Tag: trauma

Trauma Trumps Everything: How One Moment (or series of events) Can Rewrite Your Entire Operating System

Published on by Scott Williams1 Comment

Let’s get honest about trauma – it’s not just a thing that happens to you, it can be a full-system hijack of your entire psychological infrastructure.

Weird fact. Most people who’ve experienced serious trauma don’t even recognize how deeply it’s reshaping their entire existence. We’re walking around with an internal alarm system that’s permanently set to DefCon 1, and most of us don’t even know it.

Hypervigilance isn’t a choice. It’s survival mode hardwired into your nervous system. You’re not paranoid, you’re literally programmed to scan for threats constantly because once, in your past, not seeing the danger meant not surviving. People with trauma often describe themselves as empathic, or a person who is good at reading emotions or sensing danger, real or imaginary. You may be that way because it’s a skill or sense you possess, but often that skill is honed in trauma. If you aren’t sure what is walking through the door as a child you might just learn to keep your radar on, and some of you can’t turn it off.

Control issues? They’re not about being a difficult person, they may be about survival. When trauma strips away your sense of safety, control becomes your only perceived protection. Every micromanaged interaction, every rigid boundary, every meticulously planned moment is just your nervous system screaming, “I will NOT be vulnerable again.”

In our years of working with trauma survivors, I’ve seen how these survival mechanisms play out in relationships. You push people away before they can hurt you. You create impossible tests to see if they’ll leave. You oscillate between desperate connection and total emotional shutdown. It’s not manipulation. It’s protection. Your brain doesn’t understand the difference between past threat and present safety. Your body keeps the score, as Bessel van der Kolk would say. Every trigger is a time machine taking you back to the moment everything broke.

Some of us have tried talk therapy. Some of us have done years of traditional counseling. But here’s the thing about trauma: It lives in your body, not just your mind. Advanced approaches like neurofeedback offer a way to actually reset those deeply ingrained neural pathways. It’s not magic, it’s neurological recalibration.

Relationship challenges? They’re practically guaranteed. Trust becomes this fragile, impossible thing. Intimacy feels like walking through a minefield blindfolded. You’re simultaneously craving connection and terrified of it. Your attachment style becomes this complex algorithm of protection and vulnerability.

I have no research to support this beyond decades of watching humans survive, but here’s what I know: trauma survivors are some of the most resilient, complex, brilliant humans on the planet. They don’t just survive, they reconstruct themselves, piece by painful piece. Some of you know exactly what I’m talking about. The constant internal narrative. The exhaustion of being perpetually alert. The way your nervous system can shift from zero to nuclear in a microsecond.

But here’s the beautiful paradox: you can rewrite the story. You’re not just one story that you can never change. You can branch of the main storyline and create new and better adventures. Your hypervigilance? That’s keen awareness. Your control mechanisms? That’s adaptive intelligence. Your relationship complexity? That’s deep emotional understanding.

Trauma doesn’t have to be your identity, maybe its just a chapter in your story, not the whole damn book.

You are not what happened to you. You are what you choose to become.

Dealing With Your Addiction: Why A 12 Step Program May Not Be Enough

Published on by Scott Williams2 Comments

Telling people who have been in recovery that the 12 Steps many not work is akin to making a racial slur. People who have been helped by the 12 Steps are very militant, they have the Big Book virtually memorized, and are dedicated to going to several meetings per week for the rest of their life.

I have no problem with that, if it works. But more times than we are willing to admit it’s just not enough.

According to AA, 33 percent of the 8,000 North American members it surveyed had remained sober for over 10 years. Twelve percent were sober for 5 to 10 years; 24 percent were sober 1 to 5 years; and 31 percent were sober for less than a year.

The study didn’t disclose how long each person interviewed had been working the rooms to achieve sobriety. It also revealed little about the percentage of people who attended AA, relapsed, and left the program. A 1990 summary of five different membership surveys (from 1977 through 1989) reported that 81 percent of alcoholics who engaged in the program stopped attending within a year. And only 5% of the AA attendees surveyed had been attending meetings for more than a year.

As a counselor who works part-time at an addictions centre I can testify that for many people just getting to a meeting, admitting you’re powerless, and becoming accountable, is a very good though not necessarily efficacious solution to your addiction issues.

What 12 Step groups do not do is as important to understand as what they do. 12 Step programs do not allege that they are good at counseling. They are, in point of fact, very up front about their “one alcoholic (addict) helping another alcohol (addict)” stance.

What is often missing for those who struggle is the ‘why’ question. Many substance abusers are self medicating their hurts, fears, boredom, mental issue, or past abuse. They felt they were unable to cope with the pain and drinking or drugging provided a way for things to feel better. Consequently some people also do that with online chatting, or pornography, or masturbation, or even World Of Warcraft. 12 Step Groups cannot help you come to understand your historic and ongoing love affair with serotonin, dopamine, or GABA.

In counseling many people come to realize that stopping substance abuse is only the first part of the solution. Once they remove the medicating effects of that crutch the lingering effects of trauma, hurt, or mental illness begins to thrust its way back to the surface. They may have dealt with the symptom of their problem (substance abuse) without realizing that the actual reason for self medicating has not been addressed. They don’t really have a drinking problem as much as they have a trauma issue, for example.

It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to realize that if I quit drinking but do not address the important questions behind the substance abuse I may be a ticking time bomb of pain, seeking other and potentially more destructive coping mechanisms.

If you have been dealing with an addiction issue perhaps it is time to ask yourself the ‘why’ question. You might find that underneath that need to use is an issue that you have been trying to ignore or medicate for years, that will not simply go away with time. If you know you need help, or are unsure but wonder if the problem is deeper than you thought, talk to someone who can help.

Talk to a counselor that doesn’t suck.