Addiction & Mental Health

Addiction and Mental Health

I’m always surprised by how strongly these topics are connected. And how incredibly dependent we are — even in our patterns.

A few days ago, I was told something quite intense.
I had to go for an MRI because of a calcification in my head that I’ve had since my early 20s.
Since I kept having stress-related headaches, I really wanted to get it checked.

Later on, it turned out that I have tiny scars in my brain structure.
And apparently, they’ve been there since early childhood.

It seems there are two possible causes for something like this: either an undetected meningitis or an anxiety and stress disorder.
Which is interesting, because it supports my psychiatrist’s theory — that if adults respond as quickly to medication as I did back then with antidepressants, it usually means an anxiety disorder has been present since childhood.

Strangely enough, that gave me a lot of relief.
Because it shows that this anxiety disorder wasn’t caused by something in adulthood — it was always there. I had simply covered it up.

Still, I had to think back to the time when I suppressed so many of my emotions, so many fears.
How often I drank myself into unconsciousness, how often things only just barely turned out okay.
And I had to cry a little.

I’m so grateful for how everything turned out. Without the addiction, without the anxiety disorder, I would have never dealt with any of this.
I would have never asked myself why my self-worth was so low. Why I treated myself the way I did in the past.

I always thought I didn’t deserve it.
And that is, of course, the fuel of addiction: escaping into a more bearable state.