When I got sober for the first time, many years ago, I tried to figure out why I drank the way I did years after it stopped being fun. With the help of psychotherapy, all I could come up with was a bunch of unverifiable theories. And I kept on drinking. As was true of so many others, I was likely self-medicating. Against life. Against my own existence. After more self-inflicted pain and suffering, I knew that I just needed to stop and to learn how to stay stopped. And that's what I did. I embraced AA (there were virtually no other options at the time) despite all of my philosophical and personal differences with the program. Personal philosophy was extremely unhelpful and unpersuasive when I was facing certain death, eye to eye. And I needed to grow up.
While getting sober, I slowly became completely disinterested in why I drank the way I did, and instead focused on living a better, sober life. I still don't care why. I believe that even if I knew the answer to that question, it would have had no bearing on my getting and staying sober and living life the best I can, just as it failed me before I first got sober.
Intellectualization is a well-known defense mechanism among those of us who are interested in such things. It's just another type of denial, denial being at the root of most defense mechanisms. In my case, analyzing why I drank the way I did protected me from attending to the reality that I was slowly killing myself with booze. All that cognitive work I was doing buttressed the lie that I was actually doing something about my fractured relationship with alcohol by thinking myself through it. A convenient distraction that only led to more pain. I'm lucky to be alive with all the damage I did to myself while putting off getting sober and pretending to address my alcoholism by analyzing what caused me to drink the way I did.