The Health Journey of the Individual with Unresolved Trauma and Addiction

There is a haunting truth in the words of a recovering addict: “Life moves forward, untouched by your presence”.

Think about that. Think about what it means to move through the world feeling like you don’t belong, like life is happening around you, but not with you.

This is the silent, somatic experience of unresolved trauma. It’s not just a thought—it’s a deep, physical truth woven into the body of someone who has never known true safety.

For many, addiction is not just about substances or behaviors—it’s about regulation. It’s about survival. The body, primed by early experiences of pain and disconnection, finds something that offers a sense of predictability, control, or even momentary relief.

The addict isn't just "getting high"—they are stabilizing themselves in a world that feels inherently unsafe.

When someone stops using their substance of choice—whether it's alcohol, drugs, food, work, or even relationships—something profound happens. Their body, now stripped of its numbing agent, is suddenly sober enough to experience everything it has been avoiding.

What we call withdrawal is not just physical—it’s the nervous system crashing into decades of suppressed sensations, emotions, and beliefs. The body, no longer medicated, begins to feel all the grief, terror, and loneliness that was too much to handle when the trauma first occurred. It is an avalanche. A storm of everything that was once unbearable.

And on top of that, the body is physically withdrawing—not just from the external substance, but from the internal chemicals it relied on.

Addiction shapes the body's hormonal landscape. If someone has spent their teenage years and twenties using substances to regulate themselves, their body has developed in that altered hormonal environment. The moment they stop, their nervous system is left without a familiar crutch, and the withdrawal is both physical and existential.

They feel shaky. Grumpy. Sick. Tired. But more than that—they feel raw.

The body stores trauma not as a memory, but as a lived experience. It holds onto pain like an echo, waiting for the right conditions to release it. That’s why, for someone with unresolved trauma, getting sober isn’t just about not using—it’s about meeting themselves in a way they never have before.

That phrase—"Life moves forward, untouched by your presence"—isn’t just a passing thought. It is a reflection of what the body remembers from childhood. Feeling unseen. Feeling separate. Feeling like nothing in the world was meant to include you.

But here’s the opportunity: to feel what was not able to be felt when we were younger. As children, we didn’t have the capacity to process overwhelming emotions, so our bodies found ways to protect us. As adults, we have a choice—to finally sit with what we’ve been running from.

Unresolved trauma and addiction share a common thread: a lack of nervous system capacity. When someone experiences trauma, their body doesn’t just remember the event—it also encodes a pattern of survival. The fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses become wired into their system.

Each time that trauma is triggered, the body moves into dysregulation. And if we don’t have the internal resources to tolerate that discomfort, we reach for something—a drink, a cigarette, another dopamine hit. The addictive behavior isn’t just a habit—it’s a nervous system strategy.

The hard truth is this: addiction limits our capacity to heal.

Every time we reach for the thing that soothes us in the moment, we prevent ourselves from developing the resilience to sit with discomfort.

The more we numb, the less we build the muscles of self-regulation. And that’s the real work of healing—learning to build the capacity to exist in a world that once felt unbearable.

The journey out of addiction and trauma is not about fixing anything. It’s about building something that was never there in the first place—the ability to feel, to process, to regulate, to hold ourselves through the hardest moments.

And it starts with one fundamental belief: You were never broken. Your body did what it had to do to survive. And now, you get to teach it something new.

This is the health journey of the individual with unresolved trauma and addiction—the path of learning, for the first time, how to live inside their own body.

The good news is that certain foods and health behaviors can make this process so much easier—because when your blood sugar is stable, your gut is healing, and your nervous system isn’t running on fumes, the work of trauma recovery becomes that much more doable.

This is why health coaches informed about trauma and addiction can do some of the most impactful work—supporting not just behavior change, but true nervous system repair.

Stay tuned for next week’s blog on what foods support stress management and trauma recovery!