Amber Hollingsworth explains why detox alone doesn't stop addiction. The real trap is psychological: identity built around substance use, shame spirals that turn into self-pity, and thought patterns that justify relapse. Recovery means aligning behavior with your values and rebuilding how you see yourself.
Chapters
You know, once you break that like chemical addiction, if you will, like what's the emotion on the other side of that or the thought process on the other side of that then that a person has, has to address next.
Well, there is this chemical brain part to it where you know when you use a substance long enough, your brain adjust to that substance to the point that you need the substance. But honestly that's the easiest part of addiction to fix. You can go to a week, detox and medically stabilize and come off of any, anything, any of it you can come off of in a way, you know, you can detox. So that's really not what keeps people stuck. It's the psychology of the issue. And that comes to several pieces. One piece is a lot of people, especially if it's like alcohol or marijuana, they've developed an identity around it. And as much as they don't want to give up the substance, they're scared to give up the identity. They're scared to be like the non drinker, you know, because they've spent years and years and years probably talking trash about people who don't drink, right? So it's like they have this identity. So that's one piece, you know, letting the lifestyle and identity go is big, especially if it's, it's like more of an acceptable drug. Like I said, like, like alcohol or marijuana. The other piece of the psychology that happens is routine habit. That's pretty basic. Most people can understand that. But the big piece is while you're doing all this and your life is going to trash and everyone's mad at you, you do have a lot of shame. But mostly what you do with that shame is you build a lot of self pity and resentment in order to not feel your shame. So you've got this addiction, you're doing all this shady crap, you're not acting right, you know, you're not, you know, you're telling lies, you're manipulating your hiding, you're slacking, all this stuff and everything's coming down on you. And when things are coming down on you, any human, addicted or not, would we get defensive? Well, I do that because, you know, we even in our own heads, even these conversations we have in our heads and we get mad ourselves almost like, well, you know, if you were under the stress, you didn't have this jerk boss or whatever, you know, so you start developing all these justifications, whether it's I have to have it because I have this chronic pain or you know, I probably wouldn't drink so much if my wife wasn't such a crazy. You know what, you know, build this huge ball of self pity and resentment. That's how I measure how addicted someone is. I don't even ask them how much they do because they're not even going to tell you the truth ever. But I listen to them how much like irrational resentment and stuff because they're just so angry at the world. And some of that is, is because of the chemical processes. It does make you more anxious and irritable. But. But your life is crappy and everyone's on you and you're just defending yourself against the world. Yeah. Wow. It's stuck in that thinking. And if you don't fix that thinking, you're going to go back. Because that's the fuel for the addiction. Because otherwise you wouldn't continue to do this behavior that doesn't fit with your insides, you'd stop. So in order to be able to continue to do that, you've justified it a thousand million times, you've minimized it and that's almost like automatic by the time people see me. That's really entrenched as much as the substance. And you know when you have a hard day at work or you feel sorry for yourself or if you have to work 14 hours, then you start telling yourself again like, well, I need it. And so if we don't get rid of that, you're going to relapse. So that's a lot of the psychology and the counseling part of it. So getting rid of that. But also like helping people when you can make your behavior align with your values. So helping people identify what their values are and then helping them get their behavior to line up with that. You don't feel shameful, you like who you are. And neurochemically when you like who you are, you're actually protected against addiction because of like brain chemicals and stuff. But you also have less need, need to run away from things, to use substances, to justify things because you like who you are. You don't have to have all that self being resentment to guard against the shame anymore because you're proud of yourself. So it's about lining that stuff back up.
