You're listening to the Recovery Happy Hour Podcast,

and season five starts now. Hi guys, welcome to Recovery Happy Hour!

Hi guys, Welcome to Recovery Happy Hour

where we talk about life beyond the bottle and what happens after we stop drinking.

I'm your host Tricia and I've saved $19,000 in over three years of being alcohol-free and I have no idea where that money is. Thank you for

joining me. Well today's topic is going to be about trauma and I want to

start it out by telling you about the survey I found. It was a survey of

adolescents receiving treatment for

substance use where more than 70% of them had a history of trauma exposure.

Teens who experienced physical or sexual abuse were three times as likely to use substances than those who had not.

And 59% of young people with PTSD developed substance use disorders. The reason why I wanted to bring

up this specific study of adolescents is because so many people start drinking

in their teen years and we often just brush that off,

is socially acceptable, you know, a right of passage.

And I hear that so often in my interviews

when people describe drinking in their college years

is, well, that's just what I thought you were supposed to do.

And on a superficial level, I could see how this could be harmless, you know, if it's on a rare

occasion, but it gets tricky when you add in the fact that you're putting a physically addictive drug in your body and then when you layer in drinking for the wrong reasons such as to cover up feelings from old trauma which apparently 70% of

them have exposure to, well this is when things become dangerous.

Psychological trauma is defined as damage to the mind that occurs as a result of a distressing event.

That's it. There's no if your event meets the criteria of X, Y, and Z.

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