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by Mark Robinett, MFT
Most present day addiction therapists and researchers believe that
trauma is at the root of most addictions. There are two basic types
of trauma. The first is developmental trauma. This is where crucial
developmental needs are not met or are thwarted so that crucial development
does not happen, or happens in a skewed way. An example of where
developmental needs are not met is the case where a teenage boy or
girl is basically ignored and neglected with the sexual and romantic
struggles of adolescence so that healthy sexual development does
not happen or happens in an unhealthy direction. Some examples of
thwarted developmental needs include situations where a parent is
too repressive, too critical, or too encouraging of an adolescence's
sexuality so that normal sexual development is interfered with and
either does not happen, or happens in an unhealthy direction.
The second type of trauma is event trauma or shock trauma. One example
of this kind of trauma is sexual abuse, which usually causes a state
of traumatic shock within a person. This type of trauma can cause
many problems - such as unhealthy sexual development, symptoms of
unregulated emotions, or over stimulation of the nervous system to
name a few. For example, if a person has an inner state of traumatic
shock, they are usually at a great disadvantage to deal effectively
with the stresses of living or the needs of healthy sexual development.
This is because the trauma usually interferes dramatically with normal
healthy functioning. It can in fact be disruptive in many ways to
a person's physical, emotional and psychological processes. This
is why an addiction may come into play - because a person tries to
use the addiction to "medicate" or handle the state of traumatic
shock to better deal with the challenges of life, or move on with
development that needs to happen.
When a person has developmental trauma the situation is somewhat
different from shock trauma, but this kind of trauma can also lead
to an addiction. A person who does not have a healthy sexual development
on board because of certain needs not met (or needs that were thwarted),
may turn to an addiction not necessarily to try to medicate a state
of traumatic shock within, but instead because their development
went in an unhealthy direction and that is what they "know". The
addiction in this case is an attempt to get healthy needs met, but
in an unhealthy way simply because their development happened in
an unhealthy way. To illustrate this I will use an example of a person
addicted to masturbation with pornography. A person could get into
this type of addiction because their sexual development was derailed
during adolescence and they turned to this type of sex at that time,
instead of moving towards beginning to be sexual with other peers
during adolescence.
Either type of trauma can interfere with healthy sexual development
and can lead to sexual addictions (and/or other addictions) in an
attempt to cope with the trauma and its symptoms.
The healing work with these two types of trauma is somewhat different.
With delayed or with unhealthy development due developmental trauma,
a person needs support and assistance in changing the unhealthy development
into healthy development, or help in getting the development going
and on track if it did not happen at all. Regular psychotherapy is
usually very good in facilitating this kind of work.
In the case of shock trauma, a person usually needs help in healing
the trauma to their emotions, mental states and their body, and this
can require psychotherapy along with a certain other kind of work
that deals more directly with the trauma itself.
One new type of therapy that I have been using in my therapy work
appears to be very effective at working with and healing a state
of traumatic shock. It is called Somatic Trauma Therapy, or Hakomi
Somatic Trauma Therapy. This type of work focuses directly on the
state of the trauma within a person's body. It is particularly good
at working with disruptions to one's physiology. The theory is that
when there is a traumatic shock, a person's physiological systems
that regulate normal physiological stability in addition to one's
emotional and mental states have been disrupted. This style of work
has the advantage of working with all three states within a person
- the physiological, the emotional and the mental. Most psychotherapy
works only on the emotional and mental levels and often does a very
good job on healing these levels. However, when a person has a state
of traumatic shock within, they often need healing work also focused
on the physical/physiological level. In other words, a person who
has traumatic shock might do several years of traditional psychotherapy
but might still have a lot of problems due to disruptions to their
physical/physiological systems being disrupted and compromised from
the trauma. If this is the case, Hakomi Somatic work can be very
effective in doing the same kind of healing work on a person's disrupted
physiology as traditional therapy does for healing a person's emotions
and mental states. It seems that the best combination of work is
therapy that focuses on all three levels of healing - the physical,
the emotional and the mental. Somatic work has the weakness of mostly
focusing on the physical and perhaps somewhat neglecting the mental
and emotional levels, whereas traditional therapy's weakness is a
focus on the emotional and mental levels, while neglecting (almost
completely) the physical level.
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