Addiction and recovery
Lisa Arrigo on Why the Chase Starts Long Before the Drug
A psychotherapist in long-term recovery explains why compulsive chasing begins in childhood, why moderation plans collapse, and how learning to stay present loosens its grip.
I'm a Psychotherapist... and a Sober Addict | Lisa's Recovery Story
Video from The Sober Fix Podcast.
Generated from the canonical interview transcript and validated against source data by Guests on Air.
Why does the chase behind addiction start before the drug?
Lisa Arrigo says the chase usually begins long before any drug, as a childhood habit of reaching for the next grade, goal or approval instead of feeling safe where you are. Cocaine then rewires the brain, so moderation plans collapse. What helps is grounding, waiting out urges, ending secrecy and learning to stay present.
Lisa Arrigo has been in full-time private practice as a psychotherapist for about 32 years, and she specialises in addiction, attachment and trauma. She also knows cocaine addiction from the inside. On The Sober Fix Podcast she traced her own using back to college, through a 2022 relapse after long sobriety, and back again to something that started well before any drug.
Her central idea is simple to state and hard to live with. For many people the drug is not the beginning of the problem. It is the most dangerous thing a lifelong chase ever finds. That chase can look like perfect grades, approval from a parent, running, restriction around food or overwork, long before it looks like cocaine.
This article follows that thread through the interview: where the chase comes from, why a brain rewired by cocaine overrides even careful plans, and what Arrigo now practises instead. Her answer is less about willpower and more about learning to stay where she is, discomfort included, without reaching for the next thing.
Key takeaways
- Compulsive chasing often begins in childhood, as a habit of reaching for the next grade, goal or approval instead of resting.
- Cocaine rewires the brain, so the old wiring fires again the moment the drug returns, whatever the years of recovery.
- Moderation plans made while using tend to collapse within the hour, because the craving moves faster than the plan.
- Grounding, waiting out the urge and telling someone the truth weaken the chase more reliably than thinking harder.
1. Where the chase really starts
Arrigo describes herself as a good student who did not drink or use drugs in high school. Her focus was getting good grades, getting into a good school and being the perfect child for her parents. Looking back, she sees that the reaching was already there. She was always looking at the next thing she had to do, or the next way to make her mother happy.
In the interview she lists the forms it took: chasing the grade, the relationship, the high that comes with running cross country and, for a brief period, the feeling of restriction around food. She says that feeling of being a little bit high and a little bit clearer was just like the cocaine she would later find in college.
Her conclusion is that, for many people, the chasing did not start with the drug. It started with not being able to stay present, or to feel safe and comfortable just as they are. She adds that she is still learning, after all this time, how to be okay with where she is without needing to be somewhere else.
2. Why plans to moderate keep failing
Arrigo says cocaine rewires the brain. Even after years away from it, the obsessional loops and neuronal connections stay active enough, and once the drug is back in the system they fire up again. That, she argues, is why people return so quickly to where they were, regardless of how much recovery, abundance or stability they have built.
She knows the bargaining from experience. During her relapse she told herself she would do a line and then vacuum, or do a line and then make a phone call, or use a little to work more efficiently on her book. Those plans lasted about 40 minutes, and the gaps between lines shrank from 20 minutes to 10 and then to five.
A night in San Antonio, Texas makes the same point. She threw cocaine out of her car into a field when a police car drove behind her, then spent three hours on her hands and knees searching for it. She says she has never thrown cocaine out, which is why the promise to flush it if it gets too much rings hollow.
3. What staying present looks like in practice
Arrigo's alternatives are deliberately plain. When an urge arrives she sometimes sits on the floor, because if she is sitting she cannot be driving or calling around to find out who has what. She grounds herself, breathes and waits for the craving to pass, along with the voice insisting it could be different this time.
She has also stopped keeping secrets she does not need to keep. Secrets were woven into her family life long before cocaine, and she now believes people are as sick as their secrets. When she is having a hard time she picks up the phone, does some writing or gets out in nature, even when those steps feel like clichés.
She is clear that this is surrender rather than mental effort. She did not think herself into addiction and cannot think herself out of it. Dropping into herself instead of chasing, she says, opens space for compassion, curiosity, creativity and connection, the four things that disappear when the chase takes over.
