I have an addictive personality.
When I feel anxious I tend to get impulsive. That anxiety is me not feeling some uncomfortable feeling that wants to be acknowledged.
Physical Manifestations
I have avoided these uncomfortable feelings for much of my life. This avoidance used to look like heavy drug and alcohol abuse.
But those were just physical addiction manifestations of a deeper emotional addiction. An addictive personality runs deeper than substances. I have been sober for almost three years now. However, I am only just now starting to process and release some of the emotional addictions which resulted in my physical addictions.
The substances were never the root problem. They were symptoms of something I could not face. Every drink, every hit was a way of saying “I do not want to feel this right now.” And it worked. Until it did not.
One Addiction for Another
Even though I was not drinking alcohol or doing drugs anymore, I was still binging on sugar, caffeine, risk-taking, fast-talking, and making very impulsive decisions in my life as a way to not have to sit with the discomfort that life was sometimes giving me. It was a kind of transference. One addiction for another.
The physical addictions were no longer as harmful perhaps, and my willpower had gotten stronger. But I was not dealing with the causal issues, the emotional addictions.
This is what most people miss when they ask what is addictive personality. They think quitting the substance solves the problem. But you can quit drinking and start overworking. You can stop gambling and start doom-scrolling. The compulsion finds new outlets because the source remains untouched.
Something Had to Give
I had a bunch of latent emotional programs wanting to come to the surface and it just started to get harder and harder to squash them down.
Finally, something had to give and in one impulsive action I cast the straw that broke the camel’s back and all of these old, stuffed emotions came forward to be dealt with.
The breakdown was also a breakthrough. My system had been holding so much for so long that it eventually demanded attention. You can only suppress emotion for so long before it forces its way up. For me, it came out sideways in ways I did not expect or want.
Life-Giving and Affirming
And thank God. Because even though feeling all of these new feelings has been incredibly difficult, it has also been life-giving and affirming. I was not really living before I started feeling this backlog of emotional garbage. Now that I am feeling it all, I can tell that I am healing things at a deep level, and that gives me hope.
To heal we must feel. An addictive personality does not have to run your life.
What I have learned is that the addictive pattern is actually a protection mechanism. It kept me from feeling pain I was not ready to feel. But at some point, the protection becomes the prison. The very thing shielding you from discomfort also shields you from joy, from connection, from being fully alive.
Recovery is not just abstinence. It is learning to feel everything you have been running from. That is where real freedom lives.
This is shadow work in action.
If you’re ready to process what’s been running your life, explore the Shadow Work practices.