Addiction and Generational Trauma

[Dante]

A really good resource on addiction and generational trauma is "The ACoA Trauma Syndrome: The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships" by Tian Dayton.  Reading it helped me to make sense that my own addiction was a response to addictions in my family tree - not only my parents, but grandparents, and on and on.  Addiction is in no small way my inheritance.

[cynicalchicky]

Thanks for posting this, Dante! I likely have an issue with cannabis myself and am honestly too afraid to stop smoking. I've spent most of my life telling myself that it was my way of avoiding alcohol and other drug use, but that's really just trying to justify it. While I am not ready to give it up yet, I hope to reassess it someday. I'm going to give this a read to see if it can give me further perspective.
Hoping you are coping as well as you can with your addiction as well, if you are still struggling with it. As always, you are not alone.

[Dante]

I think I'm in the same place cynicalchicky.  When I came here, it was in truth a last ditch effort to become sober.  I finally after many years realized the reason I couldn't get sober was that I had unresolved trauma.  When I look back at who I was when I joined two months ago, I can't believe the difference.  I am not the same person I was.  I still have EFs and inner critics and all the trauma pieces, but I can see it now as trauma, not as ME.

And I'm at a place where I'm not sure how much I *need* the stuff I've been struggling with, but I'm questioning whether my decades long goal of abstinence from all those things is even something I *want*.  It's so tangled up, it's hard to say.  What I seek most in my life is balance.  Anything that distracts from that balance is something I don't want.  That's all I know as a guiding principle.  The rest, I'm figuring out as I go.

Best of luck to you, and same to you.  You're not alone!  That's what's amazing about this site.  For the first time, we're not alone, and we can heal together.

[Larry]

HI Dante,  thank you for the info on that book,  and thank you for being here.  you are an insiration. 

[Kizzie]

Tks for posting the book Dante. It was the first one in the AA/AlAnon/ACoA genre I ever read that linked addiction and trauma.