For a long time, I thought drugs were my problem. In reality, they were just my escape hatch — my shield against something much deeper and harder to face.
It’s only now, after the chaos has quieted and the cravings have lost their grip, that I’m beginning to understand what was really going on. Reading The Body Keeps the Score (buy here from Amazon UK) by Bessel van der Kolk has helped put words to an experience I didn’t know how to articulate — especially a passage early on in the book, around page 15, where he describes a man who, after trauma, couldn’t feel anything anymore. Not joy. Not love. Not even sadness. He wanted to love his family, to feel connected to his children and wife, but it was like his emotions were sealed behind a sheet of glass. He said he felt like he was floating in space. Disconnected. Frozen.
I read that and thought, Yes. That’s it. That’s exactly how it feels.
After the trauma I carried and the years of drug use that followed, I became emotionally numb. Life became grayscale. The things that once brought joy — a good meal, music, intimacy, laughter — didn’t land anymore. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to feel, I just couldn’t. My nervous system, my brain, my very body had been rewired to survive, not to feel. And drugs, for all their destruction, offered me two things: the illusion of control and the absence of pain.
But here’s the trap: the same substances that numb the pain also numb everything else. You start out trying to silence the screaming inside, but you end up silencing the whole spectrum of emotion. Over time, the brain becomes so desensitized that nothing feels good anymore. The reward system flatlines. You stop chasing highs and start chasing anything that cuts through the emptiness — even rage, risk, or chaos.
Like the man in van der Kolk’s book, I found that the only emotions I could reliably access were the intense ones: anger, shame, adrenaline. I’d get a thrill out of dangerous situations — fast driving, heated arguments, reckless behavior. It wasn’t joy, but it was something. It made me feel alive for a second. It punctured the numbness. But it was fleeting, and it always came with consequences.
I’ve come to believe that addiction, for many of us, isn’t about getting high. It’s about getting away — from trauma, from memories, from the parts of ourselves that are too heavy to carry unassisted. Drugs were a tool I used to keep the monster at bay. But once I stopped using, I had to finally face the thing I’d been running from all along.
And that’s where real healing begins — not just in abstinence, but in reconnection. With yourself. With your body. With your emotions. With the people who love you, even when you can’t feel that love yet.
Van der Kolk writes that trauma isn’t just a psychological wound — it’s something the body holds. The body keeps the score. The numbness, the flashbacks, the hypervigilance, the disconnection — these are all signs that the trauma is still alive inside, waiting to be processed. And healing doesn’t come from logic or willpower alone. It comes from allowing the body to feel safe again. To feel at all again.
If you’re in that space — floating, numb, trying to claw your way back to something real — I want you to know this: you’re not broken. You’re not incapable of joy. Your nervous system is doing what it was trained to do. But with time, support, and the right kind of healing, that frozen part of you can thaw.
You don’t have to live behind a glass wall forever.
