Trauma and Addiction

In my now 40 years of existence, I’ve come to know a part of myself that tends towards addictive behaviors. For the longest time, I just brushed it off as an addictive personality, or some chemical imbalance in my brain. Something I just needed to have willpower over, and any indulgence was a sign of weakness to be ruthlessly self criticized as a moment of weakness and a sign of my degenerate self taking control of my higher self.

For decades I lived in a perpetual cycle of use, self abuse, abstinence and then relapse. I don’t write this to say that I’m cured by far, nor will I say the above cycle cannot work. In my own life, the cycle winds up in a place where it’s more painful to stay in the wash than to change, and eventually I did change. The power of hindsight, though, shows me that I simply changed from one substance to another, and eventually when substances don’t work, I’d switch to an experience, or a person, or anything that would create that high feeling.

In this very personal article, I’ll share a little about my own journey, how I believe trauma triggers the addiction cycle, and what I’ve done to overcome it enough to live a more balanced life.

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In college, I drank a LOT. A normal weekend for me would easily be 20+ drinks. It didn’t get any better when I was a personal trainer in Los Angeles. In fact, the only thing that changed for the most part was drinks just became more expensive, as the location changed from cheap bars in Chico to nightclubs in LA or Vegas. There were social elements to both, of course, and alcohol in our culture is one of those socially accepted vices because of it. But when I meditate and look back at who I was back then, I wasn’t only drinking to lubricate the social element, I was dependent on a few drinks to even have the courage to allow myself to go out. It was as if I needed the inhibition factor of alcohol to speak; to mask the pain of social anxiety and feeling like an imposture around people I called friends.

It isn’t always a substance when it comes to addiction, either. For me, pornography and masturbation were big issues throughout my life. First exposed around 13, my brain had become wired to expect fantasy over reality by the ever increasing stimuli of porn. There’s a lot of debate in the psychology world about pornography, and its toxic effects on the brain. One side argues that sexuality is a natural part of psychology, and says things like “healthy masturbation,” while the other side argues that there is no safe amount of porn, especially when people are exposed at such vulnerable ages of brain development. But either way for me as a teenager, it was simply another avenue I could go down to get away from real life.

How about an addiction to a person or people? Starting at 15 and ending after college, I went from one bad relationship or friend group to another. I was always attaching myself to people who liked who I was presenting myself to be, only to have it blow up in my face when they found out who I truly was. Yet as my immature self blamed them for being the problem, my older self can see clearly that I was wearing masks I thought I needed to in order to be accepted. It wasn’t like I was oblivious to this, either. It was as if there was always a part of me trying to tell myself it was a bad fit, yet no matter how much I tried to listen to that part, another more convincing part would come in and say, “but you’ll be alone. Alone is unsafe.”

Safe Love

The crucial realization for me was to admit to myself how unsafe I felt in my life. Well intentioned friends will tell me how gregarious I am, and remind me of all the good I’ve had in my life. My often heartbroken parents and family hear me talk about a traumatic childhood and wonder what the hell I’m talking about, often saying I think too much, and need to focus more on gratitude and all the good memories.

Great advice, and definitely a part of the healing journey. In fact, I posted a video on my YouTube channel a few months back, declaring that the best decision I’d made in regards to decreasing my overall feelings of malaise in life was to simply stop telling the stories of trauma anymore. I still encourage people who ask my advice about how to deal with trauma to stop reliving it by telling the story, and instead show them what I’m about to tell you about.

But before getting into what I call peaks and valleys, I want to quote Gabor Maté, a world renowned addiction specialist, who says “don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain?” This is critical to understand, as often when I speak about trauma with clients, they tell me with their rational brain that there’s no logical reason to think they should have any trauma that needs to be worked on. To understand how I believe this is wrong, we need to understand a little about how the brain is wired differently at different stages of our lives.

The Magical Thinking Phase

When we’re little kids, especially before the age of 7, our brains are still in a theta brain wave state. That’s a fancy way of saying that the brain is under a type of hypnosis, and believes anything is possible. It’s one of the many reasons kids will do and say the most fantastical things. While some things warm our hearts and make us smile, others require emergency trips to the hospital, and spark us parents to wonder about their chances of survivability.

When the brain is in this state, it is not seeing reality for what it is, it’s seeing reality as what it CAN be. What it can mean. This is why as parents, we can remember something as benign, while our kids later tell us a completely different story of what happened from their brain’s theta memories. And to the degree that the thing that happened was CONFUSING to them, and couldn’t be processed at the time, the brain will simply say ‘hit save on that, and come back later to process it.’

This doesn’t always have to be combined with fear, but when it is, we call it trauma. Confusion combined with fear of a loss of safety or love gets encoded into the nervous system in a unique way to those little magical creatures. Their brains say, “I’ve no idea what just happened, but I’m not going to save everything. I’m only going to hit save on two things: what I believe about what happened (the meaning), and the state my body was in and went into.”

An Example of Kid Brain Logic

My dad once took me out to throw a soft ball around at the park. I must’ve been 4 or 5, maybe 6. Regardless of the age, it was one that required him underhand lobbing the ball to me and a colossal amount of patience as I dropped the ball over and over, with very little ability to throw it back. And as a predictable little boy does, I told my dad if he threw the ball harder straight at me instead of an arc, I’d probably be able to catch it easier. He resisted at first, but eventually I wore him down, and he threw that ball straight and true right at the glove in front of my chest. Or at least, where that glove was.

Because here’s what intense memories at that age do. The details not relevant to the pain, for example why my glove hand wasn’t there anymore, or how fast he actually had thrown it, or if it was a sunny day, what I was wearing, etc. The memory only includes the intense pain and confusion as the wind got knocked out of me, and the precious half a second of the freeze state as I watched the flight of the ball coming at me.

Cue the hypnotic state of the brain and body. It wasn’t about what happened, it was about what it could mean. I’ve got horrible hand eye coordination (I’m not good enough). I’ve got to be forever in a state of hyper vigilance for anything, because if a ball can hurt me, anything can (the world is unsafe). My dad threw it, and he says he loves me (love is unsafe).

A crying baby has no idea what the nipple is, nor hunger, it just cries for safety. In the above example, key beliefs about the memory were saved, and whenever my nervous system craved safety or love at all, I found it safely in alcohol, or porn, or girls with low self esteem that I manipulated subconsciously into being a surrogate mommy. After all, the bottle will never say it doesn’t love me.

Years later, I asked my dad about this memory, and he said it was still an underhand throw, and no tears, and we had a great time getting ice cream afterwards. It’s as if that hypnotic state had taken something small and irrelevant, and turned it into a huge game of ‘what if,’ magnifying all the possible ways it could mean something dangerous. That’s only one mild example of something ‘traumatic’ in a theta nervous system that isn’t any big deal to a non theta brain.

The Peaks and Valleys of Life

I don’t want this article to sound like I’m one of those anti vice people. On the contrary, I’ve read articles in Nature about monkeys and even elephants fermenting fruit to create alcohol, and other animals knowingly ingesting psychoactive plants to get high. And as I said above, there’s social and even health benefits to alcohol.

The problem is not the substance or behavior. It’s the attempt at masking the pain.

In our lives, there’s many ups and downs. We can illustrate this by drawing a horizontal line from left to right, representing our timeline lived so far. And the ups and downs, or positive and negative experiences, are a wave on that line. Substances, habits and love are all ways we can heighten the positive experiences, or even be useful as a conscious temporary escape from the negative parts of our lives. Both the positive and negative can happen over a short time frame, like an afternoon, or a long period like years (think illness or the loss of a loved one). But overall, as humans, while we can’t get away from the negative experiences in life, we’re hoping to have more positive experiences (represented by the amount above the line) than the negative.

But here’s the catch. Experiences of any kind that are disproportionately extreme to the rest, what I call spike memories, will become a sort of baseline we compare everything else to. On the positive side, let’s say the best sex you’ve ever had in life, the brain will compare everything else to that one peak. On the negative side, the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, can overwhelm us to the point of disability; causing us to remember it so vividly that we’ll do anything to never experience it again.

If those experiences happen in that theta/hypnotic state, they become subconscious beliefs of how our life will be in the future, and overwhelm any memories that may support any other possible beliefs. These spikes end up making a small good or bad memory irrelevant, leading to the example above, where the experience of just playing catch with my dad (let’s say a plus 5 experience) will be vastly overshadowed by the spike of confusion, pain and fear (let’s say a negative 100). And the resulting beliefs of that negative 100 lead to any future experience with my father having the hope of being a plus 100 instead, resulting in a constant disappointment and lack of connection, no matter how many plus 20’s I can point to on that line.

But if I get drunk enough, I can temporarily make my nervous system numb enough to forget the feelings from that moment. I can artificially, with these substances or behaviours, mask the negative, and create a huge spike of positive feelings. Now enters the come down back to reality, and the resulting consequences of over indulging vices; the hangovers, the ruined relationships, the attention diverted away from work and health towards things that get us back to that positive ‘high’ state.

This is why, at least for me, no matter how many addictions I had overcome, my system never could stay away from the spike memories for long, and I’d soon reach for another way to receive safe love enough to forget the pain.

What Finally Helped

I say help, because unfortunately, as any addict knows, muscle memory and habits are powerful forces that can easily overwhelm the strongest of intentions. Even after the trauma is ‘healed,’ these tendencies are still something that need to be re-wired through constant attention, willpower, and social influences. Our environment can also pull us back into the habits, so we must be mindful of all the triggers for the habits, and create new ones in their place.

But remember how I said those painful memories when we’re young get saved until we are old enough to process them? With the help of alternate medicine and skilled healers, I was able to enter a hypnotic state enough to re-live those memories and create new beliefs. To see the events that actually happened, and not what my immature self made up about the experiences (like the catch example above, and many others). To decrease the severity of the negative spike memories back down small enough (and in some cases back to the plus side) that they stop overshadowing the rest of our memories in life.

Energy healers and medicines would have done nothing had I not done years of therapy, journaling and meditation, clearly identifying the spike memories to work on, in order from greatest spike to least, and what I wanted to replace the beliefs with. But one by one, my timeline became less of a saw, and more of a gentle sine wave, and I found myself less and less satisfied by the results of the constant highs I was previously reveling in.

The Real Work

I want to close out this article by sharing one final vulnerable realization with you. When I started my healing journey more than 15 years ago, I was looking for some sort of fix. Something that if I could change it, would make everything in my life better. What I came to realize instead was that I was actually looking for some memory or event that I could point to to justify my inability to grow up. You see, I don’t just say the brain hits save to process later, I say there’s a part that tries to preserve the memory so much that it also preserves our psyche in a state of perpetual childishness.

And once I balanced out the memories, I was able to see that all the negative parts of my timeline were the result of poor choices I had made, and no one else. I had to sober up and grow up fast, learning skills in my late 30’s that other people had mastered in high school. I had to realize that I couldn’t sit around waiting for the fix, and instead needed to take personal responsibility for things like my finances, my marriage, and being a parent.

In short: as a result of trying to heal my depression, I became truly depressed. And the only way to climb out of the depression was one adult decision at a time. These steps are unique to each individual, and I coach people through how to discover what these steps are for them. But for me, I had to label things like staying up late and playing video games as the child, and going to bed on time as the adult. I had to equate eating poorly as the child, and eating for my own unique metabolic needs as the adult. I did the work of listing out as many ways of reprogramming my habits and beliefs as I could, and after 6 months (and a lot of support and patience from my wife), I finally could start saying I was less depressed.

It finally hit home that what Marcus Parks wrote was true: “Mental health is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.” I had to accept that while I could not change what happened as a kid, I could change the resulting beliefs as an adult. To see those beliefs as no longer serving who I wanted to be, and make up new ones.

If this article resonates with you, I ask only one thing. No, don’t worry about sharing or subscribing. I want you to take 5 minutes and write down the top 5 negative things or traumas of your life. Whether bullet point or in detail, list them only as facts, not the beliefs yet. Then, write down what you’ve believed those things to mean so far. There, we can put loads of detail.

But here’s the best part. Now write what those events CAN mean in your life that if you programmed yourself to believe them would radically change your life for the better. You see, ultimately the truth does not matter. Stop trying to go into the past to figure out what happened. Instead, take responsibility for your life, and write your own future.

If you liked this, check out my course at Four Lights Wellness, where I cover both physical and mental aspects of wellness: Healing (e)Motions: Trauma Release Exercises for People with Stress offers targeted physiological exercises aimed at reducing stress and mental health dysfunctions that can contribute to physical pain.

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