treatment for alcohol addiction

one of the many psychological causes thatleads people to drug and alcohol abuse is psychological trauma. sometimes that traumais childhood trauma and sometimes it's a more recent trauma that occurred in the courseof everyday life. so, let me give you two examples of how trauma seems to influencethe course of addiction. when you look at women who become heroin addicts or opiateaddicts, you find that they are many times more likely to be sexually abused as childrenthan other females. and there seems to be a direct connection between childhood sexualabuse between women and later onset of drug and alcohol dependency. we think that thatkind of trauma in childhood sets the individual up for a much higher or exaggerated stressresponse. so, they get traumatized in childhood

and then from that point on, the stress centersin the brain that regulate acth and cortisol are persistently over activated and as a resultthey don't respond to subsequent stresses the way someone who hadn't been traumatizedwould respond to it. so early childhood trauma, physical abuse, sexual abuse tend to set upthe individual to have a lifelong problem with stress management. the other way in whichtrauma seems to contribute to the onset of drug and alcohol problems is through an acutetrauma or an acute stress reaction. we know that when people are faced with life threateningstresses, like seeing someone the love die, or being shot, or being in a combat zone duringa wartime situation, that it can result in a condition called post-traumatic stress disorder.post-traumatic stress disorder involves insomnia,

flashbacks, vivid re-imagining that the originalincident and severe anxiety. and people with post-traumatic stress disorder are at a muchhigher risk to develop problems with drugs or alcohol than other individuals. so there,an acute recent trauma sets off a psychological reaction - post-traumatic stress disorder- which then makes that person much more vulnerable to developing a drug or alcohol problem.