When addiction and mental ill-health are normal responses to loss, grief and trauma – treating the causes not pacifying the symptoms

**TRIGGER WARNING**

This article discusses stolen generations.

Imagine being taken from your home at 4 years of age with your brothers and sisters to be ‘rehomed’ in an institution.  Imagine the first thing they do when you’ve arrived is strip you naked and dowse you in DDT (tech name, Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane).  Your clothes are burned, and they put you in generic clothing and assign you a religion.  Then you’re given a job.  Even 2-year-olds are given a job, and you’re scolded for not doing it.

Gradually, more and more over time soul is stripped from spirit and the genesis of generational trauma is initiated, in this case aboriginal children brainwashed to become white children.  This is recent Australian history, as recent as the past 50 years.  It took place between 1910 and 1970.  But this article is not a history article.

This article is about the huge correlation between addiction and poor mental health experiences and outcomes due to loss, grief and trauma.  It is hard to imagine, probably more appropriate to say impossible to imagine, the depths of loss, grief and trauma that a person of the stolen generations has had to deal with.  Addiction in many cases is merely the effect of unrequited trauma, and the societal norm has been to blame and gaslight addicts (many who are alcoholics) and not see that these responses are normal in the circumstances where there is heart rending grief and no ability to cope otherwise.

The Bible certainly agrees.  Look to Proverbs 31:6-7 and see what it says.  We can well imagine those who are born to privilege not needing the drink, like the sayings of King Lemuel say, “Let beer be for those who are perishing, wine for those who are in anguish. Let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their anguish no more.”  The truth of life is insistently relevant.  Those who have addiction and poor mental health struggle so very often because of generational trauma — trauma that is carried down from generation to generation, and many times because of war and/or government policy (to name just two where the powerful lord it over the least of these).

For those who have struggled with addiction, with depression, with anxiety, among the myriad form of harsh lived realities known to humankind, the practice of addiction and hopelessness are normal responses to trauma.  Yet as a society we have castigated the addict, and we have rejected and even institutionalised those who have mental health struggles.  We shame the individual.  We insist that they must feel guilty, and of course people comply, because whole societies have been hoodwinked or they’ve known they have no power to change it.  And guilt and shame re-double the consequences of trauma on the individual to propound the need to quell the pain.  More trauma, more pain, more need to mask the symptoms, because the causes cannot be amended.

Addictions exist as a very poor and trauma-charged coping mechanism to keep the pain at bay by amping up the pain.  What is really needed is time and space and acceptance and support for people to wrestle with their pain, so much so that there might be an opportunity to go a direct route to healing.  What is needed is love.

As societies we have always deemed it easier to shame the addict and the person with poor mental health or the one with disorders, individualising a societal problem.  This is scapegoating on a local and global scale, when those who bear the symptoms of trauma are not given the opportunity to deal with the causes of the trauma.

Whenever you face struggles that implicate you in what seem to be shameful deeds, such as addiction and to feel depressed, anxious, suicidal, etc, I hope you can see that what you’re feeling and experiencing is normal for the loss, grief and trauma that has until now been too much for you to process.  Your trauma is real and it has effects on you that you cannot change until you wrestle with them with the support of loving, trusted, skilled others who can help you through over time.

Please be kind to yourself and invest yourself in treating the causes and not the symptoms.  Instead of just giving up your drinking or other addiction, invest in getting to the bottom of your loss, grief and trauma story, to the place where you can feel those most horrendous of feelings.  Give your life to the process of grief and trauma recovery, and then your life will be yours again or perhaps for the first time.  It is worth the time and effort.

Photo by Artem Labunsky on Unsplash