Why Addicts Resist Seeing Trauma as the Root

Why do addicts not see trauma as a problem or something that they have experienced?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

I'm again for Dr. Doctor Addiction Life Guard Model. I'm Dr. Doctor psychology. Like professional helpful and addiction special. You are suffering from addiction, injury, trauma, whatever it is. I'm here to help. You're in search of help trying to get your life back together. Join me here at Dr. Addiction Life Guard, the Addiction Recovery Podcast. I wanted to be real clear about what this podcast is intended for. It is intended for entertainment and informational purposes, but not considered help. If you actually need real help and you're in need of help, please seek that out. If you're in dire need of help, you can go to your nearest emergency room or you can check into a rehab center or call a counselor like me and talk about your problems and work through them. But don't rely on a podcast to be that form of help. It's not. It's just a podcast. It's for entertainment and information only. So let's keep it in that light, alright? Have a good time, learn something, and then get the real help that you need from a professional. Interesting. So let's talk about why. Why is that? So what trauma really means in in in our lives, not just with addiction, not with just addicts, but what it means, what it really means is that we're not just it's not just war, it's not just abuse, it's or tragedy. It's also neglect, shame, rejection, chronic stress. See, there's big T trauma and things like war abuse, you know, heavy abuse, tragedy, uh, death, things like that. Those are big T traumas. The the little T traumas, neglect, shame, rejection, chronic stress, ab you know, that kind of abuse, that's one that it's death by a thousand cuts. The one the big T trauma is just one big event. And it can be just that, just one event. Um trauma is a survival response. It's not a weakness. And you know, when people experience trauma, they flip into that that survival response in their lives. Um sometimes people see trauma as being something that's making you weaker. Um but your your body and your brain, they adapt around that trauma. And oftentimes in ways that hurt long term. So when you have those long long-term hurts, it plays out in different ways. So um I've had combat vets in my office. I've had people that work for three-letter agencies that get exposed to all kinds of different kinds of um experiences of trauma over, you know, a long period of time. The big T trauma is over a long period of time. And that hurt is kind of easy to see. Those people tend to be um, it's easier to see the damage. Um, combat vets will come in and they get triggered easily into um PTSD responses. And you can see them. Yeah, I I can see them uh doing it right in front of me. Um, they start to get that thousand mile stair, they start to become disoriented, even though they're sitting in a room and it's peaceful and quiet in my office. But I can see them shift into that PTSD response. And that's when, you know, I have to be careful about how I'm navigating through this with them because I want to be able to help them heal through this. Um, but the small T traumas, I can also see people who suffered from a tremendous amount of um parental abuse, let's say. Um let's go with that. The parental abuse. And so as a small child, they experienced this over a long period of time. And it's it's it's just as evidence, but it's a little bit harder to recognize. It you don't get the thousand mile stair, you don't get the dissociation that goes on. They don't decompensate in my office. And it takes quite a while for them to be in that responsive mode, and that's simply because it's a smaller trauma spread out over many, many times of exposure. So it's uh it looks very different. But it doesn't matter. Either way, they are experiencing something and you can see it happening in the long term, and that's why they end up becoming uh dysfunctional in some way. They have they maladapt around the the uh the trauma, the coping. So why do addicts push back against that trauma language? Well, you know, they have they have had to bury a lot of what they experience. So there's a lot of denial or they'll minimize, you know, they don't feel like they're the victim, they don't want to see themselves as a victim because they've had to keep moving forward, especially if it is something like childhood trauma. That's one that gets really buried. And so the denial and the minimizing it is one way of doing it. The this, you know, like the statement, I'm not a victim. That's what they have in their head. I'm not a victim. Another way that people uh respond to that and push back against the language of trauma that I use is shame. Um, and it's interesting, the the response of shame comes from um the shutdown, and that's one technique. Another one is that they minimize so you know, the shame, they'll minimize the shame. They'll they'll deflect and they'll say, Well, other people had it worse. Or um one of one of my favorites is uh the abuser, if it's a parent, for example, the abuser, um, the label that the victim has is that, well, that's the best they could do, or that's the best they could do at the time. And I always scratch my head and I think, so locking you in a closet for five hours, that's the best they could do? Wow, that's interesting. And using plain language like that helps them in the in the coping, because they they get to see that what what they're doing is minimizing, but what the truth is, right? The enemy wants you to believe the lie, not the truth. The truth enlightens and it helps. So that's part of it is shame. Um, they feel embarrassed. And if you were sexually assaulted, especially for men who were sexually assaulted, that's a that's a strong shame component. Uh men being sexually abused, either as adults when they're raped or as children. Um lot of shame attached to that. For women too. Um, I'm not minimizing that one. Some of it's numbness. They they honestly don't feel the pain anymore. It's something they've lived with for so long that they don't even connect mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, they don't connect to the abuse. They they become so numb to it that they honestly don't feel the pain anymore. Um, they've dissociated from it. And so it it just kind of gets ignored. It doesn't get brought up. Um fear. Fear is one. If I open the door, then I'm gonna lose it, I'm gonna fall apart, I'm gonna I'm gonna lose whatever control or stability I seem to have been able to create in my life. So they're fearful of ever going back there. Um which is interesting because they're fearing the thing that they're going to run into if they think about it, but every time they think about it, if it's a if you're an addict, you end up using, which gives you this weird illusion of control. And so I'm fearful that if I go there, I'm going to lose control, I'm going to um, it's going to destroy me. So then the fear, the counter for that is the control of illusion. Drugs and alcohol make you feel like you're doing something about it. It's a weird feeling. I remember distinctly as I was in, you know, the worst of my drinking, I couldn't do anything about what was in my head. So I felt like if I drank, it would make it better. I didn't think it would go away. I knew it wouldn't go away. And everybody I talk to who's an addict, they know it's not going to go away. That's not the point. You're not drinking it to make it go away. But what you are doing is you're asserting a false sense of power over the thing that you experienced. And you go into your head and you start responding with this power struggle. And so I'm doing something about it. I feel like I'm empowering myself. So the more I drink, the more I'm controlling it, the more I'm in, I'm I'm beating this. Which, you know, it doesn't last, unfortunately. So the reason that addicts push back against the trauma language is they think they've got it all figured out and they're already coping with it well. And they're not, which is why they're in my office, or you know, why I am dealing with them in that moment, because they're not it's destroying their lives. The the thing that they're using to cope is actually destroying them. So the use of substances, and I'm just gonna stick with substances. I of course I know food food, is it a substance? Yeah, gambling, shopping, pornography, um, getting stuck on the internet, surfing your phone constantly. Those I those are coping mechanisms too. But just for our conversation today, let's just say it's substances as a coping mechanism. So um drugs, alcohol, they can make you forget. But it's interesting because they really don't make you forget. Even when you're using, you perhaps go into this room where you're actually engaging in that experience again, but you're now somehow making sense of it or controlling it, or uh, you know, you're beating on the abuser or something is going on in your head, but it's a temporary escape. It's temporary. As long as you're using, you can sort of create this illusion of control, and I'm doing something about it. But when you're not using, you're not you're not doing it anymore, right? So it's a temporary it's a temporary escape. And it's not a fix, it's an escape. Stimulants um give you energy, right? It it it it energizes you. I I used to when I was in college in my uh younger years in my 20s, my bachelor's degree, I did some of my best writing when I was really drunk. Um and I it wasn't because it was like freeing me up to free thought, it was just very energizing. So I would listen to like crazy heavy metal music as loud as I could in my headphones, and I'd be typing away. And um, it was my way of distracting myself from my depression, and so I was fighting the depression by use of some kind of a stimulant, whether it was an upper or downer. I mean, it doesn't make any difference. Sometimes people get energized by doing sedative type drugs, which that was my case. Um, stimulants, however, and the use of that word stimulant is an upper, right? So stimulants give you energy and that fights your depression, you think. So if I'm taking um speed, and uh, you know, so several of my friends were speed freaks and they would be doing a lot of speed. Alcohol calms you down, it anxies eases anxiety, hypervigilance can go away temporarily, yes, but the detrimental effects of that use for that purpose is very problematic. And alcohol for me was very problematic. Um, addiction becomes the shield against the trauma pain, and that's what you think you're doing is your your addiction is between you and your pain, but the shield ends up, you know, cutting them. It it ends up destroying you and destroying your life, causing you all kinds of harm. So the common pushbacks that I hear is uh when I ask them, so what was your childhood like? They'll say, Oh, I it was fine. I, you know, I had a normal childhood. Um and then they tell me this the the horror stories for the next you know four or five, six sessions, um in in the therapy process. Sometimes they'll just say it was just like, you know, if it was in college or high school, oh I just like to party, I just like to have a good time. Yeah, but you're drinking ten times more than everybody around you, or you're you're smoking a lot of weed, or you're you know, you're shooting up. What are you talking about? Um pushback about you know, stuff I hear. That's in the past. Why why do why do I need to talk about that? Why it's not really relevant anymore, it's not important. So those are defenses to avoid facing the pain. And again, they came into my office because things are not going well. They didn't come into my office because things are going very well. They're they're not going well, they're going horribly. Um, they'll they'll sometimes deflect and they'll say the usage is the problem. So I'm like, okay, we'll stop using and then let's see what happens. And they can't because the pain keeps coming back. Um, so they're just trying to avoid dealing with a thing that has been slowly destroying them from inside. So how does that change? Where's the turning point? So the turning point, um it it often stalls until the the trauma is identified. What I the the way I put it is trauma experiences, if there's lots of them, or kind of like cockroaches or or rats or mice in your house, you turn the lights off, they all come out. They're they're running all over the place. You turn the lights on, what do they do? The mice, the cockroaches, everything runs away, right? Because it now can be identified. So what I try to think of it as is I I'm trying to help shed light to something that wants to live in the darkness. It wants to live in the darker recesses of your mind where it can start chipping away at you from the dark. So it's in the unconscious or subconscious, and it just lives there. And and it's just waiting. It's waiting for you to be triggered by some experience, some thoughts, some words. Maybe you bump into somebody that you haven't seen for 15 years, something. Something, a picture, a photograph, a movie, a song, anything that can trigger an old thought, when it's in your unconscious mind and you haven't really dealt with it, it's gonna pop out. And that's when there's a problem. So that's the darkness that it's in, and it will spread out and start, you know, chewing away at you. So what we're doing in therapy, and the process that you need to go through to recover from this is turn the lights on, right? Don't don't let the trauma just exist in you, hidden. You know, we have a phrase for that in recovery. We say, you know, well, that experience is living rent-free in your head, or that person that you have this issue with is living rent-free in your head. Why would you do that? Why would you let them stay there? So it it will get stalled out, that recovery. That turning point needs to happen when you can stop doing that. So the resilient client, the one that has the breakthrough trauma, is the you know, trauma admission. That's the person who they're sitting in front of me, and I I I can see them just start to lose it. They'll start, I can see the emotion start coming out, and then they start crying. And they and it's because I've touched on the thing that is the thing they've been hiding the whole time. And sometimes it happens in the first or second session. Sometimes it takes me six months to get them there. Depends on how buried the trauma is and the level of trauma, frankly. Um, the bigger the trauma, the longer they've been, you know, coping with it by by minimizing and dismissing, the longer it takes to come out. They there's a trust issue between the client and the therapist many times that that they engage in. It's like this level of trust. They won't, they don't when they first come in and see me, they're not sure to trust. When that is built up over time, then I can see it. But I I actually see and they and they start to really get in that place. And I do not try to comfort them to minimize. I can't, I won't do that. I will I will be there fully present with them while they're experiencing that pain. And sometimes there's silence and it can be long because they're now in that place. I know they're feeling it, I know they need to feel it. It's they're showing me that they're feeling it, which is a sharing of that. It's an offloading. And and when you feel connected to somebody, you feel like they get it. Um that's that's when you start to really open up. And so sitting in that thought, and it's you know, honestly, personally, it's it's very challenging for me to do that because um man, they're they're feeling it, and it's making me feel it. And that's the whole point of therapy, right? I I say that to my clients. Your job is to make me feel what you're feeling. In other words, I need you to be fully in that so that I get a sense and an understanding of what you're really feeling. It's not gonna harm me, you know. I'm it's not my pain, but I need you to to feel it. So facing trauma is not it's not it's not, I don't want to use the word blame, but it's not like shame. Facing it is not shameful. You it's you owning it and starting that healing process. So facing the trauma is the is that breakthrough, it's that is that transition, and it's the thing that will get you to um the healing. And and again, if you're if you're if you're coping mechanism, chemicals, yes, but it's also there's another one there, and it is minimizing and dismissing. And again, those words that I hear people say, like, well, that's you know, my dad was he was he was kind of problem, you know, he he would hit me every once in a while, but he did the best he could. You you you're taking the person who was the abuser and you're putting them in a place that they don't belong. They don't belong on some pedal, uh some pedestal. Sorry, they they don't belong on a pedestal, they don't belong in the category of didn't happen, didn't do that to me. They did do it. And when I see that breakthrough happen, that's a turning point for the the client. That's the that's when you're struggling with this, and you can with another person fully engage in that experience of the the idea of the trauma and the emotion that it brings up in you, that is where the healing starts. So hopefully you can get to that turning point, that that transition. So how what do you what do you need to do? You need to be in a place where you can offload and stop isolating. I I've said this a thousand times in these podcasts, and I tell my clients I've said it ten thousand times in my office. Isolation is addiction's best friend. Isolation helps the addiction live in you. And the isolation is I experienced a life of horror and problems, and if I share them with another person, I'm not it's not me just talking, and the other person's going, Oh, that must have been terrible. How does that feel when I repeat that back to you? That's not that's not it. It's a connection with another human being that says, you know what? What you experienced was horrible and you believe them. Like they're speaking truth about your situation because you've spoken the truth about your situation. That's wrong. That's horrible. They should not have done that to you. That is a terrible thing. But this you you you being angry about that, that's the right feeling. You know, you need to hear these encouraging, nurturing kind of words. So healing is possible, but it takes many things, not just a single person. It's therapy, the truth, faith, community. All right, so let me break that down just a little bit. So therapy, individual therapy with a really good therapist, one that is not a person-centered regerian therapist necessarily, but somebody who actually understands uh trauma and addiction. They need to know both. And they need to understand there's a linkage. And if they don't understand that, and you're dealing with somebody who's like, we got to do harm reduction, or, you know, uh, it's a behavior, so let's extinguish the behavior. And they never ever deal with the trauma. And I hear this from my clients who come in and they've been to one or two or three or four or five therapists over their lifetime, and they come in and tell me something, and I kind of like, oh, wait a minute, that was abuse. And then I start asking them and then find out that their mom or dad or somebody was abusing them in some way. And I say, Did any of your other therapists ask ask you about that? No. Really? You've been to five therapists. Nobody ever asked you about your abuse. Did they ever use the word abuse? And you know, sometimes I'll hear, yeah, I they there was one or two, but I was like, What'd they do with it? Well, we just kind of noted it, you know. We just they said, Oh, that must have been terrible. And then we just kind of move back into today. And I'm like, So therapy, good, competent therapist. Second thing, honesty. Now I'm gonna change that. I'm gonna I'm gonna add to that. I'm gonna say honesty and openness, right? Honesty and openness, because honesty and openness are two different things. Openness differs from honesty is you just saying what happened, okay, but then if you do that and then just immediately shut back down, you're not open. So honest and open, because we have to battle shame. So if you're battling shame, honesty and openness will get you to the place where you can stop being ashamed about your past. My father was extremely verbally abusive to me. And that could I I didn't know what to do with that as a kid. I just didn't know. So I just became violent and I shut down, and then I started drinking. And so that's a horrible combination, and that's a pretty common one. Um, I have found with with uh my clients, especially male clients, that's what they do. Um, they don't know what to do with it, so they just kind of shut down. Sometimes they get violent, sometimes they don't, and then they start using chemicals. Honesty and openness is when somebody says, that was really that must have been really bad. That was really wrong. You know, that's different than oh, how does that make you feel when I repeat these words back to you that you just said to me? It's like, no, let's put a label on it. That's wrong, that's abuse. And that's what you got to do. So having a sense of community around you means that you have surrounded yourself with people in A N A S A O A, um, Al Anon, where you have a group of people who have also gone through the same thing. So they get it, right? It's people that get it. That's the key. They get it because they've been through that. So you have to have community, and you gotta have a list of numbers that you can call people when you're feeling really bad. You they have to know your face. Um it's it's it's circling the wagons. You gotta have somebody to be able to circle the wagons. You gotta have a number of wagons to be able to circle. You can't have one wagon, one person. You gotta have a number of people, but you also have to feel felt, and that's the key. That's the key with therapy, that's the key with the uh recovery community. You feeling felt, and that's the key. Like I was this, and the person looking at you goes, Yes, I was too, and that's that's wrong, that's terrible. Oh, you get it, right? And then finally, faith. Having faith, you know, you can be healed because the enemy wants to destroy you. Okay, but if you're just doing nothing but constantly battling the enemy and you don't have any healing, you know, the the idea that there's a higher power that that will guide me or protect me or make me whole again. And for Christians, that's you know, Jesus and that's God. And so having faith means that I actually can be changed, I can be healed. It's just a matter of, am I willing to? So God doesn't waste pain. He deems it when it is surrendered, it's laying it at his feet, laying it down. That doesn't mean laying it down and keep a hand on it and clutching it at his feet. It's like laying it down. So it's surrendered. I'm gonna surrender my pain. And when you surrender the pain, that's when forgiveness starts moving in, right? So you can start to move forward. Forgiveness is not carrying the anger and resentment and contempt that you feel towards somebody else for what they did to you. It doesn't mean they got away with it, it doesn't mean that it wasn't recorded. They will have to answer for whatever they did, and it's not going to be you that they answer to. It's between them and God. And so finding ways to understand some concept of like forgiveness really requires you to have faith. The life, uh, you know, as a as a uh as a lifeguard, I would say you can't rest you can't rescue someone who insists that they're fine while they're drowning. I mean, it's pretty obvious, right? They they are drowning and you can see it. You're looking right at them drowning, and they're going, no, no, no, I'm fine, I'm fine. I don't need your help. And certainly as a lifeguard, I had that experience a few times where people would say would say that. I'd come out and I'd just wait. I'd just be in the water. I'd just be in the water with my rescue cannon. I'd just be waiting. And uh they're struggling more and more and more. And then finally I'm like, Do you want help now? Because I'm not gonna fight somebody that's still on top of the water and they're talking to me. It's like, do you need help now? Yeah, and then I'd go in and I do the rescue. Um, you can't rescue someone who insists that they're fine while they're drowning. Now, if the person, because my job as a lifeguard was to go get them, I if they went under, I'm gonna go get them. And sometimes God does that for us too. Um, but that's kind of where that happens. So addiction and uh chemicals or whatever addiction it is, that's your coping mechanism. And it doesn't work. So I want you to reflect about what I've been telling you and go get help. Don't carry this trauma around by yourself. You don't need to carry it at all. But just please remember that trauma is just that. It's trauma, and it's not yours to own, but it's the enemy's tool that's gonna destroy you. Well, that's it for this edition of Doc Shock, your addiction lifeguard. I hope you've enjoyed this podcast. If you have, please like and subscribe. And if you want to reach out to me, you can through my website, wellspraingmindbody.com. This is the doc shop and worth any life understanding. Go to help, go to therapy, go to rehab, go to team, go to something, team something, don't be any powerful chemicals, all the nonsense. If you uh give me help directly, you can reach out to me. I'll just academies you can uh click that little button. So until next time, yeah.