How Childhood Trauma Breeds Addiction

If you are living in a very chaotic home and childhood, your stress response systems develop very differently than other children because it's a survival mechanism. Like, parts of your brain will be bigger, parts of your brain will be smaller because of the environment that you grew up in. And it's your brain, it's your body's way of trying to protect you. It's like giving you a really strong alarm system. And when you grow up with a really strong alarm system, you tend to be a lot more hyper vigilant. You tend to take things much more personally. The connection, connection there between trauma and addiction is when you're so hyper vigilant, when you're so reactive, when everything is coming in like your senses are coming in, really, really strong, that's pretty uncomfortable. And so you could see why someone might want to medicate or soothe the uncomfortableness of that anxiety.