Amber HollingsworthRecovery Conversation Simulator, Amber's Recovery Practice Lab · Interactive learning tool trained on Amber methodoloy

How Addiction Leads To Trauma For Everyone

22 Sept 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:57

In this segment, Amber Hollingsworth explains how living with a partner, spouse, or child who struggles with addiction can generate betrayal trauma and PTSD‑like symptoms. She describes how secret‑keeping and sudden revelations trigger intense reactivity, while the constant anticipation of bad news—such as missed calls, unanswered messages, or the possibility of police or jail visits—creates chronic hypervigilance, panic, and fear. Over time, this sustained state of alarm leads to complex trauma symptoms, regardless of whether the addicted individual is a romantic partner or a child.

Chapters

If your partner or your spouse is having an addiction and they've been keeping secrets and then it all comes out, then that reactivity is probably very connected to a betrayal trauma symptom. If it's your child, the trauma is a little bit different, but you can still have those PTSD symptoms because you're constantly imagining these worst-case scenarios. Every time you hear that phone ring, especially if it's late at night, every time you send a message and you don't hear anything back for an hour or more, and you just start to panic and you feel constantly scared to death. You're just waiting for that bad news, that phone call, that police officer to show up on your porch, that call from jail. And living like that over a long period of time will absolutely traumatize you. You will end up with complex trauma symptoms.