Addiction, while a mental health disorder in its own right, often covers deeper wounds. Treating addiction often requires a willingness to delve deep into a patient’s psyche and find the traumatic experiences that are motiving the substance abuse.

In this Mental Health Minute, Gray talks about her efforts to treat the traumas that often lurk behind addictions. She offers tips for building strong therapeutic alliances and recommends using eye movement desensitization and reprocessing to help patients with comorbid substance abuse disorders and trauma.

Ms Gray is a licensed therapist and recovery coach at Hand in Hand Counseling in Greenwich, CT.