trauma

Chapter 6 – Fear Without Solution

This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

Trauma

My mother’s dependency on Valium didn’t help much. As I explained eralier, she had been prescribed Valium soon after I was born (possibly before) and was dependent on it all her life. This meant that she mothered me in an emotionally distant, inconsistent and, frequenty, dismissive manner. She spent much of my childhood in her bedroom, bluntly asking me to leave her alone. Leaving me with the feeling it was my fault this had happened to her. A fear embedded into my heart that she never assuaged, a fear without a solution. She never recognised or addressed my fears and they were left to grow, my anger to simmer and boil over into rage.

I believe this lack of attachment and also in earlier in the first weeks and months, after being born, contributed to later introceptive and emotion processing problems. But much of the damage to my later life was done in infancy (and childhood) I believe. A damage, I think, coontributed to later addiction and C-PTSD. As we grow from infancy, our close bonds to our primary care giver is crucial for future development of our brains and our abilty to regulate our emotions, stress and ultimately ourselves (self regulation). In the first few months of life, the emotion and social parts of the brain that regulate emotion and distress develop during this initial two way relationship between primary care giver, mother in this case, and baby, me, which models behaviour that successfully regulate emotions. The brain architecture for emotion (and stress) regulation did not get properly manufactured in my brain. It did not mature properly and this led to later emotional immaturity.

I feel I was born into trauma, an attachment trauma, that I never fully bonded with my mother, the primary caregiver and ended up with a insecure attachment, one they call disorganised attachment, an attachment that provokes a fear without solution. In other to understand this type of attachment disorder, we can imagine a mother and son playing in a room, the mother leaves and a stranger comes into the room. When the mother returns and the child is reunited with the mother, following this period of absence,  a child with disorganised attachment would experience inconsistent fearful reactions that never resolve themselves, such as approaching the mother initially, then stopping or falling to the floor, it is also called fear without solution. The child does not treat the mother as a secure attachment he can return or not, safe in the knowledge she is there when he needs her. He can return when he likes, he can explore, play or come back to her when he likes as she is there, cosistently available to his emotional needs.

The disorganised child is not sure that his mother, primary caregiver, is there in a consistent manner to care for him and his emotional needs, she is there sometimes, not always, she is inconsistent in her caregiving and he is insecure in his attachment to and bonding with her. His fear is not satisfactorily solved by his mothers caregiving. Her care and love seem conditional, based on her availabilty not on his emotional needs. This lays down a template in his mind about people and how available they are to him, it infuences his future reactions, an internal working model, that care and love are not always available or that they are available sometimes and not others. It leads to a fear of rejection.

A fear of not being deserving enough of unconditional love and care. It is a pattern of responding that can lead into later adolescence and adulthood. It can lead to a wide range of mental health issues, including C-PTSD and addiction, where “substances” become a type of “secure” attachment.

Unresolved fear.

Even in later in life I would phone her armed with a tin of beer and a spliff. She unsettled me at a profoundly deep level. I was never sure of her, or safe in her presence, I was always guarded against rejection. I never felt fully secure although I loved her dearly. I was also inconsistent in my behaviour to her, especially in later life when I would exact petty revenges on her which sometimes involved abandoning her to see how she liked it. I remember once leaving her for hours with a portrait painter, a complete stranger, who made he feel very uncomfortable and anxious with his awkward questions as he painted her. Abandonment was what I felt in relation to her, even when talking to her on a phone call.

I felt I received conditional love from her although I believe and feel she loved me. It was through an emotional haze, she wasn’t fully present. She wasn’t fully available. I waited for a love that I would never fully receive. I waited for her to come for me but she didn’t and I grew up feeling strangly rejected and abandoned.

I internalised this as being my fault most of the time, sometimes unconsciously, as this “not being worth it” and this became part of my view of myself in relation to the world. My negative self perception automatically retrieved rom my negative self schema. I wasn’t worth it, I was defective in some way, not worth the effort. I wasn’t worth saving! So what did I do with my distress and my everdyay negative emotions. I buried them, suppressed them , didn’t share them. Sharing how you felt increased the chance of having them rejected. It was too painful to have then ignored and dismissed so I started blunting my emotion resposnes. Sometimes I would demand to be heard and overreact and my mother would shout to my father to have me taken away from her, to stop bothering her.

Eventually I realised my mother heard what she wanted to hear and that was rarely the truth so I tried to not having emotions as they were too painful, when not shared or reciprocated.

This led to a toxic shame and a blunted awareness of my feelings. It was as if shame was prompted by having emotional needs that were thwarted. Shame then became the overriding feeling and took control of my life. My emotions almost became servents to this overriding shame, it was the master emotion provoking self pity, guilt, selfishness, self centredness, arrogance, intolerance, impatience, anger, rage, greed, gluttony, and in later years, lust. The very same emotions I list on my Step 10 inventory every nght. The shame based respsonding I have to life today and have had since eary childhood. Traumatic and toxic shame, the beating heart of all addictive behaviour.

Shame contributed to my alexithymia, the inability to recognize or describe my emotions too, the numbing of emotional repsonse. The fleeing from feelings. My feelings were troublesome and best not having. It was best to ignore them and take your mind off them instead, to live outside them. To act outside of yourself without realising, the internal shame was constantly animating your every action. I was fixing my feelings from an early age. I could run away from them but I couldn’t escape them. They would catch up with me one day.

I now know it wasn’t her fault. She was suffering from addiction but I never knew that fully at the time. We were all suffering from addiction as a family, but this realisation came decades later. For me anyway. It didn’t come for mummy, we never fully discussed it. She was dead by the time I came into recovery. So in the absence of an acknowlegement of the terrible effects of addiction I instead waited, in my own undiagnosed addiction and alcoholism, for some recognition of a shared but troubled past she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, recall and re-examine as it may have been too emotionally overwhelming or she couldn’t reconnect with as she was fully involved in it initially.

I am trying to square that troubled past now in writing this book, to exorcise the ghosts of the past. To liberate us from our past. Memory recall often depends on the clarity and intensity of emotion that accompanied the episode remembered. Blocked off emotions weren’t conducive to this recall. For mummy it was if the past almost happned to someone else. It didn’t really happen to her because she wasn’t fully present at the time.

When I asked about the past it brought out angry reactions in her. She castigated me for dragging up the past so I cannot say if she had painful memories or didn’t want to contemplate her son’s pained reaction to the past. Emotions seemed to threaten to overwhelm her, before a shrug of the shoulders seemed to send them off, floating away on a distant cloud. As if they weren’t her resonsiblity, didn’t belong to her.  She didn’t seem to care sometimes. It was as if she was about to have some emotional response then it would dissipate like passing clouds, the Valium wafting it away.

She made me feel sad, not deserving of anything more. Thre was no explanation or commiseration, no acceptance of even acknowledgement of my pain, no empathy. I never felt fully seen, fully felt in her unconditional love. There was no safe haven or resting place in her affection. There was no solution to my fear and emotional distress.

This made me feel strangely not worth the effort or time, somehow defective. She made me angry, raging even, especially in childhood. I dismayed she wasn’t like my friends’ mother. How come my mother was so odd, so detached? Or depressed and uncaring? So useless. Why didn’t she care about us enough to love us. Why did she have us in the first place if she didn’t want us? We were all a big mistake to her it seemed. Worthless. I sought attachment everywhere I could, of course. From my sisters, from  my aunts. Friends and later from girlfriends. Anywhere I could find a fleeting solace and a place to rest from my errant painful emotions, for a while at least.

But is was precarious, I constantly guarded against a rejection I somehow was sure would come. It always did eventually, I felt. Later in life I would finish relationship with girls and woman before they did, just in case. The only constant relationship I had, that never rejected me was with alcohol, that was it until it sent me mad and almost killed me. I am so lucky that alcohol spat me out too otherwise I would have died.

It was a chemical attachment, a fairly consistent safe harbour. A solution to the fear and self loathing. A very, and increasingly crude solution. A medication just like my mother’s Valium. Strange how I never took Valium in case I became addicted like my mother? All the while slipping into alcoholism.

Decades of unresolved fear and emotion knawing away at my psyche, propelling me further and further into addiction and distress. I thought I was runnng away from my problems instead of running more deeply into them. Past addiction and trauma, the fuel for my present alcoholism. The alcohol, over years of chronic drinking, increasing the fear without solution. The fear becoming psychosis. My sisters suffered from this insecure parenting too and all the family dysfunction as a result of my mother’s Valium dependency. We all came second. Although my sisters probably didn’t always see it that way.

They thought, in my mother’s conditional love, I came first as the youngest child and only boy. God knows how little they received in terms of maternal love, if they were jealous of the scraps I got? I probably got more conditional love than they did, if that makes sense? They didn’t seem to have the same insecure attachment as me and grew up with ambivalent or anxious attachments rather than my disorganised attachment.

I believe we all grew up in the trauma of neglect and emotional abuse but I am not sure they ended up with C-PTSD and it’s associated dissocative disorder. Perhaps my initial attachment trauma left me more vulnerable to being traumatised by later traumatic events, some of which they witnessed too? Perhaps it affected me more as I was the youngest? Perhaps because I had already suffered from trauma, attachment trauma? It is difficult to say. Mental health problems, like alcoholism, are often self diagnosed, often with the help of competent professionals or through recovery circles. Most trauma, in life, seems buried in denial. I didn’t self diagnose my chronic alcoholism until it practically killed me or my C-PTSD until ten years into recovery when it threatened me with relapse. I had thought many times and discussed with my wife on numerous  occasions that I had trauma issues but only I accepted my C-PTSD when I started to profoundly dissociate, on one occasion all the way back to childhood. I even spoke in a child’s voice on one occasion, spluttering out

“When I make mistakes people die!”

https://www.benzo.org.uk/support.htm

Chapter 5 – My Sobering Story

This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

Trauma – My Sobering Story

My name is Seamas (James on my birth certificate) and I am an alcoholic. I am also recovering from Complex PTSD.

I grew in a dysfunctional Catholic family in a dysfunctional Protestant town in Derry, Northern Ireland during the so-called “Troubles”, the military conflict that raged for 30 years in the north of Ireland. The “Troubles” did not cause my alcoholism and addiction but it didn’t help them either. It did cause, however, my Complex PTSD; the C-PTSD that underpins and influences the severity and complexity of my addicton and alcoholism.

Recovery taught me not only that I am a chronic alcoholic but also that I have suffered trauma throughout my life, even in my active addiction, even in my recovery. It also taught me that I needed treatment for this just like I had for my addictive behaviour. I am not sure if I was born with an addicted brain or not. Or whether I was born with trauma or into trauma. It is still unclear whether my Valium-dependent mother was on the Valium when she was pregnant with me or not, or whether she went on them just after I was born. She confessed to me once that she had a nervous breakdown around my birth and the doctor prescribed the Valium, whether the GP had just upped the dose I wouldn’t know for sure.

All I know from talking to my mother is that she went to see him with a mental health problem and came back with a drug whose side effects that dwarfed those initial problems, by creating a whole host of other, even more profound mental health problems such as agrophobia, depression, social and generalized anxiety, suicidal thoughts, blurred vision, tingingly in her limbs, tremours, loss of feeling in her right side and so on.

She hadn’t gone to her local doctor asking for her problems to be magnified and multiplied but this is what she got. Doctors handed them out like they were smarties, increasingly so during “The Troubles”  as mothers, in particular, struggled to cope with the increasingly dangers to their children and themselves as the result of the conflict in the north of Ireland. Any attempts at giving up this medication seemed to increase these problems and the dosage of the medication to “deal” with them. 

I suppose it was not well known at the time that any type of benzodiazepine, of which Valium was one, was so addictive. This was because any research into the effects of it where based on studies covering short periods of usage. Many doctors knew and know they are highly addictive but still prescribed them, even today, when there is alot more known about their potential to become addictive.

It is difficult decades later and having witnessed “Big Pharma” manufacture so many mediactions such as tranquillisers, painkillers and antidepressants not to think they are often manufacturing addiction and creating vast profits from the subsequent human misery. They certainly created much misery from my mother and for her family. And for millions of other familes too. Addiction to Valium also seemed different to sticking a heroin needle in your arm or drinking bottles of whisky, it was surrepticious, a wee rummage in her hand bag, by the side of her chair, for her medication, which left us all wondering what the hell was wrong with our mummy? It wasn’t really an addicton to us but it’s effects on us were profound, as profound as any family living with addiction in a parent.

The denial that comes with addicton was almost increased in relation to mother’s medication perhaps even more so than if she was addicted to heroin or alcohol. It was not a drug to our young eyes but “mother’s helper” to quote the song title by the Rolling Stones.

We accepted it almost as an ally when it was the greatest enemy you could imagine. My mother struggled to understand what was going on with her and why it kept getting worse and not better, she struggled to explain the many deleterious effects of Valium and readily accepted a diagnosis Multiple Sclerosis (MS) in later life as they symptoms of Valium addiction where very similar to that of MS. It is common within Valium addiction and many Valium addicts end up with an MS diagnosis. We knew nothing of this at the time. We were glad she had been properly diagnosed and her suffering had been validated.

Years after receiving mobility allowance to help her buy a new car for my father to drive her around in (the only addiction that does!) and access to disability car parking spots closest to shops, another Doctor said she didn’t have MS but ME. Anything other than Valium addicton, it appeared. Medicine often manufactures profound problems it then spends decades misdiagnosing and mistreating. While not taking responsibility for either.

So I grew up in a home where my mother went from a nervous breakdown to Valium to a myriad of Valium-related mental health problems, which to my young mind weren’t because of this drug but because she didn’t love us enough rather than her simply struggling to cope, to MS, which all it’s extra “medication” to Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and in between a range of misprescribed drugs for MS that made her hallucinate! These new MS drugs would never have worked, mainly because my mother didn’t have MS. Or ME. She was addicted to Valium plus all the added opioid addiction in the form of solapadine addiction and other opoid dependence as a combination of tranquilliser and opoid medication was prescribed for MS too. So this misdiagnosis brought an extra susbtance addiction to go with the Valium prescription and addiction. Other opioid medication was also freely available in local pharmacies too if and when required, simply purchased by me over the counter as it didn’t require prescription.

 I was mummy’s unwitting supplier from young age.

Read More

Excellent resources page on Vallium / Benzodiazepine addiction and support groups Unfortunately not all the links work

Transcript of the Panorama program on Valium here

Read more about Complex PTSD here

A Safe Place To Visit

Just finished my third EMDR terapy session and thought I would write now otherwise I probably will not get around to it. I find I am so exhausted the next day that it is difficult to blog.

I am finding that I have a lot of therapeutic benefit already from the treatment.

Today we got into the EMDR  protocol which mainly looked at mechanisms we will adopt if I dissociate while doing the actual eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) which we will tentatively start next week.

Essentially we spent 15-20 minutes learning the relaxing techniques and “safe place” techniques I will use if I dissociate as the result of the EMDR.

It is mainly to do with “safety of the client” protocols. I felt a great relaxing benefit from doing it today. I will practice the techniques once a day while I am doing this course of treatment.

We will also use smell as a way of coming out of dissociation if need be.

We may not need these techniques but they have to be put in place just in case.

My recent dissociation has been to do with feeling detached from “me” – my body and immediate environment. We discussed how we could deal with this possibility.

I have also dissociated to childhood on occasion and this was discussed too. This type of dissociation seems to take one back to the heart of the trauma. It is like a re-experiencing without having the memory associated  with it.  It is like being behind a wall on the other side of our life, aware of certain things but not able to see it clearly

I am not fearful of dissociating – I have a grasp now of what it is and how much I have been doing it over the course of my life.

I even research the brain regions involved in dissociation and it seems the parts that deal with self reference deactivate and there is a “coming away” from representations of self and associated memory.

I have the type of head that likes to know these things – you may have noticed!?

It is a disquieting, unsettling and stressful experience but is manageable I believe with these techniques.

I  have noticed how after only a few weeks my mind and behaviour has been tied to looking at photos of the past, my old friends and my family.

My nephew also contacted me out of the blue to say he wanted to visit  and I have resumed closer contact with one of my  sisters.

I have made it clear that I am doing therapy for trauma, whether my sisters need it too I am not sure. I am the youngest in the family and a boy so my circumstances might have meant I was more traumatised by events in my early childhood than others.

Interestingly I have found a school photo  of my sister and I which is a photo of us looking a bit shell shocked, in comparison to our smiling faces of the previous year’s school photo when we were beaming more confident, mischievous smiles at the camera. I am presuming this second photo was around the time of the major trauma(s) .

I also found a photo of me in my late 20s after a cocaine psychosis and I look haunted in the same way as the school photo.

I had presumed this was due to the psychosis which is not a very pleasant experience I can assure you. I now know where the phrase “climbing the walls” comes from after that experience I can assure  you!

Now, although the psychosis obviously affect me deeply I can also see trauma in this photo and many other photos of me. My wife told me I was very paranoid at the time too which is linked to psychosis but much of the paranoia linked clearly to what I had experienced in childhood.

It was not only alcoholism and addiction that ate into my soul like a parasite feeding on my troubled emotions,  in these photos of my emaciated drug using self but also complex post trauma.

Unresolved trauma too is like a parasite feed on one’s nerves too.

Then yesterday a person who married my cousin sent me a photo of me in a underage football team that  my dad and his friend organised. My dad is in the photo too of our team.   I suddenly realised how heart breaking it must have been for my dad, what happened to our family, my mothers breakdown and eventual Valium dependence. And the decades of consequence after.

My heart  went out o him. God bless him, he was a loving father, I miss greatly.

The plan now is to finish treatment – finish a novel I was writing for many years while drinking (which is 2/3s finished) and get my driving licence. I once passed the theory part but banged my head , got concussion and could not take the practical test.

So I will try again and then take time out, a month or so to travel back to Ireland and revisit my past and see some people I haven’t seen in many many  years.

Northern Ireland has been at peace for two decades but I have yet to call a complete ceasefire with myself and my past. Hopefully I will later this yer.

Recovery has given me so much and while others hit their mid life crisis I have barely begun living. I am a published scientific writer and want to follow that by the end of this year with a published novel too.

I have a very fragmented self, blow to bits by my traumatised mother and family and my traumatised, brutalised and war torn upbringing in Northern Ireland.

I can feel these disparate parts of self slowly and naturally drifting back into shape.

It will be a new me, the composite parts that make up me no doubt but it will have the same character I am sure.

I got lost thanks to trauma and chronic alcoholism and addiction. Ten years into recovery I am still beginning the amazingly exciting journey of uncovering, recovering, the person I am and the person I am supposed to become.

When the parts reunite I will be the fullness of me.

 

Helping Others Helps Us.

In AA they say people who engage in service, i.e. helping out at meetings, sharing, making the tea and coffee, sponsoring others, helping on A A telephone helplines, inter group etc  have a much greater chance of staying sober and in recovery  long term than those who do not.

Although I was scared of my own shadow when I came into recovery and my brain was still incredibly scrambled and disorientated, I believe doing service in AA is one of the main reasons for me still being in recovery nearly 10 years later.

It helped me become part of AA not just someone who turned up and hung around on the periphery. 12 step recovery is a program of action not self absorbed introspection. The spiritual and therapeutic aspect of 12 step recovery is connectedness with others who have the same condition and share the same common purpose of wanting to remain sober and in recovery.

Doing service is an outward sign of one taking responsibility for their own recovery and declaring it too others in the meetings via service. When I see a newcomer to recovery start to do service it gladdens my heart as I know they have dramatically increased their chances of remaining sober and in recovery long term.

This has been my experience.

A reality, however, seems to be that most people are very anxious, lacking in confidence and fearful when they reach the rooms of AA.

When you have spent a long time drinking in increasing isolation, suddenly being at a meeting among strangers can have it’s problems.

When we go to meetings, to begin with, we are often unaware that we are actually in the company of people just like us, sensitive souls. Most have at some time at issues around social anxiety.

It is often said that this social anxiety is linked to the not belonging” feeling that many alcoholics experience throughout their lives prior to drinking.

Some have said it can be traced to insecure attachment to a primary care givers or to trauma or abuse in childhood.

Equally I have known many alcoholics who had idyllic childhoods who also have this feeling on not belonging socially, not fitting in, so I suggest that this social anxiety or not fitting in may be the result of some genetic inheritance which gets worse via the adverse effects of abuse or insecure attachment.

The vast majority of alcoholics I have met over the years have this sense of not belonging, having a “hole in the soul”.

I believe it is some neurochemical deficit, such as oxytocin deficit that has a knock-on effect on other brain chemicals, that decreases our feelings of belonging,  which  we all inherit and which can be made more severe via stressful adversive childhoods.

It often leads to isolation, being a loner, not only in adolescence but sometimes in recovery too. We seem to often like our own company but equally it is something to be wary of.

I have often heard of people relapsing after becoming isolated from 12 step fellowships. They stopped doing service, then reduced meetings and then disappeared off the scene, locked away in isolation.

So we seem to have a tendency to isolate and this may be due to many of us having social anxiety issues. Social events often seem like too much effort and this can be a dangerous thought.

So who do we cope with a room full of people?

I just came a cross a study recently which addressed how AA is almost perfect for dealing with this issue of social anxiety.

I will use some excerpts from it. It relates to youths in recovery but is applicable to all people in recovery or seeking recovery.

“In treatment, youths with social anxiety  disorder (SAD) may avoid participating in therapeutic activities with risk of negative peer appraisal.

Peer-helping is a low-intensity, social activity in the 12-step program associated with greater abstinence among treatment-seeking adults.

The benefits from helping others appear to be greatest for individuals who are socially isolated.

Helping others may benefit the helper because it distracts one from one’s own troubles, enhances a sense of value in one’s life, improves self-evaluations, increases positive moods, and causes social integration.

The myriad of existing service activities in AA are readily available inside and outside of meetings; are low intensity; and do not require special skills, prior experience, time sober, long-term commitment, transportation, insurance, or parental permission.

Peer-helping in AA, such as having the responsibility  of making coffee at a meeting, empathetic listening to others, reading inspirational meditations to others, or sharing personal experiences in learning to live sober, may have the effect of greater engagement in treatment and improved outcomes due to patients’ active contributions.

Learning to live sober with social anxiety is a challenge in society where people can be quick to judge others

Coping with a persistent fear of being scrutinized in social situations often requires learning to tolerate the opinions of others, feeling different, appropriate boundary setting, and enduring short term discomfort for long-term gain—skills that are in short supply among adolescents and those in early recovery.

The low-intensity service activities in AA offer youths—and those with  social anxiety in particular—a nonjudgmental, task-focused venue for social connectedness, reduce self-preoccupation and feeling like a misfit, and transform a troubled past to usefulness with others.

AA should be encouraged for socially anxious youths in particular.

As stated by a young adult, “I wanted to be at peace with myself and comfortable with other people. The belonging I always wanted I have found in AA. I got into service work right away and really enjoyed it”

References

1. Pagano, M. E., Wang, A. R., Rowles, B. M., Lee, M. T., & Johnson, B. R. (2015). Social Anxiety and Peer Helping in Adolescent Addiction Treatment. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 39(5), 887-895.

 

 

Filling that “Hole in the Soul”

When I first  arrived in AA I was told by a big scary looking man that in AA you will get better.

That “we will help you by loving you back to health”.

I was quite alarmed by this situation to be honest “loved back to health”? Was this guy some relic from the hippy era?

What he said, was very threatening to me. It suggested unconditional love, a concept that I was only partially familiar with.

I had always knew my father loved my unconditionally but this was less the case with my mother. I knew she loved me in her vague, through a  distant Valium haze but part of me was always reaching out, crying out for more. More love.

I found that love in liquid form in alcohol. Or so I felt. Alcohol was constant. It always delivered without fail, transported me to the person I would much rather be. Allowed me to escape the person I did not want to be.

I now accept my mother suffered from addiction just like me and I have immense compassion for her because of that, she did the best she could under the circumstances. I forgive her completely and love her completely.

She was not a bad person she as an ill person just like me.

Did this relationship with my primary care giver have any effect on my teenage drinking and later alcoholism?

Like many alcoholics I have spoken to over the years I too seemed to suffer from the  “hole in the soul” they spoke of.

That not feeling whole, like something in you, some part of you was missing.

Having a curious mind, I always wondered what it could be? It must be something that can be discovered? I wasn’t happy to leave it was a vague spiritual condition.

It felt too emotional just to be a spiritual thing, although it is also that.

It felt like I was lacking in something, something in my make up was not there or in diluted measure?

Later I found out that this relationship with my mother was called an insecure attachment and that lots of people in recovery had this insecure attachment with their mothers or whoever reared them.

This insecure attachment they said often resulted in novelty seeking and hunting out some “secure attachment” elsewhere, in a bottle, syringe, sex, a poker machine, food or other addictive behaviours.

It is lonely recently that I found there is a brain chemical linked to this insecure attachment called oxytocin, the “love chemical” which effects all the neurochemical said to be involved in addiction.

Oxytocin is badly affected by the stress reaction to insecure attachment, abuse trauma and a tough upbringing. The oxytocin is then reduced which reduces the other chemicals too and we search for these at the bottom of a glass.

Unfortunately alcohol seems to give us cocktail of these chemicals in liquid form. But never enough.

For a while anyway, it gives us the illusion of attachment, of that fleeting feeling of being part, of being loved.

Through the years all these chemicals start running dry and the drink stops working.

We are then left with the problems we had before we put a glass to our mouths.

So when the drink stopped working and I had to go to AA – not one wants to go  there, let’s face it, it’s because we have to!

So the big scary guy may have been right all along. I have found that he is right over the years of attending AA.

I have found a new, surrogate family  in AA, a “learnt attachment” within the fellowship of others in the same boat as me, who have felt the same as me. I have found this attachment to others, by being looked after and trying to help others – my oxytocin, the “love chemical” the “cuddle chemical” has gone up dramatically while my stress has plummeted as I have bonded with others in recovery.

This connectedness is my spiritual solution to a neurobiological problem.

I now feel part of for the first time, I have filled the hole in the soul with love given and received.