On excavation addiction, and what happens when the space that saved you becomes the space that keeps you sick
I was sitting in a circle on a folding chair in a church basement in San Diego, listening to a man tell the same story he’d told last week. And the week before that. And the year before that. He was kinda performance crying, it just felt… off. Everyone was nodding. And I was doing what I’d been trained to do in that room: holding space, being supportive, validating, letting go.
And I was dying inside.
Because I realised something that night that I couldn’t un-realise. Something that would eventually blow the roof off everything I thought I knew about healing, about recovery, about what it actually means to get better.
The room wasn’t healing him. The room was feeding him. And feeding off him.
Let me back up, because I need you to hear the distinction I’m about to make or everything that follows will sound like I’m trashing recovery. I’m not.
I walked into my first codependence recovery meeting the way most of us do: broken, bewildered, and desperate for someone to tell me I wasn’t crazy. And those rooms did that. In the beginning, they were a lifeline. Someone looked me in the eye and said “hey…it’s not your fault.” I needed that. I needed to be seen. I needed the language. I needed to know that what was happening to me had a name.
Excavation is sacred work. You need to dig. You need to name the wound. You need to look at the ugly thing in the basement and call it what it is. I’ll defend that part of the process with everything I have.
What I’m saying is that excavation addiction is destructive. The way water is essential but if you drink and drink and drink, you’ll literally drown. The thing that saves you and the thing that destroys you can be the exact same thing. The only difference is crossing some fuzzy line somewhere.
I couldn’t stop. The rooms I was in couldn’t stop. And the people running those rooms had built their entire identities on never stopping.
Here’s what happened when I stayed in the rooms too long. I started to notice a pattern in the meetings themselves, and it wasn’t a pattern of healing. There shouldn’t be a hierarchy at all, but there is. And it’s not based on who’s getting better. It’s based on who’s bleeding the most eloquently.
The woman with the worst week gets the nods. The most tears get the hugs. And God forbid you walk in with good news. I felt it: that weird, nauseating guilt when something in my life was actually going well. When I did share something good, when I let myself say “things are actually moving forward,” I could feel the room shift. The energy pulling back. The subtle, almost invisible way people rearranged their faces.
Then the next person would share something like, “Things have been okay for a while, but I know it won’t last.” Or, “We will always be here”, “I’ll always be a codependent. I always go back.” Like happiness was the exception. Like feeling good was a temporary glitch in the system before the real programming kicked back in.
And that lie, that happiness is the exception and pain is the baseline, kept me sick longer than anything my ex-partner ever did to me.
Because happiness isn’t the exception. Happiness is the address. Joy is the mainland. Peace is reality. The pain, the dysfunction, the chaos, the rooms full of people rehearsing their worst moments week after week after motherfucking week, thinking that repetition is the same as processing, that’s Neverland. That’s the trick of the light that seduces the avoidant in me. You can go there to understand what happened to you. You name it, you grieve it, you let someone witness it. And then you go back to building. Back to the life that’s waiting for you on the other side of the wound.
But almost nobody in those rooms was going home. Some were, most weren’t – myself included. And eventually, it became too loud to ignore.
Jim Rohn said you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Think about who you’re sitting in a circle with every day/week. Think about what they talk about. Think about whether their lives are getting bigger or smaller. Think about whether you leave those rooms feeling like you can build something, or feeling like the world is made of trauma and nothing is safe and everyone is either a narcissist or a victim and maybe you’ll never actually be okay.
Because that’s what started happening to me. Slowly, so slowly I didn’t see it. I was spending upwards of fifteen to eighteen hours every week immersed in tales of hopelessness, in victimhood, in the same recycled stories of pain told by people who’d been telling them for years. And it was becoming my operating system. Everything started looking like codependency. Every interaction got filtered through the literature. Every relationship was suspect. Every feeling was a symptom. It was like being handed a hammer and suddenly everything in my life was a nail.
I got great insights and traction at first. But after a while, I wasn’t getting better. I was getting more fluent in being broken. More fluent in why I am the way I am, and not doing anything about it.
Mark Manson describes this phenomenon at a cultural level, and when I heard him say it, I nearly fell off my chair because he was describing my Tuesday night meeting without ever having set foot in one. He talks about how a subculture has emerged that celebrates victimhood, that distributes social status on the basis of suffering, and that while there’s real power in a person stepping forward to name what they’ve been through and how they’ve overcome it, there’s a blurry line where enough encouragement and enough validation tips into what he calls a “Victim Olympics.” The incentive structure flips. People start sitting around thinking, what are all the terrible things that happened to me, and how can I talk about them to people? It starts encouraging the creation of suffering narratives long after the original wound has been addressed. Not because the pain isn’t real. But because the room rewards the pain more than it rewards the recovery.
That’s exactly what I watched happen. Week after week, in real time, in that church in San Diego.
The year we put on a conference, I saw the whole system exposed.
I’d invited a speaker, a well-known one, who’d built a genuinely impressive career out of his recovery. Not just talking about his pain, but building forward from it. He’d written, he’d spoken, he’d created something real. He was living proof that the work can actually take you somewhere.
And he was fantastic.
He mentioned a free pamphlet he’d written. That’s it. A pamphlet.
And the committee tore him apart. The negativity, the snide remarks, the disproportionate rage over a man having the audacity to create something from his healing and mention it out loud. It was vicious. And it wasn’t about the pamphlet. How do I know? Well, other speakers had their own non-CoDA approved materials printed and handed out by the same committee without a word.
This was something else entirely.
It was fury at the fact that someone in the room wasn’t falling apart. That someone had taken their story and actually built something with it instead of reciting it on repeat like liturgy. The committee’s own presentations were the same stories, year after year. No movement. No building. No evidence of transformation. Just the same wound, repackaged, retold, re-applauded.
And you know who they did applaud? A woman who stood up and talked about her divorce for an hour and a half. Not her recovery from her divorce. Her divorce. Like she was still in court and girl, she brought receipts. No recovery language. No growth. No evidence that a single thing had changed since the day she signed the papers.
Her divorce happened ten years ago.
An hour and a half. Standing ovation energy. Because she performed brokenness beautifully. And the man who’d actually built something from his pain? Crucified for a pamphlet.
The room applauded the woman who was still bleeding and punished the man who’d healed. If that doesn’t tell you everything about what that operating system rewards, I don’t know what will.
And it wasn’t just the meetings. My therapist, my actual, licensed, professional therapist, I sat in his office for years and asked the same question over and over: “What’s the way out of this? What do I do now?” And his answer, every single time, was some version of: go deeper, find the root, explore the attachment wound, journal about it, bring it to our next session.
Write. Name. Dig. Repeat.
Not once. Not one single time in years of weekly sessions did he say, “What are you interested in building?” Not once did he hand me a blueprint for what comes after the excavation. Not once did he say, “You know what…you’ve named it. You’ve seen it. You understand it. Now let’s talk about what you’re going to construct on top of this foundation.”
And let me say something that few in the wellness industry want to say out loud: the structure of weekly sessions, indefinite timelines, no graduation criteria, no measurable outcome other than “let’s talk next week” creates a system where the most profitable patient is the one who never gets better enough to move forward. I’m not saying every therapist is doing this consciously. I’m saying the model itself has no built-in endpoint, and for someone like me, someone who’d named the patterns, understood the wounds, and was ready to move, I just kept circling. Paying for a seat at a table where the menu never changed.
At some point, the most therapeutic thing you can do is stop digging and start building. That’s not avoidance. That’s living.
The old model says: “I act this way because XYZ happened to me.” The because is the chain. It makes the wound the cause of everything that follows, which means nothing can change until the wound is fully resolved. And if wounds like these never fully resolve, you’re trapped. Permanently excavating. Permanently explaining. Permanently a product of what happened to you.
Here’s the model I had to build for myself when I finally walked out:
“XYZ happened. It hurt like hell. What am I going to build with today?”
That’s it. That’s the whole shift. The first model chains the present to the past forever. The second one puts the pen back in your hand. You become the author, not just of a recovery story, but of a life.
I’m not telling you to skip the pain. I’m telling you to stop living there. Excavate, yes. Name it, yes. Grieve it, yes. And then do the part that nobody in those rooms or therapy offices ever said to me: build something. Change your actual behaviour in your actual life. Make the real amends. Tell the truth in love. Get the job. Take care of your health. Make your damn bed.
Action. In the real world. Where it counts.
These days, I challenge myself to this breakdown: eighty percent building, twenty percent learning. Not because the learning doesn’t matter, but because the building is where the real identity actually forms. I am not what happened to me. Period. I don’t think my way into a new life. I act and build my way back to one.
I left those San Diego meetings not because they were bad or evil. I left because I outgrew the operating system they run on. I left because the space that once said “your pain is welcome here” had become a space that said “your pain is your currency here.” And in that economy, getting better was a threat. Growth brought jealousy. Speaking truth brought sabotage.
So getting better meant leaving the room behind. Because you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And to me, that’s not just a quote anymore. It’s a law of nature.
Maybe I wanted it to be more than it was ever designed to be, maybe the “wannabe gurus” who preyed on the newcomers and vulnerable needed it to be more than it was ever designed to be.
But to me now, Neverland is the exception. Not happiness. Not building. Not the life that’s waiting for me on the other side of my wound. The dysfunction, the chaos, the rooms full of people who’ve made a home in their pain, that’s the temporary place. That’s where I visit, not where I live. Reality is the mainland. Building happens on the mainland.
My future is on the mainland.
The hardest part about leaving Neverland wasn’t admitting I was ever there. It was admitting I didn’t want to leave either. Because it’s cozy. And I know where everything is. Leaving wasn’t easy.
But I did. And the woman who walked out is worth more than every share I ever gave in a room that was never going to let me grow past the wound that brought me in.
Choose all,
xoxo Viktoria
P.S. If you’re in a room right now that saved your life in the beginning and you’re starting to feel that twist in your gut, the one that says something about this isn’t moving me forward anymore, trust it. That’s not ingratitude. That’s growth. And growth sometimes means graduating from the space that kept you alive into the life that’s waiting for you to actually start living it. Bring the sword and the trowel. Leave the folding chair.
