Anxiety, Trauma, and Addiction: Understanding the Connection

There is a growing need for dual diagnosis anxiety treatment for women. In this post, your friends over here at Villa Kali Ma explore the connection between anxiety and addiction in women, with a special focus on trauma-related anxiety.

Why Anxiety Often Co-Occurs with Substance Abuse

Anxiety is both a cause and an effect of substance abuse. For many women, living in chronic anxiety is the condition they are attempting to ameliorate through use of substances. Due to the ways that crippling anxiety can interfere with quality of life, the desperate search for something that actually works to “take the edge off” is understandable. Social anxiety, panic attacks, generalized anxiety, traumatic stress – all variations of anxiety, in fact – are very uncomfortable. Anxiety is hard on the body, mind, and spirit, and may also create social consequences for us.

It also has to be comprehended that whether a woman had anxiety to begin with or not, using substances itself creates anxiety in the mid- to longer term. The toxins that build up in the body due to chemical use, as well as withdrawal from chemicals, create feelings of deep dread and unease. In fact anxiety is a component of cravings to use when attempting to achieve sobriety. Once a woman has developed tolerance and become chemically dependent on a mood altering substance, the absence of that substance creates not just pain and discomfort but anxiety and agitation. 

Therefore, for women with anxiety, substances that initially relax the nervous system and create feelings of peace and ease artificially are enormously problematic. The potential for addiction is high, and the underlying condition of anxiety is not only not addressed, but worsened when an attempt is made to force the body’s natural relaxation abilities through the use of an outside agent like alcohol or marijuana. 

Unfortunately, this same fact is true of many of the most commonly prescribed medications for anxiety. Ongoing reliance on a nervous system relaxant of some form, such as Xanax, or any other pharmaceutical in the drug class called benzodiazepines, ultimately deepens the hole of anxiety. In general, using any substances to make anxiety symptoms disappear creates more difficulty later on when healing anxiety at root cause levels.

Treating the Root Causes of Anxiety in Recovery

When women get into recovery, they typically need to heal their anxiety. That anxiety may have been present in their life since early childhood, or it may have come about through abusing chemicals, but either way, it will need to be faced. 

It can be difficult to determine where anxiety comes from, and whether its presence is the result of an illness, what would be appropriately labeled an anxiety disorder. A certain amount of anxiety is normal and even life-serving. Anxiety is a variant of fear, and some people have good reasons to fear. When healthy, appropriate anxiety is acknowledged and responded to in a timely fashion, it can be an important part of our inner feedback system. Healthy anxiety tends to resolve on its own, though, once a danger or looming problem is no longer present.

Excess, free-floating anxiety can also be present in the body as a result of physiological factors like poor diet, inadequate sleep, or insufficient exercise. Screen time, entertainment, social media, junk food, some western medicines, and many other things we consume regularly in the West have anxiety as a side effect. When anxiety is only coming from chemical exposure and imbalances like these in the body, feelings of agitation, dread, unease, and worry will disappear in response to simple changes in lifestyle. Mindfulness practices, yoga, better nutrition and reduction of exposure to technology will do the trick of clearing anxiety out in large part. 

Some people also suffer from true anxiety disorders. These disorders come from a combination of factors, rather than from a single origin. Factors leading to pathological levels of anxiety that don’t go away even with positive lifestyle changes and sobriety may include, but are not limited to: genetics, personal history, temperament, family history, gender (women are more likely to experience anxiety than men), toxin exposure, and environmental considerations. 

Finally, it’s important to remember that extreme anxiety is one of the key symptoms of trauma. Women who come from backgrounds in which they had to fear for their safety, whether that danger was neglect, abuse, or a combination of many different complex dangers, will have the problem of continuing to feel chronic fear and dread, even when they are in safe circumstances later on in life. 

When treating root causes of anxiety, therefore, it is important to assess for complex trauma and to look at diet and lifestyle first. People with anxiety may be feeling fears that were one hundred percent appropriate in a situation they faced in the past. When this is the case, a therapeutic focus on rewiring the body, brain, and nervous system to safety, through trauma work and lifestyle changes in particular, will take care of the anxiety.  

The positive news is that any kind of anxiety is very responsive to a wide variety of healthy, kind treatment approaches that address physiological as well as emotional components of well-being. When women are given the tools to create states of safety, security, and calm without drugs and alcohol and also without any addictive pharmaceutics, their bodies happily adapt to their new state.

Villa Kali Ma offers several natural and clinical therapies that show women how to change their thoughts to generate less fear in the body. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Mindfulness and Self-Compassion, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy help women notice the ways that anxiety is being unnecessarily amplified through outdated thinking. 

We also offer several psychodynamic therapies that help increase self-love, self-connection, and self-support. Modalities like Internal Family Systems Therapy are excellent at changing internal emotional conditions, so that anxiety can be related to with more love and kindness. Internal Family Systems Therapy helps women learn that not only their anxieties themselves can be responded to kindly, but also that whatever happens in life, it’s going to be ok. This improvement in self-trust dramatically changes how much worry feels necessary in any given moment. 

Finally, we offer several state of the art trauma work modalities. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Somatic Experiencing, and Brainspotting, for example, are exceptionally effective with anxiety stemming from trauma. These transformational approaches work with the body to assist a reset to the nervous system, allowing for a true change in how life is perceived, from the body up. 

We also provide coaching in nutrition, opportunities to practice mindfulness, and yoga classes in all of our programs. If you’re looking for a place to heal your anxiety at root cause levels, consider joining one of our unique, holistic programs for women recovering from addiction, mental illness, and trauma.

If you’re looking for help healing your anxiety, trauma, or substance abuse struggles, look no further than our many kind, holistic programs  for women!