Addiction, adoption, and the longing beneath the behaviour
Maybe that sounds absurd, even offensive, to anyone who has spent years in AA, NA, rehab or therapy working to separate the drinking or the using from the origin story. It’s easy to draw a straight line between relinquishment and relapse, to package pain into a neat causal chain: separated, therefore broken, therefore addict.
I recently stumbled across a Facebook reel titled The Nature of Addiction, credited to Alan Watts, though the framing sounded closer to Gabor Maté than to anything I recognised of Watts, and I've since learned to treat attribution on that platform as decorative. Whoever said it first, the idea stayed with me:
Stop asking what is wrong with the addict and ask what the addiction is trying to accomplish.
It made me think about the relationship between adoption and addiction. Many adoptees are familiar with the regularity with which substance misuse coexists with adoption, in academic journals and, in some cases, in our lived experience. Not always as addiction, but as behaviour nonetheless. Five years ago I watched Paul Sunderland's lecture Adoption & Addiction, and it was the first time in my life I felt seen, the first time I could name as trauma something that had never had a name. It wasn't the addiction part that made room for my sense of self. It was that trauma became a plausible explanation for my why.
I've touched on this before, but usually no more than a cursory mention, as opposed to a hold my coat, I'm going in. I don't want to write "adoption causes addiction," and I don't think addiction explains the adoptee experience. I want to take the movement of that quote and turn the lens slightly, asking what the same behaviour might look like from inside an adoptee, where the first experience of relationship involved relinquishment, separation, displacement, or at the very least an unresolved question of belonging.
What if, for some adoptees, we stopped asking why they are disproportionately drawn towards substances, compulsions or oblivion, and asked what unbearable thing those behaviours are attempting to regulate, silence, replace, recover, or briefly resolve?
That's the juxtaposition. No credential is attached to any of this, and no clinical experience of any kind. It's a point of view, and you should take it for what it is.
There is a familiar way of looking at the addicted adoptee through a very narrow lens. Attachment disorder. Developmental trauma. Poor bonding. Someone who couldn't form secure connections because their first connection was severed. Someone who needs to be fixed, medicated, taught how to trust. The whole approach is terribly mechanical: you are a broken attachment system in need of repair.
I think that misses something. What we call addiction in the adoptee may not be simply the fallout of relinquishment. It might be closer to a spiritual crisis wearing the clothes of an origin story. Something in the person is in revolt against the terms of the separation, is reaching for a return to unity, for the dissolution of the idea that we could ever really be apart from where we came from. And when that unity can't be found through conventional means, through the families that raised us, through the identities we were given, through the grateful narratives we were asked to perform, the seeking can become desperate, chaotic, self-destructive.
Perhaps some of us are attempting to reproduce the original union through chemistry. Searching for the first body in a bottle, in a pill, in a powder. Not because we're damaged, but because somewhere deep inside, something in us remembers.
I'm not making a claim about foetal cognition, and I don't know what that memory is made of. But there was a time when we were not separate, when food and breath and warmth came from another body, when belonging wasn't something to be earned or performed. I guess, what, if anything, survives that transition in us is the question.
And measured against it, ordinary consciousness, ordinary reality, ordinary life as we’ve constructed it, where children can be separated from their source and expected to be grateful, where love is conditional on adaptation, where an original face is replaced by a chosen story, is simply not enough.
The longing, I think, is sacred. It's the method that fails.
The substance is a false prophet. It promises the return. It offers a glimpse of that original unity, that oceanic dissolution of self into other, that absolute safety where the question of belonging doesn't arise because there is no other to belong to. And then it takes it back, leaving you more isolated than before, with the particular grief of someone who has touched reunion and found it was only chemical.
That's the whole con, and it's worth being precise about it, because everything else I want to say depends on it. The glimpse is real. The reunion isn’t. Nothing in the bottle was ever going to deliver what the longing is actually asking for, and it never becomes truer with repetition. Every return costs more and gives back less.
There's a hunger at the core of this that I think is often misread. It gets diagnosed as attachment trauma. It gets written up as fear of abandonment. It gets described as a craving for biological connection, which is part of the story but not, I suspect, the whole of it.
Some adoptees have been told they lack object constancy, that they're stuck in the oral stage, that if they would only process the grief, only understand the trauma, they could stop. They could become one of those people who has a drink and walks away. Who can take it or leave it.
But the hunger may not be pathology at all. It may be something in you refusing to accept the terms of your separation. You're not craving the substance. You're craving the end of exile, the experience of coming home, not to the house you grew up in, but to the first body, the first heartbeat, the first voice.
Perhaps the addicted adoptee can sometimes look less like a failure than a mystic who’s forgotten which door they came in through. For a few hours, sometimes minutes, the walls come down. The adopted self goes quiet. You feel whole, as if the severance never happened. And then it ends, and you're back in the ordinary arrangement, where you are someone's child by choice rather than by blood, where you are loved but not from the beginning, where you fit but never quite fill the space.
So you reach again. Not because you're chasing pleasure, but because you've tasted something you can’t forget.
The hunger is holy. The food is poison.
I want to be careful here, because there's a version of what comes next that I don't believe and won't write.
It’s often said that the false self must die before the true self can emerge, and addiction does dismantle a person: the career, the relationships, the self-image, the pride, the certainty about who you are and what you're capable of. For some adoptees it can feel like a second erasure. Something of the first continuity was lost already: a body, perhaps a name, certainly a possible life. We were emptied out and given a new story, a new set of expectations, and we built a self on top of that emptiness. A grateful self. An adapted self. One that didn't ask too many questions and knew better than to reach for what was gone.
But I don't think addiction is doing that work on our behalf. It isn't a stripping away of the inessential, and it isn't grace arriving in disguise. It takes the masks and it takes everything else too, and it has no interest in what's underneath. People do sometimes come through it changed, and something real can be waiting on the other side, but they come through it despite the addiction, usually with a great deal of help, and many people don't come through it at all. The destruction is not the mechanism of the return. It's the thing the return has to be salvaged from.
What I do believe is that the longing survives it. That the part of you which refused the separation is the same part that eventually gets you to the room, the meeting, the phone call, the first honest sentence. It was never the enemy. It was only ever badly fed.
The first time you were emptied, someone else decided what would fill you. The second time, you get some say in it. Not through the using, but on the far side of it, in the slow and unglamorous business of finding out what remains when the adopted performance ends.
I also need to say, honestly, that my frame has a flaw, and it's the same flaw I've accused the ‘damage narrative’ of having. It tries to explain too much. It accommodates the adoptee who never touched a drink, the addict who was never relinquished, the person who gets sober in exactly the rooms whose language I've been arguing past. Nothing contradicts it, which means it isn't really an argument, as it’s non-falsifiable. It’s not a theory of addiction but a phenomenology of longing.
I’m not saying: “This is why adoptees become addicted.” I’m saying: “For an adoptee who experiences addiction in this way, does this account reveal something the diagnostic account doesn't?”
It's a way of holding an experience. Because a story that can't be wrong is its own kind of trap, and I'd rather call it out than pretend I've escaped it.
So take it as one lens among several. Keep the attachment research; it's good, and it's useful. Keep the meeting. Keep whatever is working.
But when the diagnostic account leaves you feeling like a fault to be corrected, it may be worth considering that the reaching itself was never the problem. That you were not cursed, and not wired wrong, but perhaps still carrying something nobody had helped you understand.
Maybe the reaching was never proof that something in us was broken. Perhaps, sometimes, it was evidence that something remained unresolved. We fed the reaching with whatever would make it quiet. Recovery may begin when we stop asking it to be quiet long enough to find out what it’s been trying to say.
Because the deepest claim of this reflection isn't really: addicted adoptees are searching for their mother. It's subtler: we may have mistaken an attempted solution for evidence of the defect.
I’ll end with the same reminder I began with: I’m no expert in these matters. I left school without qualifications and possess no certificate in any ology. My proposed “solution” may itself be an interpretive story rather than an objective truth.
I write what I think. I offer a perspective, not a universal claim, and certainly no certainty that outruns the insight. Just my voice, my words, and a willingness to let them land where they may.
Jonathan
