What My Pitbull Honey Taught Me About Recovery, Impulse, and Grace

The Wiring We Don’t Choose

It took me a long time to come to terms with my own addictive wiring — to stop framing it as a moral failure and start understanding it as neurobiology. The truth is, addiction lives in the brain long after the behavior stops. The patterns that once saved us from pain don’t disappear when we go to treatment; they just lose some of their authority.

People think rehab cures addiction. It doesn’t. It builds awareness, structure, and accountability — a foundation to start the real work. But as I tell clients, a pickle doesn’t turn back into a cucumber, even if you clean it up and remove it from the brine.

A real alcoholic will never drink “normally.” Someone with addictive wiring will never have non-addictive wiring. The brain can heal, adapt, and compensate — but the blueprint remains.

The Hijacked Brain

Addiction hijacks the brain’s dopamine system, rewiring the circuits that govern motivation and reward. The ventral tegmental area (VTA) and nucleus accumbens — the pleasure centers — become overly reactive to certain stimuli, while the prefrontal cortex, the seat of reasoning and self-control, weakens under the weight of repetition.

In recovery terms, this means the “wanting” system outpaces the “thinking” system. The brain starts prioritizing immediate relief over long-term well-being — what neuroscientists call skewed reward salience.

After acting out, the remorse is real. The addict isn’t bad — the brain is sick. And yet, there are tools: mindfulness, peer accountability, radical honesty, structure, and self-discipline. They don’t cure the wiring, but they strengthen the prefrontal cortex — the same part of the brain Honey and I are both trying to train.

The Bad Rap

People pre-judge pitbulls. Say the word and they picture locked jaws and danger. What they miss are the dopey, snuggly, eager-to-please dogs like Honey — the kind who snores, wedges herself between my partner and me, and if you move an inch away, pushes six closer in. A sixty-pound lapdog convinced she’s protecting you by cutting off circulation. She’s loyal, gentle, and hypersensitive to tone. If I even glance at her with disapproval, her ears drop and her body melts into apology. But when we walk down the street, people still cross to the other side — not because of her, but because of the story they’ve been told.

That same kind of bias shows up in how we talk about addiction and recovery. Words like alcoholic, addictive wiring, and relapse make people flinch. I’m not saying anyone has to use those labels. But part of breaking stigma is being able to talk about them at all — to stop letting secrecy and shame do the talking. Some of the most self-aware, grounded, and compassionate people I’ve ever met are the ones who’ve rebuilt themselves from the wreckage.

Pitbulls don’t deserve their reputation. Neither do people in recovery. Both have been misjudged because a few stories got some headlines, while many quietly keep proving that love, loyalty, and resilience can outgrow even the hardest instincts.

Honey’s Prefrontal Training

Honey has a prey drive baked into her DNA. We work on strengthening her prefrontal cortex every day. She sits and stares at her food bowl, drool collecting at her jowls, eyes flicking between the food and me. The point isn’t to torture her — it’s to train her brain to wait, to hold the tension between desire and permission.

She’s learning the same thing I am: impulse control isn’t about denial; it’s about developing enough space between urge and action to choose.

When Instinct Takes Over

But when Honey sees a squirrel or a rabbit, it’s game over. No reasoning, no command, no shock collar overrides instinct. Once her limbic system lights up, her prefrontal cortex has completely clocked out. It’s not just clocked out, it’s GONE. Sipping a fruity drink with an umbrella, basking somewhere in Bora Bora with no WiFi connection. She’s sprinting full throttle, locked in pursuit of something she’ll never actually catch.

Sometimes she comes back with scratches on her face. Sometimes hours later, dazed, panting, bleeding, trembling — her body language tells me she knows she made a bad choice and didn’t get what she was looking for.

And every time, I recognize that look. Because I’ve been there. The same hijacked system. The same trance of pursuit. The same dopamine fire drowning out reason, consequence, and everything that matters.

Addiction and the Runaway Dog

Addiction isn’t a lack of willpower any more than Honey’s chase is disobedience. It’s the limbic system hijacking the controls while the prefrontal cortex — the reasoning center — is completely offline.

When she bolts, I could scream, threaten, or punish her, but what would that teach her? That coming home means danger. That love is conditional. That she’s safer staying gone.

Who would come home to that?

That moment also reminds me of what recovery has taught me — especially the parts loved ones may hear in Al-Anon: that my power lies in how I respond, not in trying to control outcomes. I can’t stop the chase, but I can choose not to meet instinct with more instinct. It’s the same lesson I teach clients and try to live myself — that serenity comes from self-regulation, not dominance.

So I stop myself. I breathe. I kneel down when she finally returns, still shaking and raw, and I welcome her like the father in the story of the prodigal son — no punishment, just reunion. I clean her up, check her wounds, and remind her she’s still loved.

It teaches me, too, to practice things that don’t come naturally: forgiveness, patience, empathy. The things that pull me out of my own limbic reactivity and back into something higher — something closer to grace.

The Parallel to Recovery

That’s how I try to meet clients after relapse or “field research and demolition.” We come back from the field dirty, ashamed, and scared. The last thing we need is another beating.

Recovery isn’t about perfection. It’s about re-conditioning. It’s teaching the brain new routes when the old wiring still whispers. It’s building enough self-awareness to pause before the chase — the same training Honey and I practice every single day.

I believe God meets us in that same space. Not as a judge at the door, but as a steady hand saying, Glad you made it home. Let’s clean you up.

The Work That Never Ends

Honey will always have a prey drive. I’ll always have an addictive brain. Both of us can learn, practice, and grow, but neither of us can erase the instinct entirely.

The point isn’t to eliminate it. The point is to understand it — to build a life with enough structure, humility, and awareness to keep the leash in our own hands.

Recovery isn’t about becoming a different creature.

It’s about living wisely with the instincts that never fully go away — and still choosing, again and again, to come home.