DailyJim: The addiction is not the problem; if it were, people would run away from it

Hello everyone welcome to another daily gym today's episode is a sorry today is wednesday february 19th 2025 the episode today is about the addiction is not the problem if it were people would run away from it so i listened to a couple podcasts today talking about addiction and codependency and also just thinking about it more as i seem to come across more people in my life who have addictions to different substances or activities and such. And really just asking myself a lot of questions and trying to understand how do I help someone deal with an addiction? How do I help someone overcome an addiction and compulsion, whatever you want to call it. And I haven't, maybe I'm fortunate that I haven't really had to experience it too much in my life. My mom smoked cigarettes for a long time. I tried a few ways to get her to stop. It didn't really work, but she eventually stopped when she was 60. I think 60. So I haven't had a lot of experience with addiction to alcohol or hard drugs or other things like that.

But I'm sure many people have. And I heard the other day someone say that, let's say, for example, alcohol or the substance or whatever, the activity is not the problem. It's a solution. It's just not a very effective solution. And it got me thinking, and obviously I've been thinking a lot this afternoon, and this idea that a lot of times people who have these addictions or compulsions are running away from problems, avoiding problems, avoiding conflicts and whatnot in their life. And maybe we do a disservice by saying that the substance or the activity is the problem. Maybe we actually help them think that's the problem and they're like but that's not the problem.

Maybe they say i know what the problem is but i want to talk about it or they have pushed it so far out of their memory they're not even aware what the problem is um the irony is the problem is avoiding problems.

The irony is avoiding the problems is the problem. And so saying that the drug is the problem, no, it's not. Because if it were an actual problem in their life, they would run away from it. Or if they saw it as an actual problem, they'd probably run away from it because they don't want to deal with it. They would avoid it like hell. And so maybe we shift the focus. Just like we say that the problem is Donald Trump or Elon Musk, maybe that's not the actual real problem. And people are like, well, this is not a problem. Because it's not the real problem in their lives. The real problem is the thing that they're avoiding, which may be people died during COVID or their fear of their own death because they saw somebody die or they lost their whole industry. And so their fear of having no money and being an outcast in society or whatever it may be, or the divorce or whatever that happened during COVID or during another part of their life, maybe they're feeling ramifications physically of something that happened during COVID or during another time, physical illness, that people are avoiding, which is the real problem. And then these secondary problems aren't actually problems. They're solutions trying to fix the real problem or avoid the real problem. But the problem is that these secondary solutions tend to cause more problems.

So maybe they cause other problems. Maybe they exacerbate the original problem. So maybe the original problem is that the person doesn't have any money, and so they go out to drink alcohol because they feel ashamed of how little money that they have and they feel afraid that maybe a catastrophe will happen and then they'll really have no money or that something will happen they can't pay for it. Then they go drink alcohol and they spend money on alcohol and now they have less money. So maybe the alcohol itself is not such a problem, right? It's a solution but the solution is not very effective because now if the problem is money now they're spending more money on the alcohol or on the drugs and driving themselves deeper into, oh no, I don't have enough money, I don't have enough money. And I think a lot of times money is one of the problems that people avoid. Lack of money or lack of opportunity to get money or lack of friendships or lack of deep connection, like a loneliness that people are avoiding and pretending that they don't have or certain conflicts or deaths that they don't want to explore.

And I think yeah, I think we do a real disservice and we become really ineffective at solving the problem, by focusing on the wrong problem by thinking that the substance or thinking that the activity is the problem it's not the problem, it's a solution it's an attempt to add a solution to avoid the problem what's the real problem? Now, they might not want to talk about the real problem and maybe that's the whole point.

Shifting our attention to say that the problem is the drug probably misses the point as well. So what if we started talking about the real problems and help them get better at addressing and resolving and confronting the real problems? Because if the problem is avoiding problems, if we help them resolve, confront, and approach the real problems, maybe these secondary solutions go away because they don't have to run away from the problems anymore. They feel more courage, more strength, more confidence in staying and dealing with the problems than trying to escape through avoidance of these problems.

So I don't know, this is giving me a little more hope and confidence. And probably another reason why I like calling it emotional combat is to just help us realize that there's so many conflicts going on in people's lives, in our lives, and maybe if we help people address some conflicts, the other conflicts go away. In other words, in this case, maybe if we help people address some of the conflicts in their life related to shame or money or this general conflict avoidance, then they stop running towards drugs, alcohol, and other addictive activities, or activities we call addictive. Because maybe what's really addictive is just running away from the problems, and putting your head in the sand, and avoiding, and pretending that life is just peaceful, and there's no problems, and everything is fine. I'm just cool. I'm cool. No big deal. I don't care. I don't give up, you know, this whole, like, what do you want to call it? Performative indifference performative nonchalance but uh really just conflict avoidance is how do we help people resolve conflicts resolve problems in their life get better at problem solving and then maybe, some of the other things that we think are the problems actually go away because they're not the main problems so yeah let's talk for today i hope it inspires you would love to hear your feedback and i hope to talk to you tomorrow.