Songs of War and Love

For a hundred years we have been singing war songs about addicts. All along, we should have been singing love songs to them.” 
— Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream (2015)

We are all familiar with the script. When someone we love struggles with addiction—or when we struggle ourselves—our culture hands us a playbook written in shame. Confront them. Make them see what they’ve done. Threaten consequences. Cut them off if they won’t stop. We learn it from intervention shows and courtroom dramas, from politicians promising to “get tough,” from news stories that frame addiction as moral failure, from self-help books warning against enabling, from a hundred films about hitting rock bottom, from religious teachings about willpower and weakness, from a society that has pursued this approach for over a century.

For those who have not experienced addiction, tough love may seem like common sense. But as we know, this often fails because the threat of rejection deepens the very isolation that drives addiction in the first place. Johann Hari discovered this watching his ex-boyfriend relapse into a crack house in East London. Here was someone who had survived unbearable childhood pain by learning to cut himself off from people. The drugs weren’t the problem. They were the solution to pain he knew no other way to manage. So when Hari threatened to cut him off, he was deepening the very isolation that drove his ex-boyfriend to drugs in the first place.

The shift came when Hari stopped fighting and tried something else. He showed up instead of shutting out. He went to meetings together with his ex-boyfriend, sat through the urge to use however long it took. He didn’t enable by providing money or excusing behaviour, but stayed present. This deepened the relationship instead of severing it. Clinical evidence from Portugal to Switzerland to Vancouver shows this approach works. But more than that, it makes intuitive sense to anyone who has felt the pull of loneliness, the temptation to numb rather than feel.

As Hari so famously quoted, the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety; It’s connection. Of course, this doesn’t guarantee recovery or erase relapse or make the struggle easier. But it creates the ground where healing becomes possible. “If you are alone, you cannot escape addiction,” Hari writes. “If you are loved, you have a chance.”

Many of us in recovery have fought this same battle inside our own heads. The drill sergeant voices start up when we feel tempted by old patterns. You’re an idiot. You’re shameful. Someone should stop you. You should be punished. What if we stopped fighting ourselves the way the culture has taught us to fight each other? When the urge comes (to use, to numb, to escape), what if we reached for someone instead of retreating into shame? Let ourselves be seen, even when that feels impossible.

This war has been waged for over a century. In policy, in families, in our own minds. The approach hasn’t worked because the logic was wrong from the start. Shaming and isolating people who are already alone only makes things worse. The evidence points the other way. The work remains unfinished, but the direction is clear.