My journey through trauma, addiction & finding healing

This blog talks about a lot of heavy stuff, but for me, when I couldn’t talk about it, I couldn’t make sense of it. There was no healing, no growth, no forward movement. And whilst I found new ways to talk around my problems, I continued to act out the patterns of the past.

This piece was originally written for Mental Health Awareness Week, in the hope that we can become more aware of our mental health. Perhaps we can find new ways to talk about it.

My journey through trauma, addiction & finding healing

My Battle With Addiction

My father was severely mentally ill, spending a significant amount of time in psychiatric institutions. He was also an alcoholic. In many ways, he was a wonderful man and I loved him very much, but life with him was certainly difficult and often very unpleasant. In 1987 he found Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and stopped drinking. He did the “12-steps” several times and became a “sponsor” (i.e. mentor) to many people. Five years later he and I stopped speaking (I never knew why) and for the next five we didn’t see each other or talk. On November 16th 1997, during the aforementioned five years, when he was 50 and I was 25, he died.

For most of my life, I have said that I have long had an unhealthy relationship with drink and drugs (amongst many other things). I started young, in my very early teens, and kept going hard until my late 20’s when the booze & crack cocaine got out of hand. I scared myself sufficiently to lay-off hard drugs and kept the drinking “moderate”. As I said, I had an “unhealthy relationship with drink and drugs”.

It is only in the last year or two that I have been able to say I am an addict, which is something I have found to be very helpful.** 

How I think of and describe myself might seem trivial. Perhaps it even strikes you as self-indulgent. For me, my journey from “problem drinker” to “alcoholic” has been an important part of my journey towards at last being something close to the person I want to be and those I love deserve. I have gone from having everything and being miserable, to being happy. My inner critic is much less present and the self-loathing and insecurity that used to terrify me is, well, not what it was. Of course, I am still a work in progress, but it is now a largely joyful work in progress and not the very difficult slog it used to be.

Alcoholics Anonymous saved my dad’s life. Without this entirely voluntary, self-organising group he would have drunk himself to death by 40. In the years we had together when he was sober we had many happy times and he taught me a great deal about healing and getting well. In his last decade, he helped many people, got married again and had a daughter, and, I hope, experienced contentment and joy in a way I know he didn’t before.

Yet AA doesn’t work for everyone. It didn’t work for me. I had two friends, roughly my age, who it didn't work for either. They did drink themselves to death. It didn’t work for us for a number of reasons. 

The AA guide says you don’t have to believe in God, just in a “higher power”, though meetings start with a prayer. The programme also says that the only way to get well is to complete all the steps. In my experience, there is a great deal of judgement; and there is always the fear that at any minute, the addict in you will be back and you’ll be drinking again. Then you’ll die. For many years my perception was if you did either completely abstain or die you weren’t a “real” alcoholic.

But the biggest problem, for me, is that the AA philosophy brings with it an understanding of addiction as an illness or disease. I had to take a different path to get well, and I’d like to share that with you.

Adverse Childhood Experiences

In the 1990’s Dr. Vincent J. Felitti, M.D. began to look at the relationship between “adverse childhood experiences” (ACE) & later life outcomes in a study that continues today. The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study has taken a long-term, in-depth look at the experiences of over 17,000 people and reveals a powerful relationship between childhood trauma and later life, including mental and physical health.

His research includes an ACE test, a survey using 10 questions in three key areas: abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. These three categories are some of what we might think of as “traumatic events”.

When I learned of this work a few years ago I took the ACE test, which is available online.

The first thing that struck me was that it didn’t ask how bad the abuse, neglect, or household dysfunction was. For many people, including me, feeling that their experiences aren’t bad enough to count is a very real barrier to examining the impact. The experiences get minimised and explained away: I wasn’t hit by my parents that hard or that often, and anyway, I’m tough and I could take it. The second thing was that you are at high risk of poor later life outcomes if you say “yes” to only four questions.

My first ACE test score was seven. At that point in my life, I’d have told you that my childhood wasn’t great in many ways, but was wonderful in some and overall pretty good. I still feel this is a decent assessment. A score of seven caused me to rethink this, or perhaps I can say to think in a more profound, more nuanced way. I haven’t changed any of my thoughts about my past, but I do have more of them now.

As I lay in bed the night after taking the test, I remembered something; it wasn’t a reconstructed memory of something I had buried away, it was just something I hadn’t thought of earlier. My score was actually eight. I now know many people with an ACE score of eight who have experienced horrific abuse as children. Our experiences are not the same. My experiences pale into insignificance compared to theirs. I sometimes feel pathetic for even thinking of my experience as “adverse.” Yet my ACE score is eight too.

The correlation between ACE and poor later life outcomes isn’t just a coincidence. The mechanisms by which experiences have a negative physical and mental impact on our bodies is well understood. There are countless excellent books on the subject, including When The Body Says No and The Body Keeps The Score (which was the subject of an Adaptavist Book Club recently!). 

However, even if you score a zero on the ACE test, you have experienced traumatic events. 

Exposure to poverty, racism, sexism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity are all traumatic. In our lives as human beings, trauma is simply unavoidable. If we also consider intergenerational trauma and secondary trauma, this becomes even more apparent. In a society in which addiction is increasing, suicide remains high, and mental health problems increase, this is something we need to stop and think about.

Now might be a good time to pause, briefly. Simply pay attention to how you feel, in your body, about what you have just read. Perhaps you are nodding in agreement, relieved that someone else is speaking about experiences that sound like yours. Or perhaps you are annoyed by what I have written, dismissing it as “woke” or some such.

Any response, or none, is fine. Simply notice any physical sensation, emotion, thought and memory (or anything else) that comes up.

What is Trauma?

Trauma (a word which comes from the latin for “wound”) is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you. These are the words of Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-Canadian physician and trauma expert. Some of you might be familiar with Maté following the publication of his bestselling book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, his recently televised interview with Prince Harry, and a piece in The Guardian.*

This work moved our understanding of the human experience forward from what we thought in the 19th & 20th centuries. Some aspects of this work are open to legitimate critique, yet one finding is widely accepted and uncontroversial: trauma is held in our bodies.

Not that we need others to convince us of this, because we often know this from our own experience. You probably know what it is to be “triggered”. When something happens that seems to connect with something in your body that is automatic, beyond cognitive control. Everyone who has ever had a flashback after a car accident, cowered and trembled at a stranger's raised voice, or got strangely hot and flushed when an email lands in the inbox from a boss knows what is it to be triggered and has experienced what it means when we say trauma is held in the body.

This is great news because although we cannot change the past, we can change what happens in our bodies as a result of it.

A non-pathologizing view of trauma & addiction

For Jan Winhall, a trauma and addiction therapist for 40 years and creator of the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model (FSPM), there is another view. For her and many others there is a non-pathologizing view in which addiction is an adaptive response to a maladaptive situation. In her book Treating Trauma & Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, she defines addiction as anything that helps you in the short-term, hurts you in the long-term and you can’t stop. That’s potentially any behaviour, including drink and drugs, but also shopping, sex, video games, dysfunctional relationships, getting angry, or compulsively believing you're right.

Her book also includes a number of case studies, one of which is about Joe. As I read the book and his story unfolded I gradually saw that Joe’s story is my story. I began to think that if Joe was an addict, perhaps I was too. And with a new definition of addiction that definitely applied to me, I had something into which I could fit. Alcohol and drugs helped me in the short-term, hurt me in the longer term and, for at least a decade, I could not stop.

I wasn’t alone anymore. And there was a path to healing.

I had the opportunity to meet Jan last year. She lives in Toronto, which is where my wife is from and her family still are. We go there every year, because it’s been important for both Lyndsay and me that our children know their Canadian roots and their Canadian relatives.

I was completely star-struck and had to work really hard to be as interesting and intelligent as I could manage. After lunch we walked together to her house, and she asked me a question I had never considered: “Have you ever thought you might have ADHD?”

She explained why this had occurred to her, which made a lot of sense. When I returned to England, I called a clinical psychologist I know and asked her if she could tell me whether I did. After various diagnostic tools were used, the answer was a resounding “yes”.

Over the last year I have learnt a great deal from Jan, whom I have got to know. According to Maté, her model is “a new, deeply humane and promising model of addiction treatment.” Stephen Porges, a world-famous neuroscientist and creator of Polyvagal Theory, says Jan “brilliantly integrates Gendlin’s classic concept of a felt sense with Polyvagal Theory”. He goes on to say that Jan’s approach has “the potential to decode the wisdom of the body with its full repertoire of survival reactions into positive outcomes that promote optimal physical and mental health”.

The Felt Sense Polyvagal Model

Eugene Gendlin was a philosopher and psychologist at the University of Chicago, where he taught for 31 years, until 1995. Gendlin was initially interested in why some people seemed to make great progress in therapy, and some did not. He examined recordings of thousands of therapy sessions and noticed something intriguing.

Those that made less progress were confident in the answers their therapists asked, whilst those that made more progress paused and considered. He thought they seemed to turn inside themselves and ask questions, rather than provide answers from a narrative they already had in their cognitive minds.

He went on to develop an entire philosophy, which is described in a “Process Model,” called “Philosophy of the Implicit.” According to Gendlin, everything we know is first experienced in the body and only then in the mind. This bodily knowing he called “the felt sense,” which is much more than something one feels. It might consist of any number of facets, which could include bodily sensations, but also thoughts, emotions, and memories. Even images and imaginings, sounds and smells, or an atmosphere (as in, you could cut it with a knife).

A technique he developed for engaging with this felt sense and experiencing embodied meaning is called “Focusing.” According to Jan and Stephen Porges, the “felt shift” is a change in the state of your autonomic nervous system (ANS). Consisting of six steps, it does take a little practice, but as Gendlin was keen to point out, it is a technique that helps us do something that is a natural part of being human.

Gendlin’s philosophy and the practice of Focusing are an important part of the core of the FSPM. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory (PVT) is another.

PVT provides us with a deeper understanding of our vagus nerve and our autonomic nervous system (ANS), sometimes described as “the science of safety.” In a subconscious process Porges calls “neuroception”, our bodies are constantly and subconsciously scanning our environment for cues of safety and, separately, cues of threat. If we sense enough safety and a sufficient absence of threat, the ventral branch of our vagus nerve is active, and our “social engagement systems” come online. 

As social animals, this is important. When safe and socially engaged, we can give and receive cues of safety. A collective sense of safety and social engagement develops, partly through the social cues we can see, but also subconsciously through what Porges calls “co-regulation.” The mechanisms of co-regulation aren’t fully understood, but it seems different people’s nervous systems are in constant unspoken communication.

In simple, easily replicated experiments, we can demonstrate the development of a sense of safety or threat when looking at pictures of human faces that are not different in any way that is discernible to the human eye. There is clearly something going on that is beyond our cognitive awareness.

If cues of safety are absent and cues of threat present, our ANS automatically changes state. The ventral branch of our vagus nerve is deactivated, and the body shifts into a sympathetic state of flight/fight. If we cannot fight or flee, the body then shifts into a dorsal state, and we shut down. Our prefrontal cortex, the cognitive part of our brain used for what we tend to think of as thinking, is offline. Our ANS sends its signals only to the brainstem, which means we can react incredibly quickly, but cannot think clearly. The world looks more threatening to us, as we do to it.

A problem that many of us face is that our neuroception doesn’t always interpret safety and threat accurately, so our bodies can feel safe or threatened when they are not. This is because the body gets locked in a trauma feedback loop. Often those of us that have not healed from traumatic experiences seem to over- or under-react to events. This is an automatic response we learned to protect us in the initial traumatic situation, activating when we no longer need it. What was adaptive in one environment, now becomes problematic. 

My nervous system learned to get angry, fight, drink, and take drugs to keep everyone, anyone, away from the wounded person inside of me. Better that I was angry and drunk than anyone got too close. Once, this was necessary, because I couldn’t have survived what was happening without it. That was long ago, but my ANS kept deploying the same survival tactics for many years, and along the way I hurt a lot of people. Even now, I struggle with anger about some seemingly insignificant things.

The difference is that now we have a good hypothesis about what is going on, so we can recognise it and talk about it. By combining Focusing and the felt sense with PVT, Jan has created a powerful way to directly engage with and change the way our bodies respond to environmental cues and signals. With it, we can find our way to a physiological, embodied sense of safety, and we can heal, reprogramming our automatic responses to be more attuned to the world we now find ourselves in. 

Outside of my personal experiences, what I’ve said here is open to a lot of interpretation. These days I doubt there is any absolute truth human beings can know.*** But I do know that I am very different now. My long journey through the (seemingly moderate) difficulties I have faced is in a new chapter; one in which I feel content and joyful most of the time. One in which I can love and be loved in a way I have never before known.

Understanding and experiencing psychological and physiological safety was a necessary part of my growth, and it can do similarly useful things for others. A greater embodied sense of adequate safety presents the possibility of healing and well-being.

If you would like further information on any of this, clarifications, or just to have a chat, you can reach me at tooearlyturley@gmail.com, or via LinkedIn.

*He puts it well, but isn’t the only one to make this point. Bessel van der Kolk, Stephen Porges, Jan Winhall will tell you the same thing. Back further to the 1960’s & 1970’s feminist psychoanalysts like Carol Gilligan and Judith Herman, as well as Ellen Bass and Laura Davis knew this. Around then Carl Rogers was developing client-oriented psychotherapy and his PhD student, Eugene Gendlin, was beginning development of Focusing Oriented Therapy. The list of people whose work contributed to this space is extensive & the names I have mentioned a tiny proportion of those involved.

**As I have said this more, I am surprised by how many people respond by telling me that I am not. I understand where they are coming from, because for many years I didn’t say it either. A familiar pattern of thought gets triggered when this happens. “You see”, I say to myself, “you can’t even be a proper alcoholic you pathetic, whining individual”.

*** I suspect there is no objective reality, and everything is subjective.