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Comment by mindgam3 | Hacker News Reader

Introduce me to any one of these people. I can almost guarantee that every single one has some form of developmental trauma. I’m willing to be proven wrong, but after seeing a dozen ish cases up close and personal, I’m currently batting 1000.

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.

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I'm a former heroin addict. I don't have any physical trauma i'm aware of. I don't have anything in my past that I consider to be 'emotional trauma'. I had lots of friends that were also addicts (many of whom I remain friends with to this day), some of them had various forms of trauma, but many do not.

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.

First, thank you for helping fix the addiction problem by reducing stigma through the act of writing about your experience. Not trying to sound patronizing here - that takes courage and I deeply respect it.

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)

> 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 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

Thank you for sharing this.

“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.

Ya, I agree, it could, in a sense, be trauma. But I think my experience was not at all uncommon. I don't think I had it exceptionally bad, and given that, I find it hard to use as an explanatory variable. If almost everyone has a certain experience, but only a fraction of those people develop an addiction, what good is it at explaining the addiction?

Yea I think some people can be quick to label discomfort as trauma nowadays. Like you said, if we’re going to expand usage of a term to include whole swaths of experience, the term itself becomes less meaningful.

This is probably super rambly. I chalk it up to new parent sleep dep and make no apologies for it.

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.

> 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.

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.

I like Maté's theory but I think you may be getting at its weak spot here. He uses "trauma" and "addiction" in very general senses, so general that it begins to sound surprising if there's any person on Earth who's not both traumatized and addicted.

I would like to see the results of a double blind test - if we look for trauma we can find it; or create it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome

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)

As stated in the Wikipedia link you provide, so-called “False Memory Syndrome” is fake news in the sense that it is not even recognized by any psychiatric manuals (not that the DSM is necessarily a reliable guide for actual illnesses given the things that make it in there these days).

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 didn't wish to imply that abuse and trauma don't exist (don't we all have friends and family with horror stories?). And it seems obvious enough that trauma and abuse has hideous effects on people, including addiction.

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.

Can you direct me to the facility you are familiar with?

Are you in New Zealand?

some form of developmental trauma

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?

I can guarantee that there are many people who have no past trauma who have addiction. I can't say exactly how common it is (it may be a minority for all I know), but I know for a fact that they are there.

I’m sure there are some of them out there. The world is a big place. My point is, the vast majority of serious cases can be traced to developmental trauma.

> the vast majority of serious cases can be traced to developmental trauma.

Citation needed.

Let me qualify that: every single case I have personally encountered, which is on the order of a dozen, can be traced to trauma. I’m making an educated guess about the wider prevalence. Getting societal scale data is practically impossible for many reasons including privacy. However, for those looking for some data points, I’m sure Gabor Mate’s book mentioned in the original article is full of examples. The most convincing academic references I am aware of at this time is are Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (“The Body Keeps the Score”, focused on PTSD) and Christine Courtois’s books including “Treatment of Complex Trauma“ and “Healing the Incest Wound”, both of which cite a large amount of research literature.

I hypothesize that occasionally the trauma is being in the wrong social environment; being peer pressured in to something that digs in hooks.

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