More on How Trauma Leads to Addiction

Living with the kind of unpredictable and damaging behaviors that surround addiction, often challenges our sense of a normal and predictable world. It undermines our trust and faith in relationships and their ability to nurture and sustain us. It interferes with our ability to communicate our needs and have them heard or to listen to another person communicate theirs. It is in other words, traumatizing.

Over time this "cumulative" trauma can engender trauma related symptoms such as depression, anxiety, hypervigilance, low self worth and somatic disturbances (head and body aches, chronic tension and so forth). These symptoms, if they go untreated in family members, can become full blown PTSD. They can lead to all sorts of life, learning, health, psychological and relationship complications and yes, you guessed it, a desire to self-medicate.

This is how the insidious baton of addiction gets handed down through the generations. Addiction engenders trauma symptoms and trauma symptoms engender addiction. Even if family members do not become alcoholics or drug addictes themselves, they are at increased risk for other forms of self-medicating (food, sex or money, or hybrid combinations of two or three).