is a safe bond, then a childhood that teaches the body what safety feels like is the strongest protection there is. Alan Sroufe and his team ran the Minnesota Longitudinal Study, following the same children from birth into adulthood. Early security predicted doing better later in many ways: getting along with people, handling emotions, and recovering under stress (Sroufe et al., 2005).
This is not about perfect parents. Edward Tronick, a developmental psychologist who filmed babies and parents interacting, showed that healthy relationships are full of missed moments. What matters is repair — reconnecting after things go wrong (Tronick, 1989). Peter Fonagy, a psychoanalyst and researcher, studies mentalizing — being able to read what is going on inside yourself and inside others. A child builds this ability by first being understood by someone else (Fonagy et al., 2002). Two emotionally safe parents do not raise a child who never struggles. They raise a child whose body learned three things: distress ends, repair is possible, and needing someone is not dangerous.
The road base was laid before you were born. Your genotype — the set of genes you inherited — is the starting equipment your brain got. Kenneth Kendler, a psychiatrist who studies how much of mental illness is inherited, ran twin and family studies showing that genes influence addiction risk, though no single gene causes it (Kendler et al., 2003). Kenneth Blum, a researcher in addiction genetics, described reward deficiency syndrome — a brain that gets less of a “that felt good” signal from ordinary life than most brains do (Blum et al., 1996). It involves dopamine, the brain chemical behind wanting and craving rather than pleasure itself. A person built this way can feel flat or restless until something intense shows up.
Genes are not a destined predictor of wellbeing in life. Researchers call this the diathesis-stress model — you inherit a vulnerability, and life decides whether it switches on (Monroe & Simons, 1991). Michael Meaney, a neuroscientist who studies how parenting affects the brain, works in epigenetics — the role the environment plays in mental illness and how care and stress turn genes on or off without changing the genes themselves. His research showed that early nurturing physically changes the way a brain handles stress for life (Meaney, 2001). Family history also travels by example: secrecy, affairs, untreated addiction, or a rule that bodies are never discussed all pass down without a single gene involved.
Mary Ainsworth, a developmental psychologist who worked with Bowlby, tested his ideas using the Strange Situation — a lab setup where researchers watch how a baby reacts when a parent leaves the room and then comes back. She found clear patterns of attachment: secure, anxious, and avoidant, with a fourth called disorganized added later (Ainsworth et al., 1978). These harden into an internal working model — a private rulebook about whether people can be trusted and whether you are worth loving (Bowlby, 1969).
Why these three years carry so much weight. Attachment is the emotional tie between a child and a caregiver, and it gets built through thousands of very small exchanges. A baby cries; someone comes with food, or comfort, or a warm hand. Repeat that a few thousand times and the baby learns something they will carry for life: I matter, and my needs count. Consistent care also teaches that the world is predictable — if something goes wrong, someone helps. And it teaches the most physical lesson of all. Babies cannot calm themselves down. They borrow a calm nervous system from an adult until they grow one of their own, a process called co-regulation. Allan Schore, a researcher who studies how early relationships shape the developing brain, describes this as the foundation on which a child’s own ability to handle feelings is built (Schore, 2001).
When care is unpredictable. If caregivers are often absent, angry, frightening, or simply not responsive, the child lives instead with what Jack Shonkoff and colleagues at Harvard call toxic stress — stress that is strong, frequent, and not buffered by a steady adult (Shonkoff et al., 2012). Rather than learning the world is safe, the brain stays on watch. Stephen Porges, a neuroscientist who studies how the nervous system reads safety and danger, describes a body that keeps scanning for threat long after the threat is gone (Porges, 2011). Children who grow up not trusting caregivers carry a higher risk later for anxiety, depression, difficulty trusting people, and relationships where they either push others away or hold on far too tightly.
What a child concludes about having needs. This is the part that matters most when understanding how the rest of the road is built leading to an addiction. When a child reaches out and is not met — not comforted, not believed, told they are overreacting, or answered with irritation — their young brain doesn’t blame their caregiver for this. The child’s young brain has not developed the capacity to do this yet. They conclude something about themselves: that having needs is unsafe, that reaching out makes things worse, and that no one is coming. So they stop reaching.
There is a second route to the same place, and it is gentler and easier to miss. Sometimes the opportunity is there and the caregiver loves the child, but the child can see that the adult is stretched thin — ill, grieving, overworked, overwhelmed. So the child quietly decides not to add to the load. Nobody did anything cruel. The child still arrives at the same conclusion: I am responsible for my own needs.
From there the sequence is almost automatic. A child who is responsible for their own feelings has to do something with those feelings, and no one has taught them how. So they stuff them down, and then they look for whatever works fastest. Bowlby had a name for the pattern that grows out of this — compulsive self-reliance, an insistence on managing everything alone that looks like strength from the outside and feels like isolation from the inside (Bowlby, 1973).
That is the hinge. The child is not looking for sex; they are looking for relief they can get by themselves. Years later, sexual behavior turns out to be extraordinarily good at exactly that job. It is fast, private, reliable, available on demand, and it requires no one else to show up. A skill learned at the age of three because there was no other option becomes, at age thirty, a compulsion that no longer has anything to do with the original problem.
None of this requires bad parents, and none of it is beyond repair. As Part One described, what protects a child is not a caregiver who never gets it wrong but one who comes back and reconnects afterward. That returning is what teaches a child that relationships survive hard moments — and it is also, later, exactly what therapy is doing.
A child who learns “I am on my own here” gets very good at self-soothing without a person. That skill is where the road first bends. Remember Part One: the need underneath is for a safe bond. A child who cannot get that from a person will find something that works alone.
This mile marker does more damage than any other, and it is the one families most often get wrong by accident.
Childhood sexual behavior is normal and common. Sigmund Freud said so over a century ago in his psychosexual theory — his stage model of how pleasure and body awareness develop. Most of that theory is heavily criticized today, but this one observation held up (Freud, 1953). William Friedrich, a psychologist who measured what is typical in children, studied kids who had never been abused. He found that self-touching and curiosity about bodies show up at many ages and are not a sign that something is wrong (Friedrich et al., 1998). The guidance written for pediatricians says the same thing (Kellogg, 2009).
How a parent responds in these situations is crucial for healthy development of the child. When a parent discovers a child touching themselves, the behavior usually does not change much either way. The meaning changes enormously. Parents responding with calm redirection — this is private, do it in your room — teaches a child that bodies are private. Responding with alarm, disgust, punishment, or a warning about damnation teaches a child that they are disgusting. The belief “I am basically a bad, unworthy person” is often installed right here, years before a first sexual experience.
Two other things can go wrong at this mile. Too much: exposure to sexual material, unwanted touch, or an adult leaning on a child to meet grown-up emotional needs. Kenneth Adams, a psychologist who writes about parent-child boundaries, called that last one covert incest — when a parent uses a child as a stand-in partner, using the child as an emotional sounding board (Adams, 1991). And the load adds up. Vincent Felitti, the physician who led the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, found that the more abuse, neglect, parental conflict and household chaos a child lives through, the higher their risk as an adult for addiction and illness (Felitti et al., 1998).
Religious shame and scrupulosity. Scrupulosity — obsessive religious or moral guilt, where an ordinary thought feels like a sin already committed — is a recognized clinical pattern with real research behind it (Abramowitz & Jacoby, 2014; Miller & Hedges, 2008). A child taught that a thought equals an act learns to monitor, check, and confess constantly. That mental monitoring is the exact machinery that later becomes the preoccupied, searching quality of the cycle, because watching for a thought is the most reliable way to produce it. Julie Exline and Kenneth Pargament, psychologists who study how faith and mental health affect each other, have measured what they call religious and spiritual struggle and documented how costly it becomes (Exline et al., 2014).
The hard truth is that shame does not reduce the behavior. It is the fuel for station eight of the protective cycle below you will learrn about below, and station eight reloads the whole loop.
Erik Erikson, who mapped social development across the whole lifespan, said that school-age children are working on competence — am I good at something, do I have a place — and that teenagers are working on identity — who am I, and where do I belong (Erikson, 1950). Both jobs are done in public, in front of an audience of other kids.
This is where comparison starts. Somewhere around age six or seven, children begin measuring themselves against everyone around them, constantly. A kid who is good at something — a sport, an instrument, making people laugh, math — gets a place to stand. A kid who is behind, or left out, or picked last, reaches a different conclusion, and it is rarely “I am not good at kickball.” It is “something is wrong with me.” If Mile 3 already installed a belief like that, this mile does not create it. It confirms it, in front of witnesses, every day.
Social pain is not a figure of speech. Naomi Eisenberger and her colleagues put people in a brain scanner and had them excluded from a simple ball-tossing game. The exclusion lit up brain regions that overlap with the ones that register physical pain (Eisenberger et al., 2003). Being left out is not “just feelings.” The body treats it like an injury, and an injured body goes looking for relief.
Where the relief comes from. Albert Bandura’s social learning theory — we learn by watching and copying — explains the rest (Bandura, 1977). Almost nobody surveys their options and selects a coping strategy. They use whatever is closest. A father who unwinds with four beers. An older brother’s laptop. A phone handed around at a sleepover. The strategy is not chosen so much as inherited from whatever happened to be within reach on a bad day.
And the timing is brutal. Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that researches how children use media, surveyed roughly 1,300 American teenagers and found that the average age of first exposure to online pornography was twelve, that more than half had seen it by thirteen, and that about fifteen percent had seen it at ten or younger (Robb & Mann, 2023). Erikson’s developmental theory is seen here. For a great many people, the first sexual experience of their life is not with another person at all. It is alone, on a screen, at an age when they are already lonely, already comparing themselves to everyone, and already unsure who they are. This is exactly what Mile 5 is about.
The double life starts here. This is also usually the first time a person keeps something significant hidden from everyone who knows them. Deleting a history, closing a laptop when someone walks in, having an answer ready. It feels small at the time. But the split between the person you are in public and the person you are alone is not just a consequence of the behavior — it is a skill, and this is where it gets practiced, reinforcing the mask you wear in public.
Carnes described an arousal template — the personal map of what turns a specific person on, built out of early experiences, images, and feelings (Carnes, 2001). This happens because whatever else is happening during those first powerful experiences gets recorded alongside the arousal, the way a smell can bring back a whole childhood memory. If a boy is lonely, frightened, angry, or feeling powerless during those first experiences, those states do not sit off to the side. They get laminated onto the arousal itself.
Years later that shows up as something confusing: feeling lonely becomes a cue for arousal. Not because the person decided loneliness was appealing, but because at fourteen the two were filed in the same folder and never separated. This is why so many people describe reaching for the behavior at moments that have nothing to do with wanting sex — after an argument, after a humiliation at work, on a Sunday evening with nothing to do.
Why adolescence is the worst possible moment for this. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist who studies the teenage brain, describes two systems that come online at different speeds. The reward system — the part that responds to anything exciting or pleasurable — matures early, around puberty. The braking system in the front of the brain, the part that weighs consequences, regulates impulsive behavior and stops you, is not finished developing until the mid-twenties (Steinberg, 2008). For roughly a decade a person is driving with the gas pedal fully installed and the brakes still being built. A relief habit learned in that window gets learned deeply and fast. This is why urges become so hard to control as adults.
Jay Stringer, who surveyed more than 3,800 people about their unwanted sexual behavior, found six experiences that combine to drive it: deprivation (going without what you need), dissociation (checking out of the present moment), unconscious arousal (being turned on by things tied to old wounds), futility (nothing I do matters), lust, and anger. His argument is that no one of these is enough on its own, and that all six have to be addressed together rather than one at a time (Stringer, 2018).
Then it starts to move. The behavior escalates through tolerance — needing more, or more often, or more intense, to get the same relief (Volkow et al., 2016). This is the part people find most frightening about themselves. When this happens it is not that your tastes changed or that something inside you got darker. It is that the same input stopped producing the same effect, so the dose went up. That is the ordinary behavior of a reward system under repetition, and it happens with other addictions like gambling or drugs.
The template is written in strong ink. What gets built in these years is durable, which is why people can feel ashamed and bewildered by what arouses them decades later. It helps enormously to understand what the template actually is: a record of what was happening to you when the wiring was laid down. It is information about your history, not a verdict on your character. And durable is not the same as permanent — that is what healing and the road repair of the addictive roadmap that Part Five of this article provides.
There is a point where the behavior stops being something you do when you are upset and becomes something you do to keep functioning. It becomes difficult to understand what pushed one to slip again. Most people cannot name the week it happened. But afterward the thing is running on its own schedule, and the reasons that started it have become almost irrelevant to whether it continues.
Secrecy is the accelerant. Real energy now goes into hiding: clearing histories, managing timing, having explanations ready, keeping stories straight. Each concealment raises the price of ever being honest, which makes the next concealment more necessary. And every hour spent hiding is an hour spent alone with it. That is the cruelest mechanism on this whole road — isolation was the original wound, and the behavior that was supposed to treat it now develops more of it.
Life slowly becomes more difficult, balls are dropped. Not all at once. A hobby drops off. Friendships get thinner because being around people is effortful when you are carrying something. Sleep goes, because late at night is private. Sex with a partner may fade, since the private version of sex asks nothing of you and risks nothing. If you charted a calendar across a few years, you would watch it slowly reorganize around access and privacy.
It stops being about pleasure. George Koob and Michel Le Moal, addiction researchers, describe how a reward system under repeated heavy use resets its own baseline: the ordinary state you return to between episodes gets worse, so the behavior is increasingly used to feel normal rather than to feel good (Koob & Le Moal, 2001). Clients often say some version of “it stopped being fun a long time ago.” That sentence is not a failure of willpower. It is a description of a system that has moved the finish line.
The world fills up with cues. A room, a commute, an hour of the evening, a phone in a certain hand position — things that were once neutral now start the sequence on their own moving you closer to acting out. This is why people can be caught off guard by an urge on a day when nothing bad happened. The trigger no longer has to be emotional. The environment itself learned the pattern and developed its own cues.
At this point the road is behind you and the cycle is doing the work. Understanding how you got here tells you what the wound is and what belief we are treating. But you cannot solve a running cycle by explaining its history to it. That is what the rest of this guide is for.
Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, psychologists who first applied attachment theory to grown-up relationships, showed that childhood attachment styles carry straight into adult romance (Hazan & Shaver, 1987). Your experiences with your caregivers write the operational manual on how to experience intimate relationships in adulthood. Avoidant attachment can make an affair feel safer than real closeness. Anxious attachment can turn sex into a hunt for proof of being wanted. Carnes also described the betrayal bond — intense loyalty toward someone who hurts you, which keeps people stuck on both sides of infidelity (Carnes, 1997a).
This mile can end in either direction. Compulsive pursuit and total sexual shutdown look like opposites, but they grow from the same root — the belief that sex is what love is made of, and the fear of being fully known and seen (Carnes, 1997b).
The road explains how the problem got built. This cycle explains why it keeps running after you already want it to stop. You will see within this cycle that the addiction is not only about sex. The same eight stations describe not only a behavior of sex addiction but how these inner wounds can also influence other behaviors such as procrastination, rage, overworking, people-pleasing, overspending, and every other behavior a person uses to handle pain they cannot hold. The behavior changes. The cycle underneath does not.
Most models of addiction put beliefs somewhere in the loop, as one station among several. In this cycle the wound sits in the middle instead, because it is not a step you pass through on your way somewhere. It is the thing every step is bent around, feeding all eight stations at the same time. It has three parts.
Underneath the urge is something the behavior was standing in for. It sounds like: am I safe with you, do I matter, am I enough, will you be there when I need you. That is Part One arriving in the middle of the cycle.
Naming the longing and unmet need out loud is the exit, and it is the exit precisely because the behavior was only ever a substitute or protector of this pain. A substitute has to be repeated, because it never delivers the thing it stands in for. The longing can actually be met — slowly, through people, and imperfectly — which is why it ends the loop and the behavior never could.
Almost everything in this field traces back to Patrick Carnes. Beginning in the 1980s he described sexual addiction as a treatable condition rather than a moral failing, and he laid out a four-step cycle: preoccupation, where the mind becomes absorbed; ritualization, the routines that build up to it; compulsive behavior; and despair afterward. He placed that cycle inside a larger system running from a belief system, through impaired thinking, to a life becoming unmanageable, which then feeds the beliefs all over again (Carnes, 2001, 2015).
That model has helped an enormous number of people, and the Protective Cycle below is informed by some of this model’s elements. Two things in particular carry straight over: shame after acting out is not a side effect but fuel, and the belief system is where the real work happens.
| What the Protective Cycle adds | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| The body as its own station | The physical alarm fires before any thought. If you only watch your thoughts, the cycle is already four stations ahead of you. |
| The wound at the center, not in the loop | The wound is not one stop among eight. It bends all eight at once, which is why fixing one station alone never holds. |
| The Protective Urge named separately from the behavior | The gap between the urge and the act is where every intervention lives. Naming them as one thing hides the only place you have leverage. |
| Relief and cost split apart | Admitting the relief is real is what makes the rest believable. Most models skip straight to the damage. |
| The longing as a marked exit | The cycle has a door, not just a reverse gear. The behavior was a substitute; the longing is the thing itself. |
| Works for any protective behavior | The same eight stations map procrastination, rage, and overworking. Recovery from one becomes practice for all of them. |
Researchers disagree about what actually drives the loop, and the differences matter because different engines call for different treatment. Eli Coleman, a sex researcher who directed a university program in human sexuality, has argued for decades that the behavior works to lower anxiety and dysphoria — a flat, unpleasant mood — rather than to chase pleasure (Coleman, 1991). John Bancroft and Erick Janssen, researchers at the Kinsey Institute, built the dual control model: everyone has a sexual gas pedal and a sexual brake, and people differ in how easily each switches on (Bancroft & Janssen, 2000).
Alan Marlatt and Judith Gordon, psychologists who built the relapse prevention approach used in addiction treatment, described the abstinence violation effect — the collapse in confidence after a slip that turns one slip into a full relapse (Marlatt & Gordon, 1985). Matthias Brand and colleagues, German researchers who study internet-related disorders, built the I-PACE model, now the leading academic account of problem pornography use (Brand et al., 2016). Terry Robinson and Kent Berridge, neuroscientists who separated wanting from liking in the brain, showed that the wanting system gets more sensitive over time while the liking system does not, so craving grows while enjoyment shrinks (Robinson & Berridge, 1993).
Douglas Braun-Harvey and Michael Vigorito, clinicians who train therapists in sexual health, propose an out of control sexual behavior model built on the gap between what a person values and what they actually do, deliberately rejecting the disease framing (Braun-Harvey & Vigorito, 2016). Tony Ward and Stephen Hudson, forensic psychologists who study sexual offending, found four pathways rather than one; in some the person is fighting the behavior, in others they want it and plan for it (Ward & Hudson, 1998).
The experts have not settled the label. The World Health Organization added Compulsive Sexual Behaviour Disorder to the ICD-11 — the manual doctors worldwide use to name conditions — but called it an impulse-control problem, not an addiction (World Health Organization, 2019). The DSM-5, used in the United States, turned down the hypersexual disorder proposed by psychiatrist Martin Kafka (Kafka, 2010), and the argument continues (Kraus et al., 2016). What nobody disputes is that people suffer and that treatment helps.
Joshua Grubbs, a psychologist who studies religion and pornography use, and his colleagues found that how addicted someone feels to pornography is predicted heavily by how religious they are and how much they disapprove of it, not just by how much they use it (Grubbs et al., 2015; Grubbs et al., 2019). They call the gap between belief and behavior moral incongruence (Grubbs & Perry, 2019).
Both mistakes are costly. Treating shame-driven distress as if it were compulsivity can deepen the shame and create a problem that was not there. Treating real compulsivity as “just religious guilt” leaves someone unprotected while their life comes apart. Both are real, they can happen together, and telling them apart is what careful assessment is for. If Mile 3 sounded like you, this is worth bringing to a therapist.
Once you can see the cycle in your own life, each station stops being something that happens to you and becomes something we can get our hands on. At every station we do two things. First you learn to recognize and name your own experience there — your body, your words, your routines. Then we go to work changing it.
You do not have to beat the whole cycle at once. You need one station where you can interrupt it, then another. Eight small targets beat one impossible one.
| Station | What you learn to recognize | What we then work on |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Trigger | The specific setups — times of day, tones of voice, places, being alone, being criticized | An early-warning list, so the cycle gets caught at station one instead of station six |
| 2. Body | Where it lands in your body first, before any thought arrives | Settling the alarm: breath, grounding, movement, getting the body regulated before it recruits everything else |
| 3. Emotion | The feeling on top and the softer one underneath it | Naming the underneath feeling out loud instead of acting from the one on top |
| 4. Story | The exact sentences your mind produces about you and about them | Catching a distorted thought and arguing back — what psychiatrist Aaron Beck called cognitive restructuring (Beck, 1979) |
| 5. The Protective Urge | The pull itself: how it announces itself, how long it lasts, what it promises | Widening the gap between urge and act. Urges rise and fall on their own if nothing feeds them |
| 6. Behavior | The ten small steps before the act, not only the act | Building competing habits. Old circuits are not deleted; they get out-competed (Graybiel, 2008) |
| 7. Relief, then cost | What the relief honestly delivers, and what it actually charges you | Tracking the real cost, so the trade stops looking like a bargain |
| 8. Wound confirmed | The shame sentence you say to yourself afterward | Shame work. Shame survives on secrecy and dies when it meets empathy (Brown, 2006); self-kindness after failure predicts trying again (Neff, 2003) |
The wound at the center is the hardest target to identify, the longest work and the most worthwhile. It means going back to what happened or never happened, grieving it honestly, and rebuilding the domain that was left underbuilt. This is where trauma processing belongs. It is slow, and it is what makes the other eight stations stay fixed instead of springing back. To be clear, we can’t get rid of that painful part. That is the true struggle many find themselves in. They fight the pain, wanting to remove it. Healing is accepting it, comforting and validating it. We are changing the brain’s operational manual that now interacts with the painful inner wound from a position of emotional safety, insight and growth.
The longing is the piece you practice with people rather than alone. Asking directly for what you need — out loud, without hinting or protesting — is a skill most people in this cycle never got to build. Sue Johnson’s couples work is built almost entirely on this move (Johnson, 2004). It could be this longing to feel that you have worth, that it’s safe in relationships to be emotionally vulnerable, that you can depend on others to meet your needs and that others do want to help you.
None of it depends on you being a different kind of person. Daniel Siegel, a psychiatrist who writes about how relationships shape the brain, describes neuroplasticity — the brain physically rewiring itself with repetition (Siegel, 2012). The cycle was learned. The operational manual of this cycle can be modified, the brain can change. We can only influence this change and our path toward healing when we identify and element within this protective cycle, respond differently consistently every day. This then creates the demand signal to the brain to rewire this healing pathway through the neuroplasticity that Siegel describes.
Relief from the new routines do not arrive quickly, the brain doesn’t work that way. Recovery may feel like work with no payoff, while the old cycle still pays immediately. That gap is the hardest stretch and it is normal — not evidence you are failing. Slips do not restart the road; they show which station is still loaded. Progress shows up first as a longer pause between station five and station six, long before the behavior stops. Focusing on the process rather than an eye focused purely on the end state; with patience and focus, leads to humility. A humble mind is a mind postured to gain insight, to learn and grow. This is the trick to healing the addiction.
Put this to work daily. Set the intention first thing in the morning to go on the hunt for understanding. Build awareness around you with the intention not to beat the addiction, but to understand it. Work through one recent time the behavior happened. Write what was true for you, not what sounds right. Develop a habit to end your day in reflection. What insight did you gain and now with that insight, what is one small action you can apply tomorrow that moves you closer to healing.
Working on this with someone. This cycle is designed to be filled in and reviewed with a clinician. You can book an appointment here. If you are in crisis right now, please use the crisis support resources instead of waiting.
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