For most people with serious substance use disorders, understanding the connection between our habits and our histories of childhood trauma is essential to recovery. In a perfect world (hell, in a halfway decent world) drug treatment would be trauma-informed, yet some 90 percent of treatment facilities still operate as they did in the 1980s, marching every patient through the first five steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. For those who don't know, that means filling notebooks with self-lacerating...

In his groundbreaking book , In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction , trauma and addiction expert Dr. Gabor Maté writes, “There are almost as many addictions as there are people.” ACEs Connection founder and publisher Jane Stevens read that quote as a springboard to asking Maté to define addiction and explain whether or not it is always rooted in adverse childhood experiences. Maté, along with filmmaker Michelle Esrick and Saturday Night Live star Darrell Hammond,...