Why you’re addicted to your trauma & how to finally break the cycle

By Orit Krug  |  July 24th, 2023

Being addicted to your trauma can simply look like “I hit rock bottom many times only to realize that I was addicted to hitting rock bottom”

Let me share a story with you about being addicted to your trauma:

I had this huge epiphany when I started dating my husband Aaron. I tried to push him away from day 1. I tested him a lot and I didn’t trust him to stick around. I was unhappy with his habits and his friends and I tried to control everything.

Luckily, Aaron knew how to deal with my craziness at the time. He set really strong boundaries with me. He continued to show me how much he cared for me, but he was also like, “I’m not playing your games.”

That really hurt, because I was so used to being the victim and I had this desperate need to be pitied and met in my misery.

I tried so many times to get him to meet me there but he didn’t budge.

I had a life-changing realization that I was addicted to my own misery and trauma.

It suddenly all made sense. My parents never believed me when I repeatedly told them that my brothers were abusing me. They minimized it without realizing that it was a DAILY part of my world that was painful and scary.

I learned that I was the only one who would be there for me. I internalized that no one cared or felt bad for my pain, so I had to do it myself.

That’s where my addiction to my trauma began and continued to play out for the next 20-something years.

My addiction prevented me from getting help and eventually led to my biggest heartbreak.

Aaron and I are married now and have an amazing partnership, but we broke up about a year into our relationship. All my crazy from the first 12 months led him to a breaking point.

While I’d started talk therapy a few years before we got together, I didn’t feel a real shift in releasing my trauma until I finally broke my patterns of self-misery.

As much as I told myself that I wanted to have a great relationship and be happy, my body didn’t believe it was safe. On a primal level, I just was too scared that if I didn’t pity myself, I’d be left in the wild and eaten alive.

Our nervous systems are hardwired to stay addicted to trauma.

While it was my responsibility to take ownership of my sabotaging behaviors and change them, it was NOT my fault.

After you’ve experienced trauma in past relationships, your nervous system becomes extremely sensitive to signs of danger in your relationships TODAY. This creates an uncontrollable impulse to KEEP looking for threats in your partner, sabotage your relationship and maintain a level of hypervigilance that keeps you alive because according to your primal body, releasing your trauma would be FATAL.

It’s no wonder why releasing trauma SEEMS so damn difficult.

Yet, breaking your addiction to trauma is the ONE thing required of you to heal it, and it is the one thing that most people don’t do because their nervous systems believe that it’s too scary.

Once I realized I was in a loop of self-misery, I started investing my own money into dance therapy for myself as a client. Before that, I had my parents pay for my therapy or I just claimed that I couldn’t afford it at all.

Money is the biggest reason why we stay addicted to trauma.

One of the reasons I shared my crazy dating story with you is because I want to discourage you from ever trying to resolve your traumas within your romantic relationship.

I was lucky that Aaron gave me another chance but you may not be as lucky.

The only way that you can break your own cycle of trauma in relationships is THROUGH a relationship with a qualified therapist who knows how to release your trauma in a safe way. Your partner, sister, and best friend do not qualify.

You have to invest time and money to heal your trauma. So many people avoid this and impulsively say, “I can’t afford it.” Yet I just finished working with a single, unemployed mom with 3 children who invested thousands of dollars to change her life with me.

It’s easy to give your power away to money because it’s an easy way out from doing the REAL work that needs to happen to heal your trauma.

It’s easy to blame it on the husband who “won’t let you” spend the money (why is HE in charge of how you spend your shared money, even if he earns more?)

It’s NOT your fault though. Your nervous system and primal body crave safety and comfort. Doing the work feels like a threat.

Breaking your addiction to trauma is actually really simple and doesn’t have to be so hard.

First, you must recognize that blaming money and your partner for not healing mirrors your past trauma where you were trapped in a terrible situation and couldn’t get out because someone else took your power.

When you can’t afford getting help, you’re ALSO stuck in a crappy situation that can’t be resolved.

Acknowledge that this is a story from past trauma and then let it go.

Next, reclaim your power and have a calm, productive conversation with your partner asserting your need to invest in external support.

Then, you only need ONE small active step each day to break the trauma cycle and take your power back. I recommend putting aside just $1 per day into an account reserved ONLY for your trauma healing.

Even if you are financially limited, this plan is powerful and it works. It proves to your body that you DO believe that it’s completely possible to heal your trauma and create the lasting loving relationships you SO deserve.

Get on the right path to healing trauma from your body and nervous system.

Many people spend decades and thousands of dollars in traditional therapies trying to heal their trauma. Unfortunately, even the most popular therapies are scientifically shown to be limited in accessing trauma stored in the non-verbal brain and body.

Even alternative approaches, such as EMDR and Brain Mapping, are often not enough to fully heal from the physical body or the nervous system.

This makes trauma healing a very frustrating journey for so many people. They often blame themselves for being “un-healable” and decide that they’re broken.

This is NOT true!

Every human being is 100% neurophysiologically capable of healing from the past, because we all have wiring and neural pathways that can be rewired from fear and overprotection, to love and openness.

My unique, scientific-backed process via Dance Therapy has helped hundreds of clients finally heal from past trauma and transform their relationship (even after decades of trying in other therapies).

You can heal too, but you need the right methodology.

Sign up for my online course (ranges from free to $20 USD) to begin a unique, body-based learning experience that will teach you:

• Science-backed education about how trauma is stored in your body and nervous system. You’ll gain an understanding why it has NOT been your fault you haven’t healed yet from past trauma.
• Gentle, guided body-based movement that is necessary for integrated healing. This is crucial if you want your mind’s intentions to match your body’s behaviors in relationships.
• An embodied approach to healing that has helped hundreds of clients break unhealthy relationship patterns and let in healthy, lasting love.

Click here now to sign up!