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iQuestions Faculty, Dr. David Eckman 
 
 
Question: 
 
Does family background have anything to do with addiction? 
 
Answer: 
 
Family background certainly has a lot to do with addiction. 
Unfortunately, addiction does not sweep into the window and land on a 
person’s shoulder. Instead, there are cultural issues involved and 
family issues involved. 
 
Back in the late 1990s, Kaiser Permanente in San Diego and the 
Centers for Disease Control did the largest study in the history of the 
planet with the largest number of people— over 17,000— where they 
compared family background with adult health, and they came to a 
statistically-certain conclusion, which is, the more stress is in the 
family’s background, the more adverse childhood experiences that an 
adult carries into adult life, the more certain there will be the struggle 
with addiction in adult life.  
 
Why is that so? The answer is simple. Addiction is fed by unaddressed 
pain in the life, and the great pain generator for many people is their 
own family background. 
 
Therefore, if you’re struggling with compulsion and addiction, think 
about your family background, talk to others about your family 
background. You may find that as you address how you were raised 
that the pain from that background begins to ease. 
 
 
 
The principle is this: as pain goes down in the heart, addiction begins 
to drift away in the life. So, addressing the issue of family background 
is very, very important. 
 
 
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