The single thread that brings recovery together is not abstinence, diagnosis, or identity. It is anxiety regulation.
Everything we have explored so far points back to this core issue. When the nervous system is chronically dysregulated, the mind searches for relief. Addiction is not the starting point. It is the strategy the mind adopts when it does not know how to calm itself any other way. This is why no model of addiction can be complete unless it addresses how anxiety is generated, stored, and managed within the body.
With that foundation established, we can now return to one of the most influential ideas in modern recovery culture: the disease model of addiction. While this framework has helped reduce shame and moral judgment, it also risks obscuring the very mechanism that makes recovery possible. If addiction is framed primarily as a disease, attention shifts away from nervous system regulation, emotional development, and learned coping patterns, and toward permanence, pathology, and helplessness.
This chapter is not a rejection of compassion or treatment. It is an attempt to clarify causation. If we misunderstand what addiction actually is, we will continue to treat symptoms while missing the lever that creates change.
What follows is not theory for its own sake. It is an effort to restore agency, responsibility, and hope by grounding recovery in cause and effect, not identity or fate.