Trauma and addiction.
This week I am 18 years sober and reflecting out loud about what I’ve learned on my journey. In a follow up to yesterday’s post I wanted to talk more about trauma and addiction.
Trauma occurs when an event or set of conditions sensitizes your stress response system. The “stress response” system, made up of your brain and nervous system, regulates the flight, fight, freeze response to a perception of threat. An activated stress response system can feel like anxiety, depression, panic, numbness, dissociation, detachment, edginess, dread, fear, paranoia and more. These feelings are extremely uncomfortable and very compelling. They exist to mobilize a response to threat. They compel you to safety. They are designed by nature not to be ignored. The problem with trauma is that the threat is often in the past. In a person who has been impacted by trauma, the dysregulation described above can be more frequent, more intense, last longer and can be very hard to resolve. In some cases, people have lived with such constant dysregulation that they don’t know what it’s like to live without. I’m one of those people. I have had thousands of anxiety and panic attacks in my life. It puts a huge demand on you and sometimes makes it hard to function. I like to say that I have “thrive” days and “survive” days. Too many “survive” days in a row can wear you out. We do anything we can to cope, and are especially vulnerable to addiction behaviors.
Trauma effects people in many ways. It can effect your experience of yourself (Shame and negative self regard). It impacts your relational capacities (Poor boundaries, deference to others). It impacts your perception of the world and other people. (Hyper-vigilance, distrust, catastrophizing) It effects your physical health. All of these, in turn, leads to more dysregulation.
Many people who have been impacted by trauma cannot emotionally regulate themselves. Given the compelling nature of trauma dysregulation, it follows that those whose inborn capacities for emotional regulation have been compromised, or are under-developed will need to find other ways of addressing the discomfort. This is where substances and behaviors that help you feel relief come in.
I started drinking when I was 21. I had survived 19 years in a home with a sometimes violent authoritarian father. My mother had just died from cancer. I was coming out of the closet in the middle of the AIDS crisis in an era much more hostile towards gay people than today is. I had seen two kids get shot and killed at a party. My father disowned me when I came out. I felt disconnected from my family. I was sad, angry and having massive panic attacks on a regular basis. When I discovered drinking, I found the one thing that I knew could help numb the trauma chemicals constantly pumping through my body. I drank about 6 days a week for 13 years. I drank through my first breakup. I drank though a job I hated, through bad relationships and through September 11th (which I watched with my own eyes in NYC.)
The problem, of course, with addictive numbing behaviors, is that they ultimately compound your suffering. By the end of my 13 year drinking run, I would get severely hung over on just one or two beers. My body was no longer able to do it. The cost benefit analysis had swung into mostly cost and minimal benefit.
By the time I was ready to quit drinking, I had been meditating and reading Buddhist books for over a decade. I had some skills under my belt and critically, I had found a Buddhist community and a teacher. My teacher, Noah Levine, helped me get sober by coaching me on how to relate differently to anxiety. “Invite it to come kill you” he said. He wanted me to call anxiety’s bluff to prove that it would not, in fact, kill me. He was right. I started to track anxiety in my body. I started to see it just as a collection of sensations. I’d watch it rise, do it’s scary dance and be replaced by something else. I started to understand it’s predictable impermanence. This was the beginning of my sobriety.
I would not understand that the anxiety was related to trauma for another 10 years. It would take longer to identify the underlying depression that was also constantly there underneath anxiety.
When I got “sober” drinking was replaced by sex. Sex would be replaced by numbing with food and sugar. Food would be replaced by buying expensive rare records. I started to understand that alcohol was just one way I got a fix. It had nothing to do with the substance or behavior. The real issue was trauma. Addiction was secondary. Addiction, manifesting in endless ways, was a symptom of trauma.
In 2011, I was on a silent retreat when I started having panic attacks. I was lucky enough to have a teacher who was able to identify that the panic attacks were related to trauma.
A couple months later, I was starting what would become a 4 year training in a trauma resolution system called somatic experiencing. The training was revelatory. In that world everyone understood that addiction was one of the ways traumatized people cope. We understand that addiction and trauma so obviously go hand in hand. It re-framed the way I understood addiction was and also what “recovery” meant.
I’m not willing to pronounce that everyone who experiences addiction has underlying trauma. I don’t really know. But having worked in rehabs and in private coaching practice. I’ve heard peoples life stories. I’ve coached them through relapses into stable recovery. I’ve seen their paperwork. I believe trauma is very commonly central to the experience of addiction. I think it remains an overlooked dimension of the experience of addiction. Even in the Buddhist recovery world it’s treated as marginalized variable.
Buddhism was so helpful in giving me management skills. Mindfulness is a wonderful tool to help you relate and respond to to whatever is happening more skillfully. Mindfulness and community kept me sober. That was huge. But the insight Buddhism offered into the real nature of what was going on for me was ultimately limited. Buddhism shapes my life, but it isn’t a trauma resolution system. You only get so far watching the arising and passing of activation and deactivation cycles over an over again. Only when I understood trauma, it’s nature and how it functions was I able to begin to really begin to heal. It was like finding a missing map.
I am 18 years sober. I don’t identify as an addict. I don’t believe in the “disease”of alcoholism. I don’t believe in powerlessness. I understand myself as a person who has been impacted by trauma, who drank to numb the chronic anxiety, panic and grinding depression associated with developmental, shock and social trauma. I’ve managed a lot in this life. But I reject victimhood. I believe that one of the arches of healing is the move from helplessness and victimhood to self possession, personal responsibility and a sense of empowerment. I want to orient to joy and beauty and all that’s good about the world. That’s what recovery looks like to me. That and a-lot of compassion for when I have those “survive” days, eat too much sugar and buy a 12th copy of KISS Alive 2 (a red splatter repress, which I received in the mail yesterday).