Treatment For Alcohol Addiction

One of the many psychological causes that leads people to drug and alcohol abuse is psychological trauma. sometimes that trauma is childhood trauma and sometimes it's a more recent trauma that occurred in the course of everyday life. so, let me give you two examples of how trauma seems to influence the course of addiction. when you look at women who become heroin addicts or opiate addicts, you find that they are many times more likely to be sexually abused as children than other females. and there seems to be a direct connection between childhood sexual abuse between women and later onset of drug and alcohol dependency. we think that that kind of trauma in childhood sets the individual up for a much higher or exaggerated stress response. so, they get traumatized in childhood

and then from that point on, the stress centers in the brain that regulate acth and cortisol are persistently over activated and as a result they don't respond to subsequent stresses the way someone who hadn't been traumatized would respond to it. so early childhood trauma, physical abuse, sexual abuse tend to set up the individual to have a lifelong problem with stress management. the other way in which trauma seems to contribute to the onset of drug and alcohol problems is through an acute trauma or an acute stress reaction. we know that when people are faced with life threatening stresses, like seeing someone the love die, or being shot, or being in a combat zone during a 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 original incident and severe anxiety. and people with post-traumatic stress disorder are at a much higher 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.