Making the Shift: Trauma and Addiction
Monday, July 26th, 2010 • PTSD Recovery Tips •
Last year Paul Radkowski guest posted on this blog about Facing the Future. It was a cool series highlighting topics to think about in trauma recovery.
Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing Paul LIVE about the correlation between trauma and addiction. He’s got an incredibly knowledgeable, proactive, positive and creative way of looking at things. In this interview, which I’m posting live for you today, we covered:
- definition of trauma, plus its impacts
- definition of addiction, plus how to recognize it
- ideas for recovery
Paul also shared with me a very empowered model called the 16 steps. He recently blogged about it here. You can find the 16 step link here.
Interwoven throughout our discussion were scientific and psychological facts that will help you get a better picture of traum and addiction and how one affects the other.
Paul’s commentary is full of interesting info that will help you make the shift from struggling in the grip of trauma and addiction to learning how to understand it and take action. For example, I learned that stress in the mind produces 1,400 physio/chemical responses in the body. Did you know that??
My own PTSD symptoms and journey involved an addiction to an eating disorder — for 20 years! I know how tough it can be to recognize, admit and change destructive addictive behaviors. HOWEVER, when we do educate ourselves and allow ourselves to see the truth, we can finally reach the beginning of a new phase of healing.
Check out the audio file here and let me know what you think!
Tags: addiction, eating disorder, ptsd, recovery, symptoms, trauma
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Thanks Michele for including the 16 Step Recovery Model. While the 12-Step model works well for many people, others find it problematic especially with some of the language of the model i.e. the concept of “powerlessness” for one (especially for those with a trauma history who already feel pretty “beat up” and powerless).
The 16 steps are considered to be more inclusive, wholistic and
empowering. I would like to just add a few more thoughts regarding recovery that I didn’t get around to in the interview.
Trauma is a dark, heavy energy. You will notice most children’s and adult’s drawings and depictions of trauma is usually colored in black and red.
Trauma gets encoded and stored in the body, essentially locked and frozen in a state of “survival mode”. The mind/body say’s “I don’t like what happened. I don’t ever want to experience this again and will be on red alert to make sure I don’t get as blind-sided again”.
When this happens, neural pathways and synaptic connections in the mind/body will work overtime to encode the memory, essentially to protect itself from future violation. However, that which will protect, will often imprison, i.e. getting stuck in the memory, feeling, and sensation of the trauma which I call “3rd degree emotional burn”.
The body is the sub-conscious mind. That’s why it usually takes a number of mind/body modalities like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy which alters the neuro-circuitry and challenges the core beliefs of the “world isn’t safe, can’t trust, I’m damaged etc”, which then alters the neuro-chemistry, i.e. mind/body releases feel good chemicals, growth hormones (vs. stress hormones), feeling less beat up etc.
You get more information on some of this with some of my recent blog posts http://recoveryourlife.blogspot.com/
Because the body is the sub-conscious mind, it also requires some form of energy psychology/somatic intervention, as well as addressing the sub-conscious mind (which often keeps playing out… “Don’t you try and tell me I’m safe, I know better and will continue to keep things on red alert”) through hypnosis etc.
Trauma effects us on many modalities so it often requires more than just one modality (i.e. “talk therapy”) to effectively address it.
Anyhew, I’m getting a bit long winded here. You can download a rather comprehensive free ebook and get additional info. from http://www.liferecoveryprogram.com/
Best of health and warmest regards, Paul Radkowski
- Success is about progress, not perfection