Dallas Bragg argues that addiction, shame, and trauma aren't signs you're broken. He compares them to malware on a computer: corrupted code running on good hardware. The person underneath is intact; the destructive patterns can be identified and removed.
Listen, you're not broken. You're running malware. So listen, you're not diseased. You're not fundamentally flawed or defective. You're a computer running malware. Think about it. When your computer gets infected with viruses, it doesn't mean that the computer itself is defective. It means there's corrupted code running in the background, slowing everything down, causing crashes, making normal operations impossible. All those messages about being sick, Powerless, an addict for life, always in recovery, one day at a time, because you can't be trusted with your future. All of that shit is malware. The guilt from things you did while using, the shame from people who abandoned you, the internalized homophobia from a society that told you your desires were wrong, the trauma responses that got wired in before you even touched a substance, the societal programming that says you're forever tainted, forever less than, forever broken. None of that is who you actually are.
