Addiction, Traumatic Re-enactment & The Effect on Personnel and Family Values

In my private practice I have constantly reminded my clients, that when we successfully deal with our past we can change the present. For example, in therapy people often start to identify maladaptive patterns’ in their behavior with others and in their life in general. They can start identifying the fact that they are re-enacting how they dealt with people as a child or a teenager in the present tense. In fact, the traumatic experience that drives the repetition of past traumatic events is called traumatic re-enactment. This re-enactment can be an unconscious attempt to process and facilitate an adaptive process, in order to facilitate the successful resolution of earlier trauma ( Levine, 1997 ).

As a therapist I have to remind the person that this is mainly due to ‘If you are never shown anything different how do you know there are better ways of handling your life”? Traumatized adults or parents often re-enact a traumatic events that in some ways represent their unconsciousness efforts to resolve the original trauma (Levine, 1997). Once we are traumatized it is almost certain that we will continue to repeat or re-enact parts of the experience in some way over and over again. As a result, traumatic re-enactment has profound effect on our family values and can actually generate a legacy of fear, separation and prejudice in the family unit.

Traumatized people must let go of all kinds of beliefs and preconceptions in order to complete a journey back to health. Sometimes it’s important to recognize the fact that we have been abused and mistreated as children. This problem originated from not having had proper guidance, and physical emotional abuse. These problems actually originated with trauma and traumatic re-enactment. The result of this can be a child could never have learned any language as to how to calm down when they are highly agitated. Sometimes when a lot of neglect is involved with children, the parents or guardians simply have never taught them how to calm down. They simply were never comforted sufficiently. This creates a deficit in the child and later on, in the adult also.  This deficit can result with adult survivors of abuse, turning to drugs or alcohol in order to calm down. In my clinical experience, along with my qualitative research , indicates that addiction root in some cases can be the direct result of traumatic re-enactment.

Thanks for being part of this journey with me!
















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