Alcoholism and Trauma: Alcohol Addiction Treatment at Home
Most people don't necessarily know what triggers them, but nonetheless, once you know the vocabulary of trauma, you can notice yourself feeling "triggery". This is one of the first steps in releasing trauma successfully.It is dissociation from trauma that makes it possible for humans in the modern world to withstand high levels of stress and extremely taxing emotional states of existence that offer little reprieve. Dissociation, as such, is both positive and negative. Modern humans in industrialized nations are very oriented toward science and logic even when the science / logic contradicts a known fact or facts and even if the science or logic offers no hope for any kind of healing or happiness.
How do we tolerate these states of hopelessness? We dissociate. The modern human is built from childhood as a dissociated being with multiple sub-personalities that step up to embody the body as parts of the whole person. Most readers are familiar with multiple personality disorder, known today as Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID, as a serious mental health condition in which a person exists as multiple versions of themselves. In DID, a person may “switch” from one sub-personality to another with changing names that they use for each personality. Indeed, while one sub-personality may have diabetes, another sub-personality does not, demonstrating the strength of the mind-body connection in human beings. But while DID is considered pathological, having sub-personalities is also viewed, in several models in conventional psychology, as natural and, in fact, healthy. Dr. Richard Schwartz is a talk-therapist who works with traumatized patients to integrate sub-personalities that are conflict with each other. And in hypnotherapy, practitioners have been working with sub-personalities and “parts” for decades to resolve the internal conflict that modern humans experience as a result of dissociation due to extremely high stress and trauma exposure.
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Most human beings are exposed to some kind of trauma that they can’t shake off naturally. Humans, after all, are socialized to not shake off their traumatic experiences, but rather to hold the suppressed fight-or-flight response in the autonomic nervous system. The psychology of trauma is a relatively new field outside of hypnotherapy as a practice, so most of the people who read this material will only be familiar with war-related trauma as opposed to “trauma” as an experience that happens regularly in everyday life. Trauma can be due to the experience of being yelled at severely by a third grade teacher or it can be due to an open shooter at the mall. What constitutes “trauma” according to trauma psychology is something very different than how we use that word in colloquial speech. Chronic stress or neglect in either children or adults can lead to dissociative states that help us survive trauma and stress, but that also increase our complexity and sophistication as human beings.
Dissociation by itself is not necessarily a bad thing, however, if you have dissociative sub-personalities that are in conflict with each other inside of yourself, this is the root cause of most mental illnesses including addictive behaviors.
In order to understand how trauma causes alcoholism or other types of addiction, you have to first understand that trauma hijacks the mind-body interface. This interface is known as the autonomic nervous system although the endocrine system and the autonomic nervous system (ANS) are essentially the same system in the body.
The ANS is an extensive network of nerves that are so prolific in the body that if you dipped the body into a special acid and dissolved every structure except the autonomic nervous system, our basic body shape and appearance would still be intact. Let’s imagine this extensive network of nerves as a super-high-tech human body suit that we can step into and step out of with different states of consciousness to embody the body.
You might, at times, step into your ANS and embody the flesh-and-bones of your human existence with anger or sadness or fear for parts of your day. Perhaps when you wake up in the morning, you generally feel “awful”. This feeling of “awfulness” may or may not be a physical condition. “Awfulness” may be a descriptor for an emotion or for a physical condition. But perhaps when your spouse comes home, you feel some relief from the awfulness and then, instead, experience states of anxiety or guilt. Each of these distinct emotional states are sub-personalities and they likely exist in conflict with each other.
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The autonomic nervous system or rather, the high tech human body suit that we wear during our lives on earth is exquisitely sensitive to all kinds of data from the environment. The body suit can pick up the time of day or night based on the sun and the moon. If we expose the body suit to nature on a regular basis, it can sense the season and subtle changes in the weather. This body suit picks up changes in electromagnetic frequencies and it can sense other people, their presence and different bits of information about the other person’s energy field. But for many of us, the powers latent in this high tech body suit go completely unnoticed and untapped. By the time we enter our twenties, we live almost exclusively in the left-hemisphere of the brain, which is like a giant penthouse poised atop this high tech suit that lives in the natural world of urban jungles, deserts, plains, and forests. While our minds are excellent at absorbing the rules of our family, rules of our culture, rules of our religion, and rules of our government to try to come up with logical ways to live, the body, the ANS is a wild animal. The mind / left-brain hates this about the ANS even while the ANS is our lifeline. It is via the ANS and the endocrine system that we connect with the outside world and it is through these systems that our organs function without our conscious awareness. Our culture teaches us that to be wild is to be bad. But without the wild aspect of our human nature, we lack the 6th (or 7th or 8th) sense that functions through the high-tech human body suit. As humans, we are both logical, rule-oriented, civilized beings and also wild animals. A big part of our successful and happy existence on earth requires that we check-in with our wild nature, learn how to use this high-tech human suit, and allow our wildness to guide us in situations where logic simply does not make sense.The ANS / endocrine system, our high tech human suit, is essential to our survival on this planet. It is made of ashes and dust and it knows this world in a particular way that our logical minds simply do not. What our bodies experience in the real world can be traumatic, but it can also be really joyful and magical at times. In today’s world, the mind is constantly being pinged to give attention to all kinds of miscellaneous information, but sometimes, we have to shut off the mind and just feel. This sounds easy enough in theory, but trauma is like a computer virus that hijacks our high-tech human suit. It creates glitches and bugs in the suit. When we’ve experienced trauma and failed to release and process that trauma via the high-tech human suit, it gets uncomfortable to be human. We feel like “crawling out of our skin”. We can’t stand to feel what it feels like to be present inside that high-tech human suit. The feelings in there get really chaotic and out of control as the amount of trauma builds up and as our dissociative states multiply into tens or sometimes hundreds of sub-personalities. So we move up into our minds and commit to staying there at all costs. The logical mind then sets to work at punishing us for being wild animals and for having any sort of wildness to our existence. Until we learn how to release trauma from the ANS / endocrine system, each time the mind dismisses the high-tech human suit and whatever we’ve done in our lives as a result of something that we felt or sensed through this suit, we feel bad about ourselves. As the logical mind makes the argument that the things we did to survive in the past were somehow wrong, we know that we’re dissociating from a part of ourselves that we need in order to survive and thrive on planet earth.
This mind-body “problem” creates barriers to the release of the trauma that ultimately makes the human suit nearly unlivable. But the release of trauma is actually something very simple that takes just minutes if the left, logical hemisphere of the brain will allow the process to unfold.
The word “trauma” has been used primarily in psychology to describe something that happens after a person goes to war. Post-TRAUMAtic Stress Disorder (PTSD), for example, is a mental illness that acknowledges a trauma as something that plays a role in creating extreme emotional discomfort. But recent research has shown that trauma can be used to explain most of the mental illnesses that exist today.
Trauma can be anything from a painful dental appointment to being hit by a bus. It can involve nothing but the perceived threat of death (as opposed to an actual threat of death) or it can be caused by neglect that’s perceived by a child as threatening to the child’s survival. Trauma is defined as the real or perceived threat of death of yourself or a loved one and as such, it is a subjective experience. Trauma may be chronic stress at work that erodes away at your sense of financial security. Whether or not any given situation is perceived by the body as “traumatic” depends on many factors, but once trauma gets lodged in the body, specifically in the autonomic nervous system, it is no longer a conscious memory and the conscious, logical mind can’t explain it or talk about it using words.
Talk therapy thus has profound limitations because trauma does not lend itself to words and descriptions until it is at a point of integration and release. Getting to the release of trauma always involves somatic, physical treatment of some kind to release the chaotic and painful emotions that are being stored in the body.
Trauma makes us want to ignore how our bodies feel because we feel emotions in our bodies. When trauma gets stored in the autonomic nervous system, any number of “triggers” can set off the emotional content as something that we feel – like a feeling that’s been frozen in time, usually in the past – but all other information about the traumatic event is no longer connected to this feeling. So a person might be exposed to a trigger without realizing it and without having any awareness as to what the trigger is and suddenly begin to feel a powerful emotion like fear, anger, or sadness. This “free-floating emotion” of terror, rage, or extreme sadness changes the way that the person experiences the real world. You can be sitting in a peaceful meadow watching two butterflies playing with each other and be possessed by a feeling of terror due to a trauma that occurred decades prior. How the mind tries to make sense of this “free-floating terror” (and other negative emotions) that tends to emerge in response to either a trigger or from passing from an alpha brainwave state to a theta brainwave state, determines which of the various mental illnesses the person might be diagnosed with should they go to see a psychiatrist.
Releasing the trauma means releasing the mental illness as well as the awful feelings that emerge from the abyss of our subconscious minds. The process of releasing trauma sounds scary to the logical mind that has been dissociated almost completely from the body’s felt sense, but in fact, it is through re-integration that the logical mind develops compassion for the Self, a state that involves the embodiment of peace and a centered state of mind.
Alcohol Addiction Demystified: The Science of Alcohol Addiction and How to Overcome It At Home - BUY HERE!It’s important to consider the effect of trauma in alcoholism because anything that disrupts the dopamine system is likely to disrupt the autonomic nervous system’s ability to release trauma. If dopamine receptors are killed by the flooding of dopamine or by droughts of dopamine and a lack of a steady drip of this essential decision-making neurotransmitter, trauma, or rather, the incomplete actions that we weren’t able to take in response to something terrifying, sad, or maddening can get stuck in our autonomic nervous system and cause subsequent endocrine disruption as well as unsynchronized relationships with the environment.
If you’ve ever been talking with a good friend about something really important to you and were interrupted mid-sentence and mid-thought and the conversation then ended and never resumed, you have just a taste of what it’s like for your autonomic nervous system, the part of our bodies that interface between the body and the mind, to be zinged by a traumatic event. When we aren’t able to run away, save ourselves, scream, yell, or perform any number of actions that we might feel like doing if we were able during the experience of something traumatic, we store this feeling – a strong urge to perform a powerful action toward completion in the ANS. The urge to scream or to run away is encoded as an emotion of terror, for example, in the ANS as a dissociative state that can be triggered by something in the environment and then embodied in an effort to complete the traumatic storyline as a happy, rather than as a traumatic ending.
Sexual abuse, for example, often involves a bigger or stronger person who forces a sex act on a person who feels as though it’s necessary to comply with the bigger / stronger person’s wishes. Though the victim in a scenario like this may feel like running away, screaming, yelling, kicking, fighting, submitting, dying, or any number of emotions, he or she complies for any number of reasons related to the sense that if he / she does not comply, he / she may be hurt or killed (or a loved one might be hurt or killed). Suppressing the urge to run away or fight against an oppressor is traumatic. The experience as an emotion gets lodged in the body and it has to be released and integrated. Usually, the release of trauma is a quiet and gentle affair that involves breath and subtle movements. Despite this, most of us brace ourselves against the feelings that trauma generates in the body. We do anything we can to avoid feeling those feelings. We’ve been taught to continue in a dissociated state for as long as we possibly can.
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Most people can’t identify the specific traumatic experiences that might contribute to an addictive cycle because trauma, once it is stored in the body, is not something that operates in the conscious mind. Rather, trauma operates unconsciously, in the symbolic “mind-body” of the ANS. As with a computer that has a virus, trauma can drag down the whole system and take up a lot of the resources in terms of thinking and decision making. Trauma can cause issues like panic attacks, psychosis, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and almost any other mental disorder including sexual dysfunction and various forms of addiction by overwhelming the ANS with symbolic emotion-based memory-artifacts that hijack our conscious, logical minds. When our bodies feel terror that’s out of sync with the actual present-tense experience in the environment, our minds try to make sense out of this terror based on the real world. When the mind can’t make sense out of a free-floating emotion like terror that has no basis in fact in the real world, our minds are quickly recruited to come up with creative ways to explain and make sense of the problem. Indeed, our bodies can take on some of the burden too through the sudden development of “autoimmunity”, “arthritis”, “chronic fatigue”, etc. Having a physical disease is often less unpleasant for people than having the feeling of terror when there’s actually peace reigning in the real world.Killing dopamine receptors seems to keep trauma at a very slow trickle into conscious awareness which might explain why any addiction that kills dopamine receptors can be like a form of self-treatment for trauma. The death or dormancy of dopamine receptors is part of the physiological definition of dissociation. In some cases of addiction, as dopamine receptors are killed or “closed” (like flowers), the trauma gets “stuck” in the body. As an alcoholic begins to take kudzu and Mucuna pruriens on the other hand, along with other supportive nutrients, trauma may begin to rise from the unconscious into the conscious mind to cause issues like panic attacks, depression, or other mental health issues. These mental health issues are the embodiment of a trauma that is at the surface waiting for a trauma-informed therapy or a sacred medicine so that it can be released and integrated permanently. It may sound scary to confront these emotions, but if we think of panic attacks, depression, and most other symptoms of mental illness as “steam” that’s being vented from a pressure cooker that’s about to explode, we can understand these symptoms as being a part of the cure. Anyone with mental health problems or mood issues is in the process of overcoming these issues. With the proper medicines to facilitate the entry of unconscious material into conscious awareness and sacred medicines to process and sort through the unconscious material, a person can heal permanently from depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues.
Another way to conceptualize dissociation physiologically is by imagining the body as millions of tiny cells. When we are first born and as we grow into children around the age of 4 years, we embody all of our cells as a Core Self. But as we’re socialized to not express our feelings and eventually to not have feelings, we send parts of ourselves away. In alcoholism, this is one of the most important models of addiction and trauma. When we send a part of our energy or soul away, this is known in shamanic medicine as soul loss. The retrieval of lost soul parts is something that is mundane to shamanic medicine. Soul retrieval is a fundamental healing act that shaman do on behalf of a client to retrieve energies that the client has lost. But in the modern world, soul loss is not considered a logical model for ill-health. So the modern human has evolved to dissociate and send their soul parts away into other realms of consciousness until those parts are needed for particular situations that the body must confront in the real world. At the moment when a particular part of us is needed for its expertise in a particular situation like, for example, a public speaking event, or during a family reunion, that soul part is embodied and certain cells in our bodies “close” while others “open” and become functional after a period of dormancy.
This way of doing things in modern man is governed over by insulin and growth hormone release and it has some positives in terms of our ability to, at times, allow certain of our soul parts to rest while others are active. We may embody more than one part of ourselves at any given moment and some parts may be in conflict with the other parts, but alas, both parts have information that we need in the situation when they show up for embodiment.
This model of cells that are periodically going dormant and then awakening for embodiment can be used to explain and understand how and why people with multiple personality disorder / dissociative identity disorder can have one sub-personality / part with diabetes or an allergy and another part that does not have that health issue.
In today’s world, traumatic experiences literally happen to people on a daily or at least a weekly basis. The healthcare system itself is a huge source of trauma. People are traumatized, in fact, by the diagnostic labels that have been pasted onto the symptomatic release of trauma and their process of healing. So trauma is a problem that accumulates over time in the body and the goal is to release trauma at a steady pace and to learn how to release trauma to keep ourselves healthy. This is an important focal point for anyone who is doing alcohol recovery at home. Begin working with at home treatments for trauma as soon as you feel like you’re ready. Be aware of your tools for trauma-release and get to know which ones you prefer as your alcohol recovery process unfolds.
It’s important for people with alcohol use disorder to note that odd things can happen as their body starts to heal. Otherwise, many alcoholics feel like they’ve overcome alcoholism only to develop a mental or physical illness. In fact, these two things are related: as dopamine levels and dopamine receptors heal, trauma that’s been acting to drag down the body’s “system of sub-personalities” for years rises to the surface to be released (this is a good thing if you know what’s going on). The release of trauma can look like almost any kind of mental illness (including schizophrenia, panic attacks, depression, etc.) as well as any number of physical illnesses or symptoms or chronic physical pain. This might sound scary, but in fact, if patients are able to seek out treatments to help them release the trauma as they simultaneously seek to heal the physical body, they’ll begin healing from alcoholism on a whole new level.
Click here to read a bit more about my own experience with trauma and later panic attacks (in this article in the section titled “The Psychological Layer”) that were due to a dental appointment.
It’s important to note here that talk therapies can be helpful but they are remarkably slow in comparison with body-mind-based trauma-focused therapies that can be used to release big batches of trauma quickly. Talk therapy is not a way to access the ANS unless you’re working with hypnotherapy or another type of talk therapy that bypasses the conscious, logical mind. Of all of the treatments for trauma in alcoholics that work the fastest and that work best to release trauma to a point of completion, the sacred indigenous medicines are the best. These include Ayahuasca, psilocybin, San Pedro, and more. I have personally worked with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR with good results, but you can only work on one unit of trauma at a time and only “surface” traumas so it is very slow in comparison with the sacred indigenous medicines. But that being said, slow trauma release can be really helpful at first when you’re doing at home alcohol recovery because EMDR can quell feelings of panic, terror, depression, etc. as they arise during recovery. EMDR works quickly and it’s very effective when administered by a practitioner who knows what they’re doing. But sacred medicines like Ayahuasca not only work to heal the autonomic nervous system to release trauma, but they also help us heal the body, specifically the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas, along with our most valued relationships with other human beings. A person with alcohol addiction due to trauma, should consider working with Ayahuasca at some point in the recovery process simply to rebuild beta cells in the pancreas and at the same time, experience the power of being counseled by this plant medicine to move forward in the addiction recovery process with exponential speed.
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Below are some of the most important trauma-release therapies that can be used to release trauma that causes alcoholism and other forms of addiction:
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- EMDR is a treatment modality that can be performed at home to release trauma that causes addiction. It is an elegantly simple form of treatment where the eyes are guided to move back and forth, but it’s powerful. Click on this link to do a free trial of EMDR at home. Note that you need to religiously follow the instructions in this program for best results.
- Mindfulness Meditation
- Mindfulness meditation involves bringing oneself into the present moment using the five senses. Trauma is always a situation that happened in the past (though often people feel great anxiety about the future as a result of these past traumas). Bringing the self into the present moment rewires the brain.
- Craniosacral Therapy
- Craniosacral therapy is a type of massage that moves the cranial bones so as to relieve pressure on the cranial nerves. Indeed, negative thoughts actually cause our upper vertebrae and cranial bones to move out of alignment, causing pressure on cranial nerves (which are part of the autonomic nervous system). This can lead to physical manifestations of disease as well as mental illness caused by trauma.
- Alpha-Theta Therapy
- Alpha-Theta therapy requires that you work with a therapist, but this type of treatment involves moving trauma from the unconscious autonomic nervous system into conscious awareness for release.
- Neurofeedback
- Neurofeedback involves the use of electronic devices to reward the brain for being calm and for staying present. It is a powerful tool for overcoming trauma that causes addiction.
- Sacred Medicines
- The sacred medicines are the fastest way to release trauma that is causing you discomfort (mental, physical, spiritual). The sacred medicines listed below each take people to different levels of consciousness or other worlds. Lydian and I have worked intensively with each of these herbs under the tutelage of a shaman in Mexico to learn how they release trauma. Contact us at [email protected] for more information about working with any of the sacred medicines in Mexico listed below:
- Psilocybin
- Ayahuasca
- Sapito
- Peyote
- Kambo
- Sananga
- Dream herbs
- The sacred medicines are the fastest way to release trauma that is causing you discomfort (mental, physical, spiritual). The sacred medicines listed below each take people to different levels of consciousness or other worlds. Lydian and I have worked intensively with each of these herbs under the tutelage of a shaman in Mexico to learn how they release trauma. Contact us at [email protected] for more information about working with any of the sacred medicines in Mexico listed below:
Click here to buy psilocybin online.
In summary, trauma likely plays a role in most addictions, but nutrient deficiencies that lead to dopamine deficiencies can make it harder for the body to release trauma naturally through dreams, for example. The release of trauma is often a rather quiet process.
