The traumatic experiences we’ve endured are some of the most painful and emotionally challenging things we’ll go through in our lives. Our response to trauma is often to suppress it, to avoid thinking about it, and to try and forget it ever happened. We run from it, hide from it, and try to escape it. As addicts, one of our means of emotional resistance is using our drugs of choice. Addictive substances and behaviors become our way of trying to bring ourselves emotional comfort, relief, and distraction, especially from the pain of our trauma. What happens when we bury our trauma rather than addressing it?
Limiting and Harming Ourselves
Many of us who don’t have a healthy relationship with our emotions also haven’t learned how to process and heal from our traumatic experiences. We bottle up our feelings, hoping they’ll go away, hoping we can move past them. This isn’t the case for most of us, though. The more we resist looking at our trauma, the more overpowering it becomes. The pain we’ve been avoiding feeling can ultimately become paralyzing and debilitating for us. We can experience worsened mental and emotional health conditions, like painful episodes of depression and emotional breakdowns. We often will use our drugs of choice excessively as a way of coping, and we often run the risk of overdosing. We self-harm in various different ways, by using our drugs of choice, by engaging in toxic and abusive relationships, and by endangering ourselves and causing ourselves physical harm.
Blaming and Condemning Ourselves
We tend to neglect our well-being when we’re burying our trauma. We don’t care for our needs or prioritize self-care. We often believe deep down that we’re undeserving of love and happiness, so we deprive ourselves of our own self-love and compassion. We’re unkind to ourselves. We’re self-deprecating, self-destructive, and self-sabotaging. We cause ourselves considerable emotional and physical harm, often because we’ve allowed the pain of our trauma to make us believe we’re unworthy and inadequate. We blame ourselves for the traumatic experiences we’ve gone through. We tell ourselves if we had been smarter, or stronger, or better, we wouldn’t have had to go through such traumatic things. We bury the memories of our trauma, hoping to put them behind us, not realizing that under the surface our trauma is causing us considerable damage and exacerbating our existing mental and emotional health challenges, including our addictive patterns.
Are you ready to take the first step on your journey to recovery?
Call The Guest House today! 855-823-5463.