What Will Addiction Recovery Look Like in the Year 2100? 15 Things I Hope to See
Addiction and what it means to recover from it are pretty widely misunderstood in our society.
There are also key areas of understanding—particularly around what drives addiction—that are not as widely recognised as they should be.
And, partly as a result, addiction recovery success rates are much lower than they could be.
But what might the addiction recovery of the future look like?
I want to imagine what addiction recovery could look like in the year 2100 if compassion, wisdom and a scientific understanding of the nature of addiction were placed at the core of addiction recovery and spread throughout society: schools, hospitals, rehabs, clinics, prisons, workplaces, homes, universities...everywhere!
And so, here are 15 things that I hope to see in the addiction recovery world of the future!
1. We respond with compassion,
not shame, judgement or control
At the core of addiction often lies great shame.
And shaming, judging and attempts to control are a frequent response from families, friends and how addiction is seen generally in society.
But this shame and judgement is a massive barrier to our knowledge of ourselves. It causes us to deny and hide away, rather than be open about what’s going on for us.
And ultimately, shame is a major driver of addiction in its own right. More shame leads to more addiction.
I hope we come to see that compassion is the response that the addict is calling for.
This is easier said than done. Compassion requires that we look deeply at the fears and judgements we hold within ourselves that block our ability to be compassionate.
But know that addiction is, in a sense, a cry for love. The response must be love.
2. We view addiction not as a choice but
as an attempt to medicate suffering
We tend to view humans as free agents who are free to take whatever actions they want.
This is not true. Humans are deeply, deeply conditioned beings. And the roots of our conditioning go very deep into our bodies and minds.
It’s simply not true that people ‘choose’ in any meaningful sense to become addicted. Why would they?!
Addiction is, rather, an attempt to medicate a highly dysregulated nervous system that has no other way of regulating itself.
It’s a response to chronic suffering.
The weight of someone’s entire survival physiology is behind their behaviour, which is why it’s so powerful and why just choosing not to is not an option.
3. We recognise that the root of
addiction is in the body
When addiction is understood as a moral failing, disease or a ‘brain condition’, we then tend to think that we can think our way out, that we are helpless against it, or that we need medication to ‘fix’ it.
In fact, the drivers of addiction are known to us!
The core driver is trauma: broadly defined here as any unresolved emotional imprint from the past.
When we feel threatened, our body responds with a fight, flight, freeze or please response. This response is backed by incredibly powerful survival energies and emotions. If we don’t get the support we need in that moment we can get overwhelmed, in which case we must repress these energies.
But these powerful survival energies don’t just disappear when repressed. They stay in our bodies—in the muscles and the fascia—keeping us locked in a state of chronic unsafety and agitation.
This chronic nervous system dysregulation is extremely painful and is what drives our search for relief through substances and behaviours.
Check out my blog on letting go of addictions, cravings and compulsions for a fuller explanation: How to Stop Cravings and Compulsions: An In-Depth Guide to Learning to Love the Mongoose Within
Essentially, the driver of addiction is this stuck survival energy in the body.
This understanding must be the core of any addiction recovery program in the future! If we are looking for relief, it is always from something in the body.
4. Recovery focuses more on the core drivers
and less on the behaviour itself
Focusing on our addictive behaviour is, of course, incredibly helpful, relevant and a necessary starting point.
But sometimes this focus on the behaviour comes at the cost of exploring the root of the problem: the trauma and nervous system dysregulation that is driving the addiction!
Many people in recovery spend all their time talking and thinking about their behaviour, which is totally fine.
But they are missing the biggest opportunity of all and they don’t even know it! The chance to look at what’s DRIVING the whole thing! To really address the suffering that lies at the root of their addiction.
I hope that in the future we make dealing with the core drivers of addiction our number one priority, while also keeping an eye on our behaviours.
5. Recovery addresses the whole person,
not just their behaviour
Often there is a tendency to compartmentalise people’s addictive issues, seeing them as somehow separate from the rest of their lives: their environment, family and job as well as their childhood, their body and their minds.
As if addiction is some sort of free-floating ‘thing’ that exists by itself!
I would love to see recovery programs in the future that view addictive behaviours as a thread that is intertwined with all the other aspects of people’s lives and that take all those threads into account when working with people.
6. We stop treating the mind as
separate from the body
There is an implicit understanding in our society that what goes on in our minds—what we believe about ourselves and how we interpret and understand the world—is somehow divorced from the body, which is its own world.
Likewise, physical maladies are often thought to be completely unrelated to mental/emotional issues such stress or childhood trauma.
There is a whole wave of science coming out (as well as thousands of years of knowledge from spiritual traditions!) that body and mind are inseparable.
You cannot treat the body without considering the role of beliefs and emotions and, likewise, we cannot work effectively with our understanding of ourselves and the world without considering the body and the energies it holds.
7. We hold the label ‘addict’ lightly
The labels ‘addict’ and ‘addiction’ are useful.
They help us give a name to our unease and our wayward attempts to gain relief from that unease. By doing so we make it easier to approach the issue.
And they help us talk about it: this blog would have been difficult to write without it!
But when we take these labels too seriously we start to confuse the label for the person. We start to believe that what we essentially are is an addict.
I hope that in the future we hold these labels lightly.
That means that we are able to use them as a practical convenience for navigating our way through these problems, but at no point do we confuse the map (the label) for the territory (the human)!
8. We recognise that addiction can be HEALED,
and not just managed
The standard conception of addiction in the recovery world seems to be that addiction is something that needs to be ‘managed’.
In a certain sense, that’s right! But often the possibility of going beyond just coping with our addictions is discounted.
In my opinion, this is a mistake! And it causes us to ‘settle’ for merely coping with addiction, rather than seeing if we can truly thrive.
As we hone in ever more clearly on the core drivers of addiction and get better and better at unravelling the somatic root of trauma, the possibility of truly healing from addiction emerges.
In the future, I hope we start addiction recovery knowing that it is possible to go beyond merely coping with our addictions and to make at least some small progress towards healing the core wounds that drive it.
9. Recovery emphasises not just how ‘not to die’ but also how to fully live!
Addictions help us cope with the pain of our disconnection from our self, our aliveness, our authenticity.
In addiction recovery, we often focus only on being abstinent and sober. By so doing we are choosing ‘not to die’.
And this is great. But we are still half-dead!
The other aspect must be included also: rehabilitating our disconnection from self. Rediscovering our aliveness. Prioritising our authenticity over ‘keeping going’ in an undead, zombie state, which is secure and familiar but ultimately unsatisfying.
This is choosing to live fully, which is a separate choice above and beyond merely ‘not dying’.
But a lot of recovery focuses so heavily on this ‘not dying’ aspect (sobriety, abstinence) that the next step—choosing to live fully—is overlooked.
And this is not a coincidence! Choosing to live fully it’s terrifying. As Anne Wilson Schaef says: “if you choose to be fully alive, you have to be willing to face your denial system. And most of us are not willing to do that.”
I hope in the future that addicts are given the support they need not just to ‘not die’, but to face their fear of living fully.
10. Socially-acceptable addictions
are more widely acknowledged
Some addictions are condemned, while others are celebrated!
Are you on the streets and can’t stop using heroin? Bad.
Are you a billionaire that can’t stop accumulating money? You’re successful!
Do you come into work every day hungover? Bad.
Can’t stop pleasing other people? You’re so nice!
Eat too many biscuits? Bad.
Lie, cheat, manipulate and deceive your way into positions of power where you engage in blatant cronyism? Our country salutes you!
And many of the ‘acceptable’ addictions are at least as damaging as the ‘unacceptable’ ones. If not more so. We need only look at our politics to see the damage that addiction to power can wreak, for example.
Or look at the world of sport, where obsessive pursuit of victory is seen as a sign of a very ‘healthy’ and ‘strong’ mentality. Here’s a glimpse into the life of famous Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger:
Arsène Wenger knows that his love for the beautiful game is actually an all-consuming addiction. For the 34 years he spent managing football teams – 22 of them at his beloved Arsenal – he was possessed by the need to win. Little else mattered. At times this devotion produced magnificent results. At others, self-destruction.
“Competition is something that eats slowly at your life and it makes of you a little monster … [t]hat’s what I became, yes. I spent my whole life in top-level competition and it makes you slowly somebody who is psychologically obsessed and one-dimensional, someone who kicks out everything on the road that is not winning the next game.”
If anyone talked this way about drugs, they would be on the end of an intervention! Instead, he is a multi-millionaire being interviewed in the Guardian.
And we can see that all these addictions are driven by the same thing: pain. Here’s Arsene later in the interview:
“I was not the most patient child,” he says, remembering how he would be forced to kneel in front of the whole congregation after talking during services … That’s maybe where my hate for losing comes from: being humiliated.”
Recognising the deep pain that lies behind so much of what our society celebrates as ‘success’ would be a valuable step forward in the future.
What’s really driving them?
11. Society becomes trauma-informed at all levels
Currently, deep understanding of the profound impact of trauma on our society exists only within fairly limited circles (even within the recovery community).
Doctors and clinicians barely hear the word in their medical training. Nor do institutions like the police or schools seem to consider it particularly relevant, even as it is the driving force behind ‘criminal’ behaviour and ‘misbehaving’ children!
But this is changing! The world is slowly becoming more trauma-informed.
There will be great resistance to this change as it means we must reorient everything about our societies. As Gabor Mate says: we would have to change everything.
Ideally, we teach people about trauma and how to regulate and heal their nervous systems as a priority.
Teachers, doctors, civil servants, prison wardens and so on would be trauma-informed and see clearly the way in which trauma shapes how individuals behave in our society and what these people need.
If someone is behaving destructively because they are in so much pain...do they need punishment or love?
12. The war on drugs is over, with resources redirected to education and support
Since 1971, the war on drugs has cost the United States an estimated $1 trillion.
In 2015, the federal government spent nearly $10m a day incarcerating people charged with drug-related offences.
It also creates a huge market for illicit drugs, with organised crime groups making hundreds of billions each year, which then is used to fuel the expansion of crime cartels.
But the problem is not the drugs. The problem is the pain within us that drives us to misuse the drugs.
And as Ryan Hassan stated in our recent Addiction, Trauma and Society video: “it’s insane that we demonise inanimate objects”.
The root of the issue is the pain within each of us that we seek to medicate with sex, power, money, drugs, success and so on.
The idea that we need to wage ‘war’ on some particular inanimate objects is indeed insane.
I hope that in the future the war on drugs is seen as the insanity that it is, with the money instead spent on trauma-informed education and support in all of our institutions: schools, prisons, hospitals, governments and workplaces.
13. Collective beliefs evolve to see destructive human behaviour as coming from pain
Currently, the collective beliefs structure of our society holds that people (including addicts) essentially choose how they want to behave.
And if they want to behave in self-destructive ways then that’s their fault, on some level, and they need to dig themselves out of it.
Notice how we hold people to account in this way all the time.
Someone sends a nasty email? They’re a dick!
Someone is being unreasonable? How dare they!
This reaction is totally understandable. But it’s not the complete picture.
I hope that in the future we can see that whenever anyone causes pain with how they behave (either to themselves or to others) then that is coming from pain.
14. We see the ultimate goal of recovery as
helping people to return to themselves
The root of suffering (and therefore of addiction) is disconnection from self.
This is the core wound from which all other wounds proliferate and which all survival/coping mechanisms are an attempt to resolve.
This links into and summarises everything that has been said so far about the nature of addiction recovery.
Ultimately, I hope that the addiction recovery of the future gives people the support and help that they need to return to themselves.
This is a process of relinquishing all those things that take us further away from ourselves: self-deception, repression, denial, self-sabotage, people-pleasing, fear and so on.
Approaching these difficult parts of ourselves is the hardest work there is. Which is why providing compassionate and understanding support is so important!
Critically, this cannot be done for anyone else. The best we can do is to give them an environment in which people feel safe to explore their deep wounds.
15. That we don’t forget to laugh :)
OK, I couldn’t think of a 15th one that was good enough so I’ll just end with a reminder that, although working with addiction means working with our deepest pain...there’s always room for a laugh :).
Final Thoughts
What do you think the future of addiction recovery holds?
Are there any aspects that I missed out? Leave a comment ;)
Need a hand with your own addiction recovery? You can check out my free toolkit of over 100 emotional regulation and emotional sobriety tools or find out about somatic inquiry, a powerful means of healing the core drivers of addiction.
Peace!
Ben
