This short transcript features Alexa Von Tobel explaining addiction as a coping mechanism for chronic stress or trauma. She argues addictions begin as solutions to pain or numbness (citing Gabor Maté’s framing) but cross into an "addiction continuum" when behaviors shift from coping/working-on issues to avoiding underlying problems, at which point they become self-perpetuating and destructive.
At its core, any addiction is a coping mechanism from some kind of chronic stress, some heavy weight that you carry. And it could be unhealed, big T, little T, chronic T, trauma, unhealed adverse childhood experiences, or a disconnection from intimate relationships. So an isolation and an emptiness from purpose. And when you first look at it, addiction begins, as Gabor Mate says, as a solution to a problem and. And then turns into its own problem itself. But I think it's a situation where somebody finds something that they do, and it almost works to take away the pain or the numbness from that unhealed stuff, if that makes sense to you. And if it was a behavior that by itself wasn't wrong, like if it was sex between spouses, if it was exercise or food or a glass of wine at night, and the purpose of it was to deal with the high anxiety of facing the underlying issues and healing that, then those behaviors would have never been called an addiction. But it's like, of course, some behaviors are wrong from the get go when you go to porn and adultery and blah, blah, blah. But it's like once they become an avoidance pattern, to me, that's when they enter what I would call the addiction continuum, is that I'm doing this not to cope so I can work on it, but to avoid it. That's when they enter that continuum, and that's when it becomes something on a. Like an unstoppable train toward tragedy. It.
