Craig Salo

22W_ENL1813S_314
February 11, 2022
Hannah Brazeau

Library Database Research Report: Summary

In her magazine article “To treat addiction, treat trauma”, Alison Knopf explains that in

order to treat addiction in trauma survivors, we must also treat their trauma. She stresses that

people treating addiction need to have a solid understanding of the dynamics of trauma.

Addiction in trauma survivors is usually an attempt at self-soothing. When trauma is not properly

treated alongside addiction, it often leads to relapse, or replacing the old addiction with other

self-soothing addictive behaviors, such as sex-addiction and over-eating. These replacements

often become problematic and are attributed, in this article, to the untreated trauma in those

clients. She also stresses that health-care practitioners who are not trauma-informed run the risk

of retraumatizing their clients. Alison Knopf (2011), states “In fact, SAMHSA is encouraging all

service providers to screen everyone for trauma, and has been providing training in the public

sector on trauma-informed care and specific trauma interventions” (p. 13). She also stresses that

intergenerational-trauma often plays a role in the lives of people struggling with addictions and

sates that it too must be treated. She shows that untreated and undiagnosed trauma in people

struggling with addictions is an ongoing systemic issue that it needs to be continually addressed

due to the fact that many therapists are unprepared to and/or are unwilling to raise the topic of

trauma with clients.

I really liked this article. A topic that interested me in this article was that there is an

ongoing effort being made to educate people who work in the field of addictions on trauma-

informed approaches. I also liked learning about how much work there still seems to need to be
done in that area. I like that this article addresses what I feel to be a very important issue, and

raises awareness to the fact that many people who work in the field of addictions have not yet

received proper training in trauma-informed practice.