Cause of Addictive Behavior

The actual cause of drug and alcohol addiction, addictive behavior, is a thought or belief. The exact cause of an individual's addiction or dependency to drugs and alcohol and many, if not most, mental health problems is that the individual thinks and believes that he is not good enough or less than others, and as a result, there is a lack of self-love due to his negative thinking about his value and worth as a human being.

When a person believes that he is fundamentally not good enough, referred to here as his core or self-limiting belief, he will continually engage in self-destructive or self-sabotaging behaviors that will support, reinforce, and even validate his negative thoughts and beliefs about his perceived value and worth as a human being. What a person thinks and believes about himself will affect, if not determine, how he feels about himself and how he treats and behaves toward himself.

As a result of his negative thinking about himself, he will also source or attract specific dangerous experiences and substances into his life, including and especially drugs and alcohol, that will not only validate his perception of himself but will harm, if not eventually kill him if he continues with that type of behavior. The cause of a person's addiction to drugs and alcohol is in his mind, his mental health, psychology, and thinking, especially in his thoughts and beliefs about himself and not in his body!

Drugs and alcohol are not the real problem; they never have been. Drugs and alcohol are merely symptoms and instruments a person uses to inflict self-harm. More precisely, I believe that drugs and alcohol are simply the instruments that someone uses to self-execute. The actual cause of drug and alcohol addiction is the belief that I am not good enough, inadequate, and do not matter. This principle applies to all other addictive behaviors, including gambling, food disorders, porn, and sex addiction, as well as many, if not most, of the mental health disorders.

Dr. Harry Henshaw