Getting Curious, Not Critical: A Different Way to Work With Addiction

I sit with this often in the therapy room. A client arrives wanting to stop something a drink, a habit, a substance, a behaviour that has stopped serving them and they describe it the way most of us learn to describe addiction: as a battle. A war between the person they want to be and the part of them that keeps sabotaging it.

But addiction rarely looks like one thing wanting one thing.
It looks like a part of you that wants to stop, and a part of you that's terrified of what happens if you do.

It Often Starts Inward, Before It's Ever a Dialogue
Long before we get anywhere near confronting a habit, there's a quieter, earlier step one that's easy to skip because it doesn't look like doing anything at all.

The psychologist Eugene Gendlin, working alongside Carl Rogers at the University of Chicago, spent years studying why therapy worked for some clients and not others. What he found was striking: clients who could engage with a bodily, pre-verbal sense of their own experience what he called the felt sense had significantly better outcomes than those who stayed in their heads, talking about their problems rather than sensing into them.

Out of this came Focusing, and the first step Gendlin taught was something he called clearing a space. Not analysing. Not fixing. Just pausing letting each pressing thing take a small step back so you can sense what's actually there in the body. The shape of it. The weight. The pull.

This is where I ask clients to begin, long before we ever talk about willpower or strategy. Because you can't have an honest conversation with a part of yourself you haven't yet let yourself feel.

Meeting the Part That Won't Let Go
In parts work, what's underneath an addictive urge often has a name. It's a firefighter part — language that comes from Internal Family Systems, developed by Richard Schwartz. And it is, almost without exception, not the villain of the story.

A firefighter's job is to put out unbearable feeling, fast, by whatever means it has available. It doesn't plan. It doesn't weigh consequences. It reaches for the drink, the phone, the substance, because at some point often a long time ago that was the only tool available, and it worked. It's doing exactly what it learned to do.

I think this reframe changes more than people expect. Clients who arrive believing they are fundamentally undisciplined, weak, or flawed begin to see something different: a part of themselves that took on a protective job, at a cost, because no one taught it another way.

Giving the Part a Voice
Once a part has some space and some shape, Gestalt therapy's empty chair technique can give it an actual voice a dialogue between the part that wants to stop and the part that's terrified of what happens if it does. Not to declare a winner. So the exchange that's usually happening silently, underneath awareness, gets to happen out loud.

This isn't just a nice idea, either. Research on chairwork — the broader family of techniques the empty chair belongs to  has found genuinely meaningful effect sizes across individual, group, and family therapy. It seems to work not through catharsis, but by enabling real contact between parts of the self that have become split off from one another.

Getting Curious Instead of Fighting
Change often isn't about willpower alone — it's more a choice. It's about getting curious about that part instead of at war with it.
There are three things I keep coming back to with clients doing this work:

Commitment gives the process a spine. Not the white-knuckle kind the kind that keeps showing up to the work even when it's uncomfortable.

Curiosity keeps you asking what is this part protecting me from? instead of what's wrong with me? It's a small shift in language that changes the entire emotional tone of the work.

Compassion for self is the one people skip. It's also the one that makes the other two possible. You cannot stay curious about a part of yourself you're ashamed of. Shame shuts the door before curiosity can walk through it.

Small, Identity-Level Change
James Clear's work on atomic habits fits here more than people expect for a book largely written about productivity. His central idea that change isn't one big dramatic decision but small, repeated, identity-level choices maps closely onto what happens in the therapy room.

Not "I'm trying to quit," but "I'm someone who does one thing different today." Even a tiny deviation from the usual pattern interrupts the trance the habit runs on. The nervous system doesn't need a revolution to begin recalibrating. It needs enough of a break in the pattern to notice that something else is possible.

Why Hypnotherapy and Psychotherapy Work Well Together Here
Hypnotherapy and psychotherapy complement each other in this work because they meet the problem on two levels  the conscious work of commitment and curiosity, and the deeper unconscious groundwork where the firefighter part first learned its job.

You're not just changing behaviour. You're renegotiating an old agreement with a part of yourself that was trying to keep you safe and that renegotiation has to happen somewhere the part can actually hear it, which is rarely the purely rational, conscious mind.
Where This Leaves Us
If you're supporting your own recovery, or someone else's, the invitation is the same: get curious before you get critical, and let compassion for self be part of the discipline, not the opposite of it.
The part of you that won't let go isn't your enemy. It never was. It's been trying, in the only way it knew how, to keep you safe. The work isn't to silence it. It's to sit down, pull up a second chair, and finally have the conversation.
If any of this resonates, I would love to hear from you. 💙