It is evident that some people drink to get through the pain of grief, and can easily become at least emotionally addicted in the process. When we use a substance to dull the pain, we can become afraid to quit in case the pain is still there. I have become convinced that the problem is much deeper than just avoiding pain.

I walked with a mother whose daughter died of substance abuse. The family spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and the focus of their lives in a ten year struggle trying to find some cure for the pattern of abuse. I think the treatment centers missed the major reason for her problem. When the daughter was nine years old her father was killed in a wreck. Sometime after the death, her mother walked into her room and found her in tears. The mother collapsed and they experienced a rather scary time of being totally out of control. When they finally stopped crying, the mother asked what she could do to help the daughter, and was told it would help if she did not cry anymore. They made a pack to never cry again, at least in each other's presence, and they never did. 

When a nine year old girl starts tying to control her emotions and move past her grief by sheer will power, trouble lies ahead. The need to control lead to her becoming more and more isolated from her feelings. The need for control lead to her becoming more isolated from emotional involvement even with family. On the surface, she was a brilliant and talented girl. Inside, her life she was tormented and lonely. She started drinking quite early and graduated from the alcohol to drugs in an ever sinking spiral for the rest of her life. 

The treatment centers never saw that connection. They thought the problem was one of co-dependency with her mother, and worked on that exclusively, never delving into the buried trauma from the death of her father whom she adored. 

Grief or trauma that is not dealt with does not go away. It festers and grows until it can find other ways to express itself. Lenora Terr has written a very fine book called Too Scared To Cry. It is the story of the students from Chowchilla California who were captured and buried alive in a truck trailer. Someone                                  captured a school bus full of children and put them in the truck trailer which had been buried into the earth. They took some identification from each child and put them into the truck through a small trap door in the roof. The children could hear the dirt being poured on top of the trailer and, of course, felt panic no child should ever feel. One young boy made the group hold him up and he dug them out of the trap. They were home in something like thirty-four hours without a scratch. Everyone rejoiced, but no one thought of helping them deal with the trauma.

Lenore Terr did a study of those children six years after the event. She found a much higher rate of substance abuse, early marriage, and pregnancy outside of marriage among the group who had experienced the trauma.

A very small town experienced the death of seven high school students in two car accidents ten days apart. I became acquainted with six of the families and tried to offer some help during the first days after the accidents. Three years later one of the mothers called to tell me about the impact she was seeing on the students in the school. When the accident killed their friends, they were not offered any help in dealing with the grief and trauma. She said the Valedictorian of the class was in jail on drug charges, they had experienced a noticeable rise in substance abuse, early marriage, and pregnancies outside of marriage. She also said the kids were going down in the canyon near the city and driving as fast as possible at night with the lights off like they were having some kind of death wish. 

These stories are not told to scare anyone. These kinds of things do not happen to everyone who goes through grief. They probably do not happen to any where near the majority of those who experience trauma. The stories are told to simply say, that we need to take grief and trauma seriously. When we talk about grief, we are talking about more than just a period of sadness that will pass in time. We are talking about an impact that needs to be faced and walked through. There is a process built into us to do that, if we can find permission and companionship to help us. Grief is a journey that must be walked. There is no way around it. There are no shortcuts through it. We can ignore it, we can delay it, we can deny it, but, ultimately, we cannot escape its impact on our lives.