The Addiction to Complexity: How the Wound of Unworthiness Shapes the Industry Meant to Heal It Part I

October 13, 2025 

Jason Shiers, Author & Psychotherapist, Speaker, and Book Author 

Tom O'Connor, Publisher

Jason Shiers recently published an excellent book: Infinite Recovery Project: The Intelligence of Addiction - A Trauma-Informed Spiritual Approach to Recovery, Healing, and Lasting Change.

"The Addiction to Complexity: How the Wound of Unworthiness Shapes the Industry Meant to Heal It" refers to a concept by therapist and author Jason Shiers, who argues that the self-help and healing industries often become overly complex, creating a system that is less about genuine connection and presence and more about managing the symptoms of a core wound of unworthiness that many people feel. This complexity, he suggests, can perpetuate the very problem it intends to solve, as practitioners and clients alike become trapped in a cycle of seeking external solutions rather than finding wholeness within. 

This article comprises Part I of a 2-Part Series. You can read Part II next week.

According to Jason Shiers 

The Addiction to Complexity

We claim we want healing, but often what we actually seek is complexity. In addiction and mental health, the overwhelming number of approaches, models, and modalities can be confusing. There are now more than 500 recognized psychotherapy modalities, many of which differ more in branding than in substance. However, research shows that the relationship—not the method—does most of the heavy lifting. From CBT to DBT, EMDR to ACT, psychoanalysis to narrative therapy, EFT, and beyond, each claims to hold a piece of the puzzle, supported by a growing list of supporters, credentials, and certifications. But if more modalities meant more healing, we'd be living in the healthiest generation ever.

Instead, we face a crisis: addiction relapse rates hover between 40 and 60% within the first year. Long-term psychiatric outcomes remain bleak, with many individuals in treatment for decades without resolution. Burnout among clinicians is also rising. Despite the increasing complexity of interventions, genuine transformation remains rare, and when it occurs, it often has little to do with protocol. This raises a complex yet essential question: What if complexity isn't the cure, but a symptom of something else?

What if the need to accumulate more knowledge, more techniques, more structures… is actually a form of avoidance?

Carrying the Core of Unworthiness

For those professionals carrying the core wound of unworthiness - the deep, invisible belief that "I am not enough" - complexity becomes its own kind of addiction. It's the perfect distraction; it gives us something to do, someone to be, a way to feel momentarily superior or safe. But like any escape, it offers only temporary relief.

This isn't just a personal coping mechanism—it's a systemic one. An entire industry has been built around the idea that more input equals more healing, more assessments, more letters after our names, more frameworks. But beneath the surface, much of it masks the same wound we claim to be trying to treat.

The cost of this is enormous, because when healing becomes another performance—a path we must prove ourselves along—we move further and further away from the very thing we're seeking in recovery: wholeness.

This article is not about dismissing the value of techniques or belittling good intentions. It's an invitation to look deeper, to question the industry's addiction to complication. And to ask what might happen - personally and professionally - if we stopped trying to fix, and started learning how to be. What if we could strip away the layers of complexity and find the simplicity in healing? How would this change our approach to our work and our own personal growth? By questioning complexity, we can empower ourselves and inspire others to embrace personal and professional development.

The Human Drive Toward Complexity

It's not a coincidence that so many professionals, patients, and policymakers tend to favor increasingly complex frameworks when discussing addiction, trauma, or healing. In fact, the urge to add layers of intellectual abstraction—such as new models, methods, language, and categories—is often less about clarity and more about feeling safe.

We turn to complexity when the simplicity of truth becomes unbearable.

Because most of us carry deeply embedded core beliefs of not-enoughness—the felt sense of unworthiness, shame, or brokenness born from early relational pain. And while this wound is rarely verbalized in academic conversation, it quietly shapes our desire to position ourselves as experts, to find the "right" model, and to organize our experiences into something tidy and controlled.

The ego doesn't want truth, it wants certainty - even if that certainty is dysfunctional. Complexity becomes a coping mechanism, a way to distance oneself from vulnerability and defend against the rawness of direct experience.

According to Gabor Maté, "We use thought to escape feeling, and then wonder why we're still stuck." 

In this way, the growing web of professionalized, codified recovery and mental health approaches often serves the very illusion it claims to dismantle. Each new model adds a layer of protection between the person and their own direct experience. And the more someone feels inherently inadequate, the more comforting this abstraction becomes—both for the clinician and the client. Understanding the comfort that comes from abstraction can help us acknowledge and address the deeper issues at play.

Complexity as Identity

When someone builds an identity around their role in a system - whether as a trauma-informed coach, an IFS therapist, or a "recovered addict" - it's incredibly threatening to question the foundations of that system. Complexity becomes armor, and asking it feels like disloyalty or existential collapse.

What gets missed is that healing isn't additive - it's subtractive. Not more frameworks, but fewer masks.

The tendency to lean on sophisticated language and layered methods is, ironically, a way to remain stuck.

It's safer to study the nervous system than to feel our own, safer to quote Bessel van der Kolk than to meet the child inside us.

The Industry Incentivizes It

And make no mistake - this drive toward complexity doesn't just come from individuals, it's embedded in the mental health industry itself. Credentialing bodies, training institutions, and funding structures incentivize novelty, not clarity. New modalities mean new markets, new certifications mean new income streams, and new terminology means new social capital.

In the words of philosopher Alan Watts, "The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless."

Complexity offers a false permanence.

Trauma as the Invisible Architect

We like to think that we make decisions based on logic, strategy, or conscious desire. But beneath the surface of nearly every behavior - personal or systemic - lives something older, quieter, and far more powerful: trauma.

Not necessarily the kind of trauma that headlines books or therapy sessions. But the subtler kind - the trauma of not being met, of not being seen, of growing up in environments where presence was replaced with performance, and where feeling became dangerous.

This trauma doesn't just shape our nervous systems; it builds the architecture of how we relate to healing itself.

Trauma Builds Frameworks for Survival

When someone says, "That's just how I am" or "This is the way I heal," what they often mean is: "This is the strategy that once protected me - and I've mistaken it for me."

This is how trauma becomes the invisible architect of not just our inner worlds, but also our outer systems - professional identities, treatment models, and "best practices". We create programs to manage pain, and then defend those programs as if they are healing themselves.

In truth, most of what we call "treatment" is trauma management - rehearsed protocols designed to control discomfort, maintain stability, and avoid re-experiencing threat. While these tools have value, they are not the destination. They are the scaffolding; the fundamental transformation begins when we no longer need them.

Dr. Gabor Maté states, "Trauma isn't just what happened to you. It's what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you." 

And one of the most common internal responses? A hidden belief in brokenness, in pathology, in the need to be fixed.

This belief becomes institutionalized in how we structure care:

• Diagnoses become identities.

• Protocols become prisons.

• Labels become limits.

And worse, they get rewarded, insurance codes reinforce symptom checking over soul meeting. Clinical trials prioritize behavior change over embodied safety; the whole system begins to revolve around the performance of healing, rather than the lived reality of wholeness.

Trauma Trains the System, Too

It's easy to point at clients or "the broken system." Harder to see how practitioners, educators, and even leaders are themselves operating from unhealed parts - seeking order, control, and credibility to offset a core fear of inadequacy.

The wounded inner-child becomes the professional who:

• Needs to be seen as an expert.

• Collects certifications to feel worthy.

• Builds complexity to avoid presence.

According to Resmaa Menakem, "The attempt to heal from trauma without understanding trauma is like building a house with no foundation."

And if we don't question who's building the system—and what parts of them are driving that construction—we continue to install trauma-coded blueprints in the very places meant for healing.

How Complexity Sustains the Industry

If trauma creates the blueprint for how we build recovery systems, complexity is the currency that keeps those systems running.

And let's be honest: the addiction and mental health industry isn't just shaped by compassion - it's shaped by economics, professional identity, and survival mechanisms masquerading as care.

Complexity Feeds Credibility

The more complex a model appears, the more legitimate it seems—not just to clients, but also to funders, institutions, and regulators. It signals expertise, even if it fails to deliver outcomes that matter.

A 2023 research study reviewing 276 clinical interventions in addiction treatment found that only 16% of programs had consistent long-term outcomes beyond 12 months. 

Yet complexity continues to dominate:

• New acronyms.

• Hybrid modalities.

• Repurposed models with updated terminology.

• Layer upon layer of "advanced certification."

  
  

Yet, most of it is performance-based scaffolding, not healing. The appearance of transformation is more scalable than the experience of it, especially when systems are financially incentivized to keep people in cycles of maintenance.

Dr. Bruce Alexander states, "We don't measure healing. We measure compliance, participation, and retention - because that's what pays."  

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Jason Shiers can be reached at jason4656@gmail.com. If you want to learn more about the Infinite Recovery Project (IRP), please visit  https://learning.infiniterecoveryproject.com/webinar/

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