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Despite feeling grateful that he hasn’t been confronted, Spencer has no idea why the team won’t recognize his addiction; they’re profilers for god’s sake, why won’t they act like it?
It’s disturbingly reminiscent of his childhood, when he’d spend days or weeks hiding a cold, a sinus infection, a flu. His mom wasn’t lucid enough to take care of him, and school was often a safer place to be than home, so he put all of his effort into hiding his symptoms, making sure no one, teacher or student, was the wiser.
He’d always been proud of his ability to deal with things alone, to take care of himself, to depend on no one but himself – for most of his life, he’d never really had a choice, after all, and it became just another skill to continually sharpen.
But there was still that small part of him, the one that had stuck with him through everything, that voice in his head that whispered, why don’t they want to help you, why can’t they see that you’re suffering, why are you always left to do this alone? and that voice got louder when he joined the BAU, when he found a group of actual friends, of family, who studied human behavior.
That rising voice, then, was what pushed him to spit out endless statistics about addiction and recovery and facts about 12-step programs, and had him looking his coworkers dead in the eye as he did so, as if daring them – or maybe begging them – to say something, to figure it out, to ask.
None of them ever did.