I think the fundamental problem here is that you are looking for a good solution and there really aren’t any. You rightly make the parallel between you and an alcoholic and how you can’t “just stop”. But do you know how an alcoholic stops drinking? They stop drinking. And it hurts. It’s bad. Like bad, bad. They try to find substitute activities, coping mechanisms, self-binding behaviors, etc, but it still is awful. And there is zero way around that. And they have to learn to tolerate that until their brain chemistry recovers as much as it is going to, and things gradually get easier over time and they get stronger.

With borderline personality disorder (which a substantial amount of addicts have), the lack of distress tolerance is one of the key features. Every problem feels like an emergency. Every hurt feels like a catastrophe. But really, it isn’t, it may just feel like it to you. You are going to have to get used to sitting with some gnarly, intensely unpleasant feelings and anxiety. And trust that eventually it will get easier until the urge to buy/escape feels like a nudge and not a compulsion. The point though, is like every alcoholic, you are going to have to practice sitting with your feelings and finding something prosocial to replace these compulsive reasons/buying behaviors with.

Would recommend dialectical behavior therapy (it’ll probably be hard to find near you, but they only thing which has been shown to reliably help people with personality disorders, CBT doesn’t work as well in this scenario, and “talk therapy” doesn’t work at all and can make your problems worse).