What Is Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy?
If you've spent time in therapy exploring why you do the things you do — and still felt like part of you just wouldn't cooperate — Internal Family Systems might be the model that finally makes sense of that. IFS offers something genuinely different from most therapeutic approaches: it doesn't ask you to override, eliminate, or control the difficult parts of yourself. It asks you to get curious about them. And in doing so, it opens a door to healing that many people describe as unlike anything they have encountered before
The Role of Shame in Both Trauma and Addiction — and How to Heal It
If there is a single thread that runs through both complex trauma and addiction — connecting them, sustaining them, and making recovery from both so much harder — it is shame. Not the ordinary, healthy shame that tells us we've done something that conflicts with our values. But the deeper, more pervasive kind: the shame that says not 'I did something wrong' but 'I am wrong.' The shame that becomes woven into a person's sense of identity so thoroughly that it is mistaken for who they are.
Understanding the role of shame in trauma and addiction — how it develops, how it operates, and how it can be healed — is one of the most important pieces of work in the overlap between these two experiences.
Treating Trauma and Addiction Together: Why This Matters
For decades, addiction and trauma were largely treated as separate problems — different services, different specialists, different languages, different waiting lists. A person who turned up at an addiction service with a history of childhood abuse was treated for the addiction. A person who turned up at a trauma service while struggling with alcohol was treated for the trauma. The connection between the two — the way one so often sustains and is sustained by the other — was frequently left unaddressed.
The evidence has been building for years that this approach falls short. And more and more clinicians, researchers, and people in recovery are arriving at the same conclusion: for those whose addiction and trauma are intertwined — which is most people — treating them together produces better, more lasting outcomes than treating either alone.
Self-Medicating Trauma: Why So Many People with C-PTSD Struggle with Substance Use
If you live with complex trauma and have also struggled with alcohol or substances, you may have spent a long time believing that one was a character flaw and the other a wound. But they are rarely separate stories. For many people with C-PTSD, substance use isn't a problem that arrived alongside their trauma — it is a response to it. Understanding why changes everything about how healing becomes possible.
The ACE Study: How Childhood Adversity Predicts Addiction
In the 1990s, one of the most important pieces of research in the history of mental health and addiction quietly changed everything. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study didn't just confirm what many therapists had long suspected — it put hard numbers to it, and those numbers were impossible to ignore.
