Rethinking Addiction
My father drank himself to death.
Not metaphorically. Not slowly fading. He destroyed his body until it stopped functioning, then kept drinking anyway. Toward the end, he broke his hip in his apartment. He could no longer stand. He could not walk. He refused doctors. He refused hospitals.
He lay immobilised in his bed, in his own filth. Friends brought him alcohol so he could dull the pain. Even his guardian from social services supplied it, something I still find deeply unsettling. Even then, unable to move and lying in his own excrement, my father did not stop drinking. He died there, drinking until the end.
This was not a loss of control.
It was persistence.
Watching that kind of alcoholism from the inside forces a question most people never have to ask seriously: what, exactly, is being treated by the substance?
I came to suspect that my father was not chasing intoxication but relief. Alcohol did not make him happy. It made him functional. It lowered a baseline discomfort in his body that he otherwise could not escape. At the time, I had no language for this. Only the intuition that something in him was chronically off-balance.
Years later, I noticed something uncomfortable: I carried a version of the same pull. Not just toward alcohol, but toward anything that reliably altered internal state. Opioids. Stimulants. Sedatives. I recognised the gravitational field immediately. What differed was not the attraction, but my response to it.
I never fully lost control. I set limits. I observed effects. I stepped back when things drifted. But the presence of the craving itself remained unexplained. Why should the urge be there at all?
The decisive shift came when I stopped moralising the problem and treated it as a regulatory one.
Once I began supporting my nervous system directly, something unexpected happened. The cravings did not need to be fought. They dissolved. Not suppressed. Not resisted. Gone.
When dopamine tone was supported, stimulants lost their appeal.
When endorphin signalling stabilised, opioids stopped calling.
When stress chemistry was buffered, alcohol became irrelevant.
What remained was not euphoria, but normality. A clear head. Proportionate motivation. The quiet ability to act without dragging myself forward.
This distinction matters.
Addiction is usually framed psychologically as escape: from trauma, pain, responsibility, or self. That model explains much, but not all. There is another category, far less discussed because it complicates the moral narrative: self-medication for regulation.
Some nervous systems do not default to ease. They default to tension, flatness, or unease. Not enough to incapacitate, but enough to make ordinary functioning costly. Substances that restore balance feel like solutions, not temptations. The danger lies less in the relief than in the delivery system.
My father had no alternatives. No language for his body. No tools to modulate chemistry without destroying himself. Alcohol worked, and so alcohol took everything.
I only survived the same pull because I arrived later: with more awareness, some restraint, and the terrible clarity of seeing where it could lead.
This forces a reframing of responsibility. If craving can be a signal of imbalance rather than moral failure, then willpower is not the primary axis. Judgment still matters. Boundaries still matter. But shame becomes irrelevant, and punishment obscene.
This does not mean anything goes. Regulation is not an excuse for compulsion. Supporting a system so it can function is not the same as handing agency over to a substance. The difference is decisive.
The deeper shift came when I stopped asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and started asking, “What load has this system been carrying?”
Some people inherit bodies that coast. Others inherit bodies that work constantly, quietly, at higher metabolic and psychological cost. In such systems, addiction is not rebellion. It is efficiency-seeking.
Once the system is properly supported, intoxication loses its power. Not because it is forbidden, but because it is redundant.
What remains is less dramatic and more demanding: responsibility without chemical shortcuts, clarity without anesthesia, a life lived consciously rather than chemically adjusted.
My father never got that chance. I did.
The difference between us was not virtue.
It was regulation, insight, and timing.
That is not a comforting conclusion.
But it is an honest one.
There is another layer to this, one that has nothing to do with pathology and everything to do with misplaced assumptions about normality.
Peter Wessel Zapffe argued in The Last Messiah that psychological normality is not the human baseline, but a rare and unstable exception. Consciousness, in his view, overshoots what the organism can comfortably bear. Most people cope not by resolving this excess, but by dulling it: through distraction, repression, or meaning systems that keep existential awareness at bay.
Whether one accepts his conclusion or not, the inversion matters. What we call “normal” may simply be what is most effectively anesthetised.
If that is true psychologically, it may also be true biologically.
We speak as if a smoothly functioning body were the natural baseline. But that assumption strains credibility in a world of engineered food, chemically saturated environments, disrupted circadian rhythms, optional movement, and immune systems negotiating stimuli they were never shaped to meet. Allergies, inflammatory conditions, metabolic irregularities, subtle regulatory deficits: these are no longer exceptions.
In this context, “normal” begins to look less like a fact and more like a nostalgic fiction.
This does not mean dysfunction is inevitable, or effort pointless. It means that demanding effortless regulation from systems operating under chronic, unnatural conditions may be a category error. What looks like individual weakness may be systemic strain. What looks like dependency may be compensation.
Zapffe thought humanity solved its excess of consciousness by numbing itself. Our era may be doing something similar with the body: insisting on ideals of natural balance while living in environments that steadily erode it.
Seen this way, regulation is not failure.
It is adaptation.