The Deconstructing Addiction Primer
The Deconstructing Addiction League is informed by Narrative Practice and a broader tradition of post-structuralist thought. Together, these ideas offer additional ways of understanding substance-use dilemmas that can sit alongside more familiar approaches.
Many people have found disease-based understandings of addiction to be useful. They have helped people make sense of difficult experiences, find community, reduce shame, and organize efforts to change their lives. The purpose of the League is not to argue against these contributions. Rather, it is to create space for conversations that may not always fit comfortably within disease-based frameworks.
One of the questions that interests us is how different descriptions of a problem shape the possibilities available for responding to it.
For example, if substance-use dilemmas are understood primarily as the result of an underlying disease or disorder, attention is often directed toward diagnosing, managing, or treating that condition. This can be useful. At the same time, other questions can sometimes receive less attention.
Questions such as:
What purposes did substances once serve in a person's life?
What circumstances made them appealing or necessary?
What cultural messages supported their use?
What relationships, hopes, commitments, or values became entangled with them?
What skills has the person already developed in responding to these difficulties?
What social conditions may be contributing to the problem?
Narrative Practice encourages these kinds of inquiries. Rather than assuming that a person's difficulties reveal an underlying truth about who they are, it invites curiosity about the many influences shaping their experience.
This distinction matters because descriptions of problems are never neutral. Different descriptions direct our attention toward different aspects of life while drawing our attention away from others.
The League is particularly interested in the effects that various descriptions can have on people's identities.
Many people who struggle with substances have spent years arriving at negative conclusions about themselves. They may come to see themselves as broken, deficient, unreliable, weak, or fundamentally different from other people. Whether these conclusions emerge from treatment environments, family relationships, broader cultural messages, or personal experiences, they can become heavy burdens to carry.
Narrative Practice offers another possibility.
Instead of asking, "What is wrong with this person?" it encourages questions such as:
What is this person up against?
How has this difficulty gained influence in their life?
What has enabled them to resist it?
What values or commitments have kept them going despite the problem?
What abilities, relationships, and forms of knowledge have been overlooked?
These questions often produce very different conversations.
The League has found that when people are invited into these kinds of conversations, they frequently discover skills, intentions, values, and histories that have been obscured by problem-saturated descriptions of their lives. This does not minimize the seriousness of substance-use dilemmas. Rather, it broadens the picture.
Another area of interest for the League concerns the relationship between individual lives and the social world.
Substance-use dilemmas do not occur in isolation. They unfold within families, communities, economies, institutions, and cultures. They are shaped by availability, marketing, loneliness, poverty, wealth, social expectations, opportunity, exclusion, and countless other influences.
For this reason, the League tends to view substance-use dilemmas as having both individual and collective dimensions. Personal efforts matter enormously, but so do the environments in which people live.
Our hope is not to replace one way of understanding addiction with another. Rather, it is to expand the range of conversations available to people. In doing so, we hope to create additional opportunities for people to respond to substance-use dilemmas in ways that are respectful, collaborative, and meaningful to them.
Utilizing a slight shift in language
One of the ideas that has been influential within the Deconstructing Addiction League is that the language we use can shape the possibilities available to us. Different ways of describing a problem can invite different ways of responding to it.
For example, when people refer to addiction or alcoholism as something that is “theirs” (“my addiction,” “her disease,” “their alcoholism”), they are often drawing upon what Narrative Practice refers to as an internal-state understanding of the problem. In everyday life this way of speaking is usually unremarkable. In therapeutic contexts, however, some people find that it can encourage them to see the problem as residing within their identity rather than as something they are in relationship with.
An alternative is to refer to the problem as “the addiction,” “the disease,” or simply “the problem.” This small linguistic shift can create a little more space between a person and the difficulties they are facing. Rather than understanding themselves as the source of the problem, people may begin to see themselves as having a relationship to the problem. For many, this opens up new possibilities for responding to it.
Later, I will discuss ways of moving beyond disease terminology altogether. For now, however, simply speaking about the problem as something outside the person can be a useful starting point. Many people find that this makes it easier to separate their identity from the difficulties they are struggling with.
Another reason this shift can be helpful is that it broadens the conversation. When difficulties are understood primarily in terms of individual psychology, biology, or personal characteristics, social and cultural influences can sometimes fade into the background. By contrast, externalizing conversations make it easier to explore how family histories, social conditions, communities, institutions, and broader cultural forces may also be shaping the problem.
The Deconstructing Addiction League is particularly interested in these wider contexts. We live in a culture that encourages consumption in countless forms, and many of us are vulnerable to forms of excessive consumption under certain circumstances. From this perspective, substance-use dilemmas are not only personal matters. They also have social, cultural, and historical dimensions. As a result, meaningful responses often involve both individual and collective efforts.
Externalizing
One of the central practices in Narrative Practice is known as externalizing.
The principle is simple: the person is not the problem; the problem is the problem.
When conversations become dominated by descriptions of what is supposedly wrong with a person, it can be difficult to imagine alternatives. Externalizing offers another possibility. Rather than seeing the problem as part of a person's nature, it invites us to view it as something that operates in a person's life and influences their relationships, decisions, hopes, and commitments.
Many people find that this creates greater clarity and distance from the problem. It can also reduce the negative identity conclusions that sometimes accompany struggles with substances. Instead of taking a position against themselves, people are able to take a position against the problem and examine its influence more carefully.
There are many ways to support this kind of conversation.
Some people prefer terms such as heroin lifestyle or alcohol lifestyle instead of heroin addiction or alcoholism. Others find it useful to describe themselves as revising their relationship to substances rather than recovering from an illness.
Likewise, some people prefer to think of their experience as a journey, a migration of identity, or a significant life transition. Others speak of changing lifestyles, breaking from addiction, or revising substance-use practices.
The purpose of these alternatives is not to establish a correct vocabulary. Rather, they are offered as possibilities that some people find more useful, more respectful, or more reflective of their experience.
For similar reasons, some members of the League prefer terms such as substance-use dilemmas rather than substance abuse, substance misuse, or substance-use disorder. Others continue to use conventional terminology. Both approaches are welcome.
A note on the League's terminology
It is not our intention to police language.
The League offers ideas and conversational practices that may be useful to some people. We are not interested in creating a new orthodoxy, enforcing a preferred vocabulary, or dividing people into those who "get it" and those who do not.
People arrive with different histories, different communities, and different ways of making sense of their experiences. Many continue to find disease language meaningful and helpful. Others do not. Our aim is not to decide which vocabulary people should use, but to expand the range of options available.
For this reason, the language offered here should be understood as an invitation rather than a requirement.
Further deconstruction of the addiction discourse
Externalizing offers one way of working with existing addiction terminology. Another possibility is to move beyond those terms altogether.
Narrative Practice often distinguishes between experience-distant descriptions and experience-near descriptions.
Terms such as addiction and alcoholism are broad umbrella concepts. While many people find them useful, others experience them as too general to capture the particularities of their own struggles.
For this reason, some people choose to develop their own names for the problems affecting them. These experience-near descriptions are often based on the specific ways the problem operates in their lives.
For example, when describing powerful drug cravings, people have invented names such as "The Sleeping Dragon," "The Sexy Whisperer," or "The Tractor Beam."
Each name highlights something different.
The Sleeping Dragon suggests a problem that appears dormant before suddenly re-emerging.
The Sexy Whisperer captures the seductive quality of certain cravings.
The Tractor Beam evokes a force that keeps drawing someone back despite their intentions.
These descriptions often feel more vivid and more personally meaningful than broad diagnostic labels. They can also help people identify the particular tactics the problem uses in their lives and develop more tailored responses.
At the League, we have found that people are often better able to respond to difficulties when those difficulties are described in ways that resonate with their actual experience.
Some people also prefer the broader term excessive consumption. From our perspective, excessive consumption refers to extreme or complicated forms of consumption rather than a disease residing within a person. The term is intended to draw attention to the activity and its effects rather than to a presumed pathology.
Insider experience
The people most affected by substance-use dilemmas are often in possession of valuable knowledge about those experiences. Within the League, we refer to this as insider knowledge or local knowledge.
This knowledge is not derived primarily from professional disciplines. It emerges from lived experience, collective problem-solving, and the practical wisdom people develop while navigating difficult circumstances.
The League places a high value on this kind of knowledge. We believe it deserves to be taken seriously alongside professional expertise.
This does not mean that professional knowledge is unimportant. Rather, it means that people should have opportunities to participate actively in conversations about their own lives and to contribute their own understandings of what is happening and what might help.
For this reason, the League tries to create environments where people can learn from one another without positioning themselves as authorities over one another. Our hope is that collaborative conversations will strengthen people's capacity for discernment, support them in responding to the influence of substances, and help them move toward lives that they find meaningful and worth living.