A few years ago I worked in Asia in some international rehabs and I had just come out of finishing my neuroscience degree and being so full of all of this knowledge about the brain and I was just so excited to go and work with people and use all of this knowledge.
And while this work was one of the most fulfilling work I've ever done in my career,
I noticed something very fundamental and I want to talk to you about this today and I want to share and tell you something that I think is very,
Very important to know if you are going through struggles with addiction,
If you have a loved one who's struggling with addiction,
If you don't really want to call it addiction and it's kind of a dependency that's taking over your life,
You don't really identify maybe with that word but it definitely has been taken over some of your life and it's hard to control or gets even harder to control.
So,
I want you to remember that you are not broken.
It's not that there's kind of like a machine and you're just broke.
I want you to remember that your body is actually not completely destroyed.
In fact,
What your body does is through your addiction,
Through that habit,
Through that behavior that is so hard to control,
It is trying to save you and trying to help you in a way.
And what I noticed during my time there and during my work there is that the amount of identification with being broken is really not helpful when you try and get better.
And the separation in society of thinking that you're broken and others letting others think that you're broken is also not helpful in actually tackling this whole subject.
So I want to just tell you a little bit more about how the brain works and why something that feels so compulsive and not right to standards in normal social behavior is actually not brokenness.
It is a way of survival mechanism.
So your body has a lot of different mechanisms to keep you safe,
To fight for your survival.
One of those are the typical fight or flight,
Like if you're in danger,
You fight or you run away or you shut down.
But the body also needs to regulate back to feelings of calm and connectiveness after those extreme moments of fight or flight because then there's a lot of adrenaline and there's a lot happening in the body.
So it has to regulate back.
But sometimes,
Depending on how you grew up,
Who you grew up with or what happened in your life,
It feels really,
Really hard to regulate back,
Especially in our very fast paced world where you can just run to the next information and get your brain overwhelmed and not focus on itself.
So the body uses certain other things that it has learned.
And if alcohol,
For example,
Is a problem for you,
Then it has learned that if you have a drink through the effects of alcohol,
You very quickly feel more calm and you very quickly feel way more OK.
So the body uses that as a strategy to regulate back and favor that behavior in order for you to survive because it goes fast.
It's fast and direct.
And so the body and the brain remembers that.
And this is the behavior that you go into straight away when you feel out of balance.
This is not brokenness.
This is not out of any control.
This is survival mechanism.
And you can learn to adapt survival mechanisms and you can actually learn to change that dynamic in your brain.
You are not alone.
You are not broken.
And you're definitely not a hopeless case.
