So right now in therapy and ‘helping professional circles’ a popular form of therapy is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or CBT. Basically it helps you to track your thoughts and behaviour to gauge what is working and what isn’t. Through charting your thoughts it teaches you to think more realistically and positively about your life and behave differently so that you get different outcomes. I agree that this is very important. AND I am here to tell you that in my experience of being a therapist and a person (!)....trauma is stored in the body. Dr. Gabor Mate wrote a book called “When the body says NO!” Dr. Mate is renowned for his work in the addictions field. He helped to set up the needle exchange clinic in Vancouver to support addicts living on the streets. However, he himself is a self-professed addict. Only his addictions are working and collecting CD’s. Seriously. I heard him tell a story once that he had left a woman in the midst of labour to go to the store and buy a CD. He openly challenged the Dr’s in the audience to stop categorizing their patients with street addictions as ‘different’ from themselves. It’s just that ‘workaholism’ and ‘shopaholism’ are more socially acceptable addictions. However, his premise, and I would tend to agree, is that underneath all addictions are unresolved feelings, trauma and/or self-esteem issues. In his case, his mother had to hand him to a stranger to look after him when he was a baby because they were living in a Jewish ghetto in Budapest in 1944 and that was the only way she could keep him safe. He carries the scars of that abandonment to this day and when the abandonment issues get triggered he avoids the pain of those feelings through falling into his addictions no differently than the drug addict or the alcoholic. Whenever I am working with people I am always trying to get them to identify where the feeling is in their body and what positive self-esteem message would be helpful to support the feeling that has been locked away or shoved down into that part of themselves. It is surprising how quickly the tension dissipates when you turn your attention towards your pain and nurture it instead of avoiding it with whatever adaptive coping strategy you’ve learned. The key is to learn to attach to yourself in the ways that you yearn others will or that your parents would have if they could have. It’s hard. Mostly we want to avoid looking at the pain because we don’t want to feel it but if we don’t then we don’t get the comfort that we need.
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