The more I look at this, the more I think addicts–and I of course include alcoholics in this–are to their chosen poisons roughly what kids diagnosed with (note I did not say “who actually have”) ADHD are to Ritalin. Ritalin calms them down by speeding them up. It is a stimulant. They are not actually hyperactive, but hypoactive, and that causes them to bounce off the walls. So it goes in theory, at any rate. My intent is not to comment on the medication of our children. My own are unmedicated, and that is about as much control as I have.
But the addict seeks to numb feeling because he or she has too little of it. More specifically, they have layers of emotions, and the outer layer is dull. What the drugs or alcohol do is anesthetize that outer layer, which allows inner layers to come out. The quiet man becomes noisy; or the angry man finds better cause to express his anger. The heroin addict, perhaps, finds that he can commune with his inner self only when he is shooting up.
We see this theme that addicts only feel normal when they are high, because having habituated themselves to the drugs, their sense of self has changed. I think this gets things backwards. I think they get high initially to feel normal, to suppress one set of emotions to allow another, truer set of emotions out, and finding that it works, they keep doing it. And asking them to stop doing it is asking them, in effect, to abandon their sense of self, to abandon their connection to true feelings, to who they are. It is asking them in some respects to die, at least until they find a better way to live. This is why it is so hard to get many to quit: they have no where else to go.
The task, then, is liberating honest feelings without the use of drugs.
The connection with trauma is simple: trauma cuts you in half. You have a part that is hurt which has not healed–which lives in a timeless space–and the part which had to go on, which has done on, which may be outwardly well, successful, and well adjusted, because it learned to maintain appearances.
Many, perhaps most, people who have had trauma in their lives get from one side to the other without really dealing with it. Culturally, we lack good methods–in my view, religion is as good as any, and better than most–and until recently the simple task of survival left little time for wallowing in feelings.
But we live in an age where we need to do better. There are many ways we can end life on Earth. And there are many ways in which many of us have already lost contact with emotional authenticity, not least because the gravity of our culture seems to pull us in that direction; we seem poised, in fact, to generalize the sociopath as a cultural icon.