ABSTRACT
The author offers her definition of addiction and how she arrived at this simple statement: Addiction helps you in the short term, hurts you in the long term, and you can't stop doing it. Drawing from early experience trying to make sense of self-injuring behaviours of young women in her therapy group, she traces a journey of discovery that leads to a paradigm shift in addiction treatment, one that moves from the current pathologizing view to a strength-based model. Interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB; Siegel) and the polyvagal theory (Porges, 2011) emerge as physiological clues, depicting addictive behaviours as attempts to self-regulate in the face of unbearable experiences. The author explains how addictive behaviours propel neurophysiological state changes that are adaptive in the moment, although they often come with a cost – the paradox of “what helps you hurts you”. The integration of these ideas with the embodied inquiry practice of focusing and the polyvagal theory led to the creation of the felt sense polyvagal model (FSPM) for treatment of addiction.
