Sober Synthesis

“Once you start to approach your body with curiosity, rather than fear, everything shifts”. Besser van der Kolk, MD (The Body Keeps The Score)

What is the Relationship Between Trauma and Addiction?

General Definition: Any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning.

• Abuse: Physical, emotional, or sexual harm.
• Neglect: Failure to meet a child’s basic physical and emotional needs.
• In-Utero Trauma: Adverse experiences that a fetus undergoes while developing before birth.
• Research shows that approximately 46% of individuals diagnosed with PTSD also meet the criteria for a substance use disorder.
• There are estimates that adults with a history of childhood abuse and/or neglect have a 4.3 (430%) higher likelihood of developing a SUD.
  • People often initially use alcohol or drugs to alleviate the anxiety, hyperarousal (fight or flight) or hypoarousal (freeze), and other distressing symptoms described above (self medicating).
  • The neurobiological changes associated with trauma may enhance the rewarding effects of substances increasing vulnerability for addiction.

What Can Be the Neurobiological Consequences of Trauma?

• The intensity of “fight or flight” hormones and neurochemicals can result in emotional center (amygdala) functioning that remains on “high alert”, increasing risk of:
  • Mobilisation: “Fight or Flight”
  • Immobilisation: “Collapse or Freeze”

Regulating the Nervous System in Recovery – Saad – Our Garden – September 2026 – Sober Synthesis 

• Language and logic centers in the brain can be impaired during trauma resulting in decreased ability to process the traumatic experience(s).
• Sensory integration functioning (insula) can be impaired. 
  • Can reduce ability to interpret and integrate feelings, actions, and physical sensations (interoception and neuroception). 
• Memory (hippocampus) functioning can be impaired resulting in fragmented memories that often occur in “flashbacks”, the experience that the event(s) are happening right now.
• Sleep, especially REM sleep, is often disturbed including repetitive nightmares rather than restorative dreaming.
• Heart rate variability is often decreased.
  • Heart rate can become rigid and excessively steady leading to much greater susceptibility to stress due to a state of chronic hyperarousal.

Proposed Questions for Thought/Discussion:

1. For those that were at last week’s “Our Garden” meeting, were you able to identify your early cues (body/thoughts/emotions) of “Mobilisation-Fight or Flight” or Immobilisation-Collapse or Freeze”. Have you practiced any of the nervous system regulation techniques summarized by Saad?
2. Has recovery changed your nervous system balance? How?
3. Has the information shared last week and this week helped you better understand the link between trauma and addiction?