Some type of trauma or major challenge is an extremely common source of emotional pain in the context of addiction. It might be a single event, like a rape, attack, or witnessing an injury, or it could be slow and chronic, like neglect or teasing.
Burdens from the past, or fears that they’ll happen again, can make the present feel unbearable. If you’re too uncomfortable to talk about a hardship, even with close people, that’s a sign you might not be over it yet.
How Mind and Body Actually Respond to Trauma
Trauma is just a word. Don’t worry about whether your experience seems “bad enough” compared to others, like a war or assault. Thinking this way can stop you from healing. What matters is how your mind and body react to what happened, not how it looks from the outside.
Life challenges are supposed to bother us while they’re happening. But when their effects linger afterward, it’s often because of the belief systems we carry. For example, many people believe the world is meant to be fair. So they might ask themselves, “Why did my parents separate when I was so young? Why did I get bullied at school? Why did I have to face that accident?”
If you carry resentment, it may be a clue you need to let go of certain assumptions about the world. Or if you’re still responding appropriately to ongoing dangers, perhaps that’s not Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), it’s just common sense.
If there are harmful people in your environment, avoiding them, or being alert in risky situations, is natural. That fear is your body protecting you, and you can actually be thankful for it.
Yes, your traumas, and past experiences may leave lasting effects. But what that really shows is how your body and mind adapted to survive. That’s not weakness or illness, it’s resilience.
Recognizing Trauma’s Effects
Now, the key is to notice whether those adaptations still serve you. If you’ve been neglected, abandoned, teased, shot at, or abused, your mind and body learned to quickly adapt and avoid anything resembling those pains. Understanding this can help you see your reactions in a new, empowering light.
Some thoughts are common after traumatic experiences. You might not want to trust another person after being cheated on. You might feel unsafe being alone after years of fear without protection. Or you might struggle in crowded, noisy places if you had been randomly attacked before.
How could you have hope if every effort you made was rejected? How wouldn’t you want to numb yourself with denial, alcohol or food if emotions are always overwhelming and you’ve never been taught how to handle them?
Don’t just think of the example above as anxiety, depression or anger, but as your best adaptation to your environment.
Instead, you can start to ask yourself: How could you not have come away with the adaptations to your past that you did? How could your response have been any other way?
How Does Childhood Trauma Affect Adulthood?
Are you aware of any past challenges? How have they shaped you? In the exercise below, you’ll be guided to learn about how the mind and body interact.
Task on Past Challenges and Traumas: What Is the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study?
I’d like you to learn about the largest study on this topic, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, and how powerfully our early experiences can shape later health conditions, including addiction and many types of illness.
In this website page, you’ll find 10 questions. Answer them to discover your ACE score. You’ll notice the questions are related to the following challenges:
The Adverse Childhood Experiences study shows that the more difficulties you face in childhood, the higher your score tends to be – and with it, your risk of health problems later in life.
A Way Forward: How Can You Heal From Trauma?
If a deer is attacked by a cougar on its usual trail, it needs to learn not to walk that same path again, or, if it does, to move with great caution and stealth. That’s a healthy adaptation.
The problem begins only when the cougar is long gone, yet the deer continues to live in fear. The same is true for us: we need to adjust to new realities whenever our circumstances change. If you adapted so strongly to difficult experiences earlier in life, then we already know you’re capable of adapting again. In fact, the very intensity of your past adaptations is proof that you can change – you’ve already done it, perhaps even too well.
The real focus of trauma healing should be on recognizing and working with the barriers that prevent you from re-adapting to a safer environment. That can happen in two ways: first, through gradual exposure to the new environment in safe and progressive steps; or second, by reshaping your perceptions and beliefs about the hardship. We’ll explore each of these approaches.
Step One in Healing Trauma: Gradual Exposure
Let’s start with the first method to heal a mind that has over-adapted to tough conditions: Gradual Exposure.
We’ll run through a common example so you can see how this works. Imagine a scenario where someone has been neglected or abandoned. That’s a painful challenge to endure. A common adaptation in this case is becoming overly untrusting, making it hard to form new and close relationships. And honestly – why wouldn’t you be cautious and afraid it could happen again?
Next, you need to find your reason to work on it. For example, maybe you want to be able to trust a romantic partner again, or you’d like to have a couple of good friends. Without a reason, you won’t feel motivated to work on anything.
How Gradual Exposure Works
The last part is the hardest, because it’s where the real work begins: exposure. But it’s not meant to be harsh or overwhelming. In fact, the whole point is for it to be gentle. Let’s run through an example of what this could look like.
If you struggle with trust in close relationships, think about how to start small. Maybe begin by trusting an employee with some work tasks – you know they’ll be at work, and sharing tasks is part of the job. Next, try trusting your closest friend to meet up with you some of the times you ask. After that, join a team where everyone depends on one another to show up and try hard. Then, when you’re ready, share with the most trusted person in your life that you’re actively working on trust.
See, you don’t need to jump straight into the deepest end by giving your heart to a new partner all at once. You need to practice and slowly build up. By the time you do try for love again, you’ll already have a foundation of trust built through work, friendships, or even family.
If you approach this carefully and in small steps, you’ll learn the ins and outs – like who to trust, and for what kinds of things. You’ll also discover that trusting someone with information is different from trusting them with emotions, and different again from trusting them to follow through with actions. Treat this like building any other skill: it takes practice, intention, and planning your next step if you want to move forward seriously.
Step Two in Healing Trauma: Reshaping Perceptions of Challenges
Now let’s look at the second method to help a mind that’s over-adapted to tough conditions: reshaping your perception of challenges.
Some people can’t address a trauma because they fear being overwhelmed by emotion, appearing weak, or thinking it was their fault. But here’s the truth: if avoiding the past actually worked, you wouldn’t still be struggling. You’ve already learned that ignoring trauma doesn’t help in the long run.
Most ongoing issues come from trying to make sense of past challenges through old, rigid belief systems. Instead of forming beliefs based on the truths of real life, many people try to force their experiences to fit into existing (and often harmful) beliefs. Let’s look at some of the most common beliefs that keep people stuck.
Belief 1: “Only Good Things Happen to Good People.”
We want to believe this, especially as children. Parents, teachers, or religion may have taught us that the world is fun, safe, and predictable if we’re “good.” So when something bad happens, a child assumes it must be because they did something wrong.
But that belief doesn’t hold up in reality. Without challenging it, you can end up blaming yourself for terrible things, like neglect, bullying, or even rape. Believing “everything is fair” gives us a false sense of control, as though we could prevent bad things simply by behaving well.
The reality is the world isn’t fair, and horrible things happen to wonderful people all the time. And if you think that sounds pessimistic, consider the alternative: living your whole life believing you deserve bad things. That leads only to shame, guilt, or depression. Facing reality may feel harder at first, but it’s freeing, because it lets you believe in yourself even in an unpredictable and unfair world.
Belief 2: “I Should Have Known Better.”
Who doesn’t want to think they can see everything coming? Many people look back on painful experiences and believe they “should have known.” Sometimes they even recall having a bad feeling beforehand.
But here’s the truth: we all do things every day that carry risks. If I have a heart attack after eating cake, can I really say I “should have known” that specific piece of cake would do it? Of course not. I didn’t know, and so I ate it.
I’ve worked with patients who believed they deserved rape because they wore something “sexy” and thought they should’ve known better. But the reality is they didn’t know. And no matter what you wear, no matter how attractive you are, that is never an invitation to be assaulted.
Thinking you should always know what’s coming isn’t just unrealistic, it’s arrogant. Nobody has superhuman foresight. Believing otherwise only leads to self-resentment.
Belief 3: “I Need to Dramatically Change to Protect Myself.”
This belief often leads to overreactions. For example:
- “Since going out got me into trouble, I should never go out again.”
- “Since relationships end in rejection, I should avoid them altogether.”
This kind of thinking traps you between two extremes – hoping things might work out versus believing they never will – so you give up.
Instead, the goal is balance. Here’s what a healthier perspective might sound like:
- “It’s not worth the risk to go out with strangers, but it’s safe and worthwhile to go out with people I trust.”
- “It’s too painful to jump into another relationship right away, but I want one enough that I’ll give someone a chance to earn my trust over time, and I’ll ask friends for their input along the way.”
The key is recognizing that adjustments don’t need to be extreme. Most of the time, small or moderate shifts lead to a healthier balance. If you find yourself jumping to the opposite of your past behavior, you’re probably overshooting. That’s the signal to slow down and find the middle ground.
Want to Take the Next Step? Self Recovery Will Help You!
I created Self Recovery, an online addiction recovery program, to help people work through any kind of emotional pain – whether from trauma, loss, or life’s challenges – and to live a more fulfilling, balanced, and empowered life.
The program offers tools and guidance that make healing accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere. Learn more at selfrecovery.org.
