5 Revolutionary Truths About Addiction and Healing from Wounded Healers Institute
Is it a disease? A moral failing? A brain disorder? Learning Disorder? A choice? What if all are true?
The narratives surrounding addiction are a chaotic mess of contradiction and judgment, leaving countless people feeling lost, ashamed, and powerless. We are handed diagnoses by systems that pathologize our attempts to survive and offered “treatment” that feels more punitive than healing.
What if these stories are not just wrong, but a deliberate and catastrophic failure? What if the very institutions of medicine, psychology, and law that claim to hold the answers have been asking the wrong questions all along? Groundbreaking work synthesized by the Wounded Healers Institute offers a revolutionary framework—a recovery manifesto that redefines not just addiction, but the very nature of healing itself. Born from a scathing critique of the systems that perpetuate trauma, it offers a fiercely compassionate and empowering alternative.
Here are five truths from this work that will fundamentally change how you see yourself and the path to true healing.
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1. Addiction Isn’t a Flaw—It’s a Survival Skill Gone Overtime
The most profound correction in this new understanding is the total departure from the idea that addiction is a disease of the brain’s reward system. Instead, the core thesis is that addiction is a trauma response—a brilliant, adaptive strategy the body deploys to survive an unbearable reality.
The Wounded Healers Institute provides a precise and powerful new definition:
“Addiction: A conditioned bond to a dissociative state of being whose purpose is to ensure survival and regulation by any means necessary.”
This reframes the addictive state as a form of dissociation—a predictable survival strategy the body uses to sever itself from overwhelming pain, stress, or trauma. The substance or behavior is simply the tool that creates this necessary separation. This immediately removes the shame and moral judgment that have been weaponized against those who suffer. It recasts the experience not as a character flaw, but as an outdated, life-saving program running long after the initial threat has passed.
From this perspective, symptoms like cravings and urges are not signs of a hijacked brain. They are intrusive reminders of trauma, functioning much like the symptoms of PTSD. Your body is not failing you; it is desperately trying to communicate an unresolved wound.
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2. Your Unconscious Mind Isn’t Just in Your Head—It’s Your Entire Body
For centuries, Western medicine has operated on a flawed premise: that the mind, consciousness, and memory are located exclusively in the brain. This new framework makes a definitive declaration that corrects this error: the psychological unconscious is the physical body.
This isn’t just a philosophical shift; it is the foundational premise that reveals the profound error at the heart of the modern medical and psychological models. It means our memories, unresolved traumas, and deepest emotional experiences are not abstract concepts. They are physically encoded and expressed throughout our entire physiology—in our nervous system, our posture, our gut feelings, and our chronic tensions. As the saying goes, “the body keeps the score.”
The implications are immense. If the unconscious is the body, then healing can never be a purely cognitive, top-down process. It invalidates any approach that ignores the body’s wisdom. True healing must involve listening to its sensations and learning its “implicit language of emotions.” It radically redefines sanity not as a state of rational thought, but as a state of physical regulation.
“We definitively define the psychological unconscious as the body and healing is a universal right that every living being can claim…”
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3. Healing Isn’t a Mysterious Treatment—It’s an Everyday Process You’re Already Doing
For many, “healing” feels like a mysterious procedure that happens behind the closed doors of a therapist’s office. This work demystifies it entirely, identifying a universal algorithm for healing that our bodies are constantly trying to perform: Memory Reconsolidation (MR).
MR is a simple, three-step process:
- Activate an old memory or emotional learning.
- Create a contrast by introducing new, conflicting information that juxtaposes what was believed then with what is true now.
- Integrate this new, adaptive information, which effectively rewrites the original emotional memory.
What triggers this natural process? The source calls them “Mechanisms of Action” (MoA), and they are shockingly common activities. You are initiating your own healing process every day, without even realizing it, when you are:
- Walking or running
- Talking to a friend
- Listening to background music
- Mindfully gazing out a window
- Reading
This reveals a powerful truth: your body is always trying to heal, often in spite of systems that pathologize these very processes. Therapy’s true role is not to impose an external ‘fix,’ but to create a space that intentionally mimics and honors this natural wisdom.
“Therapy mimics life in the form of time passing… As everyday life (past-present-future) presents and is experienced, the experience is felt in contrast to one another… and so MR is constantly available if one is able to and willing to activate disturbed or conflicting/ambivalent feelings.”
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4. The Systems Designed to Help Are Often Addicted, Too
If healing is an innate process, why do so many people feel more harmed by the very systems designed to help them? The source offers a startling, incendiary explanation: the systems themselves are addicted.
For decades, the established medical, psychological, and legal systems have failed to even operationally define core concepts like addiction and dissociation. This foundational incompetence led directly to the senseless and moronic “War on Drugs”—a catastrophic policy failure that treats a public health issue as a criminal enterprise.
The critique goes deeper, arguing that these systems are pathologically addicted to their own undiagnosed compulsions: an addiction to power, perfectionism, altruism, and ambition. This systemic addiction has produced a track record of staggering harm, from promoting the “non-addictive opiate” narrative that fueled an epidemic, to pushing the “chemical imbalance” myth to sell pharmaceuticals, to declaring with absolute authority that psychedelics have “no medical value”—a claim made without a shred of scientific evidence.
This is a crucial and validating insight. If you have felt pathologized, harmed, or betrayed by the institutions you turned to for support, you are not wrong. The problem is not with you; it is with a “sick system” that has become a self-serving criminal enterprise, addicted to its own power and incapable of seeing your survival strategy as anything other than a disorder to be managed or a crime to be punished.
“Central to our position, the field of psychology, and de facto the APA, have not been able to explain or define who, what, when, why and how trauma, dissociation, and addiction operate.”
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5. Psychedelics Aren’t a Magic Cure—They Are a Tool for Reconnecting With Your Inner Healer
Amidst the psychedelic renaissance, it’s easy to view these substances as the source of healing. This framework offers a more grounded perspective: psychedelics are not magic cures, but profoundly powerful tools—Mechanisms of Action—that grant us access to the body’s own innate healing intelligence.
In this model, psychedelics work by lowering psychological defenses and quieting the cognitive mind. This allows the barriers between the conscious and unconscious (the body) to become permeable, letting stored, unresolved trauma come forward to finally be processed through Memory Reconsolidation.
This approach demands a critical distinction between a “Therapist” and a “Healer.” A therapist often operates within the broken, pathologizing system. A Healer, in contrast, represents an emerging profession born in opposition to that system. A Healer is a guide, often with their own lived experience of recovery, who knows the path because they have walked it. Their role is not to “fix” anyone, but to create the conditions for a person’s own inner healing intelligence to do its work.
“A Healer recognizes that healing is an innate, universal process. They do not ‘own’ any particular method or claim to be the source of healing. They act as a guide, a witness, and a supportive presence, creating the conditions for an individual’s own innate healing intelligence to emerge.”
This shifts the power away from an external substance or expert and places it back where it belongs: within you. The goal is not just to have a psychedelic experience, but to integrate its wisdom into a life of sustained recovery and wholeness.
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Conclusion: The Path Forward
These five truths weave together a new and revolutionary story. It is a story where addiction is not a shameful flaw but a testament to your will to survive. Where your body is not a problem to be solved but the very seat of your unconscious wisdom. Where healing is not a distant hope but an ever-present, innate birthright. It’s a story where the path forward involves reclaiming your power from systems that have harmed you and reconnecting with the profound healing intelligence that has been within you all along.
This leaves one powerful, all-important question: If addiction is a survival strategy and your body is your unconscious mind, what profound message has your body been trying to send you all along?
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References
O’Brien, A. (2023a). Addiction as Trauma-Related Dissociation: A Phenomenological Investigation of the Addictive State. International University of Graduate Studies. (Dissertation). Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/courses/addiction-as-dissociation-model-course/
O’Brien, A. (2023b). Memory Reconsolidation in Psychedelics Therapy. In Path of the Wounded Healer: A Dissociative-Focused Phase Model for Normative and Pathological States of Consciousness: Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/courses/addiction-as-dissociation-model-course/
O’Brien, A. (2023c). Path of the Wounded Healer: A Dissociative-Focused Phase Model for Normative and Pathological States of Consciousness: Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
O’Brien, A. (2024a). Healer and Healing: The re-education of the healer and healing professions as an advocation. Re-educational and Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
O’Brien, A. (2024e). Path of the Wounded Healers for Thrivers: Perfectionism, Altruism, and Ambition Addictions; Re-education and training manual for Abusers, Activists, Batterers, Bullies, Enablers, Killers, Narcissists, Offenders, Parents, Perpetrators, and Warriors. Re-Education and Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
O’Brien, A. (2025). American Made Addiction Recovery: a healer’s journey through professional recovery. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
*This is for informational and educational purposes only. For medical advice or diagnosis, consult a professional.
