This sounds rather much like speculation to me. Do you have any sources to back up your "Most" statement. Since the disease is generational, quite often children of addicts will have a stressful upbringing, but your theory of brain damage from stress causing the addiction is quite a stretch.

Gabor Mate discusses this in his Angry Ghosts book. If you search through my comments for his name, there is a link to an interview where he discusses this also.

I did not find your comments, but I did a quick google search. Here is one refutation that I found: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/addiction-in-society/201...

It says just about what I would have guessed too. :)

What's the point of reading a refutation if you haven't read the original? You don't even know what you're reading.

It's not necessarily always "abuse" so much as mis-parenting and/or unhealthy environments. I forget who said it but there's a quote that goes something like this: 'All healthy families share similar traits and patterns, but unhealthy families all have their own hosts of unique issues.'

For one source that hit home for me, see Addiction as an Attachment Disorder by Philip Flores

That is the first line of Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."