Comment by mindgam3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindgam3 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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