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“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe |
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Courtesy The Traumatology Institute. Consider adding this Online Trauma Recovery Program to your personal Care-Plan.
In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Mate
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Traumatic Stress Injury: What Is Addiction?
I'll start with a description of addiction as the issue is defined by Gabor Mate. Dr. Mate (retired) is my go-to virtual teacher on addictions. His understanding is well-earned, having worked as staff physician for Portland House in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, where Dr. Mate served for twelve years: |
"Addiction is manifested in any behavior that a person craves, finds temporary relief or pleasure in but suffers negative consequences as a result of, and yet has difficulty giving up. In brief: craving, relief, pleasure, suffering, impaired control. Note that this definition is not restricted to drugs but could encompass almost any human behavior, from sex to eating to shopping to gambling to extreme sports to TV to compulsive internet use: the list is endless."
"Trauma is the nature of addiction."
"Addiction is only a symptom, it's not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is trauma."
"Most of the drugs-of-choice we view as a problem are, in fact, pain-killers. We ask, 'Why the Addiction?' What we should be asking is, 'Why The Pain?'"
~ Dr. Gabor Mate (Retired).
I know my own experience as an addicted soul on Dr. Mate's terms. For me, as was taught my way with my first experience with a counselor who specializes in treating the issue, I was in the beginning using alcohol and other drugs as self-medication. Admittedly, however, all of my adult-life I learned well how to use alcohol as a crutch. Like my father before me, and his father before him, booze and I had already a long-standing personal relationship before any trauma hit me in my work as a BC paramedic.
My own alcohol use, like many, started in my youth. I grew up in a Canadian culture that celebrates near-about everything we throw a party over with alcohol as a mainsail for celebration. Additionally, I was a bullied kid across all my years of schooling, in part because I was viewed as a loser for not immediately falling into the party scene in eighth grade after first being quite the social-butterfly, swilling vodka on the bus with our first out-of-town trip.
My first actual experience of being drunk on alcohol came earlier. When I was only eleven years old, drawn to the stuff like a fly to light, a friend and I loved taking in bottles of his Dad's home-cooked wine. I next started drinking at fourteen. I'd hoped to avoid partying my school years away for my first couple of years of high-school. I ultimately gave-in to the pressures of peers, and took up partying with alcohol early on. By the time I left high-school, partying with alcohol and getting drunk with my peers happened every weekend.
This was unfortunately all too common for the Canadian kids of my own generation. We all used alcohol and pot. Some days while in school. Nobody I grew up with gave the behaviours really a lick of thought.
Alcohol use and addiction to alcohol was also a lingering genetic predisposition in my case. I've a family history of addiction on both sides of my family line-paternal and maternal. Given the perfect storm of repeated traumatic stress injuries in my work as a British Columbia paramedic, and given that basically nothing as a healthy alternative was offered to me once I completely fractured to help me avoid the issues:
I now doubt I'd have been able to avoid becoming addicted to alcohol and drugs, all things considered that were in my own way.
As I learned it might, alcohol use fell away rather easily over the years of my recovery. I turned to drug use once alcohol was no longer enough to cover-over the memories that caused me so much pain. As the Poe quote above states: "It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
Alcohol, mixed with the medications I was initially prescribed once diagnosed with PTSD, interacted in a way that my body soon rejected alcohol all-together. Not so much when my drug of choice shifted to something more suited to my trauma-troubled mind. Stimulants came along which unfortunately helped me to calm my brain down better than anything else that had been done to treat me even up to that point. The relief was instant, lending well to using drugs becoming stronger because unfortunately-they worked.
I've been addicted to drugs and accept addiction to alcohol now too. I accepted this as part of my own experience years ago.
I'm addicted to nicotine too. I no longer drink. I still smoke cigarettes. I use cannabis, with physician support, for sleep. Other drugs of choice have waned considerably in my life but I admittedly will still turn to those drugs if ever I'm out of remission with my trauma symptoms and lose my ability to think.
Stimulants, calming the mind?
This isn't that difficult to consider valid if we look at how ADHD is treated in kids today. The drugs prescribed to treat ADHD in kids today is basically speed. The stimulants I had access to were cocaine and crystal meth. Both worked to calm my mind down for me rather too-nicely.
As for all the other avenues of addiction that Dr. Mate describes above, I can comfortably admit that across the most troubling periods of my life, I've been personally addicted to practically every one of those too.
"Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-and-Roll". This is a motto my own generation adopted that I'll also admit I mismanaged in my life. If it wasn't about a party, prior to my signing up to serve as a paramedic, life wasn't all that grand to live in my own estimation. To take Dr. Mate's description a slight-step further:
I'm also now well aware of the fact that for many upper-tier, elite humans in our society, power, wealth, and status acquisition is frankly a set of functional addictions we have running in the society. These are addictions for which the sufferers are rather ironically revered. I've come to learn that our competitive nature as humans in Canada isn't doing us individually or collectively all that much good.
The point is: Our shared-sources for addiction may be, as most other things are, unique to ourselves; however, my own lived experience agrees with Dr. Mate and others in sharing what addiction is:
Addiction-is-Addiction-is-Addiction, regardless of that to which we may become addicted. An article written for Psychology Today Canada reiterates Dr. Mate's position, adding a description of the connection in the body of these drugs and behaviours of choice to activity present in the human brain. It is, I've learned, the 'trouble with addiction' that the reinforcing affect of the behaviour is connected directly inside with one of one of the most powerful, pleasure-generating, on-board (already in the human body) chemicals known to man:
'In the brain, dopamine functions as a neurotransmitter—a chemical released by neurons (nerve cells) to send signals to other nerve cells. The brain includes several distinct dopamine pathways, one of which plays a major role in the motivational component of reward-motivated behavior'. (Dopamine-Wikipedia).
This is from Psychology Today:
"Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences. Addiction may involve the use of substances such as alcohol, inhalants, opioids, cocaine, nicotine, and others, or behaviors such as gambling; there is scientific evidence that the addictive substances and behaviors share a key neurobiological feature—they intensely activate brain pathways of reward and reinforcement, many of which involve the neurotransmitter dopamine."
Where we've been led to believe these drugs we hear about are powerfully addictive, what I've learned over time and study is that in reality we become addicted to the release of dopamine. In fact, with certain addictions the greatest release of dopamine happens not in using any drug. The greatest release of dopamine for the addicted soul comes via the behaviour of seeking out those drugs we hope to use.
I stand, however, with Dr. Mate and agree with him that trauma issues lie at the root of pretty much all addictions. I know not one of my addicted friends who've not got a story of trauma to tell. Some stories of which would curl the hair of the most seasoned trauma-informed clinicians working in Canada today.
For those of us who've been traumatized in life, including those traumatized via the work we do, and those impacted by trauma in the form of Adverse Childhood Experiences, the most current information we have available to us today makes it pretty clear that trauma issues lie at the root of most addiction. Once addicted and struggling, the devil that is human-stigmatization plays a key role in keeping us stuck in addiction's patterns of behaviour. Once we start turning to the fast-acting pain-reliever that any addictive substance, liquid, or behavioural can be (enough times in uninformed succession) what starts as a way to manage troubling emotions via self-medication can turn into an experience with full-blown addiction over sometimes a very short period of time.
From there, because addiction specifically remains a stigmatized, misunderstood issue in Canadian society, with the addicted still facing criminal proceedings should we be 'caught' with any prohibited substances in our pockets, this stigmatization via criminalization serves to keep us hiding from any-and-all who may judge us inappropriately for simply being ill.
Hide away from anything? Try to NOT think about something? What do we get?
I've shared elsewhere on the site that what we focus on expands. I know this is a valid statement. I know as well that this applies to that which we do not wish to do. Focusing on 'not using drugs' only served, for me, to make the drive to use them that much more strong.
Make no mistake. Traumatizing experience ignite illness when the trauma of these experiences are left unresolved. Addiction's comorbidity with PTSD, along with Depression in many cases, makes this gather all together into a perfect cocktail that only hopes to keep us in a state of dysfunction long-term. Traumatizing experiences make it difficult some days to breathe, let alone, to go out and about hoping to fake-one's-way in life once PTSD takes hold. Feeding the medicines of addiction to ourselves, along with our traumatizing experiences in memory, combined again with the nature of addictive substances, liquids, and behaviours to act with high-level releasing capacity in the brain of dopamine:
Self-Compassion demands that I suggest that we who end up in the addiction boat grow to understand that addiction with trauma driving the issue is NOT a choice one makes consciously.
If I could personally turn-back time, knowing in hind-sight what I know today about trauma and addiction acting in a sickening concert of horrible, nonsensical, off-key tunes inside:
I'd not EVER have allowed myself use of anything other than what my physicians were able to prescribe to help diminish my own pain. Even with some of these legally prescribed so-called medicines, the legal ones, like the SSRI Anti-depressants and Anti-Psychotics I was originally prescribed, knowing what I know now, I'd have avoided even these legal-drugs altogether as well.
This point about the legal medicines prescribed to treat trauma issues is a discussion, though, for another page.
This I know for sure:
Trauma ignites intense psychic pain that these drugs/behaviours of choice, using release of dopamine in the brain, help to quell somewhat by offering rest from this pain. As short term as such chemically/behavoiurally-induced rest can be, for a time these things do work to calm the mind. In the beginning these drugs and behaviours work well-I'd argue too well, in fact. It's only once addiction takes over that I personally found the drugs and behaviours themselves to be a problem that needed correction.
By then, for me, and too many others I know, I woke up to this reality too-late to keep addiction at bay.
It didn't help that part of my own PTSD experience included the complication of my body turning on itself. I believe, and I've had physician confirmation, that the high-levels of stress-hormones running through my body due to PTSD taking root, contributed to early-onset (in my 40's) osteoarthritis. Adding physical pain (intense) on-top of emotional pain for which a sojourn into opiate use only served to make addiction for me that much more inevitable:
It wasn't until my hips broke down completely and I was granted relief via surgical replacement of my hips that my own life with intense chronic pain finally went to sleep. I suffer with chronic back-pain, left-over too from my years in the work. I don't need even a Tylenol these days to deal with that pain. My back pain is nothing like the bone-on-bone hip-pain I lived with on top of struggling with PTSD. I was nearly 7 of the last 13 years in a state of needing to manage both physical and chronic emotional suffering.
I wish it were as easy as one 'just saying no' to such things as taking any drug. Reality is far less kind. I challenge anyone reading here to consider what a life, for years, living with chronic emotional pain and later chronic physical pain might do in regards to drug-use and addiction issues developing. This too is another perfect-storm scenario that makes drug use first of all at the very least tempting. Secondly, I can say that when the pain is intense, I think we'll do near anything to find relief, and abandon in doing so any concern at all for potential addictive consequences.
Chronic pain in both forms is horrific to contend with. With little offered to help us combat even serious physical pain from the medical community these days beyond opiates, I'm personally not surprised that we've an epidemic underway in North America quite frankly. Add to this the marketing genius of Big-Pharma, who've basically sold us all of late on the non-addictive nature of synthetic opiates, we get what we get as an outcome. Add to this reality the near-abandonment of policy-makers of any efforts to stabilize mental health and addictions treatment frameworks in Canada, and we end up precisely where we are today too:
Sorting out an addictions crisis. A growing issue that still as I write (September, 2018) is showing nothing to indicate that we're any closer to solving the problem than we were five years ago, when the alarm-bells first chimed warning us of this doom now on our collective Canadian (North American) (Worldwide) plates.
Denial. That's a human-inner-beast. It's denial that keeps us from seeking help for trauma. It's denial that keeps us from seeking addictions help. It's denial too that keeps policy-makers and the medical community reticent in dealing with these issues honourably and head-on.
It's said we must first 'bottom-out' before we are willing to accept help from anyone for anything. I disagree. We often do-so, but there's absolutely no logical reason that we'd make a conscious choice to hit rock-bottom before we seek and can accept right help.
That's the power of denial in action at it's worst.
I'm fully aware that we must often go-there, bottoming-out, before we wake up to reality. All I can say is that I wish I'd listened to all the warnings that were coming at me over my years of struggle. I wish I'd heard about trauma issues sooner. I wish I'd reflected more openly on the lives my addicted family-members lived that I lived along with many as a child.
I wish, more than anything else, that I'd never started drinking or drugging.
I wish the lives of my addicted friends had warned me enough that I dropped my own denial early on, before addiction took hold to complicate all the rest of my own struggling.
I've many regrets like this running inside still today. I regret my own addiction-behavours more than I can express to those I love.
"When right help is offered and accepted? People will get well. When right help is denied (sanctuary trauma again) or cases of workplace injury (both physical and psychological) are mismanaged by employers, systems, friends, family, peers, and the society at large? People CAN NOT get well." ~ Dr. Jonathan Douglas, Parahrased. (Director, Badge-of-Life-Canada).
Where our suffering is concerned, we simply can't get right help unless we put up our hand and indicate we need it. Even then still, our systems of care are so-far-behind the eight-ball, it remains, for me, highly-discouraging. If we've money in our jeans, we can buy for ourselves the very best of treatments. If we are living on the low-end of Canadian income, it's much more difficult to access right care. If we are living in poverty, getting help is nearly impossible in this country.
When I say 'help' here, I mean, trauma-informed, specialized help. Unfortunately I know as well far too many former First Responders in Canada who are living an imposed life of poverty due to failings in our systems and the failings of employers. I know far too many who are stuck in a poverty hole, forced to accept said poverty due to inadequacies in funding our social service support systems, and unfortunately too, our Canada Pension Plan.
For persons permanently disabled, forced to accept social assistance or CPP-Disability benefits, neither today meets real costs of living. In fact, the levels of income from these sources for the permanently disabled in Canada, as things stand in regard to housing costs, isn't enough for many to meet even basic needs like rent.
We can't get right help for trauma unless we're willing to admit to ourselves we've suffered it. We can't get right help in Canada either if we can't afford to pay for it.
We can't get right help for Depression unless we're willing to admit to feeling so desperately worthless to ourselves, some days we don't even want to get out of bed. If Depression is on-board with trauma driving that issue, we can't get right help without access to trauma-informed care.
We can't get right help for Addictions unless we're willing to admit that our drug-use/alcohol-use/or behaviour patterns are warning us that we've taken ourselves down a road with these things much too far. We can't get help for Addictions either without right, trauma-informed care available to us.
Again, if we can't pay? We're stuck in a mess, because where trauma is concerned, not even our physicians have the information they need to effectively serve and treat us. This is fact. Our physicians in Canada in general practice get little education about trauma and what that does to us. Everything they serve is accompanied with a pill. Psychiatry too is remiss. This angers me more than I can express, so I'll once again turn to the words, as I've done on other pages, of Norman Lamb, British MP and a strong advocate for mental health issues who spoke in Canada in 2016:
"It's not only morally wrong, it's economically stupid for Governments (society) to NOT place mental health care on the same tiers as physical health care."
I throw this around enough in my day-to-day advocacy effort on social media. Perhaps, one day, a policy-maker will read these words and take them to heart as I've needed to do as an expression towards myself that points out that I, and addicted Canadian, isn't 'the' problem in this society. In as much as the addicted life pains those we love to the point that many of us are excommunicated entirely from family, it is the issue of not making mental health and addictions care a priority, on the part of policy-makers and the society on the whole, that keeps us stuck in lives with others addicted as means to support ourselves within the company of like-stricken peers who get it.
I'll qualify again that help is available in Canada, as I've shared above. More-so available for some in the society over others, particularly for the affluent in Canadian Society who have no problem at all getting the best of care for addiction.
To top that off, should a well-to-do Canadian citizen go into treatment for addiction, or for trauma-issues for that matter, with wealth backing her up, with status on her side, and with power to make such a decision to seek care unimpeded:
She can buy in this country the best care available and known to man. When she returns from treatment, most will throw a party, patting her on the back for having the 'courage to come back' from the struggle.
(I despise this campaign in BC: The 'Courage to Come Back=A Pet-Peeve for me, along with "Bell Let's Talk" and other ridiculous marketing gimmicks used to exploit the issues of addiction and mental health at the corporate level for corporate image gains).
For those who may find ourselves in the streets of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, with zero-means, and near-zero access to the care that those with affluence are empowered to access in Canada?
I turn again to Dr. Gabor Mate:
"If I were to design a system of care that keeps people addicted, I'd design the very system we have currently running".
For those visiting here who are dealing with the complex comorbidity of trauma, PTSD, Depression, and Addictions, all I have to offer is hope. I offer YOU a pat on the back for taking the time to even read this page. I applaud your COURAGE to face the reality of these demons.
Your WORTH is already evident because you are a human being. If you're still struggling with these issues, at the very least, you know it. Denial is no longer an option, I suspect. Thus why you might be taking time to read from another what's made a difference.
YOU deserve to BE WELL! What you don't deserve, from yourself or anyone else, family included: Is JUDGEMENT for being legitimately ill. Regardless of what our weakly educated medical community and this society has to say, there is NO SHAME in being traumatized. Nor is there shame in being diagnosed with anything related to that traumatization.
And, the last thing any of us need is JUDGEMENT any longer in this society where addiction is concerned.
I no longer accept that judgement towards myself from me or from anyone else, including those in the medical community who still seem to get-off on playing the 'shame-game' towards the addicted. These issues need one thing, and one thing alone from us all:
COMPASSION. (Please Visit our Partner in Health-Care, The Charter for Compassion).
There's no room left in my world for shame about these issues coming my way from anyone.
As I've told my own physicians now many times, "Catch THE HELL UP. YOU'RE HURTING US NOW, AND WE, THE STRICKEN, ARE NOT TAKING THAT FROM YOU ANYMORE."
I close any confrontations with physicians by pointing out that if I, an armchair academic-layman can find quality information from my Mother's couch to guide me in my personal recovery, ill with these issues still active too-boot?
Then there is NO EXCUSE for any who serve in the medical community to not empower yourselves to do the same.
It's as simple as that, really. It's time in this society that some who care for us choose to catch themselves the hell up.
I'll close this take of my own on addiction with an offering of other sources:
I offer, as well, the following reading, available at Amazon.ca:
As Dr. Gabor Mate remains my most trusted addictions expert in Canada, please see the videos below.
I'll include a couple more from other sources as well.
Follow the image-links below to access links to those who provide right care in BC.
As my first addictions counsellor shared with me, I'll share this with you visiting here:
I only ask that you find help that can confirm what I myself have experienced. Don't take what I have to share on face value. Do the work to inform yourself to the understanding that fits your unique needs as a human being. This choice to recover your life after trauma is your journey, and I honour you for choosing to embark upon it.
We all must come to our personally-owned place of understanding these troubling, destructive issues. I can only point you towards where I found what I needed to learn. I can not dare to suggest that what's helped me to better understand myself, will necessarily help you on way to better understanding you.
I can say confidently: Recovery from trauma is the goal of the journey. NOT recovery from addiction, nor depression, nor PTSD. It's in healing trauma that I know we can heal addictions, PTSD, and depression along with it. I know this because as my own trauma-issues come-and-go, in-and-out of remission (the insistent painful memories of sanctuary trauma still trip me up from time-to-time): My battles with my own addictions are that much easier to contend with.
I turn to this expression from pioneer psychologist Carl Rodgers to support the validity of my personal claims:
"Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me."
-Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
I can say, as well, and today I fully believe: "Heal Trauma-Heal The World."
We do this healing of the world, one willing, healed-trauma-survivor at a time.
You don't need to wait to hit rock-bottom in order to begin.
In fact, the longer you wait? The more difficult, in my experience, recovery can be.
Choose today, to begin a 'Heroes Journey' of recovery from trauma towards Post Traumatic Growth and Wellness.
This we all deserve: Opportunity to be the very BEST human-beings we can grow to be.
In fact, it is our birth-right.
Be Well.
"Mind How You Go."
Darren Gregory: Curator, The Trauma Recovery Blog.
"Trauma is the nature of addiction."
"Addiction is only a symptom, it's not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is trauma."
"Most of the drugs-of-choice we view as a problem are, in fact, pain-killers. We ask, 'Why the Addiction?' What we should be asking is, 'Why The Pain?'"
~ Dr. Gabor Mate (Retired).
I know my own experience as an addicted soul on Dr. Mate's terms. For me, as was taught my way with my first experience with a counselor who specializes in treating the issue, I was in the beginning using alcohol and other drugs as self-medication. Admittedly, however, all of my adult-life I learned well how to use alcohol as a crutch. Like my father before me, and his father before him, booze and I had already a long-standing personal relationship before any trauma hit me in my work as a BC paramedic.
My own alcohol use, like many, started in my youth. I grew up in a Canadian culture that celebrates near-about everything we throw a party over with alcohol as a mainsail for celebration. Additionally, I was a bullied kid across all my years of schooling, in part because I was viewed as a loser for not immediately falling into the party scene in eighth grade after first being quite the social-butterfly, swilling vodka on the bus with our first out-of-town trip.
My first actual experience of being drunk on alcohol came earlier. When I was only eleven years old, drawn to the stuff like a fly to light, a friend and I loved taking in bottles of his Dad's home-cooked wine. I next started drinking at fourteen. I'd hoped to avoid partying my school years away for my first couple of years of high-school. I ultimately gave-in to the pressures of peers, and took up partying with alcohol early on. By the time I left high-school, partying with alcohol and getting drunk with my peers happened every weekend.
This was unfortunately all too common for the Canadian kids of my own generation. We all used alcohol and pot. Some days while in school. Nobody I grew up with gave the behaviours really a lick of thought.
Alcohol use and addiction to alcohol was also a lingering genetic predisposition in my case. I've a family history of addiction on both sides of my family line-paternal and maternal. Given the perfect storm of repeated traumatic stress injuries in my work as a British Columbia paramedic, and given that basically nothing as a healthy alternative was offered to me once I completely fractured to help me avoid the issues:
I now doubt I'd have been able to avoid becoming addicted to alcohol and drugs, all things considered that were in my own way.
As I learned it might, alcohol use fell away rather easily over the years of my recovery. I turned to drug use once alcohol was no longer enough to cover-over the memories that caused me so much pain. As the Poe quote above states: "It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
Alcohol, mixed with the medications I was initially prescribed once diagnosed with PTSD, interacted in a way that my body soon rejected alcohol all-together. Not so much when my drug of choice shifted to something more suited to my trauma-troubled mind. Stimulants came along which unfortunately helped me to calm my brain down better than anything else that had been done to treat me even up to that point. The relief was instant, lending well to using drugs becoming stronger because unfortunately-they worked.
I've been addicted to drugs and accept addiction to alcohol now too. I accepted this as part of my own experience years ago.
I'm addicted to nicotine too. I no longer drink. I still smoke cigarettes. I use cannabis, with physician support, for sleep. Other drugs of choice have waned considerably in my life but I admittedly will still turn to those drugs if ever I'm out of remission with my trauma symptoms and lose my ability to think.
Stimulants, calming the mind?
This isn't that difficult to consider valid if we look at how ADHD is treated in kids today. The drugs prescribed to treat ADHD in kids today is basically speed. The stimulants I had access to were cocaine and crystal meth. Both worked to calm my mind down for me rather too-nicely.
As for all the other avenues of addiction that Dr. Mate describes above, I can comfortably admit that across the most troubling periods of my life, I've been personally addicted to practically every one of those too.
"Sex-Drugs-and-Rock-and-Roll". This is a motto my own generation adopted that I'll also admit I mismanaged in my life. If it wasn't about a party, prior to my signing up to serve as a paramedic, life wasn't all that grand to live in my own estimation. To take Dr. Mate's description a slight-step further:
I'm also now well aware of the fact that for many upper-tier, elite humans in our society, power, wealth, and status acquisition is frankly a set of functional addictions we have running in the society. These are addictions for which the sufferers are rather ironically revered. I've come to learn that our competitive nature as humans in Canada isn't doing us individually or collectively all that much good.
The point is: Our shared-sources for addiction may be, as most other things are, unique to ourselves; however, my own lived experience agrees with Dr. Mate and others in sharing what addiction is:
Addiction-is-Addiction-is-Addiction, regardless of that to which we may become addicted. An article written for Psychology Today Canada reiterates Dr. Mate's position, adding a description of the connection in the body of these drugs and behaviours of choice to activity present in the human brain. It is, I've learned, the 'trouble with addiction' that the reinforcing affect of the behaviour is connected directly inside with one of one of the most powerful, pleasure-generating, on-board (already in the human body) chemicals known to man:
'In the brain, dopamine functions as a neurotransmitter—a chemical released by neurons (nerve cells) to send signals to other nerve cells. The brain includes several distinct dopamine pathways, one of which plays a major role in the motivational component of reward-motivated behavior'. (Dopamine-Wikipedia).
This is from Psychology Today:
"Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences. Addiction may involve the use of substances such as alcohol, inhalants, opioids, cocaine, nicotine, and others, or behaviors such as gambling; there is scientific evidence that the addictive substances and behaviors share a key neurobiological feature—they intensely activate brain pathways of reward and reinforcement, many of which involve the neurotransmitter dopamine."
Where we've been led to believe these drugs we hear about are powerfully addictive, what I've learned over time and study is that in reality we become addicted to the release of dopamine. In fact, with certain addictions the greatest release of dopamine happens not in using any drug. The greatest release of dopamine for the addicted soul comes via the behaviour of seeking out those drugs we hope to use.
I stand, however, with Dr. Mate and agree with him that trauma issues lie at the root of pretty much all addictions. I know not one of my addicted friends who've not got a story of trauma to tell. Some stories of which would curl the hair of the most seasoned trauma-informed clinicians working in Canada today.
For those of us who've been traumatized in life, including those traumatized via the work we do, and those impacted by trauma in the form of Adverse Childhood Experiences, the most current information we have available to us today makes it pretty clear that trauma issues lie at the root of most addiction. Once addicted and struggling, the devil that is human-stigmatization plays a key role in keeping us stuck in addiction's patterns of behaviour. Once we start turning to the fast-acting pain-reliever that any addictive substance, liquid, or behavioural can be (enough times in uninformed succession) what starts as a way to manage troubling emotions via self-medication can turn into an experience with full-blown addiction over sometimes a very short period of time.
From there, because addiction specifically remains a stigmatized, misunderstood issue in Canadian society, with the addicted still facing criminal proceedings should we be 'caught' with any prohibited substances in our pockets, this stigmatization via criminalization serves to keep us hiding from any-and-all who may judge us inappropriately for simply being ill.
Hide away from anything? Try to NOT think about something? What do we get?
I've shared elsewhere on the site that what we focus on expands. I know this is a valid statement. I know as well that this applies to that which we do not wish to do. Focusing on 'not using drugs' only served, for me, to make the drive to use them that much more strong.
Make no mistake. Traumatizing experience ignite illness when the trauma of these experiences are left unresolved. Addiction's comorbidity with PTSD, along with Depression in many cases, makes this gather all together into a perfect cocktail that only hopes to keep us in a state of dysfunction long-term. Traumatizing experiences make it difficult some days to breathe, let alone, to go out and about hoping to fake-one's-way in life once PTSD takes hold. Feeding the medicines of addiction to ourselves, along with our traumatizing experiences in memory, combined again with the nature of addictive substances, liquids, and behaviours to act with high-level releasing capacity in the brain of dopamine:
Self-Compassion demands that I suggest that we who end up in the addiction boat grow to understand that addiction with trauma driving the issue is NOT a choice one makes consciously.
If I could personally turn-back time, knowing in hind-sight what I know today about trauma and addiction acting in a sickening concert of horrible, nonsensical, off-key tunes inside:
I'd not EVER have allowed myself use of anything other than what my physicians were able to prescribe to help diminish my own pain. Even with some of these legally prescribed so-called medicines, the legal ones, like the SSRI Anti-depressants and Anti-Psychotics I was originally prescribed, knowing what I know now, I'd have avoided even these legal-drugs altogether as well.
This point about the legal medicines prescribed to treat trauma issues is a discussion, though, for another page.
This I know for sure:
Trauma ignites intense psychic pain that these drugs/behaviours of choice, using release of dopamine in the brain, help to quell somewhat by offering rest from this pain. As short term as such chemically/behavoiurally-induced rest can be, for a time these things do work to calm the mind. In the beginning these drugs and behaviours work well-I'd argue too well, in fact. It's only once addiction takes over that I personally found the drugs and behaviours themselves to be a problem that needed correction.
By then, for me, and too many others I know, I woke up to this reality too-late to keep addiction at bay.
It didn't help that part of my own PTSD experience included the complication of my body turning on itself. I believe, and I've had physician confirmation, that the high-levels of stress-hormones running through my body due to PTSD taking root, contributed to early-onset (in my 40's) osteoarthritis. Adding physical pain (intense) on-top of emotional pain for which a sojourn into opiate use only served to make addiction for me that much more inevitable:
It wasn't until my hips broke down completely and I was granted relief via surgical replacement of my hips that my own life with intense chronic pain finally went to sleep. I suffer with chronic back-pain, left-over too from my years in the work. I don't need even a Tylenol these days to deal with that pain. My back pain is nothing like the bone-on-bone hip-pain I lived with on top of struggling with PTSD. I was nearly 7 of the last 13 years in a state of needing to manage both physical and chronic emotional suffering.
I wish it were as easy as one 'just saying no' to such things as taking any drug. Reality is far less kind. I challenge anyone reading here to consider what a life, for years, living with chronic emotional pain and later chronic physical pain might do in regards to drug-use and addiction issues developing. This too is another perfect-storm scenario that makes drug use first of all at the very least tempting. Secondly, I can say that when the pain is intense, I think we'll do near anything to find relief, and abandon in doing so any concern at all for potential addictive consequences.
Chronic pain in both forms is horrific to contend with. With little offered to help us combat even serious physical pain from the medical community these days beyond opiates, I'm personally not surprised that we've an epidemic underway in North America quite frankly. Add to this the marketing genius of Big-Pharma, who've basically sold us all of late on the non-addictive nature of synthetic opiates, we get what we get as an outcome. Add to this reality the near-abandonment of policy-makers of any efforts to stabilize mental health and addictions treatment frameworks in Canada, and we end up precisely where we are today too:
Sorting out an addictions crisis. A growing issue that still as I write (September, 2018) is showing nothing to indicate that we're any closer to solving the problem than we were five years ago, when the alarm-bells first chimed warning us of this doom now on our collective Canadian (North American) (Worldwide) plates.
Denial. That's a human-inner-beast. It's denial that keeps us from seeking help for trauma. It's denial that keeps us from seeking addictions help. It's denial too that keeps policy-makers and the medical community reticent in dealing with these issues honourably and head-on.
It's said we must first 'bottom-out' before we are willing to accept help from anyone for anything. I disagree. We often do-so, but there's absolutely no logical reason that we'd make a conscious choice to hit rock-bottom before we seek and can accept right help.
That's the power of denial in action at it's worst.
I'm fully aware that we must often go-there, bottoming-out, before we wake up to reality. All I can say is that I wish I'd listened to all the warnings that were coming at me over my years of struggle. I wish I'd heard about trauma issues sooner. I wish I'd reflected more openly on the lives my addicted family-members lived that I lived along with many as a child.
I wish, more than anything else, that I'd never started drinking or drugging.
I wish the lives of my addicted friends had warned me enough that I dropped my own denial early on, before addiction took hold to complicate all the rest of my own struggling.
I've many regrets like this running inside still today. I regret my own addiction-behavours more than I can express to those I love.
"When right help is offered and accepted? People will get well. When right help is denied (sanctuary trauma again) or cases of workplace injury (both physical and psychological) are mismanaged by employers, systems, friends, family, peers, and the society at large? People CAN NOT get well." ~ Dr. Jonathan Douglas, Parahrased. (Director, Badge-of-Life-Canada).
Where our suffering is concerned, we simply can't get right help unless we put up our hand and indicate we need it. Even then still, our systems of care are so-far-behind the eight-ball, it remains, for me, highly-discouraging. If we've money in our jeans, we can buy for ourselves the very best of treatments. If we are living on the low-end of Canadian income, it's much more difficult to access right care. If we are living in poverty, getting help is nearly impossible in this country.
When I say 'help' here, I mean, trauma-informed, specialized help. Unfortunately I know as well far too many former First Responders in Canada who are living an imposed life of poverty due to failings in our systems and the failings of employers. I know far too many who are stuck in a poverty hole, forced to accept said poverty due to inadequacies in funding our social service support systems, and unfortunately too, our Canada Pension Plan.
For persons permanently disabled, forced to accept social assistance or CPP-Disability benefits, neither today meets real costs of living. In fact, the levels of income from these sources for the permanently disabled in Canada, as things stand in regard to housing costs, isn't enough for many to meet even basic needs like rent.
We can't get right help for trauma unless we're willing to admit to ourselves we've suffered it. We can't get right help in Canada either if we can't afford to pay for it.
We can't get right help for Depression unless we're willing to admit to feeling so desperately worthless to ourselves, some days we don't even want to get out of bed. If Depression is on-board with trauma driving that issue, we can't get right help without access to trauma-informed care.
We can't get right help for Addictions unless we're willing to admit that our drug-use/alcohol-use/or behaviour patterns are warning us that we've taken ourselves down a road with these things much too far. We can't get help for Addictions either without right, trauma-informed care available to us.
Again, if we can't pay? We're stuck in a mess, because where trauma is concerned, not even our physicians have the information they need to effectively serve and treat us. This is fact. Our physicians in Canada in general practice get little education about trauma and what that does to us. Everything they serve is accompanied with a pill. Psychiatry too is remiss. This angers me more than I can express, so I'll once again turn to the words, as I've done on other pages, of Norman Lamb, British MP and a strong advocate for mental health issues who spoke in Canada in 2016:
"It's not only morally wrong, it's economically stupid for Governments (society) to NOT place mental health care on the same tiers as physical health care."
I throw this around enough in my day-to-day advocacy effort on social media. Perhaps, one day, a policy-maker will read these words and take them to heart as I've needed to do as an expression towards myself that points out that I, and addicted Canadian, isn't 'the' problem in this society. In as much as the addicted life pains those we love to the point that many of us are excommunicated entirely from family, it is the issue of not making mental health and addictions care a priority, on the part of policy-makers and the society on the whole, that keeps us stuck in lives with others addicted as means to support ourselves within the company of like-stricken peers who get it.
I'll qualify again that help is available in Canada, as I've shared above. More-so available for some in the society over others, particularly for the affluent in Canadian Society who have no problem at all getting the best of care for addiction.
To top that off, should a well-to-do Canadian citizen go into treatment for addiction, or for trauma-issues for that matter, with wealth backing her up, with status on her side, and with power to make such a decision to seek care unimpeded:
She can buy in this country the best care available and known to man. When she returns from treatment, most will throw a party, patting her on the back for having the 'courage to come back' from the struggle.
(I despise this campaign in BC: The 'Courage to Come Back=A Pet-Peeve for me, along with "Bell Let's Talk" and other ridiculous marketing gimmicks used to exploit the issues of addiction and mental health at the corporate level for corporate image gains).
For those who may find ourselves in the streets of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, with zero-means, and near-zero access to the care that those with affluence are empowered to access in Canada?
I turn again to Dr. Gabor Mate:
"If I were to design a system of care that keeps people addicted, I'd design the very system we have currently running".
For those visiting here who are dealing with the complex comorbidity of trauma, PTSD, Depression, and Addictions, all I have to offer is hope. I offer YOU a pat on the back for taking the time to even read this page. I applaud your COURAGE to face the reality of these demons.
Your WORTH is already evident because you are a human being. If you're still struggling with these issues, at the very least, you know it. Denial is no longer an option, I suspect. Thus why you might be taking time to read from another what's made a difference.
YOU deserve to BE WELL! What you don't deserve, from yourself or anyone else, family included: Is JUDGEMENT for being legitimately ill. Regardless of what our weakly educated medical community and this society has to say, there is NO SHAME in being traumatized. Nor is there shame in being diagnosed with anything related to that traumatization.
And, the last thing any of us need is JUDGEMENT any longer in this society where addiction is concerned.
I no longer accept that judgement towards myself from me or from anyone else, including those in the medical community who still seem to get-off on playing the 'shame-game' towards the addicted. These issues need one thing, and one thing alone from us all:
COMPASSION. (Please Visit our Partner in Health-Care, The Charter for Compassion).
There's no room left in my world for shame about these issues coming my way from anyone.
As I've told my own physicians now many times, "Catch THE HELL UP. YOU'RE HURTING US NOW, AND WE, THE STRICKEN, ARE NOT TAKING THAT FROM YOU ANYMORE."
I close any confrontations with physicians by pointing out that if I, an armchair academic-layman can find quality information from my Mother's couch to guide me in my personal recovery, ill with these issues still active too-boot?
Then there is NO EXCUSE for any who serve in the medical community to not empower yourselves to do the same.
It's as simple as that, really. It's time in this society that some who care for us choose to catch themselves the hell up.
I'll close this take of my own on addiction with an offering of other sources:
- Dr. Gabor Mate is Here.
- Psychology Today Canada on Addiction.
- The Addicted Brain is an excellent course available on Coursera
- Managing Addiction-A Framework for Successful Treatment is a course offered on the Edx Platform.
- "Wasted" is a Documentary on Addiction, produced by the CBC, that profiles one of my mentors, Mr. Michael Pond.
I offer, as well, the following reading, available at Amazon.ca:
- In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Dr. Gabor Mate.
- Chasing The Scream by Johan Hari.
- Recovery-Freedom From Our Addictions by Russel Brand.
- Wasted by Psychotherapist, Mr. Michael Pond and his partner, Maureen Palmer.
- My own Writing on Addiction: Follow This Link To The Blog.
As Dr. Gabor Mate remains my most trusted addictions expert in Canada, please see the videos below.
I'll include a couple more from other sources as well.
Follow the image-links below to access links to those who provide right care in BC.
- BC Association of Clinical Counselors
- BC Psychological Association
- Badge-Of-Life-Canada has links to therapy across the county.
As my first addictions counsellor shared with me, I'll share this with you visiting here:
I only ask that you find help that can confirm what I myself have experienced. Don't take what I have to share on face value. Do the work to inform yourself to the understanding that fits your unique needs as a human being. This choice to recover your life after trauma is your journey, and I honour you for choosing to embark upon it.
We all must come to our personally-owned place of understanding these troubling, destructive issues. I can only point you towards where I found what I needed to learn. I can not dare to suggest that what's helped me to better understand myself, will necessarily help you on way to better understanding you.
I can say confidently: Recovery from trauma is the goal of the journey. NOT recovery from addiction, nor depression, nor PTSD. It's in healing trauma that I know we can heal addictions, PTSD, and depression along with it. I know this because as my own trauma-issues come-and-go, in-and-out of remission (the insistent painful memories of sanctuary trauma still trip me up from time-to-time): My battles with my own addictions are that much easier to contend with.
I turn to this expression from pioneer psychologist Carl Rodgers to support the validity of my personal claims:
"Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me."
-Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person
I can say, as well, and today I fully believe: "Heal Trauma-Heal The World."
We do this healing of the world, one willing, healed-trauma-survivor at a time.
You don't need to wait to hit rock-bottom in order to begin.
In fact, the longer you wait? The more difficult, in my experience, recovery can be.
Choose today, to begin a 'Heroes Journey' of recovery from trauma towards Post Traumatic Growth and Wellness.
This we all deserve: Opportunity to be the very BEST human-beings we can grow to be.
In fact, it is our birth-right.
Be Well.
"Mind How You Go."
Darren Gregory: Curator, The Trauma Recovery Blog.
You Are Not Alone: Help Is Available: Follow the Links Below to Find a Trauma-Informed Care Provider in BC
Find Trauma Informed Family Clinical Counselors Here
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Find Trauma Informed Family Clinical Psychologists Here
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More About Traumatic Stress and Addiction
“I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
Disclaimer: These materials and resources are presented for educational purposes only. They are not a substitute for informed medical advice or training. Do not use this information to diagnose or treat a health problem without consulting a qualified health or mental health care provider. If you have concerns, contact your health care provider, mental health professional, or your community health centre
Darren Gregory © 2018. All Rights Reserved
