The trauma we face in life leaves its mark. Like scars, some fade but never fully disappear. Some are visible, most are not. They settle quietly into the body and mind, shaping how you think, how you react, how you move through the world. If we are willing, we can learn from them. But learning requires growth. It requires facing what happened, not avoiding it.
Trauma does not define me. I will never allow it to. But it has shaped me.
Many years ago, when my ex-boyfriend took his own life, I did not have the emotional tools to process something that final. I did not know how to sit with grief without trying to escape it. I did not know how to ask for help, or how to carry questions that would never have answers.
What I had was alcohol.
It was familiar. It had once brought laughter and connection. It was easy to access. And it was socially acceptable enough that no one looked twice when I reached for it. At the time, drinking felt like coping. It softened the sharpest edges of the pain. It dulled intrusive thoughts long enough for me to get through the night.
But it did not undo what happened. It did not resolve the grief. It simply postponed it.
Alcohol does not heal trauma. It suspends it.
When I eventually began therapy, I started to see something I had never fully understood before. Even prior to his death, we were both heavy drinkers in our late teens and early twenties. We were growing older physically, but emotionally we were not developing at the same pace.
Alcohol had become our default response to discomfort, conflict, insecurity, and fear. Instead of learning how to regulate our emotions, we numbed them. Instead of building resilience, we avoided what would have built it.
You know what that does? It stunts growth.
When something devastating happens and you have not developed the tools to face it, you meet trauma with the emotional capacity of someone much younger. That realization was sobering in more ways than one.
There is no blame in that statement. Only clarity.
Trauma requires presence. Alcohol pulls you away from it.
Trauma requires growth. Alcohol delays it.
The combination does not cancel pain out; it compounds it.
Sobriety, for me, was not just about putting down a drink. It was about finally allowing myself to feel what I had been avoiding. It was about growing up emotionally in ways I had unknowingly postponed.
Was it difficult? Hell yes, it was.
That season of my life – the grief, the hospital rooms, the graveside conversations, the long nights that felt endless, eventually came to an end. We live in chapters, and that one has thankfully closed. I chose to write about it, not to reopen wounds, but to continue healing and to offer hope to others walking through their own.
After the Party Ends will explore that chapter more fully.
But this is the truth I carry now:
You cannot heal what you are constantly numbing.
And you cannot mature emotionally while sedating every feeling that tries to surface.
Alcohol did not erase my trauma.
It added to it.
They do not mix.
What have you turned to, alcohol or anything else, in order to avoid feeling what needed to be faced?
Evelyn Kane 
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