The Roots of Trauma in Addiction Sex & Love

An excerpt from my research paper “Sex and Love Addiction: The Roots of Trauma in Addiction” found under the Explore tab.

The field of addictions is full of challenging issues that put society and families searching for answers on how we can create change. One major issue hidden beneath addiction is trauma. This is a topic that continues to be the center of many research studies, in order to provide increasing evidence to support trauma’s association to addiction. Many people who are unfamiliar with addiction are still unaware that addiction is rooted in trauma. If people had a better understanding of the trauma that underlies addiction would they be more apt to show compassion and care for this segment of our society? And would they be more apt to work towards increasing rehabilitation services for people who are experiencing addictions of all kinds? I believe the answer is yes. We need to educate and inform the public as well as work towards policy reform that moves towards rehabilitation rather than punishing, retraumatizing, labeling and marginalizing an already vulnerable segment of our society. 

What exactly is trauma and how does it affect each individual? The word trauma is derived directly from the Greek word for wound; while a wound, in essence, is a physical rupture of tissue, the neuropsychiatric definition also contains a sense of rupture: in safety of body and mind (Sharma, Gonda, Dome & Tarazi, 2020). It is no surprise that countless research studies have linked trauma to addiction. The strongest positive associations found in research were between trauma and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). One study thoroughly reviewed 29, 841 relevant studies on trauma and 3,054 were specifically included in a meta-analysis that showed these associations (Thege et al., 2017). This evidence points to the blameless vulnerability that these children faced, in which many of them have become the low bottom drug addicts--labeled, judged and pushed to the sides of society. They were the powerless victims to abuse, neglect, and sexual trauma, and many are still the victims of a society that does not understand them. Society needs to be educated and understand the relationship between childhood trauma and its link to addiction for change to actualize. Society must be educated and understand that most addicts are self medicating, have found a survival mechanism through substance or process addictions and need rehabilitative services that are easily accessible. 

Everyone experiences trauma differently and it does not have to be the most severe events that disrupt the feeling of safety & security. Sometimes things that may not appear to be traumatic from the outside may be traumatic to the individual. These seemingly smaller events do affect people in a similar way. As well, some people who experience traumatic events are able to modulate the experience with healthy coping styles. Whatever the cause, the repression of feelings and emotions may lead to the manifestation of addictions. Further research would need to be conducted to determine this hypothesis. 

The focus of my study on addictions will explore the relationship of trauma and sex & love addiction. With sex and love addiction, two main components have been found: sexual abuse history and disorganized attachment to caregivers, both resulting in intimacy disorders, compulsive sexual behavior, attachment disorganization, and the gravitation towards reproducing similar traumatic scenarios (Schwartz & Southern, 2017, Thege et al., 2017). Why do people continually find themselves stuck within the same revolving patterns and cycles of abuse over & over again? The famous psychotherapist Freud (1914/1958; 1920/1954) described the efforts of the person to resolve developmental trauma through repetitive compulsions, by which the forgotten memories and contexts are repressed or replayed, either actually or symbolically, in an attempt to gain mastery over the experience of neglect, abuse, or trauma (Schwartz & Southern, 2017). My personal view is synonymous in that people find themselves in the same scenarios over and over again until they are able to purge & process these deep wounds, step over & out of the cycle, break the bonds which impede their growth and ultimately transcend into a new reality. Once individuals and families are able to process these depths, they will be able to set healthy boundaries, leave toxic situations, gain stability, make new choices on how they will behave, react with less intensity, and find greater security within themselves. 

Trauma, insecurity, anxiety, depression and other psychological disorganization are difficult to endure, often hidden, and emerge as a voyage---a voyage where individuals are simply seeking relief. Some examples of experiences that have strong predictions of adult psychopathology are caregiver psychological unavailability, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and serious distortions in the infant-caregiver relationship (Sroufe 1988, as cited in Schwartz & Southern, 2017). In the face of confusing or frightening caregivers, these children were confronted with the irresolvable conflict of striving to flee from the source of fear yet they had to flee to the source of fear because those were their caregivers (Sroufe 2005, as cited in Schwartz and Southern, 2017). “Symptoms related to reminders of the exposure manifest as intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and nightmares, which invoke the same emotional, psychological, and physiological state experienced during the original exposure and lead to reliving of the trauma. Activation symptoms manifested as hypervigilance, impulsiveness, agitation, irritableness, anger, hypervigilance, impulsiveness, agitation, irritableness, anger, hyperarousal, exaggerated stress sensitivity and insomnia. And deactivation symptoms manifested as avoidance, withdrawal, emotional detachment, derealization, depersonalization, dissociation or depression” (Burton, Feeny, Connell & Zoellner, 2018; Sherin & Nemeroff, 2011, as cited in Sharma et al., 2020). The sense of safety, security and love that every human needs now presents with a severe distortion filled with pain, freight, confusion, and unwanted memories that leave them desperately seeking to escape.

These traumas are carried with that person throughout their life, until they find the healing sufficient enough to transcend the past. When these events occur in childhood and continue through adulthood, a particularly challenging split begins in the psyche which distorts the development of the personality, neurocognition, socialization, affect regulation, and sexual behavior. Many trauma survivors must also face the psychological distress of re-abandonment-- as oftentimes no one supports their experience, denying it, covering it up, keeping the family secret and that innocent, vulnerable child becomes the scapegoat of family & society. This leads to a severity of abandonment issues as well as psychological affliction. Disordered attachments to caregivers, internal splitting of how they view the caregiver between good and bad creates a disassociation. Love addiction and sexual behavior serves as both an outlet for disassociation from affect regulation and a means for trauma resolution by reenactment (Schwartz & Southern, 2017). Sex and love can then create an addictive cycle as it becomes a functional means of self-soothing and modulating intense emotions in which the individual responds to stress by escaping into fantasy, or copes with distress by numbing and escaping into an illusion of intimacy (Schwartz & Southern, 2017).