Addiction

What It Actually Is: 

Addiction is your brain's reward system gone haywire. Substances hijack the dopamine pathways that are supposed to motivate you toward food, connection, achievement, and survival. After enough exposure, your brain stops caring about those things and starts caring only about the drug. That's not weakness. That's neurobiology. 

But here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: understanding the science doesn't remove your responsibility for what happens next. Your brain got rewired. That's real. And you're still the one who has to choose, every single day, to do something about it. 

What This Looks Like in Real Life: 

You told yourself you'd only use on weekends. Then weekdays. Then it stopped mattering what day it was. You've made promises to people you love and broken every one of them. You've done things you swore you'dnever do. You've lied to cover it up, and sometimes you believed your own lies. 

Maybe you're functional. You still go to work, still pay your bills, still look mostly normal from the outside. That's its own kind of trap because it lets you tell yourself it's not that bad. Meanwhile, the substance is slowly becoming the center of your entire life, and everything else is just what you do between using. 

Or maybe you're past functional. Maybe things have fallen apart and you're reading this because you're out of options. 

Either way, you're not alone. And it's not too late. 

How This Wrecks Everything: 

Addiction doesn't stay in one lane. It bleeds into your relationships because you become unreliable, secretive, and eventually someone people can't trust. It tanks your career because your performance suffers or you make decisions you never would have made sober. It destroys your finances because the habit costs money and your ability to earn money declines. It wrecks your health in ways you might not notice until you've done real damage. 

The worst part is the shame spiral. You use because you feel like shit. You feel like shit because you used. Repeat until something breaks. 

The Numbers: 

About 21 million Americans have a substance use disorder. Only 10% ever get treatment. That gap isn't because treatment doesn't work. It's because people wait too long, can't access care, or convince themselves they can handle it on their own. 

Recovery rates jump significantly with medication-assisted treatment. This isn't opinion. It's data. 

What Actually Works: 

Medications like Suboxone (buprenorphine), naltrexone, and Vivitrol can be game changers. They reduce cravings, block the high, and give your brain a chance to stabilize so you can actually do the work of recovery instead of white-knuckling through every minute. 

Medication alone isn't enough, though. You need to understand why you used in the first place, what you were running from or trying to feel. That's where the therapeutic piece comes in. We address both. 

How We Do This: 

We provide medication management and support for addiction through in-person visits and telehealth across Washington and Oregon. No judgment. We've heard it all, and none of it shocks us. 

What we will do is be honest with you. We're not going to pretend that taking a pill fixes everything. Medication stabilizes the biology. You still have to show up, do the work, and make the choices that lead somewhere different than where you've been. 

We'll meet you where you are. But we're going to expect you to move forward. 

How Often You'll Come In: 

Early recovery requires more support. We'll see you frequently at first, usually weekly, to make sure medication is working and to keep you accountable when cravings hit hardest. As things stabilize, we space out visits. Recovery isn't a sprint. It's showing up over and over again until the new patterns stick.