Your Nervous System Is Not Gaslighting You: A Guide to Trauma and Addiction
There’s a particular kind of pain that doesn’t announce itself with obvious wounds. It lives in the body’s memory, in the nervous system’s overreactions, in the desperate reaching for substances or behaviors that promise relief. It’s like having a really annoying roommate in your own nervous system who keeps yelling “DANGER!” every time you try to enjoy a perfectly normal Tuesday. Two books have fundamentally transformed how we understand this pain: Bessel van der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score” (which sounds like a sports commentary and kind of is, if the sport is “surviving your own life”) and Gabor Maté’s “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts” (a title that sounds like a fantasy novel but is actually about heroin addiction in Vancouver, which is arguably darker than most fantasy novels).
Together, they offer a revolutionary perspective on trauma and addiction that moves beyond judgment and toward genuine healing. Also, they explain why your body sometimes acts like it’s auditioning for a horror movie when you’re literally just trying to have a nice dinner.
When the Past Lives in the Present (Rent-Free, Like the World’s Worst Tenant)
Van der Kolk’s central thesis is deceptively simple yet profoundly important: trauma isn’t just something that happened in the past, it’s something that continues to happen in the body and brain of the person who experienced it. The body quite literally keeps the score, maintaining a physical record of overwhelming experiences that the conscious mind may not even fully remember. It’s like your nervous system is that friend who never forgets that embarrassing thing you did in seventh grade, except instead of occasionally bringing it up at parties, it reminds you constantly by making your heart race for no apparent reason.
Traditional approaches to trauma often focused primarily on talking about what happened, as if putting experiences into words was sufficient for healing. “Just tell me about it, you’ll feel better,” they said, apparently unaware that some experiences are stored in parts of the brain that don’t even use language. It’s like trying to reason with your appendix. Good luck with that!
But van der Kolk’s decades of research with trauma survivors revealed something crucial: trauma fundamentally alters how the brain processes information and how the body responds to the world. The fight-or-flight response becomes chronically activated, like having a car alarm that goes off when a leaf lands on it. The parts of the brain responsible for distinguishing past from present become compromised, which means your brain might be treating your kind boss exactly like your abusive parent, and honestly, both you and your boss deserve better than that.
A person might intellectually know they’re safe, but their body tells a different story entirely. Your rational brain is like, “We’re at a lovely dinner party!” while your autonomic nervous system is screaming, “PREDATORS EVERYWHERE, PREPARE FOR BATTLE,” and you’re just trying to eat your pasta without your hands shaking. Fun times.
This has enormous implications for understanding addiction. When Maté writes about his work with severely addicted individuals in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, he’s documenting what happens when trauma becomes unbearable and people desperately seek any form of relief. His patients weren’t moral failures or people lacking willpower, though society sure loved treating them that way. They were individuals whose early experiences of neglect, abuse, and abandonment had so thoroughly dysregulated their stress response systems that drugs became one of the few things that could make life feel tolerable. Turns out, when your baseline state is “cortisol smoothie,” you’ll take whatever works, and heroin works really well for that, at least until it doesn’t.
The Neurobiology of Pain and Relief (Or: Your Brain on Childhood, Rated R)
Both authors ground their understanding in neuroscience, but they wear their expertise lightly, always returning to the human stories that illustrate these mechanisms. Nobody wants to read a textbook when they’re trying to understand why they cry during car commercials or can’t stop eating entire sleeves of Oreos at 2 AM.
Van der Kolk describes how trauma affects three key areas of the brain: the amygdala becomes hyperactive, constantly scanning for danger like an overzealous security guard who thinks everyone is suspicious; the hippocampus struggles to properly encode memories, leading to fragmented recollections and flashbacks (so you remember the feeling of terror perfectly but not necessarily why you’re terrified, which is super helpful); and the prefrontal cortex, responsible for rational thought and self-regulation, goes offline during triggered states. That’s your “executive function” taking an unauthorized vacation right when you need it most. Thanks, brain!
Maté builds on this foundation by exploring how early adversity shapes the developing brain’s reward circuitry. Children who grow up in environments of chronic stress, unpredictability, or emotional neglect don’t develop the same capacity for self-soothing and emotional regulation as children raised in secure, nurturing environments. Their dopamine systems become dysregulated, which is a fancy way of saying their brains’ reward circuits are like a slot machine that’s been rigged by a particularly sadistic casino owner. Nothing feels good the way it’s supposed to, and everything that should be rewarding is like “meh” while extremely dangerous things suddenly seem like great ideas.
They struggle with impulse control, which is what happens when the part of your brain that’s supposed to say “Hey, maybe let’s not do that” is constantly drowned out by the part screaming “EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE AND WE NEED RELIEF NOW.” Most critically, they often fail to develop a secure sense of self-worth and belonging, which means they go through life with the emotional equivalent of a phone that never fully charges.
This is where addiction enters the picture not as a character flaw but as an attempt at solution. The substances or behaviors that people become addicted to aren’t random choices. They’re remarkably effective, at least temporarily, at addressing specific deficits in brain chemistry and emotional regulation. It’s self-medication, except without the “self” part because nobody actually wants to be addicted, and calling it “medication” is generous when the side effects include “complete life collapse.”
Opioids don’t just create euphoria; they quiet the hypervigilant nervous system and provide a sense of safety and peace that trauma survivors may have rarely experienced. It’s like finally, finally being able to exhale after holding your breath for twenty years. Stimulants provide focus and energy to people whose attention systems were compromised by developmental trauma—suddenly you can actually finish a thought without seven intrusive memories interrupting! Alcohol softens the harsh edges of self-criticism and social anxiety, transforming you from someone who can’t make eye contact into someone who’s definitely going to karaoke night. (Results may vary; some restrictions apply.)
The Question That Changes Everything (Plot Twist: We’ve Been Asking the Wrong Question This Whole Time)
Maté introduces a perspective that fundamentally reframes how we understand addiction. Instead of asking “Why the addiction?” he suggests we ask “Why the pain?” This seemingly small shift opens up entirely different avenues for understanding and healing. It’s the difference between “What’s wrong with you?” and “What happened to you?”—and let me tell you, one of those questions is way more likely to get a useful answer than the other.
It moves us from judging behaviors to understanding their origins. It recognizes that addiction is always about more than the substance or behavior itself; it’s about what that substance or behavior is doing for the person. Nobody wakes up and thinks, “You know what would be great? Destroying my life with methamphetamine!” They think, “You know what would be great? Not feeling like I’m being eaten alive from the inside,” and meth happens to be very effective at that particular task, at least in the short term.
In his clinical work, Maté found that virtually every severely addicted person he worked with had experienced significant childhood trauma. Sexual abuse, physical violence, emotional neglect, the loss of parents, chaotic households marked by addiction or mental illness—these weren’t rare exceptions but nearly universal features of his patients’ histories. It’s almost like experiencing hell as a child makes you more likely to seek escape from reality as an adult. Who could have predicted? (Everyone. Everyone could have predicted this. Except apparently the people designing drug policy.)
The addiction wasn’t the primary problem; it was an adaptation to unbearable circumstances. It’s a solution that creates its own massive problems, sure, but it’s trying to solve something real. Your brain isn’t just randomly malfunctioning; it’s desperately attempting to cope with conditions that would break anyone.
Van der Kolk’s work supports this understanding by showing how trauma creates a kind of internal chaos that people will go to great lengths to escape. He describes patients who engage in self-harm, not out of suicidal intent, but because physical pain provides relief from emotional torment. When your psychological pain is so intense and so constant that cutting yourself feels like an improvement, maybe—just maybe—the problem isn’t a lack of willpower or moral fiber. Maybe the problem is that you’re in an unbearable amount of pain and you’re doing whatever you can to survive it.
He discusses how some trauma survivors become addicted to high-risk behaviors that provide an adrenaline rush, essentially using their own neurochemistry to override the numbness or despair they otherwise feel. Skydiving, reckless driving, volatile relationships—when you feel dead inside, at least the terror of almost dying makes you feel something. It’s terrible logic, but it’s logic.
The Limits of Willpower and Cognitive Approaches (Or: Why “Have You Tried Just Not Being Traumatized?” Doesn’t Work)
Both authors are somewhat critical of approaches to addiction and trauma that rely primarily on cognitive interventions or appeals to willpower. This isn’t to say that understanding or motivation aren’t important, but rather that they’re often insufficient when dealing with issues that operate at such a fundamental physiological level. It’s like trying to talk someone out of having diabetes. “Have you considered just producing more insulin? Have you tried wanting to have better blood sugar control?”
Van der Kolk notes that you can’t talk someone out of a traumatic reaction. When a combat veteran hits the floor at the sound of a car backfiring, rational knowledge that they’re not actually under attack doesn’t stop the body’s response. Their thinking brain knows they’re in suburban Ohio, but their survival brain is absolutely certain they’re back in Afghanistan and that everyone needs to GET DOWN NOW. You can explain the difference all you want; their amygdala is not interested in your explanations.
Similarly, when an adult survivor of childhood abuse feels their heart racing and chest tightening during a moment of intimacy, explaining that their partner isn’t their abuser doesn’t immediately calm the nervous system. The body remembers, and the body doesn’t care about your logical arguments. The body is very stupid in some ways and very, very smart in others.
Maté observes the same limitations in addiction treatment. Telling someone to “just say no” or educating them about the harms of their addiction assumes the problem is primarily one of knowledge or choice. As if addicted people are out there thinking, “Wait, heroin is bad for me? Nobody mentioned this!” Everyone knows drugs are bad for them. That’s not the issue. The issue is that they’re trying to solve an even worse problem.
But for people using substances to manage severe trauma symptoms, the “choice” is often between unbearable psychological pain and temporary relief through substances. When framed that way, the continuing use of drugs despite negative consequences becomes entirely understandable, even rational. “Would you like to feel like you’re being flayed alive emotionally, or would you like to feel okay for a few hours and deal with the consequences later?” Gee, what a tough choice!
This doesn’t mean people are powerless or that change is impossible. Rather, it means that effective healing requires approaches that work with the body and nervous system, not just the cognitive mind. You can’t think your way out of a problem that doesn’t exist primarily in your thinking brain. Well, you can try, and many people spend years in talk therapy doing exactly that, with limited results. (Though their therapists do appreciate the consistent income.)
Pathways to Healing: Moving Beyond Talk Therapy (Finally, Some Good News!)
One of the most valuable contributions of both books is their exploration of therapeutic approaches that directly address the somatic and neurobiological dimensions of trauma and addiction. Van der Kolk surveys a wide range of interventions, from EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which sounds like something from a sci-fi movie but actually works) to neurofeedback, yoga, theater, and various forms of bodywork. What these diverse approaches share is an understanding that healing trauma requires helping the body release stored defensive responses and develop new patterns of safety and regulation.
He describes how yoga, for instance, helps trauma survivors reconnect with their bodies in a gentle, controlled way. Many trauma survivors have learned to dissociate from bodily sensations as a protective mechanism—when your body is where bad things happen, you learn to mentally vacate the premises. But this disconnection comes at a cost. You can’t be terrified of your body and also live a full life. Yoga provides a structured opportunity to notice sensations without being overwhelmed by them, gradually building tolerance for internal experience. It’s like exposure therapy, but with more downward dogs and less screaming.
EMDR works by helping the brain properly process traumatic memories that have remained frozen in time. The bilateral stimulation used in EMDR appears to facilitate the integration of traumatic experiences, allowing them to become memories that belong to the past rather than threats that feel current and immediate. It looks completely ridiculous—you’re basically following someone’s fingers back and forth while thinking about your trauma, like the world’s worst hypnosis session—but the research shows it works. Sometimes the most effective things look the silliest.
Maté emphasizes the importance of compassionate human connection in recovery. For people whose trauma originated in broken or absent relationships, healing naturally involves repair through relationship. This is why therapeutic communities, peer support groups, and therapy relationships that provide genuine empathy and acceptance can be so powerful. They offer corrective emotional experiences that begin to address the core wound of feeling fundamentally unlovable or unworthy.
Turns out, when someone’s core belief is “I am worthless and nobody could ever truly care about me,” having people consistently show up and care about them is actually therapeutic. Revolutionary concept! It’s almost like humans are social creatures who need connection to thrive. Someone should write a book about this. (Multiple people have. We don’t listen.)
He’s also refreshingly honest about the challenges of recovery from severe addiction. Unlike some authors who offer overly optimistic promises of transformation—”Just follow these seven steps and you’ll be cured!”—Maté acknowledges that many of his patients continued to struggle significantly. Some died. Some kept using. Recovery isn’t a Disney movie where everyone gets a happy ending just because they deserve one.
But he also documents cases where people, given enough support and addressing their underlying trauma, were able to radically change their relationships with substances and with themselves. It happens. Not always, not easily, but it happens. And that matters.
The Social Dimension: Trauma and Addiction as Cultural Issues (Turns Out, Society Might Be Part of the Problem)
Both authors push back against the tendency to view trauma and addiction as purely individual problems, as if people just spontaneously develop these issues in a vacuum. Van der Kolk discusses how entire communities can be traumatized by events like natural disasters, violence, or systemic oppression. Trauma isn’t just a personal issue; it’s often a collective one.
He notes how historical trauma affects not just individuals but can be transmitted across generations, with children of Holocaust survivors or descendants of enslaved people showing markers of trauma even without direct exposure to the original events. Your grandmother’s trauma can literally affect your stress hormones, which is both fascinating and deeply unfair. “Thanks for the generational trauma, Grandma! Also, your cookie recipe. Both are equally persistent.”
Maté is even more explicit in his critique of the social conditions that create and perpetuate addiction. He argues that our culture’s emphasis on material success, individual achievement, and emotional suppression creates a kind of mass dissociation from authentic human needs for connection, meaning, and belonging. We’ve built a society that makes people miserable and then acts shocked when they try to self-medicate their misery. It’s like running an economy on stress and isolation and then being like, “Why is everyone so stressed and isolated?”
When people feel fundamentally disconnected from themselves and others, they become vulnerable to all sorts of addictive substitutes. Can’t find meaning? Try shopping! Feeling lonely? There’s an app for that! (Spoiler: the app makes you feel lonelier.) Emotionally numb? We’ve got substances! It’s almost like we’ve created the perfect conditions for addiction and then blamed individuals for falling into the traps we built.
He’s particularly critical of the war on drugs and punitive approaches to addiction, pointing out that criminalizing people for what is fundamentally a health issue compounds their trauma and makes recovery less likely. “You’re in terrible pain and trying to cope? Let’s throw you in prison! That’ll help!” Truly, the logic is flawless. His compassionate approach recognizes that what addicted people need most is not punishment but connection, support, and help addressing the underlying pain that drives their substance use. You know, radical ideas like that.
The Role of Relationship in Healing (Humans: Still Social Creatures After All These Years)
A theme that runs through both books is the essential role of safe, attuned relationships in recovery. Van der Kolk notes that trauma fundamentally disrupts our ability to trust others and feel safe in connection. Many trauma survivors learned early that other people were sources of danger rather than safety. When the people who were supposed to protect you are the ones who hurt you, your trust calibration gets thoroughly messed up.
Healing requires experiences that challenge this learning, relationships where vulnerability is met with care rather than exploitation. This is easier said than done when your entire nervous system is screaming “DANGER! INTIMACY DETECTED! ABORT! ABORT!”
This creates a particular challenge because the very thing trauma survivors need most—genuine connection—is often what feels most threatening. It’s like being desperately thirsty but terrified of water. Effective therapy for trauma requires creating a relationship that is predictable, boundaried, and consistently safe. The therapist must be able to stay regulated and present even when the client is in states of intense distress or dissociation. They have to be the calm in the storm, which is a lot to ask of someone, especially when that someone is also human and probably has their own issues. (They do. All therapists have issues. That’s why they became therapists.)
Maté describes similar dynamics in his work with addicted individuals. Many had never experienced unconditional positive regard from another person. The simple act of being seen and accepted, even in the midst of active addiction, was profoundly meaningful. Imagine going your entire life with everyone treating you like garbage, and then someone just… doesn’t. Someone sees you at your absolute worst and still treats you like a human being worthy of dignity and respect. That can be transformative.
This doesn’t mean enabling destructive behavior—Maté is very clear about maintaining boundaries—but rather maintaining a stance of compassionate witnessing that separates the person’s intrinsic worth from their current struggles. You can simultaneously believe someone deserves compassion AND that their behavior is causing harm. These aren’t mutually exclusive. Though our society seems determined to pretend they are.
Hope and Realism: What Recovery Can Look Like (Spoiler: It’s Complicated)
Neither author offers false promises or magical solutions, which is refreshing in a self-help landscape full of people claiming they have THE ANSWER. Van der Kolk has witnessed dramatic transformations in people who were able to access appropriate treatment for trauma. He describes patients who went from being unable to hold jobs or maintain relationships to living full, engaged lives. It’s possible. It happens. But it’s not easy, it’s not quick, and it’s not guaranteed.
The key was finding approaches that addressed their specific symptoms and helped their nervous systems learn that safety was possible. Not “convincing” them intellectually that they were safe—their nervous systems needed to experience safety repeatedly until it started to become the default setting instead of the exception.
Recovery from trauma doesn’t necessarily mean eliminating all symptoms or returning to some imagined state of perfect functioning. (Perfect functioning is a myth anyway. Nobody functions perfectly. We’re all disasters in different ways.) Rather, it often looks like developing the capacity to recognize when you’re being triggered, having tools to help regulate your nervous system, and being able to remain present even during difficult moments instead of automatically dissociating or becoming overwhelmed.
It’s the difference between being completely hijacked by your trauma reactions and being able to notice “Oh, I’m having a trauma response right now” and doing something about it. You might still have the reaction, but you’re not completely at its mercy. You have some agency, some choice in how you respond. That’s huge.
For addiction recovery, Maté’s vision is similarly grounded. He acknowledges that abstinence isn’t always achieved or even always the appropriate goal for everyone, which is heresy in many addiction treatment circles where abstinence is treated as the only acceptable outcome. Some people are able to develop healthier relationships with substances. Others need to avoid them entirely. Some people are still using but using less harmfully. What matters most is addressing the underlying trauma and pain, developing alternative ways of meeting one’s needs, and building a life that feels worth being present for.
That last part is crucial: building a life worth being present for. If your life is miserable, staying sober just means being fully present for the misery. That’s not exactly motivating. Recovery has to involve making life better, not just taking away the coping mechanism.
He’s critical of the shame-based approaches that dominate much addiction treatment, arguing that shame is often a core component of the trauma that drives addiction in the first place. Adding more shame through confrontational interventions or judgmental attitudes only deepens the wound. It’s like trying to heal a burn by pouring acid on it. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” Great, they already were, now they’re just more ashamed, congratulations on making things worse.
What helps people change is compassion, both from others and ultimately from themselves. Self-compassion sounds fluffy and New Age-y, but it’s actually backed by solid research. People who can treat themselves kindly are more likely to change destructive behaviors than people who hate themselves. Makes sense when you think about it—if you fundamentally believe you’re worthless garbage, why would you bother trying to get better? Garbage doesn’t need recovery.
Practical Implications: What This Means for Healing (The “Now What?” Section)
The insights from these two books suggest several important principles for anyone dealing with trauma or addiction, whether in themselves or others. Think of this as the CliffsNotes version, except instead of helping you pass a test, it might help you not completely fall apart.
First, the physiological dimension cannot be ignored. Approaches that only address thoughts and beliefs while ignoring the body’s stored responses will have limited effectiveness. You can positive-think all you want, but if your nervous system is stuck in fight-or-flight mode, those positive thoughts are like trying to use a water pistol to put out a house fire. This means incorporating practices that directly work with the nervous system: breathwork, movement, bodywork, neurofeedback, or other somatic approaches. Your body needs to learn safety, not just hear about it.
Second, safety is the foundation for all healing work. Before someone can process trauma or address addiction, they need to have basic stability in their life and a sense of safety in their body. This might mean addressing housing, food security, or medical needs first. Maslow’s hierarchy wasn’t wrong—it’s hard to work on self-actualization when you don’t know where you’re sleeping tonight. It definitely means establishing therapeutic relationships where the person feels genuinely safe and accepted, which can take a long time because trust isn’t built overnight, especially when it’s been shattered.
Third, the timeline for healing is often much longer than we’d like. Both trauma recovery and addiction recovery are typically measured in years, not weeks or months. There’s no quick fix, despite what those Instagram ads for therapy apps might suggest. And setbacks are a normal part of the process, not a sign of failure. Healing isn’t linear. It’s more like a spiral, or a drunken walk home, or that one time you tried to assemble IKEA furniture without the instructions. You’ll think you’re making progress, then suddenly you’re back where you started, except now you have more self-awareness about it. Progress!
Maintaining realistic expectations helps prevent the demoralization that can come from expecting linear progress. If you expect to steadily improve and instead you have a complete meltdown, you might give up. But if you expect healing to be messy and non-linear, a meltdown is just Tuesday.
Fourth, connection and community are essential. Whether through therapy, peer support groups, or other relationships, healing happens in the context of safe connection with others. Isolation perpetuates both trauma and addiction. We are fundamentally social creatures, and we heal in relationship. This is annoying if you’re an introvert who was kind of hoping healing could happen alone in your apartment with some books and snacks, but alas, you need other people. Sorry.
Finding ways to experience genuine belonging supports recovery. Not performative belonging where you pretend to be someone you’re not, but actual belonging where you can be yourself and still be accepted. That’s the good stuff.
Fifth, self-compassion is a skill that can be learned and is crucial for healing. Many trauma survivors and people struggling with addiction are harshly self-critical. Their internal dialogue sounds like a particularly cruel drill sergeant combined with their worst critic. Learning to relate to oneself with the same kindness one might offer a good friend creates the internal conditions for growth and change.
This is harder than it sounds. Try it right now: think about something you feel bad about, then talk to yourself the way you’d talk to a friend who came to you with the same problem. Notice how different it feels? That’s the skill. It takes practice. You’ll probably be terrible at it at first. That’s okay. Be compassionate with yourself about your struggle to be compassionate with yourself. (Meta-compassion!)
The Larger Cultural Conversation (Or: How These Books Changed Everything, Hopefully)
These books have contributed to a significant shift in how trauma and addiction are understood, both professionally and culturally. Increasingly, there’s recognition that many behaviors previously attributed to moral failure or character defects are actually adaptations to adverse circumstances. This understanding opens space for more compassionate and effective responses. It’s the difference between “What’s wrong with you, you terrible person?” and “Oh, that behavior makes sense given what you’ve been through.”
The trauma-informed care movement, which van der Kolk has been instrumental in promoting, recognizes that many people seeking help across various systems have trauma histories that affect how they respond to authority, cope with stress, and relate to others. When you assume everyone you’re working with has experienced trauma (because statistically, many have), you design services differently. You don’t yell at people. You explain what you’re doing before you do it. You give people choices. You try not to recreate traumatic dynamics in your “helping” relationship.
Adjusting how services are delivered to account for this reality makes them more effective and less likely to inadvertently retraumatize people. Novel concept: maybe we should try not to traumatize people while trying to help them! It shouldn’t be revolutionary, but apparently it is.
Similarly, the growing acceptance of viewing addiction as a health issue rather than a criminal justice problem owes something to the work of people like Maté who have helped shift the conversation. Harm reduction approaches, supervised consumption sites, and medication-assisted treatment all flow from an understanding of addiction as rooted in pain and trauma rather than moral failing.
These approaches acknowledge that people might continue using substances but can do so more safely, reducing death and disease while keeping doors open for when someone is ready for more intensive treatment. It’s pragmatic, it’s compassionate, and it works better than the “just say no” approach, which has never worked for anyone except the people making money off it.
Of course, plenty of people still resist these ideas. There’s a deep cultural investment in believing that people get exactly what they deserve, that suffering is the result of bad choices, and that if people would just try harder they’d be fine. It’s comforting to believe in a just world. Unfortunately, the world is not just, trauma is real, and addiction is more complicated than a series of bad choices.
Conclusion: The Possibility of Transformation (Yes, Even You, You Beautiful Disaster)
What emerges from these two profound works is both sobering and hopeful. Sobering because they make clear how deeply trauma affects people, how difficult recovery can be, and how our society often responds to trauma and addiction in ways that compound suffering rather than alleviating it. We’ve built systems that are almost designed to make things worse, which is quite an achievement when you think about it. It takes effort to be that counterproductive.
But hopeful because they demonstrate that healing is possible, that people are remarkably resilient (even when they don’t feel resilient at all), and that when we understand the true nature of these struggles, we can offer much more effective help. Knowledge isn’t everything, but it’s something. Understanding why you’re struggling doesn’t fix it, but it makes the struggle make sense, and sometimes that’s enough to keep going.
The body does keep the score, holding onto pain and fear in ways that can feel inescapable. Your nervous system has an excellent memory for terrible things and a terrible memory for good things, which is evolutionarily adaptive but personally very annoying. And people do become trapped in realms of hungry ghosts, seeking relief from unbearable pain through substances and behaviors that ultimately create new suffering. It’s a terrible trade-off, but when you’re drowning, you grab whatever floats, even if it’s got holes in it.
But bodies can also learn new patterns of safety and regulation. Neuroplasticity is real. Your brain can change. It’s not stuck the way it is forever, even though it often feels that way. And people can, with proper support, find their way out of addiction toward lives of greater meaning and connection. Not everyone does. Some people don’t make it. But some do, and that matters.
The invitation from both van der Kolk and Maté is to approach trauma and addiction with curiosity rather than judgment, to understand that behavior that seems irrational often makes perfect sense when we understand someone’s history, and to recognize our shared humanity with people who are struggling. We all carry wounds. We all seek relief from pain. The difference is often simply one of degree and circumstance rather than fundamental character. You could easily be in their shoes. They could easily be in yours. We’re all just trying to survive our own lives with the tools we have available.
For those struggling with trauma or addiction, these books offer validation that your struggles are real, your pain makes sense, and healing, while difficult, is genuinely possible. You’re not broken beyond repair. You’re not uniquely damaged. You’re responding normally to abnormal circumstances, and there are paths forward, even if you can’t see them yet. The path might involve yoga (sorry), therapy (probably lots of it), and learning to be kind to yourself (the hardest part), but it exists.
For those who love or work with people facing these challenges, they offer a framework for understanding that can transform how you offer support. Instead of getting frustrated that someone “won’t just stop” or “won’t just get over it,” you can understand that their struggles make sense, that shame makes things worse, and that your compassion might be one of the most therapeutic things you can offer. You can’t fix someone else, but you can be a safe person in their life, and that matters more than you might think.
And for all of us, they illuminate fundamental truths about human nature, suffering, and the profound importance of compassion in creating the conditions for healing and growth. We’re all traumatized to varying degrees. We’re all trying to cope. We’re all deserving of kindness, especially from ourselves. The body keeps the score, but the story isn’t over yet. There are still chapters to write, and they don’t all have to be horror stories. Some of them might even have happy moments, or at least moments that don’t completely suck.
So here’s to healing, however messy and non-linear it might be. Here’s to bodies that can learn safety. Here’s to breaking cycles of pain and addiction. Here’s to compassion, connection, and the stubborn human refusal to give up even when everything feels hopeless. And here’s to these two books that help us understand ourselves and each other a little better, which is about all we can ask for really.
Now if you’ll excuse me, all this talk about trauma has me needing to do some deep breathing exercises and possibly eat an entire pint of ice cream. Self-care is important, after all. (The ice cream is optional but recommended.)