Finally, at last we come to deal with the roots of our addictions is not as simple as we have been lead to believe.

Finally, we come to deal with the roots of our addictions which is not as simple as we have been lead to believe.When we start to study at the stages “traumatic reenactment”.


The memories of the traumatic experiences are dissociated, nonverbal, and unintegrated. Over and over, people find themselves in situations that recapitulate earlier trauma and lack any awareness of how it happened much less how to prevent it from happening the next time.

The lack of awareness is due to the dissociative blockade that places the behaviour out of the context of verbal and conscious control. Since words are not available to sufficiently explain the experience, thinking cannot really occur. Under these circumstances, people will usually come up with explanations for their strange and mysterious behaviour, because the rational part of their mind is struggling to make sense of the situation. But without access to the dissociated material, the rational mind flounders helplessly, interpreting behaviour in a simplistic, often crazy,disjointed way, while the person helplessly re-exposes himself or herself to further trauma. We understand that to make contact and converse with the reenactment is a way of dealing with this powerful behavioural force of childhood memory which is couched in the terms of early childhood. Hence we wish to contact the child within the originator of the original traumatic events.




The Ten Stages seeks to deal with the trapped “Traumatic reenactment”it is the term we use to describe the lingering behavioural enactment and automatic repetition of the past. The very nature of traumatic information processing determines the reenactment behaviour. The traumatised person is cut off from language, deprived of the power of words, trapped in speechless terror. Trauma demands repetition – what Pierre Janet, Freud and so many others observed when they noticed the compulsion to repeat evident in trauma survivors. As Freud wrote, “He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it without, of course, knowing that he is repeating... he cannot escape from this compulsion to repeat; and in the end we understand that this is his way of remembering”.

Addiction is the way of temporary forgetting and hence we begin to understand the repeated circle of addiction. This becomes part of the study course at The Ten Stages and starts to address the constant emotional relapse phase of an addiction.

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