Neuroscience explains part of the story. Trauma theory fills in the gaps. But to truly transform addiction, we need to integrate the soul.
Trauma, Spirit & the Science of Addiction: Why Healing Needs More Than One Lens
In recent years, trauma theory has deservedly become a powerful lens for understanding addiction. Therapists and thinkers—from Gabor Maté to Bessel van der Kolk—have helped to reframe compulsive behaviours not as moral failings but as responses to unmet needs and unresolved pain. This has been vital work.
But as with any dominant narrative, there’s a risk: that it becomes the only story in the room.
The trauma lens can illuminate many truths, but it can also cast certain patterns into shadow. Not every addiction is traceable to a single rupture or childhood wound. Some arise more subtly: through repetition, conditioning, social exposure, and the slippery descent from occasional pleasure to unconscious compulsion. Our brains are wired for addictive patterning, partly as a means of survival. And while most of us remain within the orbit of homeostasis, it’s not so difficult to slip into cycles of chasing ever-diminishing hits of dopamine, whether through drugs and alcohol, gaming, pornography, overworking, the internet, or any of the many traps modern life lays before us.
I’ve worked with many clients—and known people socially—who have had loving and stable backgrounds, fulfilling careers, supportive families, and good relationships, yet still found themselves drawn into one addiction or another.
Addiction, in many cases, is not just a cry from the past, but a pattern forged in the present—etched into the brain through neuroplasticity and fuelled by feedback loops between dopamine and desire.
Science, meet Spirit.
Science offers us remarkable insights into reward circuits, craving, and the hijacking of the prefrontal cortex and the whole dopamine-induced pain and pleasure principles. But it often struggles to account for the numinous: for those moments when a person, against all odds, finds something sacred in their suffering… or transcends it altogether.
This is where spirit enters.
We’ve seen people heal not only through therapy or medication, but through profound shifts in identity, through service, through surrendering to a higher power in 12 steps, through purpose, through surrender. Call it grace. Call it soul. Call it what you will—but we can’t ignore this possibility.
So what’s really going on?
To offer true healing, not just clinical management, we need to bridge three core dimensions:
- The neural: What’s happening in the brain. How can we support the rewiring of neural pathways through approaches such as Positive Psychology, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), or mindfulness-based techniques?
- The narrative: What story is the person telling—and believing—about themselves? Is there unresolved trauma that may be released or reprocessed through somatic therapies, regression work, or cathartic methods?
- The numinous: What is the deeper Self trying to become? How can we help our clients reconnect to a sense of spiritual meaning, inner guidance, or soul purpose?
When we combine all three, we move beyond reductionism and into a more integrative understanding of addiction, not merely as a condition to be managed, but as a potential portal to transformation.
Addiction as initiation?
Yes, in some cases.
Addiction can break someone. But it can also break them open.
And when it does, our job as therapists, healers, and fellow humans is not just to patch them up and send them back into the same life, but to help them become someone new. Someone more whole. Someone who remembers who they are.
This is exactly the approach we take at the College of Contemporary Therapy. In our Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy programmes, we train therapists to work across modalities, embracing insight from neuroscience and somatic awareness while also exploring soul-based insight, archetypal wounding, and spiritual emergence. It’s a curriculum designed not around silos, but synthesis.
Because true healing doesn’t come from one perspective – it comes from all of them working together.
And that, we believe, is the truly holistic way forward.
Blue Marsden