Substance Abuse & Trauma
Alcohol forms a mind body connection between your stomach and how your thoughts feel in your head.
Cocaine, crack and methamphetamines form a mind body connection between your heart and racing thoughts.
Opiates and pharmaceuticals like oxycodone slow your heart rate and your breathing; they numb your skin and make your thoughts feel like you’re in a dream.
Hallucinogenic drugs and marijuana makes you feel dreamlike in your head and distant from your body.
Smoking tobacco is about deep breathing a drug that calms our mind and focuses our thoughts. Chewing tobacco delivers a drug that quiets our thoughts through our mouths and stomachs.
Addiction is a physical and mental craving.
Addiction is losing control over your body.
PTSD is an interruption of the mind body connection. When you have lost control of your body by being raped, shot or violated, you can go numb and not feel, you can go dreamlike and not feel real, or you can become hypervigilant and feel all racy in your thoughts.
Drugs can mimic PTSD symptoms of feeling numb, unreal or racy.
After being traumatized, if you begin to drink or drug heavily, the drugs you choose and your patterns of use show a lot about the type of PTSD symptoms you have. Understanding how you have PTSD can help you find the right way to heal yourself.
Before the trauma, how were you using drugs and alcohol? Did you drink and use cocaine? Did you drink and not use any other substances? Did you use drugs and not drink? Did you use pharmaceuticals with or without prescription? Did you like substances to soothe depression and stimulate you or soothe anxiety and slow you down? Did you like to use drugs for the mental effects (to soothe your thoughts), for the physical effects (to calm your heart) or both?
We use drugs to manage our mind body connection. People who are depressed tend to loose contact with their bodies and stay in their thoughts. People who are anxious tend to connect with too much feeling in their bodies.
Trauma changes how we feel inside. Trauma can make us get stuck in our heads and never forget. Trauma can make us get stuck in our bodies and feel like we’re always scared. Trauma can get us stuck in our heads and stuck in our bodies at the same time and everything feels out of control, just like the trauma. That’s why trauma can change how we need and use alcohol and drugs. We may need more drugs, different drugs and different combinations of drugs to soothe us or numb us.
With or without trauma, drugs work very well to calm us when we’re anxious, or stimulate us when we’re down. But drugs can also have an opposite effect over time. Cocaine and stimulants will bring us up until they wear off, and then they bring us way down. Alcohol will calm us and then it will make us edgy as the drink wears off. Nicotine will calm us and then makes us nervous for another smoke. Hallucinogenic drugs will get us into our heads and then cause us to loose contact with our thinking. Opiates and pharmaceuticals will numb us physically and calm our thoughts until they wear off and cause us anxiety and pain.
Drugs of Choice
Our selection of drugs and how we choose to deliver those drugs to ourselves shows a lot about who we are emotionally and how we relate to anxiety and depression in our bodies and our minds. Alcohol relates to oral gratification in our mouths, our stomachs and our digestion. If we select alcohol as our drug of choice, it shows that we hold a lot of anxiety in what is called our enteric nervous system. Our enteric nervous system is a sheath of neurons that coat our esophagus, stomach and intestines. It is often called our ‘second brain’. This is where we get our ‘gut feelings’. It has major neurotransmitters like serotonin which is linked to depression. The enteric nervous system also is a natural source of benzodiazepines which are psychoactive drugs like xanax and valium.
The enteric nervous system is emotionally intelligent and is capable of forming habits and learning. Trauma is an instantaneous form of learning fear. If our response to trauma was to learn to dissociate and become numb and empty, then alcohol can connect us with feeling in our stomach. If our response to trauma was to learn to feel too much and always feel terror in our gut, then alcohol is efficient to calm down our enteric nervous system. The problem with calming ourselves with alcohol is that the secondary effect of alcohol will make our stomach nervous and crave another drink. We become addicted. The problem with alcohol to connect us with feeling is that alcohol will numb us and we will feel empty and want another drink.
With PTSD and alcohol we magnify the cycle of reliving trauma where we’re either nervous or numb. We can try to break this cycle with more substances like cocaine, pharmaceuticals or tobacco but every substance can only add to PTSD numbing or hypervigilance.
You may be thinking that there is no hope with PTSD other than staying addicted or alcoholic. I imagine that many of you are thinking something like, ‘Oh no, here’s another therapist who hasn’t been through it telling me I have to suffer more after all the bad stuff I’ve already been through.’
Limitations of Talk Therapy
I think therapy has been oversold and that people think that therapy can fix everything. There’s this fantasy that all you have to do is sit in on some therapy sessions and magic will happen. Nothing works that way. The good news is that you have power to fix you. The bad news is that you have power to fix you. People who have been traumatized don’t trust so much and the notion that there is some powerful therapist authority is not so good with PTSD. People with PTSD need to feel the power to fix themselves.
How you connect your mind to your body can heal your PTSD symptoms. Understanding how you use substances to cope with PTSD can show you the way how to heal. PTSD is an emotional response to losing control over your body. Being shot, raped, assaulted and terrorized teaches your body what it feels like to lose control. Drugs give you an illusion of controlling your body but in reality drugs take away control of your body. When you begin to understand that you are re-enacting your trauma by taking drugs or alcohol, be becoming addicted, you are beginning to take back control of your mind and body. Substances violate your body the same way that trauma violates your body. Drugs and trauma can control your body. You need to control your body.
Symbolic Behaviors
Do you re-enact trauma against your skin by cutting, shooting drugs, fighting? Do you attack your heart with cocaine or meth? Do you attack your lungs through smoking crack, tobacco or marijuana? Do you attack your stomach and liver with alcohol? How important to you is your ability to attack your thought process? Drugs attack your thought process the same way that trauma attacks your thought process. You can not think clearly when you are traumatized. You can not think clearly when you are drugged. All drugs re-enact an annihilation fantasy where you lose yourself. Trauma is no fantasy and to try to turn your trauma into a drug induced fantasy will not heal you.
There is such a thing as an attack against thought. It is a kind of denial. People can often try to attack our ability to think by insisting we believe any number of lies about many things such as sex, money or betrayals. What lies are you telling yourself right now? Can you tell the difference between what is false and what is real?
Trauma is an attack against our illusion that we are safe and secure. Trauma can turn our world inside out and upside down because our safety and security is an illusion and traumatized people know that. People who haven’t been traumatized live in a world of illusion. People tell us our PTSD is an illusion. People without PTSD live in an illusionary world and they are very lucky to be there. PTSD survivors believe we are in the harsh and real world where there is no safety or security – not even in our own bodies. But we’re wrong. Both sides are wrong. Sometimes the world is safe and sometimes the world is not safe. People with PTSD can feel safe in their bodies again. People with PTSD symptoms have to teach their bodies and their minds to be in both the safe and dangerous world. Feeling safe is a physical and emotional skill than has to be learned in the body without being high.
We use drugs to regulate an emotional balance between our mind and our body. Ideally we can think and feel at the same time. Under stress we can tend to think too much and not feel or feel too much and not think. Under traumatic stress we can shut down our feeling and have our thoughts race, or rev up our emotions and not think at all. Ordinarily we can have thoughts that calm our bodies and our bodies learn to engage in physical activities that calm our thoughts. After traumatic stress we can lose our ability to have our bodies calm our minds and we lose the ability to use our minds to calm our bodies. With PTSD our bodies and minds are in a terror place and we either shut down or accelerate.
We’ll turn to drugs when we can’t calm our thoughts or calm our bodies.
I struggled many frustrating hours trying to heal my PTSD in talk therapy. As a therapist I worked many frustrating hours trying to help people with PTSD heal with cognitive behavioral approaches. Thinking and analyzing trauma only go so far to help people. I wanted to feel better and so did my clients. I understood that bad things made me feel badly. I felt that was a no-brainer. I wanted to know how to feel better. I finally figured out that our bodies are the place to start healing PTSD. When I learned how to heal PTSD in my own body, I began teaching my clients how to get better.
Legal and illegal drugs are very powerful and can help us instantly feel good. In many ways the drug experience competes with therapy and people expect therapy to work like a drug. There are ways that you can learn to soothe your PTSD symptoms without alcohol and drugs but you have to learn how to recognize and manage your own emotions in your body. This takes emotional presence and presence of mind. This is not as easy and passive as ingesting drugs.
Trance
In order to heal your PTSD and begin to manage your own emotions, you first you need to recognize how you form your emotions through trance states. Drugs induce a trance state. TV induces a trance state. We are all conditioned to be in some trance states most of our lives. In fact we expect to be in a trance state and we get annoyed when we’re not in trance states that we like. What I mean by a trance sate is being zoned out. Have you ever had the experience of driving a long distance and arriving without really thinking about it? That is a trance state. When you watch TV your eyes are softly focused, your mind is engaged and your body is still. The whole idea of TV is to put people in a trance. The right trance is what makes a good show and a good show gives us a lot of pleasure. Music can place us in a trance state. Exercise and dance can place us in a trance state. Eating can place us in a trance state. We form habits, tastes and rituals about how we best form our trance states in how we select music, how we drive, how we think, focus and work, how we learn, how we shop, how we dress for activities, how we seek and consume food, how we engage in sexual pursuits and how we seek pleasure in every way. When you begin to think about it you realize that much of our activity is about creating trance states that please us the most and avoiding the trance states we don’t like.
We consciously and unconsciously create our trance states. We can stop creating trance states we do not like and we can construct the trance states we enjoy.
PTSD is a trance state that we learn by being frightened. Our enteric nervous system remembers the fear in our gut. Our thoughts race or shut down. We can feel numb and empty or scared and speedy. Our hearts can race or our hearts can feel empty and dead. We can feel like we don’t exist and can just float away. We can feel crazy and suicidal. Recognizing that these are trance states can empower us to take control of our minds and bodies. When our sense of security and our sense of self is taken from us we need to become more present in our bodies to feel safe again.
A Reading Trance
As you have been reading this you may have been in a trance state. Your eyes are focused. You frontal lobes of your brain are engaged intellectually as you take in this information. There is a sensation to in your eyes and your optic nerve that absorbs the colors and shapes in front of you and creates meaning inside you. There is a sensory focus in the front of your skull behind your sinuses. Deepen your breathing through your nostrils or in any way that is comfortable for you. Relax your hands. Breathe and relax your shoulders. Breathe and settle back into your chair. You are in a relaxed and aware trance state. Often we may think of a trance state as being less aware or out of body experience. Trance states are always in your body. You may have had an illusion that you are out of your body but you are always within your skin.
Guided Meditation
Breathe and feel the surface of your skin. Your skin defines the boundaries of your body. Breathe and feel your skin. Skin forms the boundary of your feet, your legs, your torso, your hands, arms, back and face. Under your skin is muscle. Your skin touches your muscles and holds your muscles. Feel your skin and muscles.
You are forming a conscious trance state that is sensual, safe and in your body.
There is a structure of bone that supports and solidifies your body from the inside out. There are bones in your legs, arms, spine, ribs and skull that hold and support all your internal organs.
Breathe and feel your lungs. Breathe and feel your heart in the center of your chest. Breathe and feel your throat, your esophagus, stomach and intestines. Breathe and feel the skin of your skull, the muscles of your face, the curvature of your skill and the sensation of thought as you breathe and read.
Are you curious? What does it feel like to be within your body and learning new ideas? What are you looking for? How do you feel when you sense that you get it? What do you feel when you sense that you don’t get it? Is there fear and anger? Do you self blame? Do you criticize and judge?
When you feel emotion, what sensation are you identifying in your body? Breathe and become aware of your intestines, stomach, heart and lungs. Is there a measure of fear in your heart? Does fear tighten the muscles of your stomach and intestines? Does fear manifest in shallow and rapid breathing. Breathe and feel your style of sensing emotion.
How do your thoughts feel? Do your thoughts spin, race, flash, flicker, flare, burn, explode, or slow down, feel hidden, frightened, dark, suspicious and unconscious. Breathe and feel how your thoughts communicate feeling to your eyes, ears, skin, lungs, heart, stomach and intestines. Breathe and feel how your thoughts respond to sensation in your skin, heart, eyes, ears, sinuses, throat, mouth, stomach and intestines.
Your thoughts generate physical responses and your physical responses generate thoughts. Conscious awareness of your thoughts and feelings is a mind body trance state. You have formed a safe and secure trance state in your body.
Lucid Dreaming
You can select your thoughts and relax your body to form a conscious trance state called a lucid dream. A lucid dream is a day dream. A lucid dream can be a sleep dream that we remember. We can learn how to be conscious of our night dreams and learn how to guide them while we are asleep. Lucid dreams can be memories or fantasies. We all have memories and fantasies that can make us feel good or we have memories and fantasies make us feel badly. We would like to only return to memories that make us feel good and avoid memories that make us feel badly but we always control our thoughts and associations. We try to control what we think and feel. We get into thinking patterns and habits because we have memories that calm us and memories that upset us so we have all sorts of strategies to hold on to the memories we like. There are memories that we replay like remembering good things that happened in the past. There are places and situations we return to revive pleasant memories and make us feel good. All these things we do about how we manipulate our feelings and memories are about how we create our lucid dreaming state of mind. We can have lucid dreams that give us physical feelings like thinking of foods that we like or thinking of sex. We can have lucid dreams that get us focused into our thoughts like puzzling, problem solving and planning in our heads.
PTSD is a lucid dream and a memory that can shut us down or make us feel like the dream is real. With PTSD the dream is real only it is not happening right now. The PTSD feeling was real in the past and now it is a memory. A memory becomes a lucid dream when it can place us in a trance state. PTSD is a habitual lucid dream that places us in a trance. To heal PTSD we have to acknowledge that PTSD symptoms are a lucid dream. Awareness gives us some power to control and guide our dreams.
Using drugs is an unsuccessful attempt to control lucid dreams. Habitual substance abuse and addiction is returning to a drug induced dream. The problem with drugs is that they don’t work well enough and our nightmare PTSD trance will return when we’re high. Drugs seem to control our lucid dreams but they really take away our control of how we dream and feel. When we lose control our PTSD symptoms get worse.
A grounded, conscious, drug and alcohol free lucid dream can give us control of how we think, feel and remember. Lucid dreaming is not an immediate fix to all your emotional problems. A lucid dream is not drug. You have to create your own lucid dreams in your imagination and in your body.
We really would prefer to have our lucid dreams controlled from the outside. By simply reading this you are letting your thoughts and feelings be directed by something outside of you. Watching movies, or TV, eating, shopping and gambling are all powerful ways to direct how we think and feel. Drugs do the same thing but they are more powerful. They really take us over from the inside out.
How you use drugs is how you form your lucid dreams.
You need to know:
When did your drug or alcohol abuse accelerate?
How quickly did your drug use or alcohol abuse get out of control?
Do you use drugs or alcohol to quiet your mind?
Do you use drugs or alcohol to quiet your body?
Do you use drugs or alcohol to completely stop thinking?
Do you use drugs or alcohol to completely stop feeling?
What drugs do you use that come through the stomach?
What drugs do you use that come through the skin?
What drugs do you use that come through the lungs?
What drugs do you use that come through the sinuses?
Do you use drugs to dream?
Do you use drugs to feel?
Do you use drugs to feel angry?
Do you use drugs to numb anger?
Do you use drugs to feel sadness?
Do you use drugs to numb sadness?
Your use of drugs is about how you prefer your mind body connections.
Do you use drugs to think or do you use drugs to feel?
If you understand how you use drugs, you can understand how to heal without drugs.
When you are high what fantasies make you feel good? Are they power, success fantasies like you’re really in the zone and people like you, they’ll have sex with you, they’ll give you money, attention and promotion? Are they anger, revenge fantasies where you are more able to ruminate about justified hate and righteous anger?
How are these habits of fantasy connected to your tastes in fiction TV and culture? Do you like action movies, sentimental movies or horror movies? Do you like to feel sad, anxious, angry or scared? What are your emotional tastes?
Building sober lucid dreams is like picturing a movie in your head. We often do this when we see a show and think that the outcome could have been better or the first part was bad and the second part was good. We often criticize what we see and re-edit stuff in our imagination thinking how it could have been better. Sometimes we want to edit something in our dreams.
Think of PTSD like a story that is told in feelings. It begins with a feeling of terror and goes on to feelings of numbness, confusion and rage. Imagine that the feelings in this story are heightened by pictures and smells and noise until you can’t stand it and want to walk out of the theater. You can’t leave because you are the theater and you are inside your head. The only thing you can do is take a deep breath and begin to re-edit the show.
The place to begin to re-edit is in your body not in your mind.
When you are high what physical pleasure do you seek and what parts of your body give you that pleasure? Do you use drugs to give you pleasure in your head, your heart, your stomach or your skin?
Drug of Choice Strategies
Remember:
Cocaine goes to your heart and head.
Alcohol goes to your stomach and head.
Smoking is about your lungs and your head.
Snorting is about your sinuses, head and body.
Shooting drugs is about penetration and skin.
When you know where you focus your physical attention you can begin to heal yourself.
Where you focus your physical attention is related to what traumatized you.
People who were raped, shot or stabbed were violated through penetration.
People who were molested were violated through skin and seduction.
People who were beaten have had their skin attacked.
People who have witnessed violence have had their senses assaulted.
All violence is an assault against the ability to think.
Healing Trauma – Memory & Dreams
People who have been traumatized can return to the trauma and try to desensitize themselves or run away from the trauma and try never to remember it.
Often we find ourselves trying to do both at the same time.
You need to understand where and how you mount your attacks against yourself to reenact the trauma and numb yourself to run away from the trauma. This is what drugs do. They reenact trauma and numb you. Traumatized people re-enact their trauma to try to control it.
The key to healing trauma is not in mounting the self attack by using drugs, over eating, gambling, breaking relationships, gambling, self mutilation, domestic abuse, sex addiction or suicide. The key to healing trauma is safely lucid dreaming the trauma to change the emotional meaning of the memory.
What is your style of thinking? Do you think in words that come through like an inner voice? Do you think more visually and your memories and thoughts flicker like pictures in your mind’s eye? Do you actually see words that form sentences or paragraphs like a book? Do your associations play like a movie that have actual scenes that play out and transition from one memory to another? We have memories and associations that relate to music and scents, places and people. Are your eyes searching? What are your ears listening for? What feelings do you seek in your skin and how motivated are you to seek feelings in your skin? Are you looking for someone and what kind of person are you looking for? Do you slow down when you see them? Does your heart skip a beat? Are you breathless in anticipation? Our bodies, memories, thoughts and actions are all connected.
When someone shoots us, or rapes us, or when someone next to us is exploded by a mine, we learn that our bodies, memories, thoughts and actions are connected to nothing. We learn that we have no power over our thoughts and our bodies and can be annihilated at any time. Trauma attacks our trust in thought and our ability to make sense of things. Our minds can not accept powerlessness and senselessness and our minds will seek to find reasons for what happened to us. We will blame ourselves. Self blame is a logical place to start. It must have been something we did that caused us to get hurt and frightened so badly. We become guilty. We become ashamed. We become angry at ourselves and want to shut down and isolate. We can often become enraged and blame someone else. Blaming someone else can be accurate enough but there will always be a doubt.
We imagine what we could have done differently to avoid the trauma. We search our memories and imagine probable outcomes. When we think this way we are forming lucid dreams. We are struggling to put together a whole bunch of ideas and thoughts to make us feel better. Often as we remember the events we will trigger a PTSD trance state where we feel we are back in the trauma. We often will use substances to shut down the PTSD trance state or to change how we feel while we try to think about what happened.
You need to acknowledge how you feel about the memory when you are high or when you are not. This will help you become aware of how you are trying to cope with your triggers. The memories that trigger you may vary and not seem very logical. You may be able to remember the event without feeling overwhelmed, yet be triggered by a smell or tone of voice. Often it is hard to accept your triggers because they may not make much sense to you. A sound, a temperature, a certain type of light may be all it takes to trigger a PTSD trance state. People can often get hung up on why they have certain triggers and not others and obsess which just makes them feel crazy. What you are trying to do here is just acknowledge what triggers you and accept it as the way you are and the way you remember. We are not crazy if a sound, scent or any sensation reminds us of something. Our brains are built to associate memories to feelings.
We can have conscious or unconscious associations to trauma and not all associations trigger the same intensity of trance state. We can go into a light trance of worry, fear, anger or numbness to all sorts of triggers. Sometimes we can have intense response to an association and really zone out. Often we are not even aware that we got triggered. It can be difficult to be aware when you are mildly triggered. It is difficult to be aware when you are very triggered and dissociated.
You can recognize your triggers by being aware of what you feel in your body. When you are aware of what you feel you can begin to identify your triggers. When you can identify your triggers you can begin to anticipate and control them. You can teach your body to relax when you’re triggered. When your body is relaxed you can think more clearly. Thinking and feeling at the same time is a mind body connection. When your mind and body work together you can feel safer and more secure. When your body and mind work together you can remember, imagine, dream, think and feel without becoming re-traumatized.
