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Why Is Cutting Back Difficult For Addicts #recoveryjourney #addictionrecovery #gettingsober

4 Jul 2025 · 1 min

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Amber Hollingsworth explains why addicts struggle to cut back even when they genuinely want to. She describes recovery as trial and error, and notes that repeated failed attempts to reduce use are actually a clinical marker of addiction itself.

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In my experience, most of the time when people make these promises and set these limits, they really truly have the intention to keep them. It just doesn't work very well. And recovery requires a lot of trial and error. I've never seen someone have an addiction, say they're going to cut it back, and that was it. They cut it back, end of story, problem over. If that's the case, that's not addiction because addiction, the very definition and nature of it is Continued behavior or substance use despite consequences. And in the clinical criteria, one of those criteria is multiple efforts to cut back, control, or stop the substance use are unsuccessful.