Trauma and Addiction: Healing Attachment Wounds

I, like many people in the United States, have had family members, close friends, co-workers, and clients struggle with addiction. Substance use disorder (SUD) in the United States is ubiquitous; it affects over twenty million Americans. Sadly, only about ten percent of people struggling with addiction receive treatment.

We cannot begin to understand addiction without first understanding its relationship to trauma. When a child experiences chronic abuse and/or neglect, their stress systems are permanently impacted. Survivors of childhood trauma often have chronic states of hyper (fight/flight) or hypo arousal (freeze/fawn). After a child experiences a traumatic event, they need connection to feel safe and secure in their bodies. If their caregiver does not know how to help a child regulate and/or perpetuates their stress response, the child continues to stay in a trauma reaction. Childhood trauma originates from intense internal pain and a child attempts to soothe that pain by disconnecting from emotions, from others, and from the body.

When a traumatized person uses a substance that brilliantly numbs pain and offers a salve to an attachment wound, it is not surprising that they become hooked. To put it simply, drugs and alcohol offers a welcome amnesty from anxiety, stress, and traumatic pain. Gabor Maté shares, “The question is not why the addiction, but why the pain…. Addiction is an attempt to solve a problem, which is the attachment.”

If you are struggling with addiction or know someone who is, please hold these three truths to compassionately understand a survivor’s pain:

All of us attempt to numb pain. When we feel pain, we try to district and avoid it. Some of us scroll TikTok or go for a run, and some of us start to drink or swallow a pill. That move to turn away from pain is a universal human experience.

Struggling with addiction is not a character flaw, nor is it a choice. Trauma and addiction both change the circuitry of the brain. When a person is struggling with addiction they have not morally failed. Addiction is about finding temporary freedom from pain.

Healing addiction is not about sobriety. Healing addiction is in understanding the survival skills a traumatized person developed to minimize pain. Second, healing addiction is about slowly and compassionately finding ways to connect back to self and to safety. You cannot treat addiction without acknowledging the root of the pain.

Sarah Young is a couple + family therapist at AACG and can be reached at sarah@amandaatkinschigo.com.