Do you struggle with addiction or compulsive behaviour? Many of us do, whether that’s drinking a bit too much wine, too often, eating more chocolate than we would like, or impulsively buying stuff we don’t really need. Our use of substances and activities can range from mild and fairly benign, like a bit too much chocolate, to severe and potentially dangerous, like using heroin.

Whether you are at the mild or severe end of this spectrum, addiction is probably something you have heard a lot about, either through your own research, from a health professional or in the media. And much of the information we get about addiction can, in my opinion, be both unhelpful and stigmatising. It can also be a bit old-fashioned, based on 20th-century ideas about the mind and brain that don’t stand up well to the latest research/insights from neuroscience and psychology.

But there is another, newer way to think about addiction. This approach is kind, compassionate and understanding of the reasons why we might misuse substances or activities, whether it’s smoking, over-eating, gambling, taking recreational drugs, drinking heavily or compulsively shopping. I have found this approach a game-changer in terms of helping my clients and understanding my own behaviour, especially when I was younger and, let’s say, not as sober and sensible as I am now!

Addiction = pain-relief

In order to understand why we become addicted to things, you first need to understand that our mind is made up of many subpersonalities or parts, with different functions for us, internally. I won’t go into detail about that here, as I have written about it extensively elsewhere, but my favourite parts-based model is internal family systems (IFS). In IFS, there are two main types of parts. You have young ones who hold painful memories, thoughts and feelings from that time in your life (so a four-year-old part, an eight-year-old part, and so on). And protectors, whose job it is to make sure those young parts never get hurt again.

These protectors are then divided into managers, who are hard-working, proactive and strategic – your Worrier is a typical manager, trying to anticipate bad things and help you avoid them. And firefighters, who are the opposite – they are reactive and want to get rid of the pain as quickly as possible, with no thought given to the consequences.

In IFS, addiction – or more accurately, addictive processes – is primarily about the firefighters. So a young part of you is in some kind of pain, feeling overwhelming emotions like stress, anxiety, loneliness, shame or anger. And the firefighter wants to put out the fire of painful feelings, by any means necessary. So firefighters might make you smoke weed, drink whiskey, use pornography, zone out with games on your phone, help you detach/dissociate from your feelings, or use a virtually limitless range of strategies to numb, distract or soothe the anguished young part.

And it works, right? That is why we have a glass of wine or two when we are stressed after a long day. Or go for a cigarette/vape break at work when we’re buckling under the weight of our workload. And it’s why people get addicted to heroin and other opioids, because they are so damn (and dangerously) effective at numbing physical and emotional pain.

Compassion for the firefighters

If you want to change your own addictive processes, understanding that any kind of addictive process is essentially the same, inside, and that they just vary in terms of severity, is step one. Then understanding that it’s all about getting rid of/distracting yourself from pain, is step two. And the admittedly tricky final step is having compassion for the parts of you that make you do things that can be harmful or downright dangerous.

As I often say to my clients, it’s helpful to separate the intention (soothing your pain) from the method or behaviour (drinking alcohol, etc). Because however damaging the method, the intention is always good. And when we speak to these firefighter parts, we get how desperate they to help – and the fact that they use the only tools they have available to them.

Learning to speak to them with compassion – rather than judgement and frustration, as we typically do – helps them soften and eventually change. And this change is long-term, because we have buy-in from every part of you, rather than the yo-yo dieting or swinging between sobriety and relapse we see so often with more traditional treatment approaches.

If you would like to find out more about this approach to healing your parts, try my Fire Drill: IFS Meditation. This will help you enter into a more compassionate and helpful dialogue with any part of you, even the more extreme and ‘difficult’ ones.

I hope it helps – sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan