How abandonment creates addiction.

I want to talk about the thing that is destroying women quietly. The addiction that does not look like addiction, the eating disorder that is not really about food, the overworking that is not really about ambition.

They are all the same thing: they are all the same attempt to fill the same hole, and the hole was made by abandonment.

For years I had an eating disorder that I did not even recognize as one while I was in it. I used food to numb what I could not name. By the time I was fourteen I had become a master at making myself not feel, because it was the only self-defense mechanism I owned. And it almost killed me.

The Psalmist names thirst as the deepest condition of the human soul. Not hunger for things, not longing for accomplishments, but thirst, the kind a deer feels when it has been running and the streams have gone dry. And this thirst is for a a religion or a doctrine, but for the living God Himself, the only One who can fill this kind of hunger.

You have been thirsty your whole life, and you have been trying to satisfy that thirst with everything but the One who designed it. The food, the wine, the scrolling, the achievement, the perfectionism, the relationships, the comfort of every kind. None of it has worked, because none of it was ever supposed to.

What addiction actually is

Addiction is not a moral failure. It is a pain management strategy. It is what a person found that made the unbearable feel bearable, for a moment.

My eating disorder was not about food. It was about control in a life that felt out of control, about punishing a body that felt like the reason people left, about numbing a pain that had no name yet.

You do not love alcohol. You love what alcohol does to the place inside you that hurts. You do not love bingeing. You love the six minutes when you cannot feel anything else. You do not love the scrolling or the overworking or the constant giving. You love the relief, the temporary exit from the ache you have been carrying since you were a child.

God is asking a question that lands on the whole human race. Why are you giving the precious resources of your life, your time, your energy, your money, your attention, to things that have already proven they cannot fill you? He is not asking it to shame you. He is asking it to wake you, because He is standing right there with what you have actually been hungry for, offering it freely, and the only thing keeping you from it is that your hands have been full of what does not feed you.

Every addiction is a misdirected hunger, and the hunger itself is real, holy and given by God. The direction of the hunger has been bent off course by pain, by trauma, by what was modeled to you, by what you reached for in a moment of need that worked for a few minutes and then trained you to keep reaching there forever. This is why willpower alone never holds. Willpower fights the redirection without addressing the hunger, and a hunger that is not addressed will always, eventually, win against a will that is only suppressing it. The work is not to make you stop reaching, because reaching is your design. The work is to turn the reach toward the One who can actually satisfy it.

The biology of abandonment and addiction

When a child experiences abandonment, the brain's reward system is disrupted. The nervous system goes into a state of chronic dysregulation, and it begins searching, desperately, for anything that will create even a temporary feeling of safety or relief. Food, alcohol, relationships, overwork, overgiving, scrolling. Any port in a storm.

Abandonment activates the same neural pathways as physical pain, and addiction is the brain's attempt to self-medicate that pain. That is biology, and biology, touched by the power of God and the renewal of the mind, can change.

Your body is not your enemy. It is a temple. And what has been happening inside it is not evidence of your failure. It is evidence of a pain that was never tended to.

There is something else you need to understand about the substance or the behaviour you keep returning to. It is the lid on a pot that is still boiling. When you fight the substance without addressing the pain it has been suppressing, the moment the lid comes off the pain rises, and the pain feels so much worse without the numbing that you put the lid back on within hours, sometimes within minutes. And what we bury does not die. Instead, the root now has a chance to grow even deeper into the ground, before one day it sprouts back up again, only this time stronger than before, often in a form the world admires. The wine becomes the work, the food becomes the perfectionism, the relationship becomes the ministry. The substance changes, but the root that was never addressed keeps pushing the same pain up through the surface in whatever new form it can find.

This is why a woman can do years of recovery work and still feel like she is barely holding on. She has been pruning the visible branches of a tree whose root system was never touched. The first step toward freedom is not willpower, it is understanding. You need to know what you are actually hungry for.

The hunger wears different faces, and the face often determines what you have been reaching for to quiet it. Some women carry the hunger for unconditional love they did not receive in their earliest relationships, and they pour it into partnerships that promise to deliver it and never quite do, where the men change but the hunger stays. Some carry the hunger for comfort that was missing in their childhood home, and they reach for food, for wine, for the soft and immediate satisfaction that fills the space the way no one filled it when they were small, where the food changes but the hunger stays. Some carry the hunger to be seen, the hunger of a daughter who grew up invisible in her own house, and they pour it into scrolling and posting and building visible lives, where the screens change but the hunger stays. Some carry the hunger for control over their own bodies, the hunger of a girl who was not protected when she was young, where the methods change but the hunger stays. The faces are different, but the thirst underneath is the same, and the redirection of that thirst back to its rightful Source is the same work for every woman, regardless of which substance has been holding her hostage.

And while we are being honest, one more thing needs to be said about the hunger itself. Your addiction is evidence of how deeply you were designed to be loved. The size of the hunger you carry is the size of the capacity for divine intimacy that was placed in you when God formed you. The world has been telling you that your hungers are too much, that your needs are excessive. Your hungers are not too much. They are exactly the right size for the love you were created to carry, and the only reason they feel like too much is that they have been reaching toward sources that were never deep enough to fill them.

The counterfeit bread

Every addiction is a counterfeit bread. It fills you for a moment, and then the hunger comes back worse than before. It has to, because you were not hungry for food or alcohol or attention. You were hungry for something that only one source can provide.

I remember the moment I finally understood this. I had been bingeing again. The cycle was so familiar by then that I had stopped even feeling ashamed of it. I was just numb. And in that numbness I had a thought that changed everything. What am I actually hungry for? Not the food. What is the real hunger?

The answer that came was simple. I was hungry to be safe, to be seen, to be loved without having to earn it. Those were needs that no amount of food was going to meet. But they were real needs, sacred needs. And the moment I could name them, I could finally begin to take them somewhere that could actually satisfy them.

In John 4, Jesus meets a woman at a well in the middle of the day.

She had come at the hottest hour, alone, because the other women in her town came at dawn and she was avoiding them. She had been married five times and was living with a man who was not her husband. She was the woman everyone whispered about, the one whose reaching for love had been so visible that her whole community pushed her to its edges. She had been thirsty her whole life, and she had tried to satisfy that thirst with one man after another, discovering each time that the well she had chosen was not deep enough to reach what she actually needed.

Jesus knew all of it, and He did not shame her, did not lecture her, did not hand her a program to break the pattern. Instead, He offered her a different water. And notice what He said about it. The water He gives becomes in you a spring welling up. It is not an external supply you have to keep walking back to. It is a well placed inside you, so that the thirst that drove you to all the wrong wells is met from within, and you never again have to chase what is already inside.

Rivers. Not a trickle, or a manageable amount, but enitre rivers of living water flowing from within the woman who finally drinks from the Source she was designed for. That is what God has been offering while you were reaching for things that could not fill a cup.

The respectable addictions and the mastery question

Some of you are reading this and thinking, this is not me. I do not drink, I have never had an eating disorder, I am the disciplined one, the one everyone admires for her self-control. This teaching may belong to you more than anyone.

Some addictions are respectable, and the culture even applauds them. Overworking. Overachieving. Religion that performs for God instead of resting in Him. Perfectionism, control of every detail of your environment and the people in it, compulsive busyness that keeps you from ever sitting still long enough to notice what is happening inside you. Every one of these is the same dynamic as the woman reaching for the bottle. The hunger underneath is the same, and the redirection toward a target that cannot satisfy it is the same. The only difference is that the world claps for your addiction while it judges hers, and the clapping has kept you from recognizing that you need the same medicine she does.

Paul is not handing you a list of forbidden things. He is teaching a deeper test. The question is not whether you can have something. The question is whether something has you. Ask it of anything in your life, the wine, the food, the screen, the work, the commitment, the relationship. Can I take it or leave it, or has it begun to take me? The moment you cannot imagine your day without it, the moment the thought of a week without it raises anxiety in your chest, it has been mastering you, and no woman of God is meant to be mastered by anything other than the God who made her.

If it has been taking that authority, the work is not shame. The work is to gently and deliberately, with the help of the only One who is meant to master you, take the authority back. I will tell you plainly that the only thing that ever fed the hunger underneath my addiction was God Himself. Not my willpower, not my discipline, not my hatred of what I was doing to my own body. His presence, brought specifically to the specific hunger, was what finally let me put the food down without it coming back as something else, because He filled the place the food had been guarding, and once He was in that place the food did not have a job in my life anymore.

I am not telling you this work is fast. It took me years to learn it, and I have kept applying it as new hungers surfaced in new seasons. But the principle will hold, because the Source is real and the well is deep.