Alcoholism – How Drinking Alcohol Can Cause Problems in Your Relationships and Early Trauma Theories



Posted: Saturday, November 06, 2010

by Samantha James

Many theories are floating around about why drinking alcohol when you are an alcoholic or alcohol abuser can cause problems in your relationships pretty much with almost everyone you know - family, friends, and co-workers for starters. To complicate the drinking matter, there is also a theory that an early trauma may have helped you develop an addiction to alcohol to begin with.

There is a veritable grocery list of why being drunk doesn't enhance your relationships and we all know what those are. People trying to have a coherent conversation with us while we are under the influence is a less than satisfying experience, regardless of how charming we happen to be feeling at the time. Then as the drinking progresses we become for instance more unreliable, possibly belligerent, and the downhill race has begun.

And as if that wasn't enough, interestingly, there is a current theory among some more experts who have studied alcoholism and their contention is alcoholism can be caused by a traumatic experience in the alcoholic's life when he or she was very young that compelled them to feel they were in serious danger and caused the future alcoholic to feel helpless. This trauma created in the alcoholic the inability to process feelings and also an inability to trust others. In other words, what caused the alcoholic to become addicted to alcohol is the same set of problems that make maintaining relationships difficult. So this could be an underlying reason for relationship difficulties in addition to the actual practice of constant drinking itself.

If in fact you were a victim of a devastating trauma as outlined above, this trauma results in what's referred to disassociation which is when you cut yourself off from your feelings and from others and isolate yourself at least on an emotional level. Building an emotional wall is another way of phrasing it. The theory goes on to say that it was at the time of this trauma that you stopped developing the part of your brain that regulates emotions.

What's the result? The alcoholic tends to have a hard time with relationships. You can't trust someone else with your feelings and so cannot maintain a genuine relationship. The alcoholic feels he or she is putting themselves in danger by exposing their feelings and risking further harm.

More to the point, as a result of this trauma, before the drinking even starts this individual may be unknowingly looking for a solution to this problem which actually sets the stage for addiction. Drinking makes life and challenges feel better. That along with the biological wiring to respond in a very positive way to substances makes addiction all but a sure thing.

So the alcoholic feels "messed up" and doesn't understand why his or her relationships aren't working out. They use alcohol to regulate the emotions that are too big and too unpleasant for them. And in relationships, since they have trust issues, some can experience feelings of great discomfort and panic when they feel a relationship is getting too intimate, and as a result are compelled to keep those who wish to be close to them at an arms length, to preserve that feeling of safety.

If you have a drinking problem, visit us at:

http://HowIStoppedDrinking.org
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