Ep 10: Your Addiction Isn’t The Problem - It’s The Messenger

What if your addiction isn’t the problem… but a message?

In this episode, we explore addiction through the lens of Carl Jung—where your patterns aren’t random, they’re rooted in your unconscious.

Addiction isn’t just about substances or habits. It’s often a response to unhealed pain, suppressed emotions, and parts of yourself you’ve been avoiding.

We talk about:

• Why you keep falling into the same cycles
• How your “shadow self” drives addictive behaviors
• Why willpower alone doesn’t work
• And what real healing actually looks like

If you feel stuck in patterns you can’t break, this episode will help you understand why—so you can finally start to shift them.

Let’s Stay Connected:

Instagram: @IamDemiCortez

TikTok: @IamDemiCortez

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What's up, family, and welcome back to the pods. Okay, y'all see the episode title. So let's get into it. Let's talk about addiction. I wanted to dive into this topic today because it's super personal to me and to a lot of you guys, I'm sure, as well. And I know this is gonna be a sensitive topic for a lot of people, but I wanted to touch on it because honestly, it's time. We need to. And when I say addiction, I'm talking about it all alcohol, lust, control, substance, hell, ambition. Hell, pick your vice, whichever you choose. And I want to look at it from a perspective of it not being a weakness or looking at someone like they've lost their entire mind. Because y'all know how we can get. And y'all know how judgmental sometimes we can be when we see people and we feel like they are battling with something and we just let them a little sketchy. Y'all know how we are. Because I started to think about addiction. It's really not about the substance. It's about what the substance gives you access to. That feeling, that relief when you take your shot after a long day or you schedule that sex date when you're feeling overwhelmed. It's so much access that you can get when you are under the influence of whatever your addiction is. Feelings of relief, silence, escapism, control, numbness. Shit, sometimes freedom. It just depends on what you choose. But what most people never stop to ask is why those feelings feel so necessary in the moment to someone who's struggling. I've analyzed this repeatedly as I've worked on my own shadow self and face my own struggles. And I've come to realize that addiction shows up when something inside of us hurts, doesn't feel safe being seen. So today I want to talk and look at addiction from a deeper lens, a spiritual one, a psychological one. It's one that I've never really looked at addiction from, you know, from this standpoint before, because this is new to me. Now we'll be using the work of Carl Jung in reference in this episode and what he believed addiction was actually pointing to. So I want to probe the question to all my listeners right now. What if addiction isn't a moral failure, okay? Or a mental case at all? What if it's a spiritual crisis? We know it's a call for help, but what if it's deeper? Because Young believed something different, and the perspective resonated with me so much while reading his work. See, he believed addiction came from disconnection, okay? A disconnection from self, from meaning and purpose and spirit. See, he noticed that people who struggled with addiction were often deeply sensitive, emotionally intelligent, and very intuitive. And I was like, oh damn, he called me out. Okay. Because see, he's he thought that people who struggle with addiction were people who felt a little too much in a world that taught them to suppress their feelings and what they were really dealing with. See, young once suggested that addiction was a misdirected spiritual longing. And I want you to let that land because it stuck with me. Misdirected spiritual longing. What are you longing for? For anyone who's struggling with an addiction right now, what are you longing for when that urge comes up? I want you to think about a time when you were possibly dealing with something heavy or couldn't express yourself or just simply felt alone. How did you feel? What was your soul really craving beyond the egoic mind? And I want you to I want you to be honest with yourself because this is what I had to do. When I had this conversation with myself, and when I processed what I was going through, I had to be honest and transparent with myself. Y'all know we don't like to be honest and transparent with ourselves. Hell, that's why some of us deal with addiction. We don't like to be honest. Because what I had to realize is that craving wasn't for substance. That craving was for wholeness, for peace, and a deeper connection with our true selves. So I want you to think about your ego. And if you guys aren't aware, the ego is a part of you that's trying to manage, survive, and hold everything together. So when it can't carry the emotional weight anymore, it starts to look outward for sex and alcohol and control and food and substances, you know, whatever your thing is. And this substance becomes the stand-in. It becomes a replacement for the safety and the security and the grounding and the connection with God and yourself that you are longing for, but you can't find that connection point. And all this is happening because your psyche is simply trying to survive in a state of feeling misunderstood and disconnected. See, Yon talks a lot about something called the shadow. And if you guys have been following me on social media and listening to other episodes, you've heard me mention the shadow before. I fell into my shadow self during my spiritual awakening. And the shadow is made up of the parts of us that were rejected early in life and the parts of us that we often just don't bring to the surface or acknowledge. So I'm talking about our grief, our anger, our needs, our fears, sexual desires, all of it. Everything that's painful to see that we don't want to address. And when those parts of us aren't allowed expression and aren't allowed visibility, they don't disappear. No, no, no, no, no. They go underground, they go deep, they move into the unconscious mind. And whatever lives in the unconscious mind starts to run the show. So addiction becomes a relationship with your shadow. It's not even a relationship with you. The addiction isn't even about you. It's about the parts of you that you don't want to face. It's how we avoid feeling what we were never taught to hold or face. Everything that had no language or voice. And here's something important: your addiction isn't attacking you. I had to realize that. It's protecting something. Usually something young and innocent. Think about your childhood, think about your inner child, something wounded, something that learned early on that being fully present, human, and yourself just wasn't safe. Now let's be clear because I want y'all to really understand that shame that you may feel doesn't heal your addiction. That only strengthens it. Because shame pushes the shadow deeper. So that's pushing addiction urge deeper. But curiosity, curiosity brings it to the light. That's when you start to face it. Personal story. Something I had to face in my own healing was this. Alcohol and lust played a big part of my own shadow that I needed to revisit and heal. See, I never saw myself as an addict. However, during my awakening, I realized I had an addictive personality. And I was in control. Don't get me wrong. Things never got too out of control. Oh, we had a couple drunken nights. But, you know, nothing too out of control. But the possibility to go overboard was there. Because see, I started drinking alcohol when I was maybe 11, and I started having sex and being sexually active when I was maybe around eight or so with boys and girls. So growing up in environments where alcoholism was normalized and sex was a rite of a rite of passage, I never saw them as an issue. My soul knew they would become an issue though, because it was in my bloodline. Can we say generational trauma? So throughout life, I looked at sex and alcohol as an escape when I was dealing with things heavy, overwhelming, or just felt alone. So this heavily impacted me. Let's not even talk about the relationships. See, I often avoided dealing with my issues in the moment and the fact that I had no spiritual roots or connection or sense of true identity. I avoided dealing with a lot of my feelings. And that was simply because no one ever showed me how to sit with them and how to be present with my feelings in the moment and how to express what I was dealing with in a healthy manner. But you know what? When I stopped judging that version of myself, that's when my healing with alcohol and lust started to shift. And I was able to actually face my shadow self. Addictions get out of control. See, the thing is that a lot of people don't understand. Addiction exists because at one point it worked. Think about it. It regulated your nervous system, it softened the pain you felt at whatever point in your life when you needed it. It helps you survive something you couldn't name. And this is why just stop or telling someone to just stop an addiction doesn't work because you're not just removing a habit, you're removing a coping mechanism that your body depends on, that your body probably has depended on your entire life. See, healing wasn't about erasing parts of ourselves. Okay. It wasn't about just overcoming an addiction and then moving on. No, because that's how relapses happen. And each time you relapse, anybody who has relapsed on any type of addiction, you know it's even harder to overcome the next time. So this is why integration is so important. Say with me. Integration. Integration is a process of combining separate things into one unified whole. That means facing your addiction, not trying to suppress it, not trying to overcome it. We have to go to the root. We have to understand it. We have to listen to it and start to heal from that place from the answers that you get. So instead of asking, what's wrong with me? Why am I addicted? I want you to reframe the question. Think about it differently. Ask yourself, what is this helping me to avoid right now? What does this addiction soos? When did it first come up? That's how I was able to get to the root of some of the issues I needed to face and I needed to address in my childhood. Because that awareness that you can get loosens the compulsion and the urge and the presence, interrupts the whole unconscious pattern. See, Young believed something else that most people misunderstood. He believed addiction, recovery requires spirituality. You have to have some type of spiritual understanding and connection. This is why so many people relapse. And I'm not talking about religion, I'm not talking about rules, spiritual connection. And this is where it hit home and connected for me. So listen to this addiction thrives in emptiness. Okay? Remember that. So when your identity collapsed, when you're going through a life pivot, when life starts to feel empty, or when the old identity no longer fits you, but the new one hasn't arrived. And I'm sure y'all know about those seasons. This is when addiction often shows up and intensifies. So think of periods like awakenings, life transition, ego depths, all of those times. And I can speak from experience because my addictive personality heightened to the max during this time. I'm talking about lust, desire, porn consumption, alcohol use, substance abuse, all of this happening during the early stages of my awakening because my soul was aware that this was something that I had to bring up, I had to face, and I had to process and work through. And the thing is, at times like this, when you could be going through something of this magnitude, the substance becomes a bridge. When we should be doing yoga, praying, or fucking breath work, we turn to our unconscious addictive patterns. Because that's the safety that we've known. But eventually something beautiful starts to happen. The soul asks for something deeper, something real, real connection with yourself, with God. And this is where the conscious recovery begins, and the addiction loses its whole because that search of what you were looking for, you understand it was always within you. It was always within. It was just buried beneath all the mess. Because inside alone doesn't just heal the behavior. You have to integrate. So asking yourself the tough questions: what is my addiction protecting me from? What do I need to know about myself right now that I'm not aware of? What would my life look like if I no longer needed this addiction? Start at the source. We have to take it back to the roots. We have to understand ourselves. We have to really see ourselves clearly, not under the influence, no influence, to understand what's really going on. So I want to say this. If you're struggling with addiction of any kind, I want you to hear this. You are not alone. Maybe you felt alone or misunderstood or unheard. But listen, let me tell you, I am you. We are all connected, going through the same shit, experiencing the same trials. I'm no different than any one of you listening to this podcast. I just started to face myself and get on the microphone and talk about it. That's it. That's it. So whatever you are facing, whatever you feel like you can't get through, whatever you feel like has a hold on you, whatever you feel like is stopping you from being the best version of yourself, and you know it's something that you need to cut ties with, you can get over it. You can do it. Because your addiction isn't the enemy, it's the messenger trying to get you to see yourself. And when you start to listen instead of suppressing and instead of numbing, and you learn to integrate instead of shaming yourself, you don't lose yourself in the addiction. You remember who you are and you overcome the motherfucker. That's it. Excuse my language if kids are listening. Sorry. Y'all know I'm here as a resource. If you need to work through your blockages, if you're on your healing journey, y'all can connect with me for one-on-one coaching. I also have just released a new guidebook to help you guys navigate through your spiritual awakening process a little better. Because Lord knows I wish I had it earlier on. All the links are available in the description. And as always, family, let's continue to evolve out loud together, baby. I'm back. I'll see y'all in the next episode.