How trauma creates drug addiction: An expert explains

Drug addiction is one of the issues faced all over the world where people lose lives and often end up harming themselves. The addiction is a process that takes form slowly and soon it becomes the way of life for the addicts. Even though people know that drugs can harm them and worse, lead them to death, they still keep doing it. Why do they initiate self-harm? A marketing campaign started in the 1980s that started the dialogues around how to quit drugs. The campaign said that it is as easy as just learning to say no to drugs and avoiding it. But is it that easy? To understand drug addiction, we need to first understand what creates it.

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Psychologist Nicole LePera addressed drug addiction and why it is so difficult to quit with an elaborate post explaining the mechanism of how addiction starts and works. She wrote that drug addiction is a silent epidemic and to truly cure it, we need to understand why people do drugs. Pointing to her years of experience of dealing with drug addicts, she added, “I spent years running groups for people who struggled with addiction. And inside each of them was a wounded inner child who didn’t feel good enough, who didn’t feel loved, who lived in cycles of intense self sabotage.”

She further added that even though people know how harmful drugs can be, they do it to escape their extreme emotional pain and their inability to soothe themselves. Healing from addiction should start from the way of creating a meaningful life for oneself. “Healing addiction is also directly tied to finding a meaningful life. I believe many people struggling with addiction are intensely creative— lost in a life without purpose.”

Nicole wrote that in order to address and eradicate the issue of drug addiction, we need more collective healing and healthy family dynamics to create a safe space for everyone to find meaning in their own lives and learning to love it.