Rehearsals

The use of strong drink is at first a matter of choice. It afterwards becomes a habit, and at length a necessity. 
— Benjamin Rush, An Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits upon the Human Body and Mind (1784)

Benjamin Rush wrote at a time when most people understood heavy drinking as moral failure. He was one of the first physicians to notice a progression that did not depend on character. What began as voluntary behaviour could gradually harden into habit and eventually into compulsion. His work helped shift the conversation from simple vice toward a more careful understanding of how behaviour develops and persists.

The older moral explanation, however, has never fully disappeared. It remains tempting to reduce addiction to a failure of will. The idea is simple and emotionally satisfying. It preserves the belief that people who stop are strong and people who cannot stop are weak. Many of us absorbed that story long before we entered recovery, and some of us continued to carry it after we arrived. This is internalized stigma—we absorbed the dominant cultural narrative about who we were and began to believe it ourselves. We assumed that if we had possessed more discipline or moral fibre, the pattern would never have taken hold.

Jeffrey Munn, in Staying Sober Without God, describes the cycle differently. Addiction develops when two conditions meet. The first is emotional discomfort, often subtle and sometimes outside our conscious awareness. The second is a previous experience with something that powerfully relieved that discomfort. The sequence is ordinary. A feeling becomes difficult to tolerate. A substance or behaviour reduces the intensity of that feeling. The brain registers the relief and stores the association. When the discomfort returns, the same response is retrieved. The process requires memory, not moral judgment.

Understanding addiction as a process of learning explains why the pattern becomes so persistent. Behaviours that regulate distress get reinforced. Each time the relief works, the association strengthens. Repetition deepens the connection until the response begins to operate automatically. By the time many people start to question the pattern, it already functions faster than deliberate thought. Insight alone rarely dismantles something that has been reinforced repeatedly over time.

This reframing does not remove responsibility. It clarifies where responsibility actually lies. If the behaviour developed through repetition, it will not disappear through condemnation. Shame intensifies the very discomfort that helped establish the cycle in the first place. The practical question therefore shifts. Instead of asking whether we are flawed, we begin asking what responses we are reinforcing now.

Another complication is that the discomfort driving the cycle is not always obvious. It may appear as restlessness, agitation, loneliness, or a vague sense of not fitting in. Sometimes it is anxiety that has become so familiar it feels normal. Sometimes it is grief that never found expression or shame that quietly shaped our thinking for years. The substance or behaviour functions as regulation. It reduces emotional intensity quickly, even if the long-term consequences become severe.

When the behaviour is removed, the discomfort it once regulated becomes visible. This stage can feel like deterioration when it is actually exposure. Without the familiar escape, the nervous system encounters the feeling directly. Recovery begins here. The system must learn alternative responses to the same internal states that once triggered the old reflex. That learning takes repetition and patience.

From this perspective, recovery is less a transformation of identity than the gradual construction of new responses. People practise tolerating discomfort without immediately escaping it. They practise honesty when concealment once felt safer. They practise boundaries when impulse demands otherwise. None of these actions appears dramatic in isolation. Their power lies in repetition. Over time the brain adapts to what is done consistently, and new patterns begin to take the place of old ones.

The story we carry about addiction matters. If the behaviour proves we are broken, we wait to be repaired. If it reflects something the brain learned under pressure, then change depends on what we practise next. The same capacity that once reinforced the old cycle can reinforce something different.

The question gradually changes. It is no longer why we were defective. It becomes what we are rehearsing today.