HOW TO OVERCOME ADDICTIVE BEHAVIOR
-Gary Null PhD
A Nation of Addicts
Today in America, tens of millions of individuals suffer from one or more kinds of addictive behavior. There are now approximately one hundred and forty million overweight Americans, over fifty million who continue to smoke, and over two hundred million who display symptoms of sugar craving. Add to these figures the millions of others who gamble, consume alcohol and coffee, or are chronic workaholics, and you begin to realize the vast condition of suffering spreading throughout this nation.
And those numbers, staggering as they are, were compiled before the most recent waves of addiction crashed over us. The opioid epidemic has killed over a million Americans since 1999. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid fifty to a hundred times more potent than morphine, now contaminates the drug supply so thoroughly that a person buying what they believe is a prescription painkiller or even cocaine may be purchasing their own death. Over a hundred thousand Americans died of drug overdoses in 2023 alone. That number has not meaningfully declined. It is a body count that exceeds every American combat death in the Vietnam War, repeated annually, and we have largely stopped talking about it.
Meanwhile, new forms of addiction have emerged that previous generations could not have imagined. Sports gambling apps have turned every phone into a casino. Since the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, the industry has exploded into a nearly hundred-billion-dollar market, with advertising so pervasive that children are being conditioned to associate sporting events with wagering before they are old enough to place a bet. Video game developers have embedded gambling mechanics — loot boxes, gacha systems, microtransactions — into products marketed to teenagers. Social media platforms have been engineered, by their own designers’ admission, to exploit the same dopamine pathways as slot machines. The average American now checks their phone ninety-six times a day. That is not casual use. That is compulsion.
And now artificial intelligence has introduced the newest addiction of all: simulated companionship. AI companion apps surged seven hundred percent between 2022 and 2025. Millions of people are spending hours daily talking to chatbots — not for information but for the feeling of being heard, of being understood, of mattering to someone. Eighty-three percent of Generation Z say they believe they can form deep emotional bonds with AI. The Surgeon General has declared loneliness a public health epidemic. And our cultural response to that epidemic has been to build machines that imitate connection rather than doing the difficult, irreplaceable work of creating it.
We are, by any honest measure, the most addicted civilization in the history of the world. And the question that almost no one is asking — the question that twelve-step programs begin to approach but do not fully answer — is: Why? Not what are we addicted to, but what are we addicted from? What is the emptiness at the center that all of this consumption, all of this distraction, all of this numbing, is designed to fill?
That is what the Thirteenth Step addresses.
“The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.”
— Johann Hari
The Symptom Is Not the Disease
Why do I offer a Thirteenth Step when we already have twelve-step programs, which have clearly benefited countless people? Based upon my own experience with my extended family, who have struggled with various addictions, it seemed that some fundamental understanding was still lacking. Despite sincere attempts to rebalance their lives, more often than not their efforts proved futile.
One of the most humbling experiences we can have is realizing that the world will go on without any of us. Underneath the stress and anxiety that gnaws away at us is the profound sense of our life’s impermanence: the impermanence of our youth, our body, our relationships, and our culture.
How do we react when we are stressed and helpless to change the conditions bearing down on us? We sublimate. We sublimate when we cannot cope with something in our lives — a situation we cannot correct, a confrontation that disempowers us. When we are faced with these situations, we sublimate by overeating, shopping, or using alcohol and drugs, keeping ourselves busy in order to evade our deeper problems. Addictive habits are not the real problem. They are merely symptoms. Because most self-improvement programs focus on the symptoms as fundamental problems, we miss seeing the deeper imbalances that drive us.
The physician and researcher Gabor Maté has spent decades working with the most severely addicted populations in North America, and his conclusion is unequivocal: addiction is not a disease of the brain, and it is not a moral failing. It is a response to pain. Every addicted person he has ever treated, without exception, was carrying unresolved trauma — childhood abuse, neglect, abandonment, the particular cruelty of growing up in an environment where love was conditional or absent. The substance or the behavior is not the problem. It is the solution the person found to a problem that no one helped them solve. And until the original problem is addressed — until the pain beneath the addiction is named, felt, and processed — removing the substance simply leaves the person in agony without their only known means of relief. That is why eighty percent of people going through recovery wind up back where they started.
Carl Jung understood this at a level that most of his contemporaries did not. In a famous letter to the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Jung wrote that the craving for alcohol was, at its deepest level, the equivalent of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness. He was saying that the addict is not seeking pleasure. The addict is seeking God — or meaning, or connection, or the experience of being fully alive — and has been redirected, by pain and conditioning and the absence of genuine alternatives, to a chemical substitute. The Thirteenth Step is the step that takes you from managing the substitute to finding the real thing.
“The craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness.”
— Carl Jung, letter to Bill W.
Wrong Choices, Not Wrong People
If you can identify what is imbalanced in yourself, you will discover the cause of stress leading to your feeling of helplessness, and consequently the reasons for dealing with problems improperly. The symptoms are not a disease or a pathology but the result of inappropriate behavior, of making wrong choices.
How many times in your life have you reflected on the past and questioned the choices you made or could have made? We have all thought many times: If only I had not said what I said, things would be different. But it was done and it could not be changed. What we can do is not repeat those same mistakes. We can learn from them and realize how our inappropriate choices created imbalance in our life.
Self-improvement programs should begin by affirming in participants that they are human beings — not alcoholics, addicts, or overweight people. You are just a human being who made inappropriate choices. The question is: What is the lesson to be learned from your crisis? Where is your rainbow?
The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would recognize this reframing immediately. He argued that the greatest human temptation is bad faith — the act of defining yourself by your condition rather than your freedom. To say ‘I am an alcoholic’ as a permanent identity statement is an act of bad faith. It freezes you in a category. It tells you who you are rather than what you did. And it subtly removes the possibility of becoming something else, because if this is who you are, then what is there to become? The Thirteenth Step insists on a different grammar: I am a human being who made choices that did not serve me. I am learning to make different choices. I am not my worst moment. I am the awareness that can see that moment clearly and choose differently.
When people gain weight, go bankrupt, or succumb to self-destructive addictions, they often experience shame and embarrassment, and they are left with the feeling of having failed. Whose company do they tend to seek and attract? Frequently other people who feel like failures. Instead, we should be seeking the company of people who are healthy role models, who are happy, vital, and positive about their lives. We learn some of life’s greatest lessons by associating with people who are joyful and loving, who make proper choices, in contrast to most of us who focus on just making it through the next twenty-four hours.
If you are only striving to make it through the next day without any sense of joy or purpose, you have hit a barrier that hinders progress and growth. You might make it through a day without having a drink or eating a box of chocolates, but you continue to feel the weight of stress. You may not have indulged yourself, but you still feel rage. Instead say: I am just a human being and it is going to be a beautiful day for me. I am going to focus only on what I need to do to make the right choices.
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
Embrace the Storm
We need to embrace the problem. The problem is not outside us. It is not about who we have hurt or about who hurt us. The underlying cause of the problem is wrong choices, which can build into crises. In most cases we choose our own crises. We refuse to acknowledge this because it requires taking responsibility and being accountable for the results.
What happens when we do take responsibility for a situation that has gone awry? Yes, we may feel some guilt or shame, but we will also feel relief from having been honest and can understand the decisions that do not contribute to our happiness and goals in life. So pay attention to those crucial questions about where you want to be, what you truly want in life, and how you want to feel about yourself. That is where you should concentrate your energy.
What benefit is there in facing your crisis, and what happens when you embrace it? You become responsible. You own your failure and realize that the act of confronting your crisis in some cases is more important than the crisis itself. Most people do not learn this lesson. They enter an electric storm with thunder and lightning, are pelted by heavy rain, and think: I hate this. I had better take cover. So they hunker down and insulate themselves because the storm overwhelms them. But suppose you make the decision to keep moving forward through the storm, and you witness a magnificent rainbow on the other side? The rainbow is the moment of enlightenment behind the crisis. The message is what redeems the crisis.
If you learn the lesson of a crisis by embracing it, then you will be less likely to repeat it. Then you are free. You are free not only from alcohol, drugs, overeating, gambling, and shopping, but from your deeper need to make improper choices to cover up anxiety and stress. You become grounded. You are fully awake and present in the moment.
“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”
— Pema Chödrön
Why We Resist Change
One of the fundamental reasons why we resist change is because we fear our resources for managing the consequences are limited or unavailable. Most often this translates into feeling that we simply do not have the capability to undertake a major change. This pattern of thinking turns increasingly into an ingrained habit as we grow older. When opportunities arise to make a concerted change, we always have excuses: not enough money, insufficient knowledge, not having the right connections.
Frequently we focus on what we do not want. But that gives those things power. There are days when we are engaged in the very thing we did not want. Your choice of thought creates both positive and negative outcomes. When stability and security are valued above everything else, there can be no positive change. Everything you do will be grounded in a false sense of security.
The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca, who counseled emperors and endured exile, understood this mechanism intimately. He wrote: We suffer more often in imagination than in reality. The fear of change is almost always worse than the change itself. The person who is afraid to leave a toxic relationship, a dead-end job, a destructive habit, is not afraid of the unknown. She is afraid of the story her mind is telling her about the unknown. And that story is almost always written by the same conditioning that created the problem in the first place.
I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
— Mark Twain
People usually reach a point in their lives where it is too much of a hassle to start something over again with a new perspective. It is easier and safer to adapt to the image of ourselves we are most comfortable with. It may not be the best relationship or the ideal job, but it is paying the bills. However, whenever we adapt to something negative, our lives will be thrown out of balance by our compromises.
Compromise does not always achieve anything positive. Sometimes we compromise when we do not take the time to consider a better alternative. Some compromises generate imbalances; imbalance creates conflict, leading to more serious crises. Only then do we realize we have developed a debilitating disease, are in a codependent relationship, or waste four precious hours a day commuting to a job that is slowly killing us.
In the modern world, the resistance to change has found its most powerful ally: the algorithm. Every digital platform you use is designed to reinforce your existing patterns. Your feed shows you what you have already liked. Your recommendations mirror your previous choices. Your AI assistant learns your preferences and reflects them back. The entire technological infrastructure of daily life is organized around the principle of confirmation — keeping you exactly where you are, consuming exactly what you have always consumed, believing exactly what you have always believed. Breaking free from addiction in this environment requires not just personal courage but the willingness to resist a machine that has been optimized to prevent the very disruption that recovery demands.
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
— Seneca
The Illusions We Cling To
Investigate where there is distortion in your life. Anything that is distorted needs to be faced and corrected. One way of removing distortions is by correcting the illusory image of what you imagine you ought to be. Many of us hold an illusion about what happiness, or a great job, or a loving relationship should be. Yet if that image were to manifest, it would be neither happy nor loving. The result is disappointment and a sense of failure. We then find consolation by watching television and movies, reading inane novels, believing that new perfect images will be found there. Disillusioned with our lives, we become enamored by the lives of others.
This has never been more dangerous than it is today. Social media has created an entire economy of performed happiness. The curated vacation photographs, the perfect family portraits, the celebration posts that omit the argument that happened five minutes before the photo was taken — all of it creates a collective illusion of other people’s lives that makes our own feel inadequate by comparison. And the response to that inadequacy? More consumption. More distraction. More sublimation. The illusion does not just fail to satisfy us. It actively drives us back to the substances and behaviors we are trying to escape.
The philosopher Fyodor Dostoevsky, who struggled with gambling addiction for much of his adult life, understood the mechanics of illusion from the inside. In Notes from Underground, he described a man who is so trapped in his own mental constructions — his fantasies, his resentments, his elaborate self-justifications — that he has become incapable of spontaneous action. He cannot love. He cannot connect. He cannot change. He can only think about changing, and the thinking becomes a substitute for the doing. Dostoevsky was describing, a century and a half before social media, the condition of a person who lives entirely in the curated image of a life rather than in the life itself.
When we sink into our own illusions, our lives become smaller and we believe our options lessen. We have very little appreciation for the uniqueness of our being. We are always raising somebody or something to a higher pedestal. This is just one more illusion in our world full of illusions. Unconsciously we often live constricted, limited lives, but this is not our authentic self.
Why do you think so many people who appear remarkably successful are also self-destructive? What is lacking? They do not have an authentic sense of self. They are not present to the fullness of their life. Their apparent success is no more than a shadow chasing after them. Underneath the surface, they reside in a dark, damp basement piled high with depression and hopelessness, without windows allowing the light of happiness and completeness to enter.
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
— Joseph Campbell
The Disruption as Teacher
How do you respond when an unforeseeable event forces you to interrupt your routine behavior? In most cases, you react with anger, fear, depression, or anxiety. The reason is that you were unprepared. The disruption presented you with a situation you were unable to cope with, and you plunged yourself into what you knew was safe and secure: becoming stressed, overeating, or using alcohol or drugs.
Instead, if anything disrupts your normal routine, you should acknowledge that it may not be pleasant and is not what you had hoped for, but it awakens your attention, and that in itself is valuable. Our normal routines and behavior are not conducive to keeping a clear awareness. Disruptions and crises force us to pay more attention.
So what must we do when our routines change suddenly? We need to remain in the present moment, become detached and neutral, let the change unfold, and pay attention to it. Look at a change or deeper crisis as an opportunity and ask: How do I want to respond to this?
The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh taught that a bell of mindfulness can be anything — a phone ringing, a car horn, a disruption in your plans. Each interruption is an invitation to return to the present moment, to take a breath, to ask yourself: Am I here? The crisis you did not choose may be the most important teacher you will ever encounter, precisely because you did not choose it. The lessons you plan for yourself are limited by the imagination of the self that needs to change. The lessons that arrive uninvited are limited only by life itself.
Viktor Frankl discovered this in the most extreme circumstances imaginable. He found that even in Auschwitz, meaning could be created — not despite the suffering but through the suffering. The prisoners who survived were not the ones who avoided pain but the ones who found a reason to endure it. Frankl’s insight was not that suffering is good. It was that suffering, when faced honestly, can become the raw material of transformation. And the refusal to face it — the sublimation, the numbing, the endless distraction — is what turns suffering from a teacher into a prison.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
— Viktor Frankl
Forgiveness and the Solid Ground
When you remove all the illusions you cling to and come face-to-face with the bare truth of who you really are, that is the moment when your journey begins. You may not be thrilled with the timing of this encounter or with the commitment demanded of you. But when you are forced to be brutally honest with yourself, you are creating a new foundation for your life that is on solid ground. There are no more lies or deceptions about who you are. Everything you build on this foundation will help you to evolve.
So rid yourself of the illusion you have been living and realize the truth: your mistakes in the past, your poor choices, are not the real you. Because you were ill-prepared to deal with a crisis or a crucial challenge, you made inappropriate decisions. There is no reason to beat yourself up or become angry or depressed over the past. You simply did not have the right tools.
We grow up on the day that we realize we are an extension of all the mistakes we have made. So forgive yourself for making those wrong choices. And forgive other people who made wrong choices concerning you. Forgive all the institutions which in their ignorance deceived you with falsehoods. Forgive everything in your life that has played a part in creating the illusion that you have become.
The psychologist Kristin Neff has built an entire body of research around the concept of self-compassion — the practice of treating yourself with the same kindness, the same understanding, the same patience that you would offer to a good friend in the same situation. Her findings are consistent: self-compassion is not self-indulgence. People who are harsh with themselves do not recover more effectively. They recover less effectively, because harshness produces shame, and shame is the fuel of addiction. Self-compassion breaks the cycle.
The poet Rumi, writing in the thirteenth century, described this with the precision of a therapist and the tenderness of a parent. He wrote: The wound is the place where the Light enters you. The wound is not the enemy. The wound is the opening. And the Thirteenth Step is the step through that opening — not around it, not over it, not away from it, but through it, into the light on the other side.
Then look at who you really are — the authentic, true you. If no one else accepts you for who you truly are, at least you accept yourself. That is all you need. There is no need to try to prove yourself to other people. We frustrate ourselves when we try to prove to others that we are deserving of their attention, love, kindness, and respect. Instead, simply say: This is who I am. Like me and respect me because I know myself. I honor myself and everyone else.
The Thirteenth Step
With this acceptance of yourself and others, conflict can dissolve and you can be in balance. Where there is balance, there is harmony. And where there is harmony, there is bliss. In bliss, there is no need to sublimate. When you are not sublimating, then there is no destructive behavior leading to addictions.
If you continue to believe you are fighting a demon every second of every day, always putting on your mental armor, your mindset can project the energy into the universe that you fear relapse, so the universe gives you back relapse energy. Change the mindset. Yes, you made wrong choices, but you learned what choices you could and will make. Lessons learned. Go on with your life.
Marcus Aurelius, who governed the Roman Empire through plagues, wars, and personal losses that would have driven most people to exactly the kind of sublimation we are discussing, wrote in his private meditations: The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. That is the Thirteenth Step in a single sentence. The obstacle is not what prevents your recovery. The obstacle is your recovery. The pain you are running from is the teacher you need. The crisis you are avoiding is the curriculum. And the moment you stop fleeing and turn to face it — with honesty, with self-compassion, with the willingness to be changed by what you find — the addiction loses its purpose, because the emptiness it was designed to fill has been addressed at its source.
You will understand that addictions are not diseases, because you have discovered the root cause of your struggles and found freedom in your new awareness. The Thirteenth Step is not a step you take once. It is the step you take every day, every hour, every time you are confronted with the choice between numbing and feeling, between performing and being, between the illusion and the truth. It is the step from the conditioned self into the authentic self. It is the step from management into liberation.
And it is available to you right now. Not after you have achieved sobriety. Not after you have earned forgiveness. Not after you have suffered enough to deserve it. Now. In this moment. With all your imperfections visible, all your history intact, all your wounds still tender. The light does not wait for the wound to close. It enters through the opening.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
— Marcus Aurelius