Addictive behaviors provide tentative relief from boredom and pain in the form of euphoria. Such relief and reinforcement process leads to persistence. To be sober, people suffering from addiction will need to confront boredom and pain that they experience in life that led them to addiction in the first place. Therefore, people with an addiction problem tend to experience ambivalence towards recovery that it would mean facing challenging feelings that they have avoided by using a substance (Wong, 2011).
This notion that addiction is a form of escape from boredom and pain fits with one of my clients who have struggled with alcoholism. She shared that her alcohol use was strongly associated with her experience of a wish to escape. She indicated
