The Addiction to Complexity: How the Wound of Unworthiness Shapes the Industry Meant to Heal ItPart II
- Jason Shiers
- Oct 16
- 8 min read
October 20, 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. This project, which serves as the basis for our discussion, is a comprehensive exploration of addiction and recovery, offering a unique perspective that challenges current industry norms. The Infinite Recovery Project is the culmination of years of research and practical experience, aiming to provide a more authentic, relational, and straightforward approach to healing.
"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. He 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. However, Shiers also offers a reassuring perspective-true healing is not about complexity, but about simplicity and relational connection. This understanding can bring hope and reassurance to both practitioners and clients, showing that healing is within reach and not as daunting as it may seem.
This article comprises Part II of a 2-Part Series.
According to Jason Shiers
Pathologizing Normal Human Responses
One of the system's great tricks is the subtle rebranding of normal human distress as clinical pathology. When someone who's experienced childhood adversity feels disoriented in adulthood, we label it "dysregulation" and route it into a protocol. When someone seeks connection through compulsive behaviors, we diagnose addiction and hand them a workbook.
This isn't always done maliciously, but it functions beautifully for the system:
The person remains a patient.
The practitioner remains employed.
The institution remains funded.
Everyone feels they're doing the right thing. Meanwhile, the client's core pain - the one that can't be assessed in a questionnaire - remains untouched.
A Machine That Can't Afford Your Wholeness
Here's the uncomfortable truth: wholeness doesn't generate recurring revenue.
When people actually heal, rather than improve their scores or "stay abstinent," they no longer require the same structures. They no longer need supervision, labels, or identity maintenance, and most definitely do not confuse external validation with internal peace.
In short, they outgrow the system.
Thomas Hübl declares, "A person deeply connected to their inner world becomes far less dependent on outer structures for validation or direction."
That's not profitable, so the system adapts—not by simplifying, but by expanding its complexity—by introducing more theories, labels, trainings, and always, more steps to follow.
Case Study: When Complexity Becomes the Cure
Recently, a widely shared article in the recovery and trauma space drew enthusiastic praise across professional networks. It was elegant, articulate, and thoroughly informed. Using layered frameworks, therapeutic language, and an inclusive tone, it offered a sweeping reframing of addiction. It acknowledged multiple factors — namely, trauma — invited compassion, and even proposed the possibility of transformation.
But something essential was missing; the more you read, the more the article became a perfect case study - not in healing, but in the seduction of conceptual safety. This term refers to the comfort and security we derive from complex theories and frameworks, which can sometimes hinder our actual healing process.
Here's what it revealed
A deep craving to feel unique - and the use of language to justify that uniqueness
A need to feel not wrong, and the reliance on trauma-informed framing to explain pain
A carefully crafted complexity that, while seemingly inclusive, remains fundamentally ego-centric - I am this way because of that.
This is the great trap of modern recovery and trauma discourse. It allows us to feel seen without being met; it gives us theory in place of contact; it reinforces the very thing we're trying to outgrow—a self-concept forged in pain.
It is precisely what Thomas Hübl warns about when he says, 'Intellectualized trauma work is still a trauma response.' This concept highlights the danger of using intellectual understanding as a substitute for emotional healing, a common pitfall in the trauma recovery process. It's a cautionary note that aims to raise awareness of potential pitfalls in the healing process, encouraging the audience to remain vigilant and ensure their healing journey is genuinely transformative.
Because when complexity becomes the cure, something strange happens:
We start to admire the complexity rather than step out of it.
We build entire professional identities around explaining the wound rather than meeting it.
We polish our coping strategies until they become our philosophy.
In this case, the article reads not as a guide to healing, but as an act of literary self-soothing. It's less an invitation to inner transformation than a justification of the author's unresolved survival story—articulated beautifully enough to earn applause.
And this is what makes it dangerous, because when the ego is still driving, masked as intellectual insight, the system stays in place, yet it's just cloaked in more enlightened language. The illusion of progress is often more dangerous than no progress at all. This cautionary note aims to raise awareness of potential pitfalls in the healing process,
encouraging the audience to remain vigilant and ensure their healing journey is genuinely transformative. It's a call to action, inspiring the audience to seek genuine transformation in their healing journey.
This is how the industry sustains itself; it doesn't need to produce transformation. It just needs to create resonance—the momentary sense of yes, that's me —that feels like insight but often leaves people stuck.
When our trauma story becomes our professional calling card, our content strategy, and our reason for being, we become invested in not healing.
Because healing would mean:
Letting go of the identity that gave us belonging
Risking the unknown of life without the story
Losing the audience we built around the wound
And so we unconsciously protect the very thing we say we want to transcend, to be clear, the article that sparked this reflection was not malicious. It was intelligent, heartfelt, and skillful.
But it exemplifies a larger truth: complexity is the perfect hiding place for unworthiness.
When our deepest wound is "I am not enough," complexity gives us a way to feel important. It earns likes, shares, validation, and positions us as nuanced, sensitive, and evolved.
But healing isn't nuanced. It's human, and the moment we mistake our philosophy for our presence, we've lost contact with what matters most.
Healing doesn't require more layers. It requires fewer, but it doesn't mean denying our pain; it does mean being willing to meet it without a framework to protect us.
Because underneath the story of addiction, trauma, identity, and even recovery, there's just a human, a human who needs to be met, not managed, a human who will never find themselves in the complexity of a paragraph, but might just rediscover themselves in the simplicity of connection. This human-centered approach to healing truly values and understands the individual, making them feel seen and heard in their journey towards wholeness.
And until we're willing to lay down our sophisticated frameworks, we'll keep teaching about healing… while never quite arriving there ourselves.
The Myth of Expertise
In a world increasingly flooded with credentials, certifications, and carefully curated bios, the role of the "expert" has become more performative than evidential. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fields of mental health and addiction recovery. The myth of expertise rests on the assumption that knowledge alone is sufficient for transformation. But healing is not a fact to be memorized; it is an experience to be lived.
The challenge here is not that professionals are malicious or uninformed—it's that the systems we train in reward intellectualism and protocol adherence far more than embodied wisdom or human depth. You can hold a PhD in trauma, speak at global conferences, and still be disconnected from your own body, from intimacy, from the unresolved pain driving the pursuit of credentials in the first place.
Studies have shown that traditional psychotherapeutic outcomes are not significantly predicted by the therapist's specific model or level of training, but rather by the quality of the relationship, with empathy, presence, and attunement being the most predictive factors for healing outcomes. And yet we continue to build systems that elevate qualifications over connection.
This reinforces a subtle but damaging message—that transformation is something we deliver to others, rather than a process that arises within us.
Worse still, this illusion of expertise creates dependency—a revolving door of clients who return again and again, not because they are healing, but because they have outsourced their authority to someone who appears to hold the key. It is no surprise that therapy has been described as "the only industry that profits when it fails."
When our systems prioritize knowledge over knowing and information over intimacy, we inadvertently teach people to seek answers outside of themselves—in books, in experts, in more treatment—rather than in their own direct, living experience.
The real expertise is not in having the answers, but in cultivating the conditions where another can safely meet their own.
What Actually Heals
So far, we've dismantled much of the industry's architecture, the over-complication of addiction, the allure of performative expertise, and the invisible trauma blueprints driving both clients and clinicians alike.
But What Actually Heals?
We must start with a radical yet simple premise: healing is a return to wholeness that already exists. The goal is not to build something new from scratch, but to uncover, unlearn, and finally remember what was never lost - only obscured.
Healing is not merely the removal of symptoms, nor is it about adhering to a method, label, or performance. It is a process of reconnection:
Reconnection to the body
Reconnection to presence
Reconnection to safety
Reconnection to the parts of ourselves that were exiled during trauma
Polyvagal Theory suggests that our capacity for connection and regulation is biologically wired, but often disorganized or disrupted by trauma. Healing, then, is about restoring access to those innate capacities —not by teaching something new, but by remembering what's already true.
Therapist Bonnie Badenoch refers to this as "being seen into existence." When a person is met in the fullness of their experience —without being pathologized, fixed, or bypassed—something in the system reorganizes. That reorganization is not conceptual; it's somatic, relational, and real.
In his work on embodied trauma recovery, Dr. Gabor Maté also emphasizes that healing is not about insight alone; it's not enough to know why we suffer. We must come back into contact with the felt experience of self, the one who was left behind when trauma interrupted development.
What heals, then, is not more ideas.
What heals is presence, what heals is relationship, what heals is compassion held in the body, what heals is permission to feel everything that was once forbidden.
It's often not the intervention that works - but the quality of the connection in which that intervention lands. The practitioner's nervous system, attunement, and willingness to meet the client not as a technician but as a fellow human being.
True healing destabilizes the system; it doesn't require elaborate certifications, it doesn't inflate egos, and it cannot be monetized in the same ways. That may be why it is still so rare.
Conclusion: Healing Is Not an Algorithm
If you've made it this far, thank you—truly. You're probably someone who already suspects what many quietly feel but rarely say—that, despite the frameworks, funding, and professionalization of care, healing remains a deeply human process. It is not a 12-week program, a manualized workbook, or a DSM code.
Healing is messy, nonlinear, and alive.
It requires presence, not protocol.
Relational depth, not intellectual distance.
And the courage to be witnessed - not managed.
We can continue adding complexity in the name of rigidity. We can layer models on top of models, systems on top of systems. But until we are willing to meet people, rather than fix them, to see ourselves, rather than mask behind methods, the system will continue to confuse structure with substance.
The truth is, no model will ever be complete, because human beings are not puzzles to be solved, but mysteries to be understood.
As the field continues to chase evidence, metrics, and scalability, we must not forget that the most powerful interventions often arise from the unmeasurable, the felt sense of safety, the resonance of a shared silence, the unspoken permission to be exactly as we are.
The Paradox?
The industry built to heal suffering often perpetuates it—not out of malice, but because it refuses to look inward, as most of humanity does.
And until it does, we'll keep pretending that the system is healing people, rather than recognizing that it's the people within the system who do the healing - often despite it.
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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 http://www.infiniterecoveryproject.com/
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