Self-Medicating Trauma: Why So Many People with C-PTSD Struggle with Substance Use
If you live with complex trauma and have also struggled with alcohol or substances, you may have spent a long time believing that one was a character flaw and the other a wound. But they are rarely separate stories. For many people with C-PTSD, substance use isn't a problem that arrived alongside their trauma — it is a response to it. Understanding why changes everything about how healing becomes possible.
The ACE Study: How Childhood Adversity Predicts Addiction
In the 1990s, one of the most important pieces of research in the history of mental health and addiction quietly changed everything. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study didn't just confirm what many therapists had long suspected — it put hard numbers to it, and those numbers were impossible to ignore.
