Healing emotional trauma can be a key component to successfully treating one’s addiction to alcohol or other drugs. The reason this is true is that so often a person finds alcohol or other drugs soothes the symptoms of their emotional trauma. In time, the brain maps the alcohol or other drug use as the answer, and a person finds themselves drinking or using without conscious thought when emotions related to trauma are triggered. Today’s Face of Recovery, Cassidy Webb, explains that it was healing her emotional trauma and her addiction that finally set her free to enjoy her life in sobriety and recovery.

Cassidy Webb is an avid writer who works with Clarksville Rehab to spread awareness around the disease of addiction. Her passion in life is to help others by sharing her experience, strength, and hope. She has been in recovery since 2016.

 

Emotional Trauma in Childhood

My parents raised me the best way they knew how. I always like to acknowledge that, because it does me no good to blame the things that happened to me on others. Instead, I accept them as fact and seek to heal past wounds. 

My parents raised me to be strong. They raised me to be resilient. However, my definitions of strength and resilience are different from theirs. For them, to be strong was to be able to walk through any life situation without feeling hurt. To be resilient was to be tough on the outside – not letting words get me down. I remember being bullied at school and coming home in tears only to be told to stop crying because I was being dramatic. Essentially, any negative emotion that I displayed was dramatic or unnecessary. 

The voice of my parents telling me to stop crying, telling me that I was just being dramatic, ended up turning inwards and becoming my own voice. Whenever I felt a negative emotion, instead of crying and expressing my feelings, I simply told myself “get over it, you are overreacting.”

As these emotions bottled up inside of me, I sought escape. I found solace in drugs and alcohol.

In the Grips of Addiction

My addiction started off young. By age 13 I was smoking marijuana daily and beginning to take prescription pills. By 18, I was injecting heroin. 

In the beginning, the drugs worked for me. If I felt something I didn’t want to feel, I could drown it out with waves of euphoria. I knew nothing about addiction when I began using drugs. I had no idea that it is progressive and that I would eventually be unable to control my drug use. I didn’t wake up one day and tell myself that I wanted to be a drug addict, but I was desperate to feel okay and to appear strong, and drugs did that for me. 

The first time I realized that I had a problem was when I was sitting in a jail cell at 19 years old. I had been kicked out of school and arrested as a result of my drug use. As I was sitting on the cold concrete floor, I experienced opiate withdrawals for the first time. I was covered in chills while sweating profusely. Every bone in my body was incessantly aching and I felt despair for the first time. 

For the next three years I woke up each day promising myself that I wouldn’t get high that day – and I believed it wholeheartedly. A few hours later, every ounce of willpower I had was broken and I would find myself using once again. No matter how badly I wanted to stop, I just couldn’t do it.

I felt defeated. I couldn’t get sober and I didn’t want to continue living the way I had been living. I had sunk into a dark depression and was crippled by hopelessness. Seeing no way out, I attempted to take my own life. I told myself that if it didn’t work I would get treatment.

Fortunately, I woke up from the intentional overdose. I called my family for help and found myself miles away from home at a treatment center. 

Finding Sobriety

For many, addiction treatment is a great source of therapy and healing. For me, it was merely separation from drugs. My therapist suggested I participate in their family therapy group each week, but I was extremely defiant. I didn’t want to talk about my family. I didn’t want to address my past. Talking about these things brought up anger and fear, and the only way I knew how to deal with those emotions was to avoid them. At the time, I wasn’t ready to deal with those things. Most of all, I absolutely did not want to identify and feel my emotions. My therapist gave me a stern warning that this avoidance would catch up with me at some point.

What I did get from treatment was a restoration of the mind and an introduction to a twelve-step fellowship. I had obtained education about the disease of addiction and learned that there is no cure, there is only a treatment that is found through working the steps of a recovery program.

Upon my release from treatment, I only spent time with women who had more clean time than I did. I followed them like a lost puppy, taking every piece of advice they had for me and putting it into action. It wasn’t easy – I had to do things that were uncomfortable. I had to reopen every dark nook and cranny of my past to begin to heal the turmoil I had brought upon myself and others. I had to give up my old self and old behaviors to become the woman I am today. I had to stop living with selfish motives and begin to help others in any way I could. By living a life based on love, compassion, and unselfishness, I haven’t picked up a drink or a drug since. 

Getting Help for Emotional Trauma

After about two and a half years sober, my pattern of shoving my emotions down and constantly telling myself I was “too dramatic” caught up with me. I found myself outside of a recovery meeting, overcome by the multitude of emotions that I had been ignoring for years. I was uncontrollably crying, overwhelmed by fear, anxiety, and anger. I had been telling myself that visiting my family for the first time sober would be no big deal. I had been telling myself that being annoyed with my roommate was just me being dramatic. Every single thing that I had been experiencing, regardless of how minuscule or large it was, came to a roaring head. 

It was at this moment that I realized that my therapist in treatment was right. If I didn’t learn how to identify my emotions and cope with them in a healthy way, it could come back to me. And it did. I was absolutely unable to control and cope with my emotional nature.

Being sober and trying to live a healthy lifestyle, I knew I had to push my ego aside and get help. After all, there was a therapist who worked right next door to my office, so I had no excuse to avoid therapy. 

The difference in doing therapy today and doing therapy when I first got sober comes down to my own willingness to grow. When I was in treatment, I just wanted to know how to stop using, I didn’t care about addressing my emotions because I didn’t fully understand how important that would become. On the other hand, today I recognize that shoving my emotions down is only harming myself. I didn’t get sober to continue harming myself – I got sober to get better. 

Each week when I meet with my therapist, we work on identifying my emotions and learning how to cope with them. We do cognitive behavioral therapy to help shift my thinking and help me begin to truly love myself. We talk about my inner child, and how despite the fact that she didn’t receive compassion as a young girl, I have the capacity to show her compassion now. I’m learning how to set boundaries and how to stand up for my beliefs rather than being the doormat I am so used to being. As a woman in recovery, I am continuously a work in progress. 

My Life Today

Today I have a more intimate relationship with my family than I have ever had before. I have a job where I am valued as an employee and my voice is important. I have friends who love me for my strengths and my weaknesses. I work with other women to show them exactly what I did to stay sober. 

I have changed the way I view the words strength and resilience. To me, strength and resilience mean the ability to be vulnerable and the willingness to seek help when it is needed. It’s easy to shove emotions down, but it’s difficult to be an open book.

Just because I’m sober doesn’t mean I am perfect. I have faults, I have many of them. However, the foundation of my life today is within the fact that I am willing to work on my faults and I am willing to better myself each and every day. I will never be perfect and that’s okay. Today I am sober and I am happy – which is more than I could have ever dreamt of.