Are we Sick?

My personal experience

During my years of alcohol dependency and other patterns, I never feltill in the way that classic medical language suggests.

- I experienced functional impairmentand repeated self‑sabotage.

- I saw patterns I could not easily change.

- I lived with consequences that were objectively harmful.

But internally, my world still felt “ordered” in its own distorted way. From the inside, it did not feel like a disease attacking me from outside. It felt like a system I was running – badly.

That subjective experience matters, especially if we want to work with adults as autonomous agents and not as passive objects.

Illness or management defect?

From the outside, calling addiction an “illness” can be:

- relieving (less shame, more access to help),

- or limiting (implied passivity and fixed identity).

From the inside, many people experience:

- both a sense of being stuck,

- and a sense that they are still making choices – even if badly.

In my practice, I therefore do not need to insist on the illness label. Instead, I work with this framing:

→ We are not "sick" in a moral sense.

→ We are dealing with functional defects and management errors in the way we handle our dependencies.

This is not a denial of biology or psychology. It is a different emphasis:

- It respects existing medical approaches where they are helpful.

- It avoids turning a temporary configuration into a fixed identity.

- It supports self‑responsibility without moralizing.

Why this language choice matters

Language shapes behaviour.

- If everything is “illness,” people may wait for external cures.

- If everything is “willpower,” people drown in guilt and shame.

The middle path I propose:

- acknowledges the structural and biological realities,

- but invites people to see themselves as managers of their own dependency landscape,

- capable of learning, correcting, and rebuilding functionality.

This is the stance from which I work with clients.