How do I deal with trauma and addiction?

When trauma has shaped you, try not to confuse who you had to become with who you can be.

Battling both PTSD and addiction together can feel like a never-ending, can’t win situation. But even if this feels like a battle, it’s not one we are having alone.

About one in five people experience mental health problems in the United States, and 46% of Americans may experience a mental health condition in their lifetime. This includes 19 million adults in the United States who live with addiction or substance use disorders. And 12 million who live with PTSD.

This means a lot of people have been through some in their lives. And going through trauma makes us more susceptible to problems with addiction. But we are not alone in this. There are ways to cope, and there is hope!

To heal, we need to face our emotions

One of the hardest things in recovery is to face the emotions that we have been burying for so long.  Once we strip away the addiction, it’s just the emotion left, and we have to learn how to deal with it.

The intensity of some emotions that may come up from PTSD during our recovery periods are stronger in the period of recovery from drugs and alcohol. For example, emotions like anxiety, hypervigilance, depression, guilt, resentment, disappointment, fear, or anger may be more intense experiences without substances to help numb them.

But we have to prepare ourselves that we will have days when we are going to have some difficult and volatile emotions. We can learn to reconnect with our emotions without getting overwhelmed.  Doing self-care and using the coping skills we have learned in our recovery helps so much.

When addressing our emotions, we need to have some self-compassion, and show ourselves some grace and patience.  It will take time to work through these emotions and events from our past.  Even after that, some events we had forgotten may come up. We also have to be patient with our recovery. Recovery is a process, and it takes a while. Some days we will have good days and some days we will have bad days.

Forgiveness is something that comes sometimes in layers as well. It’s important to not force ourselves to forgive but to work on it and let it happen as it happens. Be gentle with ourselves. Forgiveness releases us from the bonds of not forgiving and holding onto the events that caused our PTSD.  There may be times that we will have to remind ourselves that we are safe right now and calm ourselves when we are feeling triggered.

Learn your triggers

A PTSD trigger or activator can be any sight, sound, smell, thought or reminder of a traumatic event that has happened. The activator could be internal such as thoughts or feelings. Or the activator could be external such as stressful situations or certain places. We all have activators. We learn how to cope with them by using our coping skills and tools.

Identifying activators is especially important to help manage PTSD. We cannot help what our activators are. It’s particularly important in recovery to be self-aware. Increasing awareness of what our activators are, then we can work on the impact the activators have on us.

It’s hard to avoid our activators and live life. So, because we cannot avoid them, we need to learn to cope when we are triggered.

Here are some coping skills we can use to cope when we are activated:

• Controlled breathing—helps with anxiety and panic.
• Mindfulness—pulls us back to the present and into the now.
• Journaling—Helps to get our feelings, memories, and experiences out of our heads and onto paper.
• Calling someone in our support system—helps us to get out of our heads and not be alone.

Integrated treatment or places that treat co-occurring disorders can also help people who suffer from a mental condition and addiction at the same time. It’s an individualized treatment plan that will treat all of an individual not just the mental condition or the addiction separately. It tailors the program to the specific needs and goals of the individual and has been shown to produce the best results.

Give ourselves love and compassion

When we are dealing with our trauma, it’s especially important to give ourselves a lot of self-love and self-compassion. There can be a lot of guilt and shame with the traumas we are dealing with, so it’s especially important to be very gentle with ourselves.  It’s important to not be judgmental of ourselves. If we need to feel a feeling, then we should let ourselves feel it and then let it go without judgment.

It’s particularly important to monitor the self-talk that we are using to talk to ourselves in our heads. If we would not say it to a small child, then we should not be saying it to ourselves. Changing our self-talk can help us heal.

And it’s also crucial to try to practice gratitude in the middle of all of the work we’re doing.  Gratitude changes the way we look at things and our mindset about everything. It’s not always easy to find something to be grateful for, but we can always find something if we look hard enough.

Talk to someone

It’s especially important to have someone to walk us through our emotions, memories, and feelings that will come up when we begin recovery. As well as when memories come up and when we are healing from traumas.

This could be a sponsor when working the twelve steps, a therapist, a peer coach, a warm line, an accountability buddy. Or just someone who can help untangle the mess of emotions, feelings and memories that we are experiencing. Having a support group, a twelve-step group, a mental health group, or a group of friends that we can open up and talk to can help.

A support system is vital for social reasons, accountability, and support during the tough times in recovery and processing trauma. They help us persevere through challenging times and reach our goals. It also helps to have other people around who are going through or have been through similar experiences who can help with tips that may have worked for them. These coping skills might work for our situation too.

Being around others improves health and reduces stress and anxiety.  Being around other people who have similar struggles and are trying to improve their lives helps us feel better that we are not alone.

Emotional Regulation and Therapy

Many types of therapy can help with trauma. For example, there is CBT- cognitive behavioral therapy which focuses on thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. There is also DBT- dialectical behavioral therapy which focuses on mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and more. And in addition, there are many other types of therapy as well.

The emotions we are experiencing can be complicated and challenging to work out. After finding the therapy option that is best for you, you can establish a relationship with a therapist. By working on our co-occurring disorders in a healthy manner, we develop resiliency and inner strength.  And sometimes we need guidance and perspective from a mental health professional to help us become healthier and feel better.

If for one reason or another, it’s not a fit then it’s okay to find a new one. This is our recovery! Just remember there is hope out here for all of us no matter what we have to overcome, and we don’t have to do it alone.