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Why Does Trauma Cause Addiction?

Why are we all in some kind of pain or suffering? Those of us that could catch on sooner, will figure it out and try to understand our suffering and our pain. Our pain of what?

I thought I was born with some kind of learning disability. I felt like maybe my mom dropped me on my head.

When I was in school, things that the teacher was trying to teach, was way over my head. That’s after I learned to speak and read English.

I learned how to read and speak English, thanks to my 4th-grade teacher who took “my time” after school to mentor me.  I thought she was punishing me for stabbing the other kids with my pin.

I used to carry a long hatpin in my braided hair to defend myself during recess or sometimes after school. I had to fight off some of the kids that wanted to beat me up. Why I don’t know!

Sometimes, there were like 12 kids and just me. NAWW… there were only two and/or three. But it felt like a lot of them to fight off.

This story has nothing to do with becoming addicted to drugs, Nothing, but it was a good story, and it’s true too.

Sometimes, I like to break the monotony. Part of my ADHD, maybe.

Why do some of us get addicted to alcohol and drugs? We all can agree that addiction is a chemical reaction in the brain. This can be caused by ingesting a substance that triggers addictive brain synapses, or your brain – without any other exterior substance – can fire off the same addictive response, even though no drug or substance was ingested. Trauma is such a trigger device.

In terms of trauma, in the beginning, people who go through a traumatic event turn to alcohol and other pain-relieving measures to forget about what occurred and to escape from the horrible memories of their traumatic experience.

An early stressful event can also grow the risk of substance abuse issues, due to attempts to self-medicate or hose-down mood signs associated with a deregulated organic pressure of reacting to pain and suffering.

How do you explain trauma-informed care?

Trauma-informed care is a strength-based total framework that is grounded in the information and responsiveness to, the effect of the trauma, that emphasizes bodily, psychological, and emotional protection for survivors. This creates opportunities for survivors to rebuild and have a sense of control.

 How does trauma affect the mind?

In the patient’s response to traumatic events, a secondary stress hormone known as adrenalin gets launched into the bloodstream, in an area of the mind referred to as the amygdala and sends it into overdrive. The amygdala is responsible for triggering flashbacks and is critical in detecting emotions consisting of fear.

How do you know if you need help?

Symptoms

  1. Lose track of time.
  2. Chronic headache or headaches that linger or get worse.
  3. Convulsions or seizures.
  4. Vomiting or nausea.
  5. Dilation of one or each pupil of the eyes
  6. Clean fluids draining from the nose or ears.
  7. Unable to wake up from sleep.

The link between childhood trauma and addictions

The human mind is one of the most amazingly adaptive things on earth, the brain can react and adapt to whatever you go through in your existence. It is amazingly made.

This potentially plays into every available part of your presence, allowing you to analyze new abilities and make memories as you move throughout the stage where life plays out.

How does plasticity help in adulthood?

Plasticity is also why the things you enjoy in your youth are congruent with you into your formative years and maturity. Plasticity is a series of neurological systems that fire in succession based on your experience, how you react, behave, and understand the human nature of situations.

Your brain’s neurons change with the experiences that affect your life. It continues as you mature into adulthood.

There is a clear connection between early life trauma and alcoholism and other addictions. This connection between child abuse and adulthood trauma occurs because adolescent trauma and maltreatment may be the motive behind abnormalities inside the brain structure.

Those abnormalities can cause various problems with cognition and behavior. Excessive degrees of cortisol and other stress hormone compounds from neurological systems based on years of trauma, and these systems have a hugely negative effect on normal brain function and development.

Treatment:

Trauma can create a series of long-term intellectual fitness problems, including PTSD. As many as one-third of all individuals with addictions experienced some form of trauma in the course of their formative years.

Those individuals might also model their substance abuse and self-medication on behaviors they observed from a loved one while developing, a “learned behavior”.

This self-medication is the foundation for linking trauma and substance abuse.

Treating dependency and alcoholism resulting from trauma includes addiction therapy which starts evolving together with detoxing to wean your body off drugs or alcoholism, with medically supervised environmental dependency specialists, leading to understanding and formulating a highly customized approach to behavioral rehabilitation.

In the end, you may be able to supersede your past substance use and trauma by accepting your true faith and collaboration. As you analyze coping mechanisms apart from self-medicating, you’ll begin to feel empowered and strong again.

Aren’t you sick and tired of being sick and tired?

Here’s another way to heal.

Being addicted to drugs, alcohol, or any other substance is not easy to overcome, because it takes a source stronger than you or me to assist us with this problem. Addiction hurts us to the core.

A higher power, having a purpose in our lives, having faith in something far superior to anything we could otherwise imagine, some of us are “put off” hearing it, but it takes God.

Spirituality is important to recovery. Alcohol and drugs make us feel like we are alone. They make us feel like there is no reason to live. “I am too weak” “I am not strong enough to get off drugs” Are you willing to try?

You are not alone.  Please get help.

Many Blessings to you.