Addictive behaviours are symptoms or effects of a bigger issue relating to unresolved psychological pain.

A client once said to me; ‘…so, alcoholism has impacted all the generations of my family and I feel trapped – is it nature or nurture?’ It’s a good question. How much can be attributed to my genes and how much to say a relative.   But let’s look at this another way – can nature and nurture exist as separate entities and do I today have control over any aspect of this dynamic? It is at least heartening to know that we can at least control the here and now; our thinking, feeling and yes our actions. It is equally heartening to know that we always have ‘choice’ in deciding how we will respond to our thoughts, feelings and actions and indeed others.

The bottom line is that addictive behaviours are symptoms or effects of a bigger issue relating to unresolved psychological pain. Beneath symptoms lie cause(s) or as I prefer to say, our life story. Nobody just wakes up addicted and nobody has to remain in active addiction. But we can convince ourselves that this is the case. At the risk of over-simplifying addiction, in the same way that one can have blocked sinus’ and sneeze profusely, necessitating a trip to a doctor to understand whether it is an infection or such like, it will always be important to understand the origin of our symptoms before we treat them. To this end, we must first bring our awareness to the challenge at hand.