In my psychology reading, the theories of Gabor Maté have really stood out for his work on trauma. He has a talk on how life traumas turn us into addicts - to substances, to distractions, to work.
Healing the trauma can help heal the addictive behavior.

https://howtoacademy.com/events/a-compassionate-approach-to-addiction-and-self-destructive-behaviour/

Personally I think it's pretty revolutionary to understand "acceptable" addictions -- shopping, workaholism -- as having similar origins to addictions that have traditionally been misunderstood and shamed, like alcohol and drugs.

The best part of his work, I think, is that he's very hopeful that healing trauma can help heal any addictive behavior and allow people to live liberated from the pain that looked for some external medicating force.

I should note here that healing any trauma is more than recognizing it existed. In fact, recognition can keep you locked inside the trauma, identifying with it. Healing means going back and reparenting yourself -- feeling the pain in your body and soothing yourself as you needed

That's according to experts any way. It's all very hard work and takes some time and is best done with a professional guide, like a therapist, because the subconscious is nowhere to go messing around alone

Also: A lot of people don't think they don't have addictions but they do. Working all hours and forgetting to eat and ignoring family? That's workaholism and it's an addiction. Online shopping at 3 am? Shopping addiction. Twitter? Video games? Also addictions. All from trauma.

It's almost perhaps constructive to add this: Even if you have a therapist, you have to keep learning and exploring to make that therapy useful. A therapist doesn't solve your problems for you; they're there to guide you and help you solve your own problems.

Therapy isn't just showing up and talking about your week. It's really about noticing obstacles to growth and having a guide to dig them out. But if you don't take that work and questioning and reading to the therapist, they can't do much for you. They won't push past you.

It's like having a doctor or personal trainer for ye physical health. Would you work out and eat nutritiously only with your trainer? Would you take your medicine only at the doctor's office? Of course not. They're guides. The real work is what you do between appointments.

I kind of dream of a situation where people schedule mental health breaks and read or practice their mental health healing strategies every week, keeping them in the calendar. Like a workout or a doctor's appointment.

Mental health is like anything else: To work well, it requires maintenance and tune-ups and care. Otherwise it starts to fray, and people are so separated from their mental health that they don't pay attention until it hits a crisis: Burnout, for one thing.

Here is a great little video on addictions -- which again, include "normal" things like work, love, food -- and how you should thank them for being the part of you that tried to pace and treat your trauma. They didn't, of course. But the impulse was good.

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CKrLyB2HEH6/?igshid=1d5pq6k1rlfhk

Something to think about: What in your life has become an addiction? If it's work (and for almost everyone here with a check mark, it's work) think about the traumas you accepted to keep that workaholism going, rejecting your physical needs and your instincts to feed work.

I think work, as we have experienced it over the past 20 years -- long hours, precarity, fear of constant restructuring, demands to give up on parts of ourselves -- has traumatized us en masse.

It might be possible that the quarantine/pandemic might be triggering or questioning latent addictions - this is why people are working more hours, shopping more, more obsessed with relationships than even in the beforetimes.

Anyway! Shopping! https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/the-shopping-addicts-of-quarantine

Again, your mass assignment this month is to think about the ways we have normalized work as an addiction. For some predetermined salary or recognition, you are expected to sell your physical being and your identity. Does that feel right? https://twitter.com/llchristyll/status/1356339427983941632

We truly have to do something about work addiction -- "workaholism" makes it sound light and fun but it's destructive to the soul. My theory is that work addiction has become the "safe" way to play out our traumas of neglect during the pandemic. https://twitter.com/anabnieto/status/1356933614034964482

To expand on my theory: Trauma tends to replay itself until it's resolved.

I think work is a way that we replay the ways we have been abandoned and neglected, by abandoning ourselves (selling out our own needs to a boss's needs) and neglecting our own emotions. https://twitter.com/business/status/1356932720484642818