What is the Relationship Between Trauma and Addiction? [Video]

What is the Relationship Between Trauma and Addiction? [Transcript]

Hello, my name is Weston Clay, and I’m a psychotherapist at myTherapyNYC. I’m going to be talking about the link between trauma and addiction. Sometimes addiction can be hard to understand. Whether you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, you might wonder why can’t they just quit? Why are they continuing to engage in this behavior that they know is harmful to themselves? The answer to this often lies in trauma. 

What is Trauma?

What exactly is trauma? Trauma can be thought of as any experience we have that overwhelms our ability to cope. This could be what is called a “Big T” trauma. That is something like an accident or a single incident assault. Or it could be a series of “little t” traumas, or what’s sometimes called “complex trauma.” This is a pattern of abuse or neglect in a relationship with a parent or a partner. The main factor is that we feel unable to cope with the experience and often feel very alone. 

Trauma tends to lead us to feel very anxious, to feel ashamed, and to feel an unbearable feeling of aloneness.  These emotions can be very hard to kick. For a lot of people, they can be pretty prevalent and something they experience almost all the time. This is where addiction comes in. 

Post-Traumatic Stress and Addiction

When you have post-traumatic stress, you essentially have a nervous system that rarely, if ever, feels settled. You know how some people may to want a drink or some weed to unwind after a stressful day? Well, the relationship between trauma and addiction is basically an extreme version of that. After a stressful day, maybe you’re feeling a little anxious, and that drink could help you to feel settled. 

A person who has a nervous system that almost never feels settled and who never really feels safe may feel a lot of relief when they use drugs or alcohol. Although the relief is temporary, it may feel almost miraculous because it’s something they don’t experience regularly. If they continue seeking relief through the substance, they may begin associating the substance with that lack of anxiety or terror that they otherwise would feel. Further, if they continue the cycle, strengthening the association, it maybe get harder and harder to resist using that substance. This can be the case even if they know it’s harmful or know that they’re going to feel worse later. If the cycle repeats itself enough, that person has developed an addiction. 

If you, or someone you know, struggles with addiction, it’s important to understand that it’s an attempt to feel normal. It’s an attempt to regulate anxiety and feelings that feel unbearable. An addiction does not develop because a person is weak or because that person is reckless. It develops because the substance that they found provided some much needed relief. 

Unfortunately, addiction is also harmful and can negatively impact a person’s physical health, mental health, ability to function in life, and quality of their relationships. It leads to a whole host of other problems. But quitting doesn’t really feel like an option, right? Because it means going back to those intolerable feelings that were there in the first place that may be related to trauma. So what do you do? You’re kind of stuck in this place where either you’re using a substance that’s causing you harm or you’re feeling these emotions that are pretty unbearable. Well, the best thing to do is to try to find some help. 

Find Help Managing Trauma and Addiction

If you can, find a mental health clinician or a team of mental health clinicians who specialize in addiction and trauma. They can help you to establish a course of treatment that will work best for you. This may be an inpatient situation or working with a therapist; it depends on the severity of your situation. For some people, the course of treatment is focusing on sobriety and developing the coping skills necessary to be able to cope with the feelings that underlie the addiction and then addressing the trauma. 

Read more about substance abuse treatment

In other cases, the person may need to scale back the substance abuse to a point where it’s more manageable and then address the trauma. This is a harm-reduction approach where you’re not getting fully sober, but rather are scaling back your substance use to the point where it’s a little more sustainable, and then you’re addressing the trauma. Either way, the goal is to find a way to eliminate or greatly reduce the harmful impact of the substance use and to address the underlying feelings that drove this person to the substances initially. Both of these things are important to address; if you miss one of them, then the other is likely to come back. 

If you get sober but are dealing with a lot of post-traumatic stress, there’s a good chance you could relapse because those feelings are what drove you to the substance initially. If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, it is probably going to be helpful to view the situation with compassion and understanding that this is a way to cope with something that feels unbearable. Seeking treatment that can address both the addiction and the trauma is often the key to getting sober and staying sober, or for some people, just finding a healthier balance that may not involve full sobriety. 

Read more about healing the pain of addiction