Dealing with past trauma may be the key to breaking addiction
Yeah, this is pretty much the most matter-of-fact (and accurate) headline I've seen on hacker news all week.What's funny (funny strange, not funny ha-ha) is that there even need to be headlines about this. In my mid twenties I struggled with some of the various addictions that were quite fashionable among the SV tech elite (work, Facebook, Burning Man, psychedelics, in that order). Thankfully I survived that period and was able to reflect on it, at which point a boatload of repressed childhood trauma began surfacing. After a number of years of working through that, the connection between trauma and addictive tendencies is so painfully obvious. Feeling bad + never learned healthy self-soothing rituals ==> take a hit of something to feel better ==> rinse and repeat.I've known enough other people who struggled with similar issues to understand that my experience is hardly unique. I would go so far as to say that anyone who ever experienced addiction will understand at some intuitive level that their dysfunctional behaviors are connected to past trauma. The question is, why is mainstream psychiatry still so obsessed with "curing" addiction via chemical means, as opposed to through psychology/trauma recovery?