A Narrative and Sociological Approach to Addiction Therapy
Addiction is often treated as an individual pathology or a lack of self-control. This dominant perspective, though widespread, overlooks a crucial factor: identity. In practice, addiction is not just about the relationship with a substance or a behavior, but about a person’s relationship with themselves and the story they have learned to tell about themselves.
Narrative therapy proposes an alternative framework for understanding, in which the problem is not identified with the individual, but is understood as a dominant narrative that has gained excessive influence in their life (White & Epston, 1990).
Identity: a stable characteristic or a dynamic process?
Contemporary sociological approaches describe identity as a continuously forming process, a product of social relations, cultural discourses, and personal experiences. The way an individual perceives themselves is influenced by the narratives that prevail around success, competence, autonomy, and responsibility (Giddens, 1991).
In the context of late modernity, the individual is called upon to be constantly functional and self-regulating. Psychological distress is often privatized and interpreted as personal failure, rather than as a social or relational phenomenon (Bauman, 2000).
Under these conditions, addiction can transform from a behavior into an identity: from “I use” to “I am the one who…”
Addiction as a Mechanism of Emotional Regulation
Clinical data show that many forms of addiction do not begin with a search for pleasure, but with the need to regulate internal states, such as anxiety, inner tension, and shame. Use initially functions as an adaptive response to conditions of nervous system overload or identity ruptures.
In clinical practice, this often does not appear as “resistance to change,” but as a difficulty imagining oneself without the addiction. Not because one does not desire change, but because addiction has become the primary organizing framework of meaning and self-understanding.
According to Alexander (2008), addiction cannot be adequately understood in isolation from the social context in which it develops. When social connection weakens and demands for autonomy increase, addiction often functions as a substitute for meaning and belonging.
Over time, however, this “solution” ceases to be functional and transforms into a dominant narrative, which begins to organize the past, the present, and expectations for the future.
Stigma, Discourse, and Social Identity
The social discourse surrounding addiction critically contributes to the formation of an individual’s identity. The pathologization and moralization of use reinforce shame and limit available self-narratives.
Thus, addiction is presented as an individual failure, while in reality, it often constitutes a symptom of broader social and relational pressures.
As Foucault (1978) has shown, discourses around normality and deviance do not merely describe reality, but constitute it. The individual does not only experience use as a problem, but often learns to experience their very self as problematic.
Narrative Therapy: De-identification and Re-authoring Identity
Narrative therapy focuses on de-identifying the person from the problem and highlighting alternative life stories. Change is not limited to discontinuing use, but to broadening identity and possibilities for meaning (White & Epston, 1990).
Therapy becomes essential when the individual does not merely seek to stop something, but to understand what need the addiction served and what other story can gradually take its place.
Through the therapeutic process:
• the problem is externalized,
• moments of resilience and values are recognized,
• the individual reconnects with aspects of themselves that had been silenced.
The more stories a person has about who they are, the less power addiction has to define their life.
Conclusion
Addiction is not an identity. It is a story that developed under specific psychological, social, and relational conditions.
Therapy is not just about abstinence, but about the restoration of meaning, complexity, and the freedom to choose one’s self.
Bibliography (APA 7th)
Alexander, B. K. (2008). The globalization of addiction: A study in poverty of the spirit. Oxford University Press.
Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Polity Press.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Volume I – An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). Pantheon Books.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford University Press.
White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. W. W. Norton & Company
