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

How Childhood Trauma Shapes Your Stress Response

31 Jul 2024 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:43

Amber Hollingsworth explains that children raised in chaotic homes develop altered stress-response systems—essentially an overactive alarm—that leads to chronic hypervigilance and heightened reactivity. She connects this heightened, uncomfortable arousal to a tendency to self-medicate (substance use) as a way to soothe anxiety, framing it as a protective-but-costly adaptation.

Chapters

If you are living in a very chaotic home and childhood, your stress response systems develop very differently than other children 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 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.