Pursuing addiction recovery is a courageous decision, especially if you’re navigating trauma and recovery from addiction simultaneously. Understanding this, trauma informed care offers a compassionate and effective approach to healing from both successfully.
As a holistic addiction and trauma treatment center in New England, our team at Sana at Stowe provides a sanctuary where people like you can find hope and begin their journey toward long-term recovery from addiction and trauma’s lingering effects. Here’s a closer look at what you can expect in the trauma-informed addiction treatment process.
What is Trauma?
For starters, what is trauma, exactly? According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), trauma is an event or ongoing circumstance that results in physical, emotional, or life-threatening harm. It can be classified as acute (a car accident, death of a loved one, sexual assault) or chronic (repeated exposure to harm, such as racism, bullying, or domestic abuse).
Though trauma can occur at any age, childhood trauma can make a substantial long-term impact in your adult life, including in your relationships, decision-making, mental health, and prevalence toward substance abuse. Commonly called adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), examples of traumatic childhood experiences that can have lifelong effects include:
- Divorce
- Death of a loved one
- Emotional, physical, or sexual abuse
- Neglect
- Natural disasters
- War or other violence
- Mental illness in the home
Trauma’s Long-Term Impact
As a trauma informed addiction treatment center, we understand that trauma doesn’t just affect those who experience it directly. It can continue to impact descendants as well. Generational trauma occurs when ACEs pass from generation to generation, often mimicking inherited genetic traits. You may be bearing the scars of a parent or grandparent’s childhood trauma yourself.
Trauma impacts everyone differently into adulthood. However, some common symptoms of childhood trauma in adults include:
- Relationship challenges: You may not connect well with others, or you may form unhealthy attachments with people who aren’t good for you
- Memory loss: Because trauma actually affects the brain’s development, you may have stretches of your childhood that you cannot remember at all as your brain “forgets” traumatic events as a way to cope
- Physical ailments: Heightened stress hormones resulting from trauma can cause a variety of physical ailments, from obesity to heart disease to stroke
- Substance abuse: Trauma and recovery from addiction often go hand in hand, as many people use substances to cope with the lingering effects of their trauma
Trauma and Recovery: How Addiction Enters the Picture
Many people who have suffered childhood trauma develop unhealthy coping mechanisms in an effort to mitigate trauma’s ongoing effects. Such coping strategies may include regularly using drugs or alcohol to numb the pain. This can quickly turn into a reliance on the substance of choice, and then the ever-destructive cycle of addiction and trauma begins. Sadly, the substance that was once viewed as a relief from trauma now makes it worse.
But it is important to remember that even in the middle of complex trauma and addiction, there is hope. Trauma and recovery do not have to be mutually exclusive; you can find healing for your past, peace in your present, and hope for your future with trauma-informed care.
Trauma-Informed Care at Addiction Recovery Centers
Trauma-focused or trauma-informed addiction treatment goes beyond treating surface-level symptoms. It addresses the deep-rooted emotional wounds that often drive substance use. This approach acknowledges the ways trauma, whether from childhood experiences, abuse, neglect, or significant life events, can alter brain function, emotional regulation, and behavior.
In the context of trauma and recovery, trauma-informed care at an addiction recovery center like ours focuses on providing a safe, supportive environment where clients feel understood and empowered. This allows us space to address the root causes of addiction through integrating the following principles into treatment:
- Safety: Ensuring physical and emotional safety for clients
- Trustworthiness: Building transparent and reliable relationships
- Peer Support: Facilitating recovery support from peers with similar experiences
- Collaboration: Involving clients in their treatment planning
- Empowerment: Focusing on clients’ strengths and fostering autonomy
- Cultural Sensitivity: Recognizing and respecting diversity in all forms
Trauma and Recovery: Our Treatment Framework at Sana at Stowe
From intake to aftercare, our team at Sana at Stowe integrates trauma awareness into every aspect of addiction treatment. This ensures we provide each client with empathy, safety, and individualized support. Such a holistic framework creates the foundation for true transformation, helping people like you to reconnect with themselves and rebuild their lives with clarity and compassion.
Our trauma informed addiction treatment program structure and framework center around a four-phased process that we utilize each day of rehab. Designed to bring about healing, this process restores your safety and connection. As a result, you can better engage with yourself and the world around you while developing healthy practices to enhance your state of being moving forward. This treatment framework includes:
- Safety: We help you establish safety within your own body and the outside world. By doing so, you can learn to achieve the ventral state, or your nervous system’s calm, positive, and regulated state.
- Process: Being in your ventral state allows you to notice the difference between your dysregulated state impacted by trauma and substance abuse. Understanding this difference allows you to discuss and process your trauma and recovery together.
- Integration: Building off of your re-established safety and self-awareness, we help you engage in practices and therapies that connect you to your witness self. Your witness self allows you to observe your thoughts and emotions without judgment.
- Becoming: We help you develop practices that lead to self-actualization, or your highest-level thinking and self-realization necessary for healing. These practices involve addiction support groups and therapies that help you establish new patterns of behavior consistent with your values and beliefs.
The Role of Dual Diagnosis in Addiction Recovery
Many individuals facing trauma and recovery also contend with co-occurring disorders. Co-occurring disorders involve having both an addiction and a mental health disorder at the same time, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Common mental health disorders associated with co-occurring substance use disorders include:
- Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
- Bipolar disorder
- Anxiety
- Depression
This dual diagnosis requires a comprehensive treatment approach that simultaneously addresses both co-occurring disorders. At Sana at Stowe, our integrated programs are designed to treat these co-occurring conditions together, recognizing that mental health challenges often underlie addictive behaviors. As a result, you’re equipped to heal from both conditions, as well as your past trauma—putting you in the best position to achieve long-term recovery.
Trauma and Addiction Treatment in Vermont
Recovery is possible, and it starts with taking the first step. At Sana at Stowe, we support you through every phase of your addiction recovery journey. Our trauma-focused approach ensures that you receive compassionate, tailored care, including:
- Medically-supervised detox: Providing safe and comfortable withdrawal management
- Residential treatment: Offering 24/7 inpatient care in a serene, luxurious setting
- Evidence-based therapies: Utilizing cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), medication-assisted treatment, and other proven modalities
- Holistic services: Incorporating yoga, breathwork, meditation, nutrition, and therapeutic arts
Set against the backdrop of Vermont’s Green Mountains, our trauma informed addiction treatment center provides a tranquil environment conducive to healing. Whether you are seeking care for yourself or a loved one, our trauma and recovery programs are here to help you reclaim your life. If you’re ready to start your new beginning, call us today.
“I have been struggling with this for the past 18 years, yet I feel much better now! The road ahead is long but thanks to your team, I have hope and can see a path forward and an assurance that I can do it. The facilities are so beautiful, comforting, and a real sanctuary. And the staff is so wonderful, compassionate, supportive, and smart. Thank you!”
— Former Client
