Relapse Is Not Failure: Treating Trauma and Addiction Together

Three out of four people who enter addiction treatment will relapse. For many of them, the drinking or drug use was never the first problem. It was the way they learned to survive something that happened earlier.

In this focused lesson from Divine Mercy University’s COUN 640 course on crisis and trauma, the Lecturer introduces dual diagnosis, the combination of trauma and substance abuse in one person. Starting from the ACE study by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, the lesson traces how early childhood trauma shows up across a lifetime, explains why people use substances to manage pain, loneliness, and symptoms, and makes the case for treating trauma and addiction at the same time rather than one after the other. It also names a gap every counselor can close: trauma histories that clients report but that rarely make it into the chart. Finally, it turns to the helper. Counselors hear trauma stories for a living, and they are not exempt from vicarious trauma or from reaching for something to cope.

The lesson pairs the video with clinical scholarship from the Divine Mercy University repository and the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, Gabor Maté’s work on trauma and addiction, and the spiritual wisdom of Augustine, Fr. Benedict Groeschel, Thérèse of Lisieux, and Hans Urs von Balthasar on falling and starting again.