Addiction: Illness or Indulgence?

For decades, addiction has been argued over as though there were only two possible answers. Either it is a disease, something that happens to you and lies outside your control, or it is an indulgence, a moral failing, a matter of weak willpower. People are asked to pick a side, and a great deal of shame rides on the choice.

In my experience as a counsellor, that binary is not just unhelpful, it is the wrong question. Neither "disease" nor "choice" describes what I actually see in the room.

A more useful question

Addiction is a habit that, at some point, worked. It once provided comfort, relief, or a feeling of safety. The emotional, limbic part of the brain is wired to our survival instinct, and it can come to treat an addictive behaviour as something essential to staying safe. That is why willpower so often fails: you are not fighting a bad habit so much as a part of yourself that believes it is protecting you.

So the question I find far more useful is not "Why the addiction?" but "Why the pain?" Addiction is almost always a solution, a faulty one, to pain that has not yet been met. Heal the wound underneath, and you take away the need for the anaesthetic.

Why the binary causes harm

Calling addiction a pure disease can leave people feeling powerless, as though change were out of their hands. Calling it pure indulgence loads them with shame, which tends to drive the behaviour rather than ease it. Both stories miss the same thing: the unmet need at the centre.

When we treat the cause rather than the symptom, something shifts. There is nothing to confess and nobody to blame. There is simply a pattern that once made sense, and a person who can learn a different way to feel safe.

What this means for recovery

Recovery, understood this way, is not about white-knuckling your way to abstinence. It means recovering the true, authentic self that was there before life twisted things out of shape. That work is gentler, and far more durable, than fighting yourself into submission.

If any of this resonates, you might find it helpful to read about my approach to addiction counselling, or about the link between trauma and the habits we use to cope.