Coming to The Intuitive Mirror
A new way of looking at the relationship between addiction and intuition
This is part of a new series on addiction and intuition called The Intuitive Mirror.
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Looking at my own life and my body of work as a writer so far—70,000 words of memoir and another ~100,000+ words of essay material—the two most resonant themes that emerge are intuition and addiction.
My relationships with the two have followed an interwoven path, with addictive patterns being one of the primary drivers of my behavior from age ten until my mid forties. During that long early phase of my life I felt very little sense of self, and never had that ‘gut feeling’ that is the most common and down-to-earth way of describing intuition.
At a certain point though, these two complexes began to change trajectory. Due to a number of factors, my felt sense of self gradually increased, and my addictions declined. By age 48, the two life-lines had crossed; although it continues as a significant thread in my psychology, at that point, I left my last major debilitating addiction behind, and began to feel more and more like someone I wanted and knew how to be, and to live more and more by my intuitive sense of direction. Addiction and intuition had reversed roles, with a clear sense of inner guidance becoming the primary driving force in my life, and addiction taking a much less prominent role.
This closely intertwined relationship between intuition and addiction in my own lived experience and my writing prompted me to think about the connection between the two in a more general way, and about how this lens could be useful to others.
The idea first came to me as a sort of manual for avoiding the many “ordinary disasters” of my own life, and evolved as I began to see the many alignments between the two topics. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a book about ’addiction’ that focuses on intuition, nor is there a book about intuition that has all that much to say about addiction (one exception is Joel Pearson’s book The Intuition Toolkit1, but I disagree with his “broken compass” take entirely; a more relevant piece on the subject is Cary Dakin’s dissertation from Pacifica Graduate Institute2, which I was fortunate enough to come across a few years ago).
This hole in the literature backs up my feeling that there’s unexplored territory here, especially as it’s now widely understood that just about everyone deals with addictive behavior at some point in their own lives, or the lives of loved ones3. It’s not only about addiction—just as much as I struggled with addictive patterns, I felt lost, bereft, and hopeless with no connection to my intuitive self, and I had no guidance in terms of connecting with that part of me. There’s a real need for a practical understanding of intuition that’s grounded in real-life experience and in actionable methods that can actually be practiced and improved—perhaps especially for men, and perhaps especially with regard to addiction.
As I’ve developed the idea, it occurred to me that addiction can be seen as sort of the opposite, or shadow of intuition. Since addiction was such a pervasive issue, and probably presents less of an problem in terms of getting buy-in, the primary theme is presenting a new way of looking at addiction through The Intuitive Mirror. Along the way, I will also present several new ways of looking at intuition.
My goal is to present a new perspective on addiction, showing how an underdeveloped intuitive sense often fuels addictive patterns, and how cultivating an intuitive, felt sense of self creates a pathway to freedom through clarity, rather than by way of attempting to control the addictive shadow. I think this book will give people a new way to understand and move beyond addictive behavior—and also some new ways to understand and improve their relationship with intuition.
If you're already invested in some other understanding of what “addiction“ means—or how to move past it—I would invite you to consider that whatever we think we know is always incomplete, and even what seems to be the most rigorous scientific perspective at any given time is always revised as time goes on, especially with regard to deeply human, deeply psychological and deeply unconscious phenomena that make up core parts of what it means to be human.
Even more than the ongoing evolution of science-based understanding, I would also offer that what I’ve experienced as the relationship between the dark shadow of addiction and clear mirror of intuition has been a very fruitful lens through which to view these two deeply human psychological complexes. While no single model offers a complete picture of anything, and there are many other helpful ways of looking at both addiction and intuition (many of which I will reference), this new point of view centered on the ways in which these two ways of being human are so closely related provides new insight—and actionable methods.
If you're someone who wants to change their relationship with some kind of compulsive behavior, if you're looking for a more embodied, more holistic, more fluid, less dramatic way out of an addictive cycle, or if you're someone who already suspects that your intuition might have more to offer, I invite you to join me for a deeper investigation into the relationship between intuition and addiction.
1 Pearson, Joel, The Intuition Toolkit: The New Science of Knowing What without Knowing Why, 2024, https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9781763557116, p144.
2 Cary Elizabeth Dakin, “The Role of the Intuitive Function in Addiction Recovery” (Dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2013), https://www.academia.edu/18545527/Role_of_the_Intuitive_Function_in_Addiction_Recovery.
3 Just a few of many sources: Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, First edition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016), https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9781250116444, Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky, Love and Addiction (Watertown, Massachusetts: Broadrow Publications, 2015), https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9780985387228, Adi Jaffe, The Abstinence Myth: A New Approach for Overcoming Addiction without Shame, Judgment, or Rules, First edition (Los Angeles, CA: IGNTD Press, 2018), https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40815329-the-abstinence-myth, Elias Dakwar, The Captive Imagination: Addiction, Reality, and Our Search for Meaning (Harper, 2024), https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9780063340480, Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture (New York: Avery, 2022), https://bookshop.org/a/96231/9780593083888.
Questions for you
Have you ever sensed a relationship between addiction and intuition?
Do you have a good connection with your own ‘gut feeling’? Does it show up somewhere else—or not at all?
What do you do when you can’t decide what to do?
Is there some addictive pattern or not-all-that-healthy habit of your own that you’d like to change?
Please do leave a comment—and click the little ♡ heart
👇🏻 right down there to let me know if you found this worthwhile.
I like the idea. Interesting combination of forces to unpack. Personally I’ve always had a strong sense of intuition and have relied on it quite often—even in the dark days of my worst addictive behaviors. I always “knew” what I was doing went against that intuition—and yet I would often continue with the behavior nonetheless. All the while “knowing.” I’ll be curious to read and examine your thoughts.
Hi Bowen. I intuit many addictions are often just substitutes. A rat in a cage will tap the cocaine lever incessantly. Given a more natural environment it has no interest. I've been reading a lot about the gut brain connection. Unless an imminent decision is crucial, I convince myself I've made a decision and do nothing. I have patterns that I don't necessarily need to change, rather patterns that I would like to emulate. My sixty-seventh birthday is happening March 11th. I'm going to keep rollin' with what I got. There are numerous variables in your questions relative to time, time left, experience, culture and perhaps geographical location. Ergo no simple answers.