- One of the outcomes of childhood distress is addiction.
So that if you look at the research literature on addiction,
the more adversity experienced in your childhood, the greater the risk of addiction, exponentially.
And in the Downtown Eastside Vancouver , which is a population very much affected by addiction,
in 14 years I never met a single woman who has not been sexually abused as a child.
And many of the men had been abused, traumatized, abandoned, neglected.
Terrible things happened to them over time.
Now addictions are not the problem.
At least, of course they are problem, but they're also the attempt to solve the problem.
and the problem is unbearable psychic distress or pain.
So there's no understanding of addiction without understanding human pain.
And there's no understanding of human pain without understanding human childhood experience.
So it all goes back to that.
And that's for two reasons.
One is that it instills the pain that you try to soothe with the drugs,
not just the drugs also with addictive behaviors of all kinds
from shopping, to eating, to work, to internet, to pornography, to gambling, video games.
Whatever you're addicted to these are all your attempts to escape pain, distress, discomfort with the self.
And no infant is uncomfortable with themselves,
so that discomfort is a response to the parents’ discomfort.
And in the case of the most traumatized population
the parents’ high level of dysfunction which goes back to their own childhoods.
So there's no one to blame, it's multi-generational, but that's how it's transmitted.
It's not genetic. Alcoholism is not a genetic disease, drug addiction is not a genetic disease.
That's one of those myths that our society likes to hold onto.
It runs in families,
but not because of genes but because of emotional patterns and behaviors
that give rise to that same pain, and that same desire to escape from that pain.
So that's the first reason, the second reason why, negative child experiences, particularly trauma.
Predisposed to addiction is because it actually shapes their brain certain ways,
so that the brain's reward chemicals, the circuitry that modulates those chemicals,
doesn't develop as well in a traumatized child.
Nor do the circuits that regulate stress, so their way of relieving stress
is to do something that soothes their pain temporarily.
So when you're stressed you're going to drink a lot, eat a lot, go shopping, spend money you haven't got, do drugs.
Those circuits, again, develop or don't in response to childhood experience,
and the more supportive and secure the environment,
the more optimally those circuits develop,
Now you've got the reward, and the pleasure, and the happiness chemicals inside you,
and they're available to you, but what happens if the environment doesn't promote,
or encourage that kind of element? Then you'll be seeking it from the outside.
So addictions, whether physical or behavioral,
are all about trying to seek something from the outside that you're not able to generate from within.
And it all goes back to pain and loss, and in the severe cases, trauma.