I have relatives and friends with serious addiction problems who had no serious past trauma (of the kind described in this article)
I would bet that the reason you are unaware of the past trauma is because the individuals have chosen not to disclose it to you, due to the stigma and shame associated with opening up. Also, in the most severe cases, the core wound is generally repressed until some shock to the system causes it to be more accessible.
Citation needed.
From the article:
"in his 40s and 50s, he began to unravel the root cause – and that took him all the way back to Budapest, where he was born in January 1944. Two months later, [snip] “Right now,” the doctor replied, “all the Jewish babies are crying.” This is because, explains Maté, what happens to the parent happens to the child: the mothers were terrified, the babies were suffering,
Later, Maté’s mother, fearing for his survival, left him for a month in the care of a stranger. All this, he explains, gave him a lifelong sense of abandonment and loss which had an impact on his psychological health. [snip] To compensate for his buried trauma, he had buried himself in work and neglected his family."
I get that is a truth for him, but it sounds contrived as only a psychologist can do (without more context)
To your point: yes, humans have the ability to make up stories about anything and do so frequently. Yes, there are bad or misguided psychologists out there who may manipulate some patients into saying something that isn’t true in order to, say, boost their career. Yes, there are bad psychiatrists and social workers who do the same thing.
On the other hand, child abuse is a real thing that due to the crushing societal stigma tends to be severely underreported. It’s like sexual harassment cases, except the risks are even higher, so most people just never talk about it. Some people go insane because they never even admit it to themselves and end up dying of addiction trying to fill an un-fillable hole.
Meanwhile, people talk about False Memory Syndrome like it is a problem of the same magnitude. It isn’t.
I certainly can believe he was sad at 2 months old, for the reason given. I just find it unbelievable that that sadness became "buried trauma" that could be held in part responsible for neglecting his family later in life.
I originally said "if we look for trauma we can find it" which I wished to be the main point.
Dealing with trauma generally involves intensive therapy - maybe attention and help are the key - not finding "buried" trauma. E.g. the facility I am obliquely familiar with has a patient to staff ratio of 2:1, and is intensely into talking with patients.
It is definitely the case that trauma can cause addiction. However, I think it's over-reaching to describe it as the sole cause, especially when it comes to physically addictive drugs like opioids. Sometimes addiction just is what it looks like it is - the brain's neural nets finding a trivial solution to their prime directive.
I don’t believe I ever claimed that trauma is the sole cause. As stated in an earlier comment thread, I believe based on experience that it is the primary cause especially of the most severe cases.
I do think you bring up a good point about some substances which are so physically addictive that it might entrap people who are less psychologically vulnerable than trauma survivors.
That said, if you don’t mind me pushing for a bit more clarity here - you must have known going in that heroin is an exceedingly bad idea due to its physical addictiveness. What was it that caused you to start taking it? I am genuinely curious, not here to judge you.
I might guess based on your comment that peer pressure may have been a factor, given many friends who were addicts. But if so, what was the root cause of the insecurity that caused you to be vulnerable to peer pressure in the first place?
(If it wasn’t peer pressure, whatever it was... basically I’m just trying to understand what was the root cause of you personally making the unhealthy decision to try heroin)
I may be an odd case. I started reading about drugs on the internet, on Erowid, and various forums. I started experimenting, first with psychedelics and dissociatives, but then others things as well. Eventually I discovered opioids, and I just really really liked them. I sort of didn't believe the hype about their addiction potential, thought that I was strong enough not to have that happen to me.
I also have some social anxiety, and drugs generally helped me to socialize with other people. Both by reducing my anxiety in social situations chemically, and also by having something to talk to people about that we were both interested in (drugs).
> I might guess based on your comment that peer pressure may have been a factor, given many friends who were addicts. But if so, what was the root cause of the insecurity that caused you to be vulnerable to peer pressure in the first place?
I wouldn't say it was peer pressure that got me into these things. I sought them out, consciously. That being said, you are right to ask about the root of the vulnerability, but it wasn't so much vulnerability to peer pressure as it was difficulty socializing, probably caused by my generally introverted nature. If you want to try to connect that back to trauma, you could say that I had a difficult time in middle school socially, but I think that's a fairly common experience.
> (If it wasn’t peer pressure, whatever it was... basically I’m just trying to understand what was the root cause of you personally making the unhealthy decision to try heroin)
To summarize as best I can:
- Genuine curiosity
- Distrust in authority and their narratives about drugs
- Social anxiety
- Belief in my own invulnerability, common around that age (18-21 was the time in my life)
- Really really liking the way opioids made me feel“If you want to try to connect that back to trauma,”
Guilty as charged :-)
you could say that I had a difficult time in middle school socially, but I think that's a fairly common experience”
Okay, great. This is a real thing that I can relate to. “Trauma” may sound like too big and scary of a word for something that we almost all experience to a certain degree in school. We could call it “bullying” or “social isolation due to kids being mean”, ultimately I’m referring to the same thing: some core experience of getting hurt which stuck with you for a while.
But, I would caution you not to downplay the impact of this on your development. Speaking from personal experience, downplaying the extent is very common for survivors of trauma/bullying/etc. There’s many different degrees of “difficult” time. Me, I got punched in the face in 5th grade for standing up (verbally) to the school bully. Later in high school I was socially shunned for being a small geeky kid in a big high school where I knew nobody.
That in itself wasn’t so bad, like garden variety schoolyard bullying. But for me, again only speaking personally here, the reason why I let myself get bullied at school was because I was being bullied at home. The home situation is what led to me not having the self confidence which attracted the bullies. Or rather, the occasional possibly ill advised self confidence, which is what led to me getting punched in the face.
Anyway, it sounds like you’re in a much better place now. So thanks for sharing your perspective.
What if trauma is simply a response to discomfort we don't learn to accept and grow through?
It stands to reason that if it's a common issue and situation, not learning from it could compound over time.
I consider this to be "trauma," though I take a more expansive and meaningful take on trauma, in that I consider, for example, the lack of initiating into capitalism and the overwhelming difficulty of living a life outside of a capitalist society to be traumatic because it can keep us from meeting our need for autonomy.
In that sense, I may be considering trauma to be a chronic denial of some need (needs being defined as the minimal set of things required to thrive). Without a clear awareness of needs, then, it becomes easy to deny trauma.
I also consider codependency (which has also been said to be too broad to be meaningful) to be a form of trauma, in that it's a chronic denial of the need for interdependency.
Personally, I think expanding a term to include everyone gives everyone an opportunity to more deeply self-examine and connect with others. I find it to be a way to bring more meaning in, not less. If you judge an expansive definition as meaningless, that doesn't actually make it true for others. It'll simply be true for whoever chooses to believe it. The issue, I think, is everyone really wants to hear very specific and targeted descriptions before accepting some diagnosis. I've seen it in friends suffering from depression, anxiety, and/or addiction: until they hear someone with a story really similar to theirs, they won't allow themselves to connect. I view this as one of the reasons black-and-white thinking is so difficult to heal through/from.
What difficulty is that? Is something stopping you from living on public land in the wilderness?
> Personally, I think expanding a term to include everyone gives everyone an opportunity to more deeply self-examine and connect with others. I find it to be a way to bring more meaning in, not less. If you judge an expansive definition as meaningless, that doesn't actually make it true for others.
It's not that it's meaningless. It's that you can't use it to explain something. If everyone has experience X and 10% of people have outcome Y, then X cannot be used to explain Y.
Depending on how you define that, doesn't nearly everyone have some form of developmental trauma? Is there really such a thing as a perfect childhood with no trauma whatsoever? Isn't going to puberty itself already enough of a traumatic experience for a lot of people out there?
A kid can feel neglected and abandoned because they might have food and a roof over their head, but they're not getting nearly enough hugs and cuddles as they need. Or they grow older and they're not given any trust, the parents assume the worst intention the whole time and the kid becomes a scapegoat.
Or it's applied so inconsistently that you don't even know what's right and wrong, because you do one thing one day and it's praised and you do it the next day and you get your ass beaten for it.
It's not the sense of no future, it's the lack of nurture and care. And it festers because there's this whole belief that parents know best. The kid knows a damn lot too and needs to be heard.
Still that is interesting and I wonder if it maps well to the rates of depression with the rise of paranoid helicopter parenting or if that is a spurious correlation in itself. I have remarked that parents these days seem to consider it /ideal/ to be acting like they are antagonists of a YA Dystopian novel where they see devices sold boasting "Track your children secretively through technology" and think "That sounds like a good idea." instead of "That sounds incredibly messed up and would be considered satire a few decades ago." It might be more of a middle class issue - I'll admit to not having intimate details across the economic spectrum.