Trauma & Addiction: Gabor Maté & The Body Keeps the Score (An Honest Take)

Why the pain, not why the addiction? An honest, peer look at the trauma model of recovery.

This week it's a solo one. I sit with two thinkers who reshaped how we talk about addiction — Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts) and Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score) — and I try to do the thing recovery content usually skips: take what's genuinely useful, and stay honest about where it gets oversold.

Maté's line — the question isn't why the addiction, it's why the pain — did more to pull shame out of addiction than almost anything this century. It reframes you from a bad person into a hurt person, and for a lot of us that's the first door out of self-hatred. Van der Kolk adds that trauma doesn't just live in your memory, it lives in the body and nervous system — which is why cravings and relapse aren't a simple willpower problem.

I also get personal about what trauma actually is (it's not only the "big" events — it's how your body stored what happened), a grade-four moment I still carry, and the long work of forgiving myself, including after a relapse that cost me what I thought was seven and a half years.

Then the other side. Critics like Stanton Peele and Nick Haslam point out that most people with addiction weren't traumatized as children, and most people who were traumatized don't become addicted — trauma raises risk, it doesn't write destiny. Richard McNally argues some of the science gets stated more strongly than the evidence supports. The danger for us in recovery: "my trauma made me this way" can flip from liberating to a life sentence. The honest frame — your pain is real, and you're still not sentenced by it. Understanding why you hurt is a starting line, not a verdict.

Two questions I leave you with: – Does understanding my pain free me, or give me a place to hide? – My pain is real, and I'm still responsible for ______.

Recovering Out Loud is peer-to-peer lived experience, not medical or clinical advice. If you're struggling, please reach out to a professional or a trusted person in your life.