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Drinking often fills unmet needs, not just a craving for alcohol itself.

Recognizing needs helps break the cycle of drinking habits.

The "invisible drinking loop" can trap people seeking unmet needs.

“Why do I still want a drink after all this time?”

This is a painful question that many clients come to me with. Each person would list all the reasons why they “should” already be over the desire to drink: health concerns, relationship strains, ultimatums from people in their lives.

“I swear, I am really trying.” Their faces tightened with embarrassment and frustration.

The Cycle of Shame and Drinking: The Shame Spiral

I know the painful struggle too well. In my own journey, I’ve lost count of the times I picked up the bottle after swearing never to touch it again. It made my heart sink each time I imagined the disappointed face of my loved one. So at some point, I learned to hide my “failure.” But as the empty bottles piled up in the back of my closet, I became convinced something was wrong with me. Why else would I keep returning to the thing that threatens to ruin everything that I care about? That painful belief pulled me further into the drinking spiral. The more broken I felt, the more I wanted to seek refuge in drinking, and the more I drank, the more I wanted to hide from the rest of the world.

I would have been stuck in the shame spiral for years if it weren’t for my studies in psychology. In my training to become a therapist, I learned to see that all behavior is an adaptation to help us meet a need, including the ones that appear to be problematic from the outside, such as excessive drinking. That’s when the shame finally started to lose its grip, and that realization planted the seed that eventually allowed me to outgrow my old drinking pattern.

Today, in my work, I use the same insight to guide my clients to understand their drinking patterns with compassion and take the first step toward change.

The Common Misunderstanding: When Drinking Is Seen as the Problem

When drinking starts to draw attention in a person’s life, many people naturally notice the problems it causes. But they often miss that before drinking becomes a problem, it was first a solution. In my framework, I help clients shift from seeing drinking as a problem to recognizing it as a routine that helps them meet an unnamed need.

Here is how this showed up in my own life. It might surprise many people, even as an alcohol-free guide and into the sixth year of my sobriety, I still experience cravings from time to time. Just the other day, as I was trying to force myself to finish the notes while feeling under the weather, the thought of “I wish I could grab a couple of beers” hit me out of nowhere. The old me might easily feel defeated by the craving and conclude “an alcoholic never changes,” but the new me knows better.

The craving is not an indication of my brokenness, but a messenger that points to an unnamed need and the old routine that once helped me meet that need. In this case, it was my old “drink to rest” routine at play. Secretly an overachiever, I’d often push myself beyond my limits. Alcohol used to be my way to quiet down the voice in my head and finally allow myself to rest. So when I ignored my body’s need to rest, my brain naturally wanted to reach out to the routine that worked: drink to rest.

This shows up in different forms. The mother who takes care of everyone’s needs during the day and craves a glass of wine after everyone goes to bed. The college student who feels the urge to grab a beer as he walks into a party full of strangers. A retired professional who finds themselves reaching for a bottle every afternoon as the quietness creeps in. The situation might look different from the outside, but when we look beyond the surface, we realize they are all driven by the same human force: an unnamed need.

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Here is the thing: people don’t crave a drink because they have a “drinking problem”; they crave a drink because they have a drinking solution that helps them meet an unmet need.

What Your Craving Is Really Pointing to: An Unmet Need

When we see drinking as an isolated behavior, and trying to change our drinking by simply “just quitting,” we fail to address the needs that our drinking routine once helped us meet. The natural result is that when the same unmet need arises, we’d try to reach for the one solution that we know works: alcohol. Without realizing the underlying mechanism, many people feel ashamed and embarrassed, mistake themselves as weak or broken, and the shame further traps them in the same loop.

In my work, I call this pattern the invisible drinking loop—a cycle that keeps people stuck in the same drinking pattern even when they genuinely want to change. The first invisible force that drives the drinking loop is an unnamed human need. The need for rest, comfort, connection, or to feel something.

The First Step to Change: Naming the Need

Only when we name the need can we start to find new ways to meet these needs. The goal is not to remove alcohol, but to replace it with new tools to support you, so that you no longer need alcohol to fulfill the need. Next time an urge to drink shows up, pause and ask: what is the need I am trying to fulfill right now with alcohol?

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