Book Review: Trauma and Addiction
Ending the Cycle of Pain Through Emotional Literacy by Tian Dayton PhD Published by Heath Communication Inc., 2000
Written by a seasoned author, therapist and the adult child of an alcoholic father, this book explores the lifelong impact of childhood trauma. The author gives very honest accounts of events from her own childhood and the effect that they have had upon her life along with illustrations from clients over the years.
She starts by quoting the advice of Oprah Winfrey (who is well placed to know about these matters): “If you don’t heal the wounds of your childhood, you bleed into the future.”
Dr Dayton addresses how the psyche deals with trauma and how, when there was no framework for processing overwhelming emotions at the time, they often remain like an unexploded bomb within until triggered by some event later in life - often in an intimate relationship.
This unprocessed trauma can then cause feeling flashes, flashbacks and memory fragments to zoom to the surface at split second speed like “an actor who arrives suddenly on stage with an old script looking for another character with whom to play out this scene” and so "the buried grenade from a previous war gets triggered in another time and place".
Trauma: The early years
The author also looks at the impact of very early life as it is now acknowledged that during the first year of life the brain of a baby more than doubles in size from 400 g to 1,000 g as circuitry is hard-wired into the brain. A growth-producing environment during this crucial time involves empathic care, consistency and authenticity and allows the developing child to to internalise behavioural norms which, in turn, mean that the child feels safe enough to be curious about their world.
For a child developing in a growth-inhibiting environment such as those affected by mental illness or alcoholism, the child can be assailed by painful, confusing and inconsistent behaviour from the adults in their world and these children become internally preoccupied with trying to establish order so that they can feel safe.
The somatisation of trauma
“The body remembers what the mind forgets.”
J L Moreno
The author also quotes from the research of Dr Candace Pert as detailed in her book ‘Molecules of Emotion’ which revealed that all emotions elicit hormonal and other biochemical messengers which dock with receptors on every cell in the body, and in this way, emotional memories are encoded at the cellular level in every cell. Dr Pert also refers to the bodymind since the division between body and mind is effectively an artificial one.
The legacy of trauma and addiction
The author outlines 20 of the signs of trauma as detailed below.
1. Learned helplessness The feeling that nothing you do ever changes anything.
2. Anxiety Panic disorders and overreacting such as jumping ‘out of your skin’ because a troubled parent cannot teach a young child the necessary developmental skills required to self-soothe.
3. Depression The feeling that you are living in a dark hole. Stressful events are recognised to precipitate 50% of depression and early life stress is strongly related to depression later in life.
4. Emotional constriction Feeling numb and unable to share your feelings even with a partner.
5. A disorganised inner world The world seems confusing and things don’t seem to make sense. The young child has internalised a fractured representation that they are desperately trying to integrate.
6. Traumatic bonding The pattern whereby those individuals with unprocessed trauma keep choosing the wrong people. Being treated kindly simply feels foreign and these people repeatedly magnetise the very relationships and situations that they seek to avoid. This means that the sexually abused may become promiscuous or may become abusers.
7. Cycles of re-enactment The recognition that you’ve been in this situation before. So that the abused child may marry an abusive partner because they have not processed, grieved for, or even labelled their childhood experiences as traumatic. This recognition always indicates the need for inner work.
8. Loss of ability to modulate emotions People suffering with the after-effects of trauma tend to be quite black and white in their thinking and to have intense reactions or to shutdown. Starving and purging, dramatic geographical moves and repeatedly attending change-your-life seminars are all symptoms. However, there is no magical fix, just practice over a period of time in learning to modulate your emotions and to walk a middle path.
9. Emotional triggering Those suffering with the effects of unprocessed trauma may overreact to a current event with the intensity of emotion related to original trauma.
10. Distorted reasoning Resorting to blaming, justifying and other distorted reasoning in an attempt to try and make sense of things that make no sense.
11. Loss of trust and faith The abiding feeling that things will never work out for you.
12. Hypervigilance The feeling that you are always ‘waiting for the other shoe to drop’ rather than being able to enjoy the good times. These individuals feel haunted because they know that their world can fall apart suddenly and unexpectedly and sometimes may even provoke a reaction just to terminate the suspense of waiting.
13. A loss of ability to take in support Traumatised people put up such defences that others can’t reach them. This often relates to the memory of being let down by those on whom they most depended. In families where one parent is mentally ill or an alcoholic the affected parent is effectively emotionally unavailable and the other parent may be very preoccupied with the partner and trying to keep the 'show on the road'.
14. Fused feelings Like melted electrical wires, different feelings may have become fused together so that love and violence or sex and aggression have become related in the individual suffering with unprocessed trauma and this can leave them feeling crazy.
15. Emotional numbness Being 'emotionally illiterate', experiencing 'feelings with no words', having an impaired capacity to mourn, shutting down or feeling emotional numb are all indications that trauma has been somatised (stored in the body) rather than processed.
16. Loss of spontaneity The feeling that your life does not feel alive.
17. High-risk behaviours Those with unprocessed trauma may seek sensation, danger, or the intensity of a physically or verbally abusive relationship in order to feel something.
18. Survival guilt Feeling guilty because you got away and made a life for yourself when other family members may still be stuck in the dysfunctional relationship.
19. The development of rigid psychological defences
This can include:
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Denial: 'Nothing really bad happened'.
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Dissociation: Becoming a dreamer who retreats to their inner world.
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Intellectualisation: The person who prefers to talk about, rather than to feel their feelings.
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Repression: The effort involved in repressing denied emotions eventually takes its toll on emotional, mental and physical health.
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Idealisation: Idealising the abuser. This may involve the abused splitting their feelings about the abuser and projecting the uncomfortable feelings onto another.
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Projection: The individual with unprocessed trauma sees their feelings as being outside of themselves and thinks that their problems would be resolved if others would change.
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Displacement: Those carrying unprocessed trauma see their own problems in another whilst disowning them.
20. Desire to self-medicate According to the author, all addiction arises from trauma and the desire by the individual affected to medicate their pain. This may take the form of compulsive shopping, sex, gambling, drinking, drugs or eating but is an attempt to self-medicate using a prop that can be relied upon. Dealing with the particular coping mechanism therefore, only solves part of the problem as the individual is then left to face the original pain and trauma that they were medicating. Successful treatment necessarily takes time and involves addressing both the addiction and the original trauma.
The importance of social support
To stress the profound importance of social support, and how damaging the isolating legacy of trauma can be, the author then lists a variety of shocking statistics. Comparing widows to married women:
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34% more die of heart disease
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46% more die of cervical cancer
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55% more die of cirrhosis of the liver
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4 times more die in automobile accidents
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6 times more die in fires or explosions.
Think that is bad news? It gets worse! Comparing divorced with widowed women:
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25% more die of cirrhosis of the liver
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28% more die of cervical cancer
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43% more commit suicide.
Women with little social support experience complications during pregnancy 91% of the time compared to just 33% of those who have good social support. Just to demonstrate that men are also affected - twice as many divorced men aged 55 - 64 years die compared to their married counterparts.
Resolving childhood trauma
The legacy of trauma colours every aspect of life and can be resolved with willingness, time and effective professional help. The author argues the case strongly for group therapy to both provide social support and give the individual the empathic feedback that may have been lacking in their early life.
One trap she identifies is the desire by those carrying unprocessed trauma for a quick and easy magical 'fix', but in her experience, it takes approximately 7 years to process all the various aspects of trauma. The vast majority of sufferers, of course, never do this work and so the legacy of trauma is unwittingly passed to another generation ...
Further resources
To buy a copy of Trauma and Addiction by Tian Dayton click the appropriate link to go to Amazon UK
or US
. Related books including Love's Hidden Symmetry, Family Secrets: What You Don't Know Can Hurt Youand The Body Bears The Burden are listed in the Emotional and Spiritual Health section of Recommended Reading.
For an explanation of how childhood trauma leads to later chronic illness and how to unravel the damage please refer to The Natural Recovery Plan book
“The book contains a wealth of information ... there is light at the end of the tunnel.”
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