Addiction, numbing and escapism
We tend to talk about addiction as if it is the problem - the alcohol, the cocaine, the casual sex, the relentless training schedule, the nights lost to work, the scrolling, the gambling, the food, the chaos, the next hit of intensity. But the truth is far more uncomfortable: addiction isn’t the problem. Addiction is the solution you built when it didn’t feel safe to feel.
Most people aren’t addicted to substances or behaviours. They’re addicted to escape. To relief. To the brief moments where they don’t have to sit inside the weight of themselves.
No one becomes an addict because they are weak.
They become addicts because at some point in their history, feeling became unbearable and numbness felt like survival.
The Addict Is Usually the Most Sensitive Person in the Room
We imagine addicts as reckless, chaotic, impulsive. But I’ve never met someone who numbs heavily who wasn’t, underneath it all, profoundly sensitive.
Sensitivity becomes unbearable when you grow up in environments where:
feelings weren’t met,
vulnerability was punished,
affection was inconsistent,
love was conditional,
anger was explosive,
or silence was its own form of violence.
When overwhelming feelings have nowhere to go, they go inward. When inward becomes too much, the body searches for a way out.
And so begins the quiet apprenticeship into addiction: the learning that you can dampen the noise of your inner world with enough distraction, stimulation, intensity, or self-destruction.
Addiction Is the Body’s Response to Unprocessed Pain
People drink not because they want to get drunk, but because there is a feeling they cannot bear to be sober with.
People chase sexual intensity not because they don’t want love, but because intimacy terrifies them more than desire does.
People overwork not because they love achievement, but because slowing down means hearing the truth they’ve been running from.
People train obsessively not because they enjoy the grind, but because stillness brings them face-to-face with parts of themselves they’ve avoided for years.
People binge, restrict, gamble, scroll, spend, smoke and detach - not because they are irresponsible or careless but because these are the only tools they ever learned to soothe what was never soothed for them.
Numbing Is Self-Protection Wearing the Mask of Control
Most numbing behaviours begin quietly: a drink after work, a few lines on a night out, sex without connection, pushing that extra session in the gym, staying late at the office again. It doesn’t look like destruction at first.
It looks like coping.
It looks like “I’m fine.”
It looks like “I’ve got this under control.”
But addiction always has a tell:
you need more of it to feel less of you.
And the more you rely on the behaviour, the more unbearable returning to yourself becomes.
Why the Avoidant Personality Is Drawn to Numbing
Some people run from feelings because they were never allowed to have them.
Others run because feelings were too big, too dangerous, too disappointing.
But avoidant men - the ones who charm, then disappear, who open up in fragments, who offer intensity and withdraw from intimacy - they numb because closeness wakes up something they don’t know how to name.
It’s not the relationship they’re escaping. It’s the version of themselves that relationships reveal.
Alcohol, drugs, sex, work, fantasy, ambition - these things offer temporary identity. Temporary peace. Temporary selfhood.
Connection demands something far scarier: the courage to be seen without the armour.
Addiction Begins as Comfort and Ends as Disconnection
The tragedy of addiction is that it begins as an attempt to feel less alone and ends by making you lonelier than ever.
At first, the drink softens the edges.
The drug widens the world.
The sex distracts the ache.
The achievement gives you something to hold onto.
The workout gives you control.
But numbness always comes at a price: you lose access to the parts of yourself that are capable of being loved.
Because you cannot selectively numb pain - when you numb one thing, you numb everything.
Recovery Isn’t About Stopping the Behaviour - It’s About Meeting the Pain Beneath It
People don’t heal by removing the addiction. They heal by finding what the addiction was protecting them from. And what it almost always comes down to is this:
grief that was never processed,
fear that was never named,
shame that was never soothed,
loneliness that was never witnessed,
anger that was never allowed,
and needs that were never met.
Addiction collapses when the person finally feels safe enough to feel.
To be known.
To be held in the places where their pain began.
This is why recovery requires connection - not willpower.
The Invitation Back to Yourself
If you numb, it does not mean you’re broken. It means you learned to survive in the only way you were taught.
The question isn’t, “Why do you drink?”
or “Why do you work so much?”
or “Why do you seek intensity over intimacy?”
The real question is:
What hurts so much inside you that you needed something stronger than yourself to hold it?
That is the beginning of healing.
Not shame.
Not punishment.
Not perfection.
But the moment you turn toward the very part of you you’ve spent years running from.
And the truth you already know
Addiction is not about the substance.
Or the sex.
Or the achievement.
Or the gym.
Or the chaos.
Addiction is about the pain it covers,
the feelings it shields,
the truths it conceals,
and the self you abandoned in order to cope.
You don’t need to be punished for your addictions.
You need to be met.
Because beneath every form of numbing is a person who once felt too much and is finally learning that they don’t have to run anymore.