addiction
The realities of addition; the truth about living under, above and beyond the influence of drugs and alcohol.
Addiction and Grief: A Complex Dance
Addiction and grief are woven together like threads in an intricate fabric, shaping lives with their mutual influence on each other. Grief can drive people to self-medicate with substances, often leading to dependency, which in turn activates profound sorrow for both the individual and their loved ones. This profound connection between the diverse forms of grief, and the development and exacerbation of addictive behaviors, results in a painful cycle that can be difficult to break.
By Deborah Kourgelis9 days ago in Psyche
How Childhood Trauma Shapes Adult Fear
I can trace almost every fear I have as an adult back to a specific moment in childhood. My fear of abandonment? It started the night my mother packed a suitcase during a fight with my father and said, "I'm leaving, and I'm never coming back." She came back three hours later, but seven-year-old me didn't know she would. Seven-year-old me spent those hours convinced that mothers could just disappear, that love could evaporate without warning. My hypervigilance in relationships? It began during the years I spent walking on eggshells around my father's unpredictable rage, learning to read the tension in his shoulders, the tone of his voice, the weight of his footsteps. By the time I was ten, I could predict his moods with frightening accuracy. I had to—my safety depended on it. My inability to accept help or show vulnerability? That crystallized the day I fell off my bike and came home bleeding and crying, only to have my father tell me to "stop being a baby" and send me back outside. I learned: pain is something you handle alone. Needing someone makes you weak. I thought I'd left that childhood behind. I thought becoming an adult meant those old wounds would stop mattering. I was wrong. The Architecture of Fear Childhood trauma doesn't stay in childhood. It doesn't remain a bad memory you can file away and move past. It becomes the foundation upon which you build your entire adult life—your relationships, your career choices, your capacity for trust, your sense of safety in the world. A child's brain is exquisitely designed to learn from experience, to adapt to their environment, to develop strategies for survival. When that environment is unpredictable, frightening, or emotionally unsafe, the child's brain learns accordingly. It learns: people are dangerous. Love is conditional. The world is threatening. You are alone. These aren't conscious thoughts. They're pre-verbal conclusions that get encoded into your nervous system, your implicit memory, your automatic responses. They become the operating system that runs in the background of your adult life, influencing decisions you think you're making rationally. My therapist explained it to me this way: "The child you were is still inside you, and that child is still afraid. When you encounter situations as an adult that resemble your childhood trauma—even loosely—that frightened child takes over. You stop responding from your adult self and start reacting from your child self." That's why I, a competent professional, would have panic attacks when authority figures got angry. That's why I'd sabotage relationships the moment they got too close. That's why I couldn't relax, couldn't trust, couldn't let my guard down. I wasn't living my adult life. I was defending against my childhood. The Invisible Inheritance The most insidious thing about childhood trauma is how normal it feels. Growing up, I didn't think my childhood was traumatic. We weren't homeless. I wasn't physically abused. My parents stayed together. We had food, shelter, the basics. Compared to kids who had it worse, I thought I had nothing to complain about. But trauma isn't a competition. You don't need the worst childhood to be affected by it. Emotional neglect is trauma. Unpredictable parental moods are trauma. Witnessing conflict you couldn't control is trauma. Being taught that your feelings don't matter is trauma. I grew up in a home where anger exploded without warning, where love felt conditional on good behavior, where emotional needs were treated as inconvenient. That was my normal. I didn't know any different. So I carried those patterns into adulthood without recognizing them as problems. I thought everyone felt anxious all the time. I thought everyone struggled to trust people. I thought everyone had a voice in their head constantly scanning for danger, preparing for catastrophe. It wasn't until my marriage started falling apart that I realized: the way I experienced the world wasn't universal. It was specific to me, to my history, to the child I'd been who'd learned some very effective but ultimately damaging survival strategies. The Patterns We Repeat My husband was nothing like my father. He was gentle, stable, emotionally available. Everything my child-self had desperately wanted. But I couldn't receive it. Every time he got close, I'd push him away. Every time he tried to comfort me, I'd shut down. Every time he expressed frustration—normal, healthy frustration—I'd interpret it as rage and disappear emotionally for days. I was replaying my childhood, casting him in roles he never auditioned for, reacting to threats that didn't exist in our relationship but had very much existed in my family of origin. "Why do you do this?" he asked after one particularly painful fight. "Why do you run every time things get hard?" I didn't have an answer then. But in therapy, I found one: I ran because running had kept me safe as a child. I withdrew because withdrawal had protected me from my father's anger. I expected abandonment because I'd learned that love was temporary and conditional. I was forty years old, but in my marriage, I was still that seven-year-old girl, using the only tools she'd ever learned.
By Ameer Moavia9 days ago in Psyche
The Mind’s Way of Protecting Us Through Numbness
The call came at 2 AM on a Friday. My father had a heart attack. Massive. Unexpected. He was gone before the ambulance arrived. I listened to my sister's sobbing voice, said the right things, made the necessary calls, booked a flight home. I moved through the next week like a well-programmed robot—funeral arrangements, paperwork, comforting relatives, delivering a eulogy that people said was beautiful. Everyone commented on how strong I was. How well I was holding up. How brave. But I wasn't strong. I wasn't brave. I was nothing. I felt absolutely nothing. I stood at my father's grave and waited for tears that never came. I looked at his photo and felt like I was looking at a stranger. I heard people share memories and couldn't connect to my own. It was like watching my life through soundproof glass—I could see everything happening, but I couldn't feel any of it. "Why aren't I sad?" I asked my therapist two weeks later. "What's wrong with me?" She leaned back in her chair, her expression gentle. "Nothing's wrong with you. Your mind is protecting you. You've been through too much, too fast. So it's doing the only thing it can—it's shutting down the pain receptors until you're ready to feel it." The Breaking Point Before the Numbness My father's death wasn't the first blow. It was just the final one. In the eighteen months before he died, I'd lost my job in a brutal round of layoffs, watched my marriage disintegrate through a painful divorce, moved three times, and discovered my teenage daughter was struggling with depression. I'd been operating in crisis mode for so long that crisis had become my baseline. Each loss, each trauma, each disappointment had chipped away at my capacity to feel. I'd processed what I could, stuffed down what I couldn't, and kept moving forward because stopping felt impossible. My father's death should have shattered me. Instead, it was like my emotional system looked at this new tragedy and said, "Absolutely not. We're at capacity. We're shutting this down." And just like that, I went numb. Not sad-numb or depressed-numb. Just... nothing. A vast, empty quiet where feelings used to be. Like someone had turned off all the lights in my interior world and left me standing in the dark. The Mechanism of Mercy Numbness gets a bad reputation. We treat it like emotional failure, like evidence that something's fundamentally broken. But my therapist helped me understand: numbness isn't malfunction. It's protection. "Think of it like a circuit breaker," she explained. "When the emotional system gets overloaded, when there's too much pain coming in too fast, your mind flips a switch to prevent complete collapse. It's not that you can't feel—it's that you've temporarily lost the capacity to feel because feeling everything at once would destroy you." Numbness is your mind's emergency response to unbearable circumstances. It's the psychological equivalent of shock after physical trauma—your system flooding with natural anesthesia so you can survive what you otherwise couldn't endure. In a strange way, going numb was the kindest thing my mind could do for me. It gave me space. Distance. Time to catch my breath before the full weight of my grief crushed me. The World That Doesn't Understand But the world doesn't see numbness as protection. It sees it as pathology. People started asking if I was okay, their voices edged with concern and judgment. "You seem so... detached," they'd say. "Are you sure you're processing this?" My sister accused me of not caring. "You didn't even cry at Dad's funeral," she said, her voice sharp with pain and accusation. "How can you be so cold?" I wanted to explain that I wasn't cold—I was frozen. That there's a difference between choosing not to feel and being incapable of feeling. That I would have given anything to cry, to hurt, to feel connected to my own grief. But I had no words. The numbness had taken those too. Society expects grief to look a certain way—tears, visible pain, emotional expression. When you don't perform grief correctly, people assume you're either in denial or you didn't love the person who died. Nobody considers that you might be loving them so much that your mind had to temporarily shut down your ability to feel it, just so you could survive.
By Ameer Moavia9 days ago in Psyche
The Speed of Life
We live in an age where speed is celebrated. Faster internet, faster success, faster replies, faster results. From the moment we wake up, life seems to press a silent accelerator. Notifications buzz, deadlines chase us, and comparison quietly sits in our pockets. The speed of life keeps increasing—but the quality of life often does not. This raises a powerful psychological question: Is moving faster actually helping us live better, or is it slowly draining the meaning from our lives?
By Alexander Mind9 days ago in Psyche
The Body Remembers What the Mind Tries to Forget: My Journey Through Somatic Trauma
My neck went out on a completely ordinary Wednesday. I wasn't lifting anything heavy. I wasn't in an accident. I simply turned my head to check my blind spot while driving, and suddenly, searing pain shot down my spine. By the time I pulled over, I could barely move. Three doctors, two physical therapists, and countless medical tests later, no one could find anything structurally wrong with me. "Probably stress," they said with a shrug, handing me muscle relaxers and sending me home. But I wasn't stressed. Not consciously, anyway. Work was fine. My relationship was stable. Life was, on paper, good. What none of us realized was that my body was holding a conversation my mind had been trying to avoid for fifteen years. The Accident I Thought I'd Survived I was nineteen when the car accident happened. A drunk driver ran a red light and T-boned us on a rainy November night. My best friend walked away with bruises. I walked away with a concussion and whiplash that healed within weeks. "You're so lucky," everyone said. And I believed them. I went back to college, back to my life, back to normal. I didn't have nightmares. I didn't avoid driving. I didn't think about it much at all. Except my body never forgot. For fifteen years, I'd been living with unexplained symptoms that no doctor could quite piece together. Chronic neck tension that no amount of massage could release. A startle reflex so sensitive that unexpected sounds made me jump out of my skin. Difficulty sleeping through the night. A vague sense of unease I couldn't name or explain. I'd learned to live with these things, treating each symptom as a separate annoyance rather than pieces of a larger puzzle. Until my neck gave out, and a trauma-informed therapist finally asked me the question no one else had: "Tell me about any accidents or injuries you've had." When the Body Becomes the Vault "Trauma lives in the body," she explained during our first session. "Your mind might move on, but your nervous system stays stuck in that moment of threat. Your body is still bracing for an impact that happened fifteen years ago." I wanted to argue. I'd processed the accident. I'd dealt with it. I was fine. But as she guided me through a body scan exercise, asking me to notice sensations without judgment, I felt it—a bone-deep tension in my shoulders, a tightness in my chest, a perpetual bracing as if I were permanently waiting for collision. My body had been screaming at me for over a decade, and I'd been too busy living in my head to listen. She taught me about implicit memory—how traumatic experiences get encoded differently than regular memories. When something terrible happens, especially something sudden and life-threatening, your brain doesn't have time to process it normally. Instead, the experience gets fragmented and stored as sensations, emotions, and physical responses. Your mind might forget the details. Your body never does. The Map of My Trauma Over the following months, my therapist helped me create what she called a "body map" of my trauma. We identified where I held different emotions and memories physically. My neck and shoulders: the bracing, the eternal waiting for impact, the hypervigilance. My jaw: the anger I'd never expressed, the screams I'd swallowed, clenched tight for fifteen years. My chest: the fear that had solidified into chronic shallow breathing, never quite getting a full breath. My stomach: the anxiety that manifested as digestive issues, my gut literally "tied in knots." My hands: trembling whenever I felt unsafe, my body's first line of alarm. Each physical symptom wasn't random. Each was a chapter in a story my body had been trying to tell while my mind insisted everything was fine. The Language of Sensation Learning to listen to my body felt like learning a foreign language. I'd spent my entire life prioritizing thoughts over feelings, logic over intuition, mind over matter. But my therapist insisted: "You can't think your way out of trauma. You have to feel your way through it." She taught me somatic exercises—simple practices that helped me reconnect with physical sensations I'd been dissociating from for years. Placing one hand on my heart and one on my belly, just breathing and noticing. Slowly rolling my head from side to side, paying attention to where I felt resistance. Shaking out my hands and arms, literally releasing stored tension. At first, it felt ridiculous. How could these simple movements address something as serious as trauma? But then something shifted. During one session, as I practiced a gentle neck rotation, I suddenly felt overwhelmed with emotion. Tears poured down my face. My whole body started shaking—not from pain, but from release. "That's it," my therapist said softly. "Your body is finally discharging what it's been holding. Let it happen." For twenty minutes, I shook and cried and made sounds I didn't recognize. It felt primal, uncontrolled, terrifying—and somehow, necessary. When it passed, my neck had more range of motion than it had in months.
By Ameer Moavia9 days ago in Psyche
The Ghosts That Wait: Understanding Why Old Wounds Bleed in New Moments
It was just a Tuesday. Nothing special, nothing traumatic. I was standing in line at my usual coffee shop, scrolling through emails, half-present in the mundane rhythm of my morning routine. And then I heard it—a man's laugh from somewhere behind me. Deep, familiar, with that particular cadence that made my chest tighten. My hands started shaking. My breathing became shallow. Tears burned behind my eyes for no reason I could immediately name. The laugh wasn't his. The man wasn't him. My ex-fiancé lived three thousand miles away and we hadn't spoken in five years. I'd done the therapy. I'd done the healing work. I'd moved on, fallen in love again, built a beautiful life. So why was I standing in a coffee shop at nine in the morning, fighting the urge to run, feeling like I was drowning in pain I thought I'd left behind? The Myth of Linear Healing We're told that healing is a journey with a clear destination. You process the trauma, you do the work, you move forward, and eventually, you arrive at "healed." Past tense. Complete. Done. Nobody tells you that healing isn't a straight line—it's a spiral. You circle back to the same wounds at different altitudes, seeing them from new perspectives, feeling them with different intensities. You can be genuinely okay for months or years, and then something small—a song, a scent, a stranger's laugh—rips the scab off a wound you didn't even know was still there. After the coffee shop incident, I went home and canceled my meetings. I spent the day curled up on my couch, crying about a relationship that ended half a decade ago, feeling stupid and weak and confused. "I thought I was over this," I told my therapist later that week. "Why is this happening now?" She smiled with the gentle patience of someone who'd heard this question a thousand times. "You are over it. But your nervous system has a longer memory than your conscious mind. It's trying to protect you from something it thinks might happen again." The Body's Archive Our bodies are remarkable archivists. They catalog every moment of fear, every instance of heartbreak, every second of helplessness we've ever experienced. Not to punish us, but to protect us. This is what trauma specialists call implicit memory—emotional and sensory information stored below conscious awareness. When you experience something painful, your brain doesn't just file it away with a neat label and a timestamp. It creates an entire sensory network of associations: sounds, smells, times of day, tones of voice, patterns of behavior. Years later, when something in your present environment matches something from that network—even loosely—your body sounds the alarm before your conscious mind even registers the connection. That laugh in the coffee shop? My nervous system recognized it as a threat signature from my past. It didn't matter that my conscious mind knew I was safe. My body remembered betrayal, and it was trying to protect me from experiencing it again. The Triggers We Don't See Coming The cruelest thing about resurfacing pain is its unpredictability. You brace yourself for the obvious triggers—anniversaries, familiar places, certain songs. But then you're blindsided by things you never saw coming. A friend's wedding sent me into a spiral of grief about my father's death, even though he'd been gone for seven years. The smell of cigarette smoke in a parking lot transported me instantly to my childhood, to feelings of fear and uncertainty I thought I'd processed. A colleague's dismissive tone in a meeting triggered shame from bullying I experienced in middle school, decades ago. Each time, I'd feel ambushed. Each time, I'd question whether I'd actually healed at all or if I'd just been fooling myself. But I was learning something crucial: the pain resurfacing doesn't mean the healing didn't happen. It means there are layers. Healing isn't about erasing the past—it's about changing your relationship with it.
By Ameer Moavia9 days ago in Psyche
The Weight of Words Never Spoken: What Happens When We Bury Our Emotions Alive
For years, I smiled through the pain, convinced that silence was strength. It wasn't until my body started screaming what my mouth refused to say that I learned the true cost of swallowing my truth. The panic attack hit me in the middle of a Tuesday morning meeting. One moment I was nodding along to quarterly projections, and the next, my chest tightened like someone had wrapped steel cables around my ribcage. My hands trembled. The room spun. I couldn't breathe. Twenty faces stared at me as I mumbled an excuse and stumbled out, convinced I was dying. The ER doctor's words still echo in my mind: "Physically, you're fine. But your body is trying to tell you something." I wanted to laugh. My body had been screaming at me for years. I just hadn't been listening. The Art of Pretending I learned early that emotions were inconvenient. Crying made people uncomfortable. Anger made me difficult. Sadness was selfish when others had it worse. So I became an expert at the smile that didn't reach my eyes, the "I'm fine" that meant anything but. When my father left without saying goodbye, I swallowed my abandonment and wore a brave face for my mother. When my best friend betrayed my trust, I pushed down the hurt and pretended it didn't matter. When my boss belittled me in front of colleagues, I buried my humiliation under layers of professional composure. I told myself I was being strong. Mature. Rising above it all. What I was actually doing was building a pressure cooker inside my chest, adding more heat every time I chose silence over honesty, more tension every time I said "it's okay" when it absolutely wasn't. When the Body Keeps Score The human body is remarkably honest. It will express what the mouth refuses to say. My suppressed emotions didn't disappear—they just found other ways to speak. The chronic headaches that no medication could touch. The insomnia that left me staring at the ceiling at 3 AM, mind racing with thoughts I wouldn't let myself think during daylight. The digestive issues that doctors couldn't explain. The inexplicable fatigue that made even simple tasks feel mountainous. I visited specialist after specialist, searching for a physical explanation for what was actually an emotional rebellion. My body had become a museum of unexpressed feelings, each symptom a exhibit of something I'd refused to process. The panic attacks became more frequent. My immune system weakened. I'd catch every cold, every flu, as if my body was too exhausted from managing my emotional lockdown to defend against anything else. The Breaking Point The Tuesday morning panic attack was my breaking point, but it wasn't the beginning. It was just the moment I could no longer ignore what had been building for decades. That night, alone in my apartment, I finally let myself feel. Not just the fear from the panic attack, but everything I'd been storing in the vault of my chest. The grief. The rage. The disappointment. The loneliness. The hurt.
By Ameer Moavia9 days ago in Psyche
The Night I Understood Football
I didn’t go to the game expecting hope. It was a cold November Thursday. My brother had just lost his job. My nephew hadn’t spoken in days after a school incident. The world felt heavy, and the last thing I wanted was to watch a mismatch—our hometown team facing a dynasty that hadn’t lost in months.
By KAMRAN AHMAD9 days ago in Psyche
The Emotional Impact of Growing Up Unloved
Nina was thirty-four when someone asked her what she needed, and she realized she didn't know how to answer. Her friend had noticed she looked exhausted—working sixty-hour weeks, managing everyone's problems, never saying no to anyone. "What do you need right now, Nina? How can I help?" Nina opened her mouth. Closed it. Felt panic rising. "I'm fine. I don't need anything." But that wasn't true. She was drowning. She just had no idea what she needed because no one had ever asked before. And more fundamentally, she'd learned by age seven that her needs didn't matter.
By Ameer Moavia10 days ago in Psyche
PAPER THIN. Content Warning. AI-Generated.
Raffaelo learned the rhythm of cruelty before she learned its intention. It arrived dressed as humor, wrapped in familiarity, passed hand to hand at family gatherings like a shared inheritance. Buffalo. A word chosen not for meaning but for sound, because it rhymed, because it landed easily, because no one had to think before saying it. Her parents said it with smiles, squeezing her cheeks, proud of how unbothered they believed she was. They never noticed how her laughter came a second too late, how she began standing at the edges of rooms as if apologizing for occupying them.
By Designed by Romaisa11 days ago in Psyche
