Introduction

Getting To the Root of All Our Troubles

I was born into trauma and know no different.

Trauma, with a helping of genetic disposition, gave birth to addiction and alcoholism which it then used to try and kill me.

It led be to a place that I strongly believe was worse than dying.

Eventually it has led to a place, and a way of life, which I would have scarcely believed existed.

This is a book about my journey though alcoholism, addiction, complex PTSD (and related OCD) and my continued recovery from these conditions, via 12 step recovery and treatment centres, neuroscientific research and trauma therapy.

It is about how I have survived addiction and, at times, recovery.

Recovery can kill you too; other peoples’ views and understanding of alcoholism has a bearing on whether you live or die. Their lack of understanding about co-occurring disorders can too.  

This may be unpalatable to some but it doesn’t make it less true.

These people can include fellow recovering people and recovery groups (while acknowledging their crucial role in recovery), medical professionals, those working in treatment, your loved ones and many other professionals who deal with addicted individuals on a daily basis and the media.

The more each of these groups know more precisely the nature of addiction, what caused it and how this can be recovered from, via specific and appropriate, sometimes individualised, treatment, the better they can help people in recovery.

We tend to blame addicted individuals for not recovering rather those helping to treat them or giving medical advice.  Or those whose responsibility it is to provide clear understanding into the nature of addiction.

Society also continues to create stigmas in the absence of a common knowledge about these conditions. Stigmas blossom in ignorance.

Clarity of understanding leads to a compassion that simply wilts in it’s absence.

I have experienced much of this ignorance in my own recovery and have been moved to challenge it now in this book.

I have found medical and treatment professionals and those in recovery to be lacking in precise definitions and the consequences are profound.

It seems that the precise definitions of other chronic diseases, seen elsewhere in medicine, is somehow not as important in addiction, a condition that remains one of the worst killers.

So let’s start here with a clear definition of addiction and what causes it and then show how this manifests in the life of one alcoholic/addict.

Addiction is the progressive impairment of self control (regulation). This can be mapped in the brain and addiction has a brain signature.

It is driven, to endpoint addiction, by the effects of emotion/stress dysregulation (which itself is often prompted and often sustained by negative self schema, often post traumatic ) on reward (motivation) dysfunction.

In simple terms, most addicted individuals cannot process emotion properly and this causes them to flee feelings by substituting unpleasant, undifferentiated, feeling states with more controllable feelings of pleasure and relief from aversive feeling states. It represents the “fixing of feelings” externally, outside of self, as opposed to emotions being processed internally, in the brain . This is negative and positive reinforcement combined at the very onset.

This represents a defective and disordered survival network, an embryonic neurobiological disease state, as it represents a disorder of function, emotion processing, which will eventually create a distinctive group of neurobiological changes, and thus, unwittingly, creates the fertile ground for later addictive behaviour.

As emotion/stress dysregulaton escalates, the inital prompting of impulsive behaviour increasingly becomes compulsive addictive behaviour as increasing and continual levels of distress increase reward dysfunction and a patholical wanting (needing) results.

At the endpoint of addiction, the rewarding and relieving effects of addictive behaviour diminish in relation to chronic distress levels and even increasing levels of addictive behaviour no longer have sufficient effect on what often becomes compulsive behaviour; this automatic behaviour to relieve chronic distress yields increasingly diminished returns. The addictive behaviour as “solution” profoundly diminishes while the “problem” of chronic emotion/stress dysregulation escalates.

Recovery is often particularly viable at this point and needs to address the cessation of the former “solution” with treatment of the underlying problem – emotion/stress dysregulation, the pathomechanism of this addictive behaviour.

This emotion disorder and thus impairment of self regulation, often born out of genetic disposition and/or environmental trauma, is the pathomechanism that drives most addictive behaviour, not only in substance addiction but also in behaviour addictions.

It is a mental health issue, primarily.

It can be diagnosed, it can be tested for. It can be treated. It need not be shrouded in mystery. It need not be endlessly argued over. It is inherent in most addictive behaviour and it can be treated effectively.

In this book, I will show how I came to be in recovery after almost dying from alcoholism. I will show my struggles in recovery and with the recovery programmes I have followed.

Leaving the 12 step recovery, that saved my life, and which still offers me a template of recovery today, was very frightening but I felt I had no choice. Through neuroscientific research and, eventually, trauma therapy, I have been like a detective piecing the clues together to better understand my condition – to understand how I ended up the way I did.

It has not only helped me more clearly understand my addiction, and the trauma that partly underlies it, but it has often saved my life.

The outside help I received in addition to 12 step recovery has not been an adjunct to addiction but has shown me the fertile soil in which my addiction grew.

It showed me what partly fuels my addiction today, seventeen years into recovery. It shows me why my addiction still continues to be progressive, even in revcovery.

Recovery has been discovery, often thrilling, often terrifying. It continues to be so today. Let me take you on that journey from despair to hope, from ignorance to understanding.

Let me take you through my traumatic childhood and life, through alcoholism and addiction to recovery. Through 12 step recovery and treatment to the research and trauma therapy to a new understanding that reconciles all treatment and arms it with greater clarity and understanding.

Structure of this project This book is split into three distinct parts – Addiction, Trauma and Recovery. These can be read separately, in order, or not, or concurrently. Each section interweaves in their influence on my addction and recovery. One feeds into the other, as in real life.

In all three parts, I will marry my anecdotal and neuroscientific research into the nature of my addiction.

In this first part, I will share my journey into recovery from chronic alcoholism, looking at what happened to bring me into recovery and what has happened in the seventeen years of my recovery.

In recovery, I have journeyed through six years of 12 step recovery and AA anecdotal wisdom about addiction and recovery to twelve years of neuroscientific research into understanding how the brain changes as a result of addiction and what, in addition to substances, accounts for this dramatic change in how the brain controls our behaviours. 

Via this research, early understandings of addiction have been both complemented and challenged, resulting in a clearer insight into how addiction can effectively be treated.

Although this research gradually saw me gradually move away from 12 step recovery (although I still follow the steps on a daily basis) , my research also shows, in a more profound way, how this type of recovery is key to helping addicted individuals recover.

Finally the experiential wisdom of 12 step recovery has become more effectively married to the most recent neurosicentific research so I believe it is time, as Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, once declared, to be “friends with our friends”.

In fact, Bill Wilson has been a constant inspiration for me in my research, he was constantly striving learn more about addiction via his work with academics and would be, no doubt, fascinated by what neuroscience has unearthed about this strange illness of mind and body.

He was also worried that 12 step recovery was based on a book “frozen in time”; I hope to unfreeze some of our understanding in this book.

In the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous it also suggests people in recovery should get “outside help” for conditions other than alcoholism, or co-occuring conditions as they are called today.

After ten years, I found that I needed to get treatment for Complex PTSD and attachment trauma as they were threatening my recovery.

Thus, the second part of this book is dedicated to Trauma and starts with my experience of trauma from infancy and early childhood onwards until I started treatment for it at the age of 48 years old, ten years after seeking recovery from chronic alcoholism.

I will then explain the treatment I had before taking you on part of the actual therapeutic journey I undertook to get more healed.

This is the part of my “experience , strength and hope” sharing how trauma, in the fertile soil of family addiction, led to my later chronic alcoholism.

The complexity and severity of my alcoholism was caused by Complex PSTD and it’s treatment has greatly reduced the severity and complexity of my alcoholism while in recovery.

Although alcoholism and trauma are two tributaries running into the same river, I hope by clearly delineating them, the reader, and those who suffer from similar co-occuring conditions, can more clearly see how they influence each other and how they may need, at times, separate, and common, treatment in recovery.

The treatment of one affects the recovery of the other has been my experience. This is my message of hope to you.

Finally, in the third part of this book I show how a mixture of 12 step recovery, “outisde help” in the form of trauma therapy, meditation and Yoga and my increasing neuroscientifc understanding of addictive behaviour keep me in recovery , one day at a time.

This is a work in progress and I am adding chapters all the time. I’m afraid that my chapter numbers might change or just be plain wrong as I revise the text. I will try an keep up double checking the indexing but organisation is a weak point of mine, so please bear with me!