Pleasure and pain, the two "sovereign masters" that the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham claimed rule the lives of all men, are obviously instrumental in steering not only human beings but every sentient creature toward certain goals and away from others. One need not be a crude utilitarian nor a rank hedonist to see that a significant disruption in the "guidance system" of the pleasure-pain sensors could have negative, even fatal results. For example, if it felt good rather than bad to thrust one’s hand into a fire there would certainly be a lot of badly burned and permanently crippled people around, still struggling against the temptation to "do it just one more time." And in the other direction, if the sexual reproductive act were an intensely painful experience for all parties involved, it is not likely that the problem of overpopulation would ever arise.
Thus in some rough and certainly inexact fashion the sensations of pleasure and pain seem to act as guidance systems and channel markers to steer the individual in a safe direction and away from harm. And it is also difficult to deny that under most circumstances a feeling of well-being or happiness most often indicates that "all systems are go," i.e. that the individual’s inner and outer milieu is at the moment stable, healthy, and conducive to life and growth. A pervasive bad feeling, on the other hand, or any sustained state of negative or so-called "emergency" emotions(fear, rage, guilt &etc.) suggests that an unhealthy condition exists either internally or externally and that some action is called for to restore the conditions necessary for health and its associated positive feelings.
The syndrome and process of addiction involves what might be regarded as a sustained manual override by artificial means of the "autopilot" of the addict’s natural and interactive hedonic(pleasure-pain) regulation. The addict, that is, learns to take control of his hedonic state by direct chemical or behavioral means, thereby short-circuiting its connections to his actual inner and outer environment and rendering it worthless or even harmful as a "compass" to steer by. By means of a kind of Faustian Bargain he manages to attain good feelings and to avoid bad ones, not in a natural and healthy fashion that is intimately related to the ongoing reality of his life and behavior, but by the manipulation of his addictive substance or process. As time passes he strays further and further from the true path of health and sanity until at last, and usually before he realizes what has happened to him, he finds himself lost in a dark wood of addiction with no guide to show him the way back. For by this time his own "compass" has been so damaged by his addiction that he is very apt to fear and avoid just those things that would be good, even lifesaving for him, while instead steering and steaming with all his might directly into the jaws of the very addiction that is destroying him. His feelings are no longer reliable guides to rational and healthy action but in fact quite often the very reverse. Thus while the motto of addiction itself might be "If it feels good, do it!" the motto of recovery, certainly not in all cases but in more than a few could be "If it doesn’t feel good, do it anyway."
The addict’s Dilemna, then, comes down in the end to this: what he feels like doing is seldom good for him, while what he doesn’t feel like doing, e.g. stopping his addiction, getting treatment, engaging in healthy behaviors &etc. often is. In most cases of well-established addiction the emphasis has long since switched from the so-called "positive reinforcement" paradigm in which the addictive behavior is primarily motivated by a search for pleasure or good feelings, to a "negative reinforcement" model in which the goal is mainly to avoid the bad feelings that the addict knows are in store if he fails to perform his accustomed hedonic manipulations by means of his substance or process of choice.
Such considerations help to explain the fact, well-known to professionals who deal with individuals suffering from serious addictions, that lasting recovery, when it begins, quite often begins in the context of a crisis of sufficient magnitude to overwhelm the addict’s natural and well-entrenched aversion to recovery by an even greater fear such as the loss of an important relationship, a job, health or freedom(the threat of jail for addiction-related offenses).
It is therefore not at all the case that alcoholics and addicts "have to want to get better" before recovery can commence, much less that they must "want to get better for themselves and not for someone else." For the addict’s double-mindedness makes such "pure" motivation all but impossible for the vast majority of addicts. Luckily for the addict, recovery is just as likely, perhaps even more likely if he is in effect marched at bayonet point in the direction of behaviors that are good for him and which he would therefore, owing to his addictive hedonic disorientation, normally avoid like the plague if only he were not afraid that by so doing he would incur an even more unpleasant consequence. For it is one of the many curious paradoxes of addiction and recovery that genuine and sincere motivation for recovery is a result of and not a prerequisite for recovery.
When addictive behavior is suddenly interrupted or suspended –usually by circumstances beyond the addict’s control, but occasionally as the result of a rational decision- there is an immediate hedonic backlash effect as the "bills" begin to come due for the prolonged artificial manipulation of mood and feeling state that is a central feature of the addictive process. The addict suddenly feels worse – much worse. Depending upon the specific substance involved he may undergo so-called "withdrawal symptoms." But regardless of the substance or process involved, when an addiction is suddenly interrupted the addict is plunged into a negative hedonic state that may last days, weeks, or even months. During this period of time –early recovery or early remission- he is obviously extraordinarily vulnerable to a return to his accustomed "old reliable" means of directly manipulating his feeling state, the very addiction that has brought him to the unpleasant predicament he is presently in and is trying to escape from. As he begins to abstain from his addiction he feels bad – but he is doing well. In fact the negative hedonic state of bad feelings the addict encounters as the consequence of suspending his addiction is the very first step in the direction of health and normalcy. For the first time in what is often a very long time his bad feelings have a natural and ultimately healthy origin: his mind and brain are attempting to re-establish their own autonomous equilibrium after the withdrawal of the artificial external mood changers that his addiction has relied upon to manage his hedonic condition. All that is necessary in many cases is for the addict to abstain from his addiction long enough to permit his own resources to begin to take over again. Given sufficient time –usually to be measured in months rather than days or weeks- the natural resilience of the nervous system "works through" whatever abnormal changes or deficits resulted from the prolonged artificial mood regulation of addiction and restores the abstinent addict to his pre-existing, pre-addictive status.