Nearly half of U.S. adults showed problematic signs of at least one addiction in a given year. That was the finding of a 2011 study by Sussman, Lisha, and Griffiths. It predates the smartphone era, engagement-optimized algorithms, and legalized sports betting. I suspect the number has only grown. Epic Research (2026) found that diagnosed gambling disorder rose more than 60 percent in states that legalized sports betting since 2018, while it fell in states that did not.
So why is addiction so widespread?
Genetics gets much of the attention. While some people do inherit a nervous system more vulnerable to addiction, vulnerability isn’t destiny. What happens in our relationships and environments powerfully shapes whether that vulnerability develops into addiction.
Most of my clients struggling with addiction tell me that they want to stop but don’t know how. One client turns to whiskey, especially when stressors involving his children, partner, and work begin to collide, even though he knows it compromises his sleep, marriage, health, and ability to focus. We’ve been working together on learning to turn toward other people for support rather than whiskey. That shift gets at something I believe is central to understanding addiction.
As Gabor Maté has suggested, perhaps the more useful question isn’t simply why the addiction, but why the pain behind it? What is the addiction doing for the person? What is it helping them escape or relieve? I believe the answers to these questions bring us closer to its roots.
After 15 years in this work, I’ve often seen addiction begin as an attempt to fulfill two deeply intertwined needs. By the time someone seeks help, that attempted solution has become a serious problem of its own. Understanding what drew them toward it can help us see what’s actually missing.
Root one: disconnection
This isn’t always one isolated in a basement. Sometimes it’s the executive who has 30 Teams channels open but zero people he’d feel comfortable reaching out to, and limited people who’d show up for him if he called in a pinch. I’ve come to see addiction as less exclusively a chemistry problem and more a relationship problem, often wearing a brain-chemistry costume. The substance, the scroll, the cake, the bet—they’re reliable. People, unfortunately, are far more complicated, but also far more substantive. They require trust, investment, and reciprocity. They can’t always be counted on to show up when we need them. That reliability must be built long-term, through trust and investment in the relationship—to me, that’s the defining difference.
The research backs up what I’ve seen in my sessions. The brain’s opioid system regulates social bonding, and social disconnection isn’t just a side effect of addiction but may also help drive it (Løseth et al., 2025). The relationship can become self-reinforcing: disconnection can increase substance use, while substance use can further erode relationships. Morris and Onyegesi (2025) similarly described loneliness and substance misuse as a self-reinforcing loop in young adults and proposed an attachment-based practice model. Kurt and Taşdemir (2026) found that insecure attachment and emotional neglect were associated with separation anxiety among people with substance use disorder, while secure attachment appeared to buffer the effects of neglect.
The pandemic gave us an unsettling natural experiment: as much of the world became sharply more socially isolated, drug-related deaths rose sharply in many places. By contrast, places that maintained more social continuity (like Sweden), which took a markedly different approach to lockdowns, did not see the same increase. That doesn’t prove isolation caused the difference, but it’s hard not to notice the relationship.
Part of root one is at least one absent attachment. I say “at least one” deliberately. Without indicting one’s childhood, we can still notice where it often originates. If no one modeled “I can be upset, and you’ll still stay,” one grows up needing something that will stay predictably regulated no matter what they bring to it. A substance or addictive behavior doesn’t get its feelings hurt or need you to read the room. That’s a nervous system often doing the best it can to get the comfort and nurturance it needed to survive with the relationships (or lack thereof) it was handed.
And these patterns don’t always begin with the person who eventually develops the addiction. They’re often embedded in families long before one becomes addicted (Juhnke & Hagedorn, 2019). The addiction is often what is labeled, but the underlying patterns, what EFT recognizes as an adaptive response to an unmet need for connection, were inherited long before. Without a safe connection to help process difficult experiences, emotional pain usually gets trapped inside the body, setting the stage for the second root.
Root two: unprocessed or unhealed pain or trauma
I’ve repeatedly seen how experiences from years or even decades earlier continue to shape how people cope with distress. I’m not necessarily referring to major, unambiguously catastrophic events like an earthquake, physical abuse, or a car crash. Trauma is less about the event than the body’s reaction to it. Sometimes it’s the accumulation of a thousand small moments where one learned that needing something from others was dangerous or pointless. The nervous system remembers.
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Suppressing trauma intrusions demands so much mental energy that the exhaustion itself can push people toward addiction for relief. This is where EMDR excels in my practice, not by arguing someone out of a coping mechanism but by reprocessing what it got stuck on decades before addiction emerged, usually as a coping mechanism initially.
The numbers point the same way. Azagba et al. (2025) found a dose-response relationship among U.S. high school students: more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) meant more addiction. Mongan et al. (2025) followed a population-based sample into early adulthood and found that parent and peer relationship quality and school engagement mediated how childhood adversity led to substance use later on.
So to me, an emerging addiction equation may be: disconnection + difficulty regulating painful internal states = addictive (substance and/or behavior) as relief.
None of this excuses the wreckage addiction leaves behind. A cough can be “just a symptom” of a cold and still keep the whole house up at night. But if we only ever treat the cough, we miss the infection, and eventually we’re band-aiding the same cough again.
Connection is thus the underrated engine of prevention. If addiction often starts as a way to survive disconnection (Hari, 2015), then the antidote can’t be willpower alone. It was always going to be a person, or several, who could carry one’s heavy emotion with them without flinching. To me, this largely explains why therapists have jobs. Relationships contribute to wounds, and relationships are thus part of how we heal.
I’m not saying every addiction begins with loneliness or trauma. Addiction has many contributing causes. But in my clinical work, disconnection and unresolved pain have been two of the most consistently overlooked pieces of the puzzle. Recovery can involve more than white-knuckling our way through cravings; it can mean finding people we no longer have to struggle alone with.
Relationships can offer something that stopping alone cannot. Beyond sobriety, there’s the work of building the human connections that addiction may have helped us endure living without.