What is Addiction?


By Jesus Mendez Carbajal, APCC
Jesus is a bilingual (Spanish/English) Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (APCC) who holds a B.A. in Chicana/o Studies with a minor in Women’s Studies, and an M.S. in Counseling from SDSU’s Community Based Block (CBB) Multicultural Community Counseling and Social Justice Education Program. Jesus understands that while the issues people face are personally experienced, they’re also connected to systems of power, privilege and oppression and their impact extends beyond the self. Overall, Jesus is a passionate life-long student of healing, plant knowledge, emotional wellness, mental health, and spirituality. 

Many people use substances to cope with personal and systemic problems. Substance use, substance abuse and addiction can be born out of many experiences including childhood trauma, chronic or acute mental and/or physical health challenges, traumatic experiences, job loss, housing or relationship loss, grief, death and loss, experiencing the impacts of economic recessions, social drinking/social drug use, familial/cultural/societal expectations and many others.

Substances can include alcohol (beer, wine, liquor), prescription and over the counter medications, weed/marijuana, cocaine, fentanyl, heroin, ketamine, tobacco/nicotine, vapes and the list goes on. All of these have varying degrees of impact on our bodies, minds and spirits and can impact other areas of our lives as well. However, substances aren’t the only thing we can use or abuse. There are also what are called “process or behavioral addictions” which can include shopping/retail therapy, dieting, exercise, eating disorders and disordered eating, working/overworking, internet activity, out of control sexual behaviors, video gaming, social media use/over use, phone use/over use and gambling, to name a few.

Distinguishing the line between non-problematic use and abuse/addiction is subjective to each individual. Some important things to consider if you’re curious or concerned about your substance use or behaviors, are: Does engaging in the behavior or using the substance get in the way of living a full life? Do you notice yourself yearning or craving for the next time you use or engage in the behavior? Under what conditions, circumstances or situations do you find yourself reaching for substances or engaging in the behavior? How frequently do you use the substance or engage in the behavior?

We are each capable or defining and redefining our relationship to substances and behaviors. We each get to determine what we want our use/behavior to be. We get to decide if we want to limit our use/behavior, decrease our use/behavior, continue our use/behavior or leave our use/behaviors as is. Each of these decisions carries its own potential outcomes and we get to decide which outcomes we are willing to accept or are comfortable with and which outcomes we are not comfortable with.

If you’re interested, our Counselor Tammah Watts, LMFT facilitates a SMART-informed Recovery Support Group on Thursdays from 12pm-1pm both online and in person for students dealing with addictive behaviors of any kind. Please see below for a copy of the flyer and you can also  reach out to our office to ask for more information. As always you can also stop by for a drop-in session or schedule weekly sessions with us to discuss the topic of substance use, abuse and addictions.

Further reading and resources:

●     Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) https://www.samhsa.gov/

●     American Addiction Centers: Process Addictions and Abuse https://americanaddictioncenters.org/process-addictions-abuse

●     Harm Reduction: Principles of Harm Reduction https://harmreduction.org/about-us/principles-of-harm-reduction/

●     Moderation Management for Alcohol Use: https://moderation.org/about-mm-support-overview/about-us

●     SMART Recovery Support Groups: https://smartrecovery.org/ 



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