October 2, 2026

Michael Williams

Michael Williams (Mikey) is the Clinical Lead at Abbington House and has been in recovery since 2011. He oversees the day-to-day delivery of care and brings lived experience into every part of the work.

This month, I attended Transform Trauma Oxford 2026, a four-day conference bringing together thousands of people working across trauma, mental health, neuroscience and clinical practice.

The theme this year was Science, Spirit and the Body: The Synthesis of Healing, looking at trauma from different perspectives and bringing together research, clinical practice and lived experience.

There was an incredible line-up of speakers, including Gabor Maté, Bessel van der Kolk, Dan Siegel, David Nutt and Janina Fisher. I’ve followed Gabor Maté’s work for some time, so having the opportunity to hear from him was something I was particularly looking forward to.

But the reason I wanted to be there goes back to the work we do every day at Abbington House.

Addiction might be what brings someone through our doors, but it isn’t the sum of who they are. There are relationships, experiences, losses, ways of coping and often years of behaviour that have developed around their alcohol or drug use.

If we’re going to help someone properly, we need to be interested in all of that.

Looking at what happened, not only what went wrong

One of the questions that sits at the heart of trauma-informed care is: What happened to this person, rather than simply, "What is wrong with them?"I think that's an important question in addiction treatment.
When someone has been drinking or using drugs for a long time,it's very easy for everyone around them to become focused on the behaviour. Families are understandably exhausted by it. Trust may have been damaged. There may have been arguments, broken promises and things that are difficult to repair.
The person themselves can arrive with that same focus, because they know what they've done and they know where their addiction has taken them. Treatment gives us an opportunity to look further.
Trauma can shape the way someone responds to emotions,relationships and situations in which they don't feel safe. Anger can sometimes sit over fear. Someone may shut down when they're overwhelmed. Alcohol or drugs may have become one of the ways they've learned to cope with feelings or experiences they haven't known what to do with.
That doesn't mean we assume trauma is behind every addiction, or use somebody's past to explain away their behaviour. We ask questions, we listen and we try to understand the person we're working with.

Stopping the substance is only part of the work

One of the things I’ve learned through my years working in treatment is that taking alcohol or drugs away doesn’t automatically resolve everything that was happening around them.

Someone can stop using and still struggle with anger. They can still find relationships difficult. They can still feel overwhelmed, frightened or unable to trust people.

Without the thing they used to change how they felt, some of those feelings can become much harder to ignore. That’s why the work we do at Abbington House goes beyond abstinence.

We want people to start recognising their own patterns. What happens when they feel rejected? What do they do when they’re angry? How do they respond when somebody challenges them? What happens when they feel uncomfortable and can’t immediately escape that feeling?

Those conversations can tell us a lot.

Trauma-informed doesn't mean avoiding difficult conversations

Understanding why somebody behaves in a particular way doesn’t mean saying the behaviour is acceptable.

If someone's addiction has hurt the people around them,

understanding where their own pain comes from doesn't remove that hurt. Recovery still involves responsibility. It can involve looking honestly at your behaviour, recognising your part in situations and learning to respond differently.

Trauma-informed care gives us

more context for doing that work. Instead of deciding somebody is difficult, angry, withdrawn or unwilling to engage, we can ask what's happening underneath the behaviour we're seeing.

Sometimes there will be a reason

we can identify and sometimes there won't. Either way, we haven't decided who that person is before we've got to know them.

Learning from people who have shaped how we understand trauma

One of the things that made Transform Trauma Oxford particularly valuable was the range of people contributing to the conversation.

The conference included more than 100 sessions across four days, with speakers including Gabor Maté, Bessel van der Kolk, Dan Siegel, David Nutt, Janina Fisher and many others working across trauma and mental health.

Gabor Maté was somebody I was particularly interested in hearing. His work has been influential in conversations about trauma, addiction and the importance of looking beyond a person’s behaviour to understand what may sit underneath it.

What I like about being in environments like this is that you’re exposed to different ideas.

You don’t have to come away agreeing with everything you’ve heard. That’s part of professional development too. You listen, question things, think about what applies to the people you work with and take useful learning back into practice.

For me, it always has to come back to the person sitting in the room with us.

Does understanding this help us ask a better question?

Does it help us understand a behaviour differently?

Could we be missing something because we're concentrating on what somebody is doing rather than what is happening for them?

That's where the value is.

Bringing it back to Abbington House

I don’t want what I learned in Oxford to stay in Oxford. So I’ll be sharing what I took from the conference with our wider treatment team and looking at how it can inform the work we’re already doing at Abbington House.

We’re working with people at a point in their lives when quite a lot has usually happened.

The addiction matters. Of course it does. It’s why many people come through our doors. But there’s still so much to find out about the person underneath it.

The more we understand about that person, their experiences, their relationships and the ways they’ve learned to cope, the better placed we are to work with what is actually happening rather than only what we can see.

For me, that’s what trauma-informed treatment comes back to; seeing the person first.

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Understanding Trauma Has Changed the Way I Think About Addiction Treatment