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<\/a>For almost twenty years, I\u2019ve been arguing that models of addiction that held that people had chosen to be addicts or that it was their diseased brains that made them into addicts were both insulting and wrong. I\u2019ve been arguing that addiction is a relational problem, that no one is born that way and you have to harm the heart to create dependency.<\/p>\nAnd, for a lot of that time, it seemed like no one was even listening – and so few Calgary Counsellors were willing to stand up and say the same things.<\/p>\n
Well, times are changing.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, Johann Hari<\/a> published a brilliant summary of the latest research in the field:<\/p>\n \u201cA person who experienced any six or more of the categories” of childhood trauma, Dr Felitti tells me, \u201cwas 4600 percent more likely to become an IV [injecting] drug user later in life than a person who experienced none of them.” He adds: \u201cI remember the epidemologists at the CDC told me those were numbers a magnitude of which they see once in a career. You read the latest cancer scare of the week in the newspaper and something causes an increase of 30 percent in breast or prostate cancer and everybody goes nuts – and here, we\u2019re talking 4600 percent.”<\/p>\n The published research showed that for every category of trauma that happens to a child, they are two to four times more like to grow up to be an addict – and multiple traumas produced a massive risk. The correlation for addiction was startling. Nearly two-thirds of injecting drug use, they found, is the result of early childhood trauma.<\/p>\n But why would this be? Further research by the British psychoanalyst Dr Sue Gerhardt advances an explanation. When you were a baby, what happened when you were upset? If your mother soothed and reassured you, in time, you will have learned to soothe and reassure yourself. If, however, your mother responded to your pain by being hostile or angry or distressed \u2013 as chaotic addicts like Whitney Houston often do – you will not have learned to regulate your own feelings. You would then be much more likely to need to seek external soothing – and nothing stuns internal grief quite like chemicals, for a while.<\/p>\n Just as Dr Felitti\u2019s obese patients tried to protect themselves from predatory sexual attention with layers of fat, his drug-addicted patients were often trying to protect themselves from the childhood storms in their own heads – by numbing themselves with chemicals. His obese patient didn\u2019t feel so afraid of sexual assault if she had rendered herself conventionally \u2018unattractive.\u2019 His addicted patients didn\u2019t feel their own agony so keenly if they were drugged.<\/p>\n And, Hari is only one of a growing list of distinguished and aggressive authors and thinkers who are finally standing up to the monolithic force of Control Model based assessments of addiction.<\/p>\n The list now includes the ridiculously comprehensive studies out of the Baldwin Research Institute, the yearly verified results coming out of St. Jude\u2019s Treatment Centres, SMART Recovery\u2019s repeated self-studies, Dr. Gabor Mate\u2019s (somewhat distressing) studies with Vancouver\u2019s Safe Injection Site\u2019s patients and so many more voices.<\/p>\n They are standing up and fighting back with ever more inescapable volumes of research, statistics and psychologically founded treatments for addiction. And, unlike Control Model Based programs, they can prove that these techniques actually work! Thankfully, a growing list of Calgary therapists are starting to listen.<\/p>\n