In this Who Did You Help Today podcast Denise Cloughley, founder of Seeking Solace, talks about drug & alcohol addiction.
In the words of Denise Cloughley: "I personally don't believe addiction is a choice. I believe a substance people rely on, or self-medicate on, and to do it constantly, is to self-medicate a wound, or trauma, or something underlying within a person that they need to be continually drinking or drugging to become numb.
I didn't wake up in my 20's or 30's and decide I was going to become an alcoholic and on the brink of death by the time I was in my late 40's, I woke up with a lot of anxiety and I woke up knowing I wasn't coping with what was existing in my life at the time. To me there was no harm in opening the fridge and saying "hi there Sav" at 4pm in the afternoon. It caught me, and I was unaware of it.
"Addiction is not something you go seeking, addiction is a substance you are using over and over again to medicate against something that's not correct in your life or is not sitting right within you - its depression, anxiety, trauma, grief. It's loss, it's complete fragmentation of a person - it could be social, it could be economical. There are a lot of reasons you are seeking to use a substance to feel better, and that's all it is.
"Sadly, once you are past the point of chemically and psychologically becoming addicted, your mind and physical body takes over from there and before you realise it, you're actually too far deep into addiction to easily back away from it and that's when it becomes a disease."
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