I came across this great article titled: “Addiction doc says: It’s not the drugs. It’s the ACEs…adverse childhood experiences.”, written by Jane Ellen Stevens and posted on AcesTooHigh.com

Yes to all of it.

I’ve been a psychotherapist for almost 20 years. I know what all the other therapists I know, know – and that is – that our body is always seeking safety, any way we can get it. Even if its harmful and destructive to us, like addiction. Ritualized compulsive comfort-seeking. Our bodies will seek comfort from the distress of our childhood and trauma, any way it can, regardless of the cost.

What are ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences)? Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are traumatic events occurring before age 18. A landmark study in the 1990s found a significant relationship between the number of ACEs a person experienced and a variety of negative outcomes in adulthood, including poor physical and mental health, substance abuse, and risky behaviors. These events are extremely distressing to developing brains and impact our emotional wiring for the rest of our lives.

What is this distress that we carry with us from our childhood? It’s so much – its growing up with an angry critical father, its having an unstable mother who can unleash her anger on you at any time, its having an overly anxious parent or two that made you believe the world was unsafe, its feeling like a burden to your overworked and over-stressed parents, its the consistent disappointment and chaos of an alcoholic family system, its consistent distress from financial struggles, its when a job loss is unbearable on parents and they can’t cope, its when one or two or your parents can’t regulate their emotions and they yell, hit, abuse, fly off the handle at any moment, etc. It is also the abuse that is talked about – sexual abuse, physical abuse and extreme neglect. Unless you have healed enough in therapy to integrate the distress your nervous system endured, and became wired for, you may not realize that all of these patterns children endure on a daily basis, wire them for distress.

Is it all from our families? No… sometimes children must face distressful relationships and structures and they don’t tell their parents, or parents don’t see it, or deny it. Maybe abuse from a family member, bullying in school, not fitting in, in school. Children could go through years of distress that their parents may simply write off as ‘something they will grow out of’ or parents may not be alarmed because they may be the same way. If a parent has anxiety he/she may not be alarmed at a child having anxiety, as an example. It is so important to get children the help they need BEFORE they become of age where alcohol and drugs are easily accessible.

Our body is always seeking safety from the distress. What does this mean? It means that the amazing complexity of our physical/ emotional/ and spiritual body is working all the time to protect and shield us from this distress and lead us toward safety, even if for the briefest moment, and even if this safety seeking causes damage.

How does addiction develop? According to Dr. Sumrok, Whether you’re talking about obesity, addiction to cigarettes, alcohol or opioids, the cause is the same, he says: “It’s the trauma of childhood that causes neurobiological changes.” And the symptoms we saw 40 years ago in soldiers returning from Vietnam are the same in the people he sees today who are addicted to opioids or other substances or behaviors that help them cope with the anxiety, depression, hopelessness, fear, anger, and/or frustration that continues to be generated from the trauma they experienced as children.”

Our body doesn’t differentiate an emotional response from today, or the past. The wiring you have, was created then, unless you’ve had the opportunity to heal and integrate your past distress with your present experiences.

When do people turn to drugs and alcohol? Perhaps – when the opportunity presents itself – is the best answer. It could be the first time your teen goes to a party where alcohol or drugs are present. Clients of mine often remember those first experiences. They have reported feeling free, feeling happy, or having a dark cloud lifted for the first time. They remember the escape from the pain. It could be a car accident when opioids are prescribed. It could be well into adulthood when current life stressors just ignite the trauma already stored in your body.

Understanding your trauma will help you heal. “Sumrok normalizes their addiction, which he explains is the coping behavior they adopted because they weren’t provided with a healthy alternative when they were young. He explains the science of adverse childhood experiences to them, and how their addictions are a normal – and a predictable – result of their childhood trauma. He explains what happens in the brain when they experience toxic stress, how their amygdala is their emotional fuse box. How the thinking part of their brain didn’t develop the way it should have. How it goes offline at the first sign of danger, even if they’re not connecting the trigger with the experience. Drugs like Zoloft don’t really help much, he tells them. Zoloft and other anti-depressants don’t remove the memory triggered by the odor of after shave that was worn by your uncle who sexually abused you when you were eight, or the memory triggered by a voice that sounds just like your mother who used to beat you with a belt, or by a face of a man  who looks like your father who used to scream at you about how worthless you were…the examples are infinite. That’s why van der Kolk says, “’The body keeps the score’,” Sumrok says. (An amazing book by the way – The Body Keeps the score)

Back to my work as a psychotherapist. I’ve spent thousands of hours across from adults as they awaken to the trauma of their past. A large part of the work is to normalize their current day behaviors as a direct result of what they experienced. As Dr. Sumrok states “Ritualized compulsive comfort-seeking (what traditionalists call addiction) is a normal response to the adversity experienced in childhood, just like bleeding is a normal response to being stabbed.”

This concept is extremely relieving to clients – it’s a ‘game changer’ for people I work with who have seen other therapists in the past that just focus on present-day solution focused change. It makes sense to people and they can understand that they aren’t crazy…their body is just seeking safety the only way it knows how. We spend as much time as we need processing the past, integrating the distress with present day, and healing from the pain and fear.

An integrated approach to addiction: We must heal the trauma to successfully free those who are addicted. And the same goes with everyone who is struggling. Weekly individual therapy where the trauma can be healed is a necessary ingredient in an integrative approach to treating addiction. If you or a loved one is struggling with addiction, ask about weekly psychotherapy that is trauma focused, to heal what is stored in the body. The best approach is an integrative approach.

For more information:

Old Bridge Marriage and Family is a private psychotherapy group practice in Old Bridge, NJ. Ellen Gregory, LMFT, author of this post, is the owner and clinical director of the practice. If you are in our local area and are in need of individual therapy, couples counseling, family therapy or group therapy, reach out.

Resources:

Addiction doc says: It’s not the drugs. It’s the ACEs…adverse childhood experiences.”, written by Jane Ellen Stevens and posted on AcesTooHigh.com

Adverse Childhood Experience Scale (ACE): Take the Quiz

Ted Talk – How Childhood trauma affects health across a life time:

 

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