Those of us carrying intergenerational relational trauma don’t necessarily walk through our days feeling traumatized. We feel numb. Or anxious. Or braced for something we’re convinced is happening, or will happen….or might happen. That’s what I mean by we can’t heal what we can’t feel, in fact we often don’t even know it’s there. My rule of thumb is to look to our over reactions to gain some insight into what we’re sitting on in silence. We need to understand the emotional conflicts and compulsions we keep recreating to get a sense of the pain we can’t process.

As Adult Children of Alcoholics or kids who grow up with emotionally immature, damaged or abusive parents (whatever we want to call it) we learn early to step around our own feelings like they were annoying puddles on a sidewalk. And if we ever land wrong and get wet, we think it’s the puddle coming after us. Why me? What am I doing wrong? Why doesn’t this puddle like me? Get me? Want the best for me?” Then we feel hurt all over again and stay stuck in a wound we’re pretending isn’t there.

In this way we build entire lives circumnavigating wounds we don’t know exist because we can’t feel them.

We build a whole architecture of self around the hidden damage buried in the basement, it’s that trunk under all the suitcases we just never open. The one our kids can open some day. We laugh it off, minimize it and hand it off to the next generation to figure out. We don’t renovate or restore or repair….. we decorate and re-decorate and call it home. The home we raise our kids in.

Here’s what I see in my practice, and in myself: we can sidestep all of this old baggage for years. We get the job. We perform well under pressure. We’re often brilliant in a crisis, after all that is where our on the ground training came from, family crisis management. All that childhood vigilance finally has somewhere useful to go and we get praised and paid for it.

But then we fall in love. Or we have a child. And the frozen wounds thaw at the worst possible moment. Just when we want to be cool and in control we’re losing it all over the place.

Needing someone reawakens what it felt like to be a needy kid, or more precisely, what it felt like not be allowed to be the needy one. That old, unfelt pain doesn’t stay in the past. It walks straight into the present and gets pinned on whoever’s standing there, a partner, a child a friend. It comes out at the wrong person, at the wrong place, at the wrong time and for the wrong reason. Until we trace it back to where it started, we keep reliving our childhood and calling it our marriage or our kids.

Because our childhood wounds didn’t stay still. They grew up with us, got rationalized, minimized, quietly rewritten until “I was scared” became “I’m just someone who manages things perfectly.” Or hypervigilance becomes “I’m just unusually attuned and sensitive”. The hurt is still in there. It’s just wearing a very convincing disguise.

Why We Grip So Hard: A Finger in the Dyke

So why do we hold on so tightly to thinking that clearly hurts us and keeps us stuck and recreating dysfunctional cycles of behavior?

Because when we’re scared enough, we regress. Not metaphorically, actually. In that instant we’re not an adult having a hard day. We’re a child again, grabbing the only life preserver we ever had: rigid, black-and-white conclusions about how to manage a conflict or a challenge, humiliation or hurt that feels unmanageable. We revert to our old scripts.

And here’s the maddening part, it works. Our sense of control returns. The panic recedes. The ice feels solid again underfoot. But as far as deepening intimacy goes, it doesn’t work so well. It just alienates. And friends and co-workers don’t love this side of us, either. And the more it doesn’t work the more we get defensive and rationalize and dig in our heels. And the blinder we become to what from our past is getting recreated in our present because we’re bleeding old wounds into today and making them about our current relationships.

But to a good therapist or your higher, smarter self, these old issues are hiding in plain sight, in our over reactions and reenactments, the conflicts we just keep recreating with different faces and names, the out of control behaviors we can’t control.

Because the real truth is the problem isn’t really out there, it’s inside of us; we’re just making it about what is out there because feeling it, makes us feel confused, scared and horrible all over again. Suddenly we’re that helpless, hurt kid with no power to change anything. We’re trapped with no visible off ramp. So the storm we’re managing is our own emotional and physiological overwhelm. It’s what is getting activated INSIDE of us. It’s grief we never grieved and resentment that we have buried still moving underground, still generating the same old shame, spitting rage and hunger for certainty and closure we longer for and never got. And just like when we were kids, it feels like there is no way out.

Present Day Triggers: Why Intimacy Gives Us a Second Chance (Or Not)

Few things trigger that undertow like the two relationships that matter most: loving a partner and raising a child. Both ask us to do the one thing our false, defended self, the one we so effectively present to the world (and to ourselves) was built to avoid, namely to stay open and present. A partner who loves us asks for vulnerability. A child who needs us asks for presence. Both reach directly into the room we’ve spent a lifetime keeping locked. And when something in that room gets touched, we become briefly, involuntarily, our youngest, most wounded selves. Not because we’re bad partners or parents. Because the wound is still unexamined.

This is our inheritance as untreated ACAs or adults with cPTSD and the one we risk handing down. Not through cruelty. Through the quiet, devastating mechanics of unresolved pain: the way we go cold, the way we need too much or refuse to need anything, the way we’re there and somehow also gone. Because open and present was maybe a dumb idea in a chaotic home where it just got us creamed or doing jobs no one else wanted to do. But in partnering and parenting, they are the skills we need. A partner who loves us asks for vulnerability. A child who needs us asks for presence.

The Complexity of Partnering as an ACA

Our childhood wounds don’t just shape our parenting, they shape who we fall for in the first place. We often gravitate toward partners who feel emotionally familiar. For both better and worse our nervous system hones in on what it recognizes, even when what it recognizes incorporates fists full of hurt or chaos.

And sometimes it’s intimacy itself that trips the wire. Being truly seen, being depended on, letting ourselves need someone…. all of it can feel risky when our first lesson in love was that it might vacillate unpredictably or even disappear without warning only to reappear on someone else’s schedule and based on their needs and state not ours.

Ordinary conflict lands differently, too. If our childhood home had a lot of unpredictable anger, a disagreement about the dishwasher can register, neurologically, as a five-alarm fire. We over react or underact, we fight or flee. Maybe we freeze or fawn, whatever our go to defense might be, we revert to it. Our nervous system doesn’t know it’s 2026, it just feels like it’s under attack.And our cognitive distortions insist that our interpretation of the situation is the only one possible. That we’re totally justified in what we feel and think is happening, we have little to no room for finding middle ground solutions. Nuance goes out the window.

When We Become Parents: The Trigger We Didn’t See Coming

Still plenty of us sail through our twenties looking remarkably put-together. High-functioning. Competent. We’ve built lives that look nothing like the ones we escaped, and we’ve promised ourselves and meant it, completely, that we’ll be different.

Then we have a kid.

Nothing reaches into old attachment wounds quite like a small person who needs us constantly and cannot regulate their own feelings yet. Children spill things, shriek, cling, melt down and follow us everywhere (everywhere). They also laugh with their whole bodies and love us with a trust so total it’s almost unbearable. All of it, the mess and the magic, can detonate wounds we didn’t know were still armed and ready to fire.

Those of us who once had to shrink our own needs to stay relevant and valued by our families, may find our child’s ordinary needs overwhelming, in a way we can’t quite explain. Or the opposite, putting ourselves aside as parents in favor of our kids needs feels familiar, even like a relief maybe, we can slot back into our role of being there for everyone else. Except maybe ourselves. We may cope and cope and cope, and then suddenly explode over something small, terrifying ourselves as much as our child. Or we go quiet. Or we vanish behind our own eyes.

The middle ground, warm, steady, responsive parenting, requires a regulated nervous system, and that’s exactly the thing we never fully got to build. So maybe we do our parenting without being fully there or maybe we helicopter around so we get in the way of our child’s autonomy because we don’t want them to ever feel as abandoned as we felt. We smother them. Either extreme based more on our own unmet needs from the past than on their needs in the present.

What Gets Passed Down

None of this represents a lack of love on our parts, we love our children fiercely. It’s a shortage of resources that weren’t there to absorb and model like co-regulation, emotional vocabulary, a settled sense of our own worth. We can’t give a child what we don’t have. Not without doing the work to build it first.

A dissociated parent can’t mirror a child’s feelings. A parent in survival mode can’t attune. None of it is intentional but still it has consequences in our own child’s lives, the ones we swore we’d protect but defaulted to smothering or knee jerk blaming instead. And (as ACAs or kids who grew up with neglect or abuse that never went soothed or repaired), we even tell our kids they’re the lucky ones, that we had it hard. So they not only feel hurt they feel guilty cause they can’t hide it well enough. So they continue to seamlessly inherit the very wounds we never named. They don’t even get an addiction to point to for a reason for why they feel crazy. This is what can happen when they are carrying the confusion, unresolved hurt that we won’t process.

Because unprocessed grief and shame don’t just evaporate. They travel, into the next generation, and sometimes the one after that, showing up as anxiety, depression, illness, relational trouble, or new addictions of their own. The wheel keeps turning.

Until we decide to do our own work. This is why I have written Growing Up with Addiction. To parce these issues out chapter by chapter and to light up an off ramp. To give you a torch to hold in your hand as you dare to explore your own shadow and make real what Rumi says, “the wound is where the light enters”.

https://www.amazon.com/Growing-Up-Addiction-Children-Codependency/dp/1649634242?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Role Reversal Letter Writing: Click to watch this video.

I have been working with attachment trauma since before we had a name for it. When I began, I found that if I asked clients questions about what happened to them so I could better understand how to help them, their recollections were often foggy and indistinct. They felt inept, like they were incapable of remembering the details of their own life, like they were flunking therapy. I wanted to help them in a way that felt non-pathologizing, that let them be in the driver’s seat, that respected them. And in truth, there were my own moments of feeling like I was flunking being a therapist, that I just didn’t know the right things to ask.

This was decades ago and we have learned a lot since then, for example that words actually don’t make sense to someone who was locked in a fight, flight, freeze, fawn response because those very mechanisms shut thinking down in favor of self preservation. Terror calls for a quick response whether it is a truck coming at you or a parent’s waving arm. And children are so little compared to their parents, so their terror is real. If those emotions don’t get processed and understood so that calm and reason can be restored to the relationships, kids compartmentalize them, they develop hidden pockets of fear that they don’t know are there, that they carry into adulthood where they too often burst out at the wrong person, in the wrong place and at the wrong time. I have spent the last forty years learning how to work with this kind of frozen pain and to use it as a path to growth, so that we can risk loving and being close to ourselves and others once again.

Locating the Attachment Wound in Time and Place: The Birth of the Trauma Timeline

So I began inviting my clients to divide the long side of a paper into a timeline with five-year intervals, from birth to the present. I would say, “Jot down the moments when you froze or shut down or dissociated to try to get away from situations that felt too painful to stay in.” They began writing, they knew, they remembered, and as they remembered they filled in more. The simplicity of the exercise, and the act of writing down moments where something happened that still carried a charge for them, opened a door inside of them. I called this The Trauma Timeline, or The Attachment Trauma Timeline, and it became one of my RTR model’s foundational interventions (see relationaltraumarepair.com).

This timeline allowed clients to embody rather than describe moments where they lost connection with themselves.

The Resilience Timeline: Learning to Think, Hope and Dream Again

But the attachment trauma timeline, I realized, wasn’t enough. Over the years I saw too many people get stuck in the wound, stuck in the blame, stuck in the transference. Resilience was becoming a topic in the 1980s, and it became obvious to me that people needed to learn to see their trauma within some sort of frame so that it didn’t spill into their lives as their full identity. Because I do program development for treatment centers, I had to create what today we call interventions, that could be easily learned by therapists and had the same results over and over again. These timelines proved to be just that. I started asking, “What strengths did you build along the way, through facing and overcoming challenges? What great choices did you make that allowed you to start on a different path? Who was there to lighten your load? Write those into a new timeline”. What I called The Resilience Timeline became a concrete way for clients to claim their own strengths and to see that they weren’t as alone as they felt, that others were there. They could simply share what they had written, write a letter or do a short empty chair role-play and thank those people, or themselves for showing up.

This timeline matters clinically for a reason that’s easy to underestimate: resilience research consistently shows that the presence of even one stable, attuned figure substantially buffers the developmental impact of an otherwise difficult childhood. It is that one relationship that can make all the difference in a child’s life. Because your nervous system did not only learn danger. It also has evidence, stored somewhere, of safety, of being seen, of a different way relationship could feel. In my work I have observed that everyone has an innocent core that operated on a different plane, as a kind of constant. Capturing and experiencing this innocence, strength, and resilience is just as important as processing the pain.

Letter Writing: Three Letters That Let You Close the Trauma Loop

Letter writing is such a successful exercise for processing deep emotion, it has now become a well-documented therapeutic mechanism on its own, but it began with psychodrama. Moreno, the creator of psychodrama, introduced it, calling it a “near-psychodramatic technique,” pointing out that it was a role-based exercise involving two roles, the sender and the receiver. Decades of research on expressive writing, beginning with James Pennebaker’s foundational studies on journaling, have found that structured writing about emotionally significant experiences produces measurable improvements in psychological and physical health, including meaningful reductions in post-traumatic stress symptoms (Pennebaker, 1997; Pennebaker & Beall, 1986; van Emmerik et al., 2013).

Interestingly, Pennebaker’s earliest research found that writing about the facts of a difficult experience without engaging the feelings connected with it, produced no benefit. The healing is in the emotional processing, not the reporting(Pennebaker & Beall, 1986). When I spoke with James about this, he said it took surprisingly little time, journaling for ten minutes or so, letting feelings surface and simply witnessing them, was significantly healing. Then coming back and doing it again seems to offer more change than using only long sessions. What letter writing gives us, is a safe space to see what we might be carrying; it underscores that we don’t just want to be seen and heard by others, we want to be seen and heard by ourselves. It lets us process what we’re carrying inwardly, rather than releasing it at the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Try writing three letters

First write a letter to an attachment figure (maybe your parent) or to your inner child. Choose an age, a moment, a period of time from your attachment trauma timeline at any point along your development. Say what you needed to say then but couldn’t at that time; let the child in you have a voice.

The second letter is to yourself, a resilience building letter recognizing the strengths you built along the way by meeting the challenges of your life, or the letter you write to someone who was there for you, whether it be your neighbor, grandparent, relative, or pet. A letter thanking that person, or part of yourself, for meeting the moment with courage and willingness.

The third letter is the one you wish you could receive. This is where you’re inhabiting the voice that has something to give you, where you become your own, best friend and cheer-leader rather than critic. It might come from your inner child, thanking you for showing the strength it took to get here, or for finally reconnecting with them.

Or it might be from someone else, the attachment figure, or whoever the first letter was addressed to, acknowledging what they did, and apologizing for it. You are not claiming the actual person would ever write this to you. You’re giving your own psyche the words it has been waiting to hear, because sometimes the nervous system needs to receive something, even something it constructs for itself, before it can fully release the waiting. This I call role reversal letter-writing and I have added a video of how moving this exercise can be. Role Reversal Letter Writing: Click to watch this video.

These letters are never to be sent. Their function is internal: structured emotional processing, given enough specificity and feeling to actually move something (Pennebaker, 1997).

Coming Back Into Balance: Breath, Regulation, and Release

Now give yourself a moment to be with the inner shift, maybe slow your breath: in for a count of four, a brief hold, out for a count of six to eight, the exhale longer than the inhale. This is one of the most reliable ways to shift the autonomic nervous system out of sympathetic activation and toward a calmer, more regulated state and a good think to have in your tool box! Let your attention settle in your body, feet on the floor, weight in the chair, the actual temperature of the air. Notice anything that wants to move: a held breath finally let go, tears, a sigh, even just the urge to stretch. This is often the literal, physical signature of an old defensive response finally completing itself, the discharge Levine describes as the missing piece in trauma that talk alone never resolves (Levine, 1997). Just let it happen, if tears come, let them, if your body wants to shiver, let it. Just feel and heal.

You don’t have to figure out what it all means in the moment. Let whatever is ready to release, release, and trust that the rest will keep working in you on its own time.

If you would like more about this and other exercises and issues related to relational trauma, cPTSD or ACA issues, check out my recent book Growing Up with Addiction (or parental dysfunction of any kind).

Good Morning or good evening depending on where you are…..I thought I’d do an exercise today……as much as I write books….the work that I do is psychodrama and relational trauma repair (RTR). I work with people experientially …..

So Before the phone. Before too much social media or email. Maybe alongside tea or coffee. Or maybe before you turn in for the evening….

Take a pause….one or a few slow breaths, and observe: Where is my mood right now?

Use my Mood Meter to check into how much or how little of any particular feeling you are experiencing. Then mentally answer or journal….what percent of this feeling am I experiencing right now? If this feeling had a color, what would it be? If it had a shape what would it be? If it had a sound, a scent, a texture what would they be? If this feeling could talk what would it say at this particular percent…..does the percent change as you explore? .

Try to resist the urge to fix your feeling, simply be with it…..allow it to in a sense flower before your mind’s eye, own it.

Breathe into it. Where in your body are you feeling this at the moment. Place your hand there. If your feeling had a voice, what would it say?

Next shift your location slightly and sit beside your feelings instead of inside it.

Feelings have movement built into them, they make us want to do something. Let your feeling move into an action in your mind’s eye. Watch your movement the way you’d watch a stream as it flows by you…appearing, passing through, shifting.

Healing or shifting your inner state is a gradual process……It shows up in small things: a softer shoulder, a looser jaw, a relaxed gut….a slightly deeper breath. Welcome each one.

Often, emotions aren’t trying to stay — they’re trying to be heard…to be seen….to be felt rather than ignored, dismissed or over-managed. Once they know you’ve noticed them, they tend to spread out….to relax…they move through you…..let them.

Every time you notice, accept, and breathe with a feeling, when you can be with it instead of push against it…..you teach your nervous system something important: emotions aren’t permanent residents. They rise, they fall, they move, they shift…..

Awareness is where choice begins.

Breathe in and out easily and completely without a pause between inhalation and exhalation and relax……let your inner world soften and expand as you witness it…..be a friend to yourself…..to your inner being…….

Enjoy your day today…….

I coined the expression “trauma transference” in my book Trauma and Addiction in 2004, to explain a particularly sticky form of transference that I see happening when for example, we get locked into seeing our spouse as our drunk or abusive parent. The child in us gets triggered, we feel trapped and helpless the way we felt as a kid, we see the person triggering us through the lens of the parent that hurt us. And because our perception is narrowed because of our rage state, we drag our past into our present but we don’t know we’re doing that. We then feel justified assigning our unresolved pain from our past onto our relationship today, we get stuck and cannot find our way back to clarity and safety. We can’t talk about what we don’t understand and have spent our life pretending wasn’t there in the first place.

I am drilling down here to unwrap some of the reasons we can’t see our way out of these moments. It is a particularly “chewy” article but I am hoping you will find it useful, do let me know. So here goes…..science et al.

I have long observed in my decades of working with clients and being an ACA related to a lot of other ACAs myself, that there is a particular kind of rage that doesn’t feel like a choice. It arrives, takes over, and then — and this is the part that confuses everyone, including the person having it — it leaves no clear memory behind. The person who exploded can’t quite say what happened. The people on the receiving end can’t quite say what happened either, except that they now know, in their bodies, never to do that again.Whatever that was.

I want to make a brain-based argument for why this happens, because I think understanding the mechanism is the only way out of the moral confusion it creates. When someone can’t remember their own rage, can’t reflect on it, can’t own it — we tend to read that as denial, as manipulation, as a character defect. Sometimes it is. But often it is also something more literal and more biological: the brain structures required for self-reflection were simply not online while the behavior was happening. While, in other words, when our spouse was raging, they were locked in an unconscious replaying the past in the present.

I should say plainly what kind of argument this is before I make it. Every individual piece of brain science below comes from real, peer-reviewed research — the amygdala studies, the memory studies, the conditioning studies are not in dispute. My reflection is the chain I’ve built connecting them, and the term I’ve coined to name what the chain adds up to. No one has run a study on “trauma transference” by that name, because I’m the one naming it here. What follows is a clinical synthesis, built from decades in the consulting room and grounded, line by line, in established research — not a settled finding waiting to be cited back to me. I think it’s right, or close to it. I also think a good theory should be offered the way I’m offering this one: with its sources visible, so you can see exactly where the established science ends and where my own clinical reasoning picks up the thread.

The hijack: when the alarm system takes the wheel

Almost everything we sense, first passes through the thalamus, a structure sitting deep in the middle of the brain. Its job is closer to a switchboard operator than a decision-maker: it routes raw sensory signals onward, and from there, the signal can travel two different routes at once.

The first route is what neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux named the “low road” (LeDoux, 1996): a direct projection from the thalamus straight into the amygdala, skipping the cortex entirely. Because the path is short and structurally simple, it’s extremely fast — a threat signal can reach the amygdala in roughly 12 milliseconds. The cost is precision. LeDoux called this route “quick and dirty”: the thalamus hands the amygdala only a crude sketch of what’s out there — something large, fast, sudden, loud — not a refined picture. That crude sketch is enough for the amygdala to sound the alarm and start mobilizing the body, releasing cortisol and adrenaline, raising heart rate, tensing muscle, before the rest of the brain has any real idea what’s happening. It’s the reason you flinch at a shape on the ground before you consciously know whether it’s a snake or a stick.

The second route is what LeDoux called the “high road,” and it’s worth being precise about what that actually means, because it’s often misunderstood as a direct route to the prefrontal cortex. It isn’t. The high road runs from the thalamus up to the sensory cortex — the region that processes whatever sense is involved, visual cortex for what’s seen, auditory cortex for what’s heard — where the same raw signal gets built out into an accurate, detailed picture: actual shapes, actual tone of voice, actual context (LeDoux, 1996). Only after that fuller picture is assembled does the cortex send it down to the amygdala. This route takes longer, something like 20 to 25 milliseconds more than the low road, but what it delivers is accurate. It’s the difference between “something large and fast” and “that’s just a delivery truck.”

The prefrontal cortex is doing something related to this, but distinct from it, and the distinction matters for understanding rage. Rather than building the initial sensory picture, the prefrontal cortex — particularly its ventromedial and orbitofrontal regions — sends regulatory signals back down to the amygdala once some appraisal of the situation has occurred. Anatomical research has found that these prefrontal projections into the amygdala terminate largely on inhibitory interneurons there, which is a structural way of saying: the prefrontal cortex’s job, wired into the brain itself, is to put a brake on what the amygdala does next (Banks et al., 2007). Brain imaging consistently shows this relationship as an inverse one. When the prefrontal cortex activates more strongly during deliberate emotional regulation, amygdala activity measurably drops. And the reverse holds too: when the amygdala is highly activated, prefrontal engagement is reduced — weakening the very brake that’s needed most in that moment (Banks et al., 2007). I think this is key to understanding why, when and where we get stuck. Section #1 allows us to own our own reaction, modulate it and reflect on our behavior. Scenario #2 gets us stuck in our overreaction, we disown it as our own and project the feelings that have no name and no story line onto the other person. We assign the pain inside of us onto another person, place or thing and we can’t step back or understand ourselves in the moment. We see someone else as the cause of all the pain we’re in and we see the solution there as well, “If only the could change, I would be OK”.

So the fuller picture has three parts, not two. The low road gets the alarm ringing before there’s any real information to justify it. The high road, in LeDoux’s original sense, arrives slightly later with an accurate read of what’s actually there. And the prefrontal cortex sits a layer above both of these, acting as the brake that can either confirm a threat is real and worth escalating, or recognize it as a false alarm or see it as an over reaction that may be partly justified but needs to be dialed back and dampen the amygdala’s response back down — but only if it has the bandwidth left to do so. And bandwidth, as it turns out, is exactly what high arousal takes away first.

This pattern shows up clearly in studies of people prone to reactive aggression. Functional imaging research comparing violent offenders to non-offender controls found that when participants were provoked to anger, connectivity between the amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex — the region responsible for regulating emotional responses — broke down (da Cunha-Bang et al., 2017). The combination of heightened emotional reactivity and a prefrontal cortex that has essentially gone offline is, researchers note, exactly the condition under which behavior can spiral out of control. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex in particular appears to function as a brake on anger and aggression; when that brake is unavailable, there’s nothing left to apply it (Mancke et al., 2022).

This is the neurological reality underneath what’s often called an amygdala hijack, a term Daniel Goleman introduced (Goleman, 1995) and which has since been studied extensively. It is not a metaphor. It describes a real, measurable state in which the parts of the brain responsible for self-awareness, impulse control, and moral reasoning are not merely overridden — they are *suppressed*.

Tunnel vision: the brain narrows what it can even see

There’s a second, related piece of brain science that matters enormously here, and it’s one I think gets less attention than the amygdala story: what happens to attention itself during a rage state.

In 1959, psychologist James Easterbrook proposed what’s become known as the cue-utilization hypothesis: as emotional arousal rises, the range of information a person can take in narrows (Easterbrook, 1959). Attention collapses onto whatever feels most central or threatening, and everything peripheral — including, crucially, the other person’s face, their fear, their attempt to de-escalate, their actual words — drops out of the available field. This isn’t a failure of willpower. It’s a feature of how an aroused nervous system allocates limited processing resources. At high enough arousal, the cue-utilization range narrows so far that a person is, quite literally, no longer able to perceive most of what’s happening around them. And this is key to understanding why we get locked in a trauma transference. This is why someone in the grip of unconscious rage often cannot, even hours later, reconstruct what they said, how their voice sounded, or what their face looked like to the people watching it happen. They were not strategically ignoring it. Their available bandwidth for taking in information had been narrowed by their own physiology to almost nothing beyond the perceived threat itself.

Why there’s often no memory to return to

This is where the third piece of the puzzle comes in, and it’s the one that explains why people who rage so often cannot own what they did — not because they refuse to, but because there may genuinely be very little encoded memory to recall.

Memory researchers have long studied what’s called state-dependent memory: the principle that what gets encoded during one physiological or emotional state is often difficult to retrieve in a different state (Hermans et al., 2018). When the nervous system is in a flooded, dysregulated state — high arousal, suppressed prefrontal function, narrowed attention — the conditions for encoding a clear, integrated, narrative memory are poor. Some clinical researchers connect this directly to dissociative processes: under overwhelming stress, the brain can fail to integrate an experience into ordinary autobiographical memory at all, producing what’s recognized clinically as dissociative amnesia (Hermans et al., 2018).

This doesn’t mean every person who rages and then “doesn’t remember” is dissociating in a clinical sense. But the underlying mechanism — a nervous system so flooded that it never properly encodes what it’s doing — is the same mechanism, on a continuum. The rage state and the reflective, remorseful, accountable state are, neurologically, almost two different rooms. And if the memory was encoded poorly in the first room, it may simply not be available for retrieval once the person walks into the second one.

This is the cruelest part of the pattern, and I think it deserves to be named honestly: a person can do real damage to the people they love and, afterward, in their calmer state, have something close to the truth when they say *I don’t really remember it like that.* The lack of memory isn’t always a lie. It can be a faithful report of a brain that was not building memory the normal way while it was busy reacting to a threat that, by then, may have had almost nothing to do with the actual situation in front of them.

Where it comes from: rage as old material wearing a new face

This is where I want to re-introduce the term I use for this phenomenon: “trauma transference.”

What I mean by this is something more specific than ordinary anger. It’s the unconscious displacement of old, unresolved relational injury onto a present-day person or moment that merely resembles, in some emotionally coded way, the original wound. The spouse’s raised voice becomes the parent’s rage. A child’s ordinary defiance becomes an old, unbearable feeling of powerlessness. The nervous system doesn’t experience this as “an old memory is intruding.” It experiences the present moment as if it were the original threat, with the full force the original threat required — because, neurologically, the amygdala doesn’t reliably distinguish past danger from present resemblance. It responds to pattern, not to chronology. So this is how our unprocessed, childhood attachment wounds can get acted out in our current relationships but we don’t know that’s what is happening.

This is why the rage so often feels disproportionate to whoever’s standing in the room receiving it. It is disproportionate — inside of them. It is not disproportionate to whatever it’s actually about, which the conscious mind has no access to in the moment. In other words, the “inner child” may have a right to this level of rage from their accumulated relational trauma or parental abuse. But they are acting it out with the wrong person, at the wrong place and at the wrong time.

Trauma transference is what happens when an old wound takes over a current relationship without ever announcing itself as old. It hijacks the prefrontal cortex along the way, which means the person enacting it has no real-time capacity to notice, narrate, or interrupt what’s happening — and afterward, no clean memory to examine, learn from, or take responsibility for in the way we usually mean when we ask someone to “own their behavior.”

When the trigger is a parent who could not be predicted: Adult Children of Addicts

There’s a specific version of trauma transference I want to name on its own, because I see it constantly in adult children of alcoholics, and I think it deserves to be understood as its own pattern rather than a generic variant of childhood trauma.

A child raised by an alcoholic parent doesn’t form one internal picture of that parent. They form at least two, and the two can be strikingly discontinuous — sober and drunk can look, sound, and feel like different people occupying the same body, what clinicians have long described as a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde split in the household (Project Courage, 2026). Because of state-dependent memory, the drunk-parent material tends to get encoded under a specific physiological signature — fear, helplessness, the held breath of waiting to see which parent walked through the door — that ordinary, calm conditions don’t easily reopen. The sober-parent memory and the drunk-parent memory aren’t well integrated into one continuous narrative of “who my parent is.” They sit in separate, state-bound compartments, and the compartment holding the drunk parent is the one wired directly to threat.

For a small child, fight is dangerous and flight is usually impossible, which leaves freeze as the only available option (Walker, 2013). Freeze is not passive. In polyvagal terms, it’s a hybrid state — sympathetic mobilization paired with dorsal vagal shutdown — meaning the body is fully activated for defense with nowhere for that activation to go (Porges, 2011). Levine’s work on trauma describes exactly this: when a defensive response is mobilized but can’t complete itself, the energy doesn’t simply dissipate. It stays held in the nervous system, looking for a future moment of completion (Levine, 1997). For a client who froze repeatedly in front of a drunk mother, the rage he can’t access toward his wife may be that old, interrupted defense finally finding an outlet — except the outlet has less to do with his wife than the mother who repeatedly wounded him and because he could not release his hurt and rage at his mother, it became compartmentalized and comes out at his wife. It has everything to do with a fight that was never possible to have at the time it was needed.

This is also, I think, part of why the rage lands specifically on a spouse and not on a coworker or a stranger. Attachment relationships recreate the original conditions of dependency and vulnerability, and the amygdala matches by felt pattern, not by literal resemblance or by chronology, as we covered above. A spouse doesn’t have to resemble the drunk parent in any visible way. She only has to occupy, in some relational sense, the position of someone he depends on who has suddenly become unpredictable — and that’s enough to retrieve the old state and discharge the old defense.

The second presentation you describe — a client who appears to have married his mother’s drunk persona — points to a related but distinct mechanism: repetition compulsion, the unconscious drive to recreate an unresolved early dynamic in present-day relationships (Freud, 1920/1955; Levine, 1997). One reading is that some part of him is still seeking mastery: a chance, this time, to finally be loved correctly, to fix what couldn’t be fixed, by a figure who occupies the emotional position the original parent held. Unpredictability itself can also feel familiar, and that familiarity can feel in a weird way safe, even though it is profoundly triggering. This isn’t a flaw unique to him; it’s a well-documented pattern in adult children of alcoholics specifically, who report romantic relationship difficulties and a sense of the alcoholic parent’s dynamics intruding into adult life at notably high rates in clinical and survey research (Haverfield & Theiss, 2014). However this is precisely why relationships can be so healing, because they trigger what is unconscious inside of us. If we can step back and own an over reaction as being at least in part about us, create and get curious about our huge reaction, we can connect with that inner child within us that still is waiting to heal, wanting to tell someone how much it hurt.

Whether this is something distinct to ACAs or simply the general trauma mechanism wearing alcohol-specific clothing is worth sitting with rather than answering too quickly. The underlying machinery — state-dependent encoding, freeze, repetition compulsion, amygdala pattern-matching — isn’t unique to alcoholic homes; it shows up with any frightening, unpredictable caregiver. What may be more particular to ACAs is the sharpness of the split. Active intoxication is a discrete, recognizable on/off state, which may make it easier for a child’s nervous system to keep two separate files open — sober parent, drunk parent — rather than gradually blend them into one complicated, ambivalent picture the way other relational trauma often does over time. That distinction is consistent with the broader argument that ACA experience constitutes its own identifiable post-traumatic pattern rather than a simple subtype of family dysfunction (Dayton, 2012).

And the broader pattern does extend well past alcoholism specifically. Large-scale public health research on adverse childhood experiences has shown that the same family conditions — caregiver unpredictability, household substance use, witnessing violence between parents, physical or emotional abuse — cluster together and predict adult outcomes regardless of which specific adversity was present (Felitti et al., 1998). A parent who is unpredictably rageful but never drinks, or a parent whose volatility is purely emotional rather than substance-driven, can install the identical mechanism: state-dependent splitting of “safe parent” from “dangerous parent,” a freeze response with nowhere to discharge, and a nervous system primed to recognize unpredictability in adulthood as something closer to familiar than alarming. This is also the territory Hendrix maps in his work on unconscious partner selection: people are frequently drawn to partners who carry, in combination, both the comforting and the wounding qualities of their original caregivers, in what he calls an unconscious search to finally resolve childhood’s unfinished business through someone new (Hendrix & Hunt, 2007). Alcoholism gives this mechanism an especially sharp, visible toggle switch — drunk or sober — but the same wiring is available to anyone whose childhood depended on managing an adult whose mood they could not predict or control.This is cPTSD, when complex attachment trauma from childhood shows up in our attachment relationships as adults.

The cost to everyone else in the room

I don’t think this argument is complete, though, if it stops at explaining the rager’s experience. The brain science also explains something about what happens to everyone around them — and this is the part that tends to get lost when we focus only on understanding the person who exploded.

Fear conditioning doesn’t require many repetitions to take hold, and it doesn’t require direct harm to the person being conditioned. Research on family fear transmission has shown that children can acquire conditioned fear responses simply from witnessing a parent’s fear, without ever experiencing the frightening stimulus directly themselves — the nervous system updates its threat map vicariously, not only through direct experience (Pittig et al., 2021). A handful of rage episodes is more than enough to teach a family’s collective nervous system where the danger lives. This is how children around rage become traumatized themselves, it is the trauma of being a witness to a sibling or another parent being abused. And it is serious.

Because once that conditioning is in place, something insidious happens: the family doesn’t need the rage to actually occur anymore in order to organize around it. Foundational research on uncontrollable, unpredictable aversive experiences has found that what produces the deepest helplessness isn’t the intensity of the stressor — it’s the unpredictability and lack of control over when it will happen (Seligman & Maier, 1967; Maier & Seligman, 2016). A family living with someone whose rage is unconsciously triggered, rather than rationally provoked, is living inside exactly that condition: there is no reliable behavioral rule that prevents the explosion, because the trigger isn’t really about anything they did. So everyone learns the only strategy that ever partially works — get small, get quiet, scan constantly for mood, never be the variable that tips the balance. Become hypervigilatd, don’t let your guard down.

This is why a suggestion of rage becomes as powerful as rage itself. Once a nervous system has been conditioned by even a few real episodes, a darkening tone of voice, a particular silence, a certain look, a tightening of the ragers muscles, their leaning forward and raising their voice can be enough to trigger the same shutdown response the original rage produced. The family doesn’t need ongoing punishment to remain compliant. They need only the possibility of it, held in memory, to keep behaving as if it were always imminent.

And this is precisely what gives the unconsciously raging person so much unearned power. They don’t have to be raging to control the emotional weather of the household. They only have to be capable of it, and known to be capable of it, for everyone around them to keep organizing their own behavior around not poking the bear. The rager experiences this, often genuinely, as a fairly peaceful household. They may not see what it costs those around them to maintain that peace, because the cost is being paid by people who have learned not to show it.

Why this is so hard to undo

This is, I think, the heart of why trauma transference is so difficult to interrupt, both for the person enacting it and for the family living inside it.

The person raging cannot easily access what’s happening because the very brain systems required to notice it — sustained attention, autobiographical memory, prefrontal self-monitoring — are the ones being suppressed at the moment it’s occurring. They are, in a very literal sense, the last to know. And because the memory often wasn’t encoded clearly in the first place, there’s frequently nothing solid to return to afterward except a vague unease, easily talked out of, easily minimized, easily blamed on something external — the traffic, the stress, what the other person “started.”

Meanwhile, the people around them have been conditioned by a process that doesn’t require their conscious consent either. Nobody decides to become hypervigilant. The nervous system does that on its own, efficiently, after a small number of unpredictable, uncontrollable episodes, and it does not undo itself just because the person says “I’m sorry” or even means it.

So you end up with two unconscious processes locking together: one person who cannot remember or own what their nervous system did, and a family whose nervous systems have learned, without anyone agreeing to it, never to test what might happen if they don’t comply. Both halves of that system are running mostly below awareness. That is what makes trauma transference so durable, and so hard to name from inside it — not because anyone is lying, but because the very mechanism that would be required to see it clearly is the one part of the system rage takes offline first.

Why I’m calling it something new

I want to be precise about why I feel trauma transference earns its own name rather than simply borrowing one already in use, because the field already has several terms that sit close to this territory, and I don’t want to blur into them.

Classical transference, in its original psychoanalytic sense, describes the displacement of feelings about an early figure onto a present one, in treatment it may be a transference onto the therapist, and it usually unfolds gradually enough that both parties can eventually see and name it. Trauma transference, as I’m using it here, is faster, more total, and far less available to conscious inspection while it’s happening, because it isn’t simply displaced feeling — it’s a rage state that has measurably suppressed the very brain regions a person would need to notice the displacement in real time. Repetition compulsion, Freud’s term and Levine’s after him, names the unconscious drive to recreate an old dynamic, and it does real work in explaining why someone might marry into a familiar danger. But it describes the seeking, not the firing. It doesn’t, on its own, explain why the person doing the recreating so often cannot recall their own behavior inside it. Trauma bonding describes something closer to the experience of the person on the receiving end — why it’s so hard to leave, why cruelty and tenderness create an unusually sticky attachment. That’s a real and important piece of this picture, but it describes the bond, not the neurological event that produces the behavior the bond forms around.

Trauma transference is meant to sit underneath all three: it’s the specific, brain-level mechanism by which an old wound seizes a present relationship with enough force to suppress the rager’s memory and self-awareness, while simultaneously conditioning everyone nearby into the silence and compliance that allow it to continue, in addiction circles this can even be seen as an “enabling” behavior, in mental health it can partially describe who people remain married to spouses who abuse them. I hope to add to the conversation around transference, repetition compulsion, and trauma bonding. I think the trauma transference helps to name the engine room that either combusts the behavior or keeps it in motion.

If any part of this resonates with your own family history, it’s worth saying plainly: understanding the mechanism does not excuse the impact, and it isn’t meant to. It’s meant to make change possible — because you can’t repair what you can’t first see clearly.

References

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Introduction

Long before there was a name for being an adult child of an alco-

holic or addict (ACA), I could feel something living inside me that

I couldn’t quite name. In my family, we called it “Dad’s alcoholism,”

but it was more than that. It wasn’t just that his drinking and abu-

sive behavior had slowly changed him, which of course, it had; it

was that his drinking had also slowly changed us.

As I grew up, I felt haunted by images and episodes, some that I

could recall with crystal clarity and others that were indistinct and

obscured. I somehow knew they belonged to my past, my family, but

that didn’t mean I didn’t feel them intruding on my present. When

these ghosts from our past got activated in one of my family mem-

bers, they seemed to get activated in all of us. These ghosts knew one

another. But they were ungovernable. It seemed they knew us, but

we didn’t really know them.

Our shared history could erupt over the most seemingly innocuous

look or comment, but because none of us knew what was happen-

ing, otherwise pleasant moments could devolve in seconds. Suddenly,

there might be silence, explosive anger, or manipulation as we vied for

control over whose version of the truth was the real one. We couldn’t

examine it together because the pain we carried so quickly turned

into blame and finger-­ pointing, each of us guarding our particular

interpretation of our mutual history as if our sanity depended upon

it. But the truth is, none of us really knew for sure who was right and

who was wrong. Our reality had been shrouded in so much denial

that it left us all guessing. It was as if the past and present were on

some sort of psychic loop in all our heads. We were equally invested

in bringing these ghosts to light and leaving them alone.

The problem was, they wouldn’t leave us alone. This is the legacy

of growing up with addiction. As children of addiction and relational

trauma, we carry that legacy in our bodies and our hearts, but it

doesn’t stay there. It becomes the fuel pump that drives dysfunc-

tion throughout life. Today, I understand this blend of physiological,

emotional, and behavioral dysregulation as part of a complex post-traumatic

stress reaction. So often, as ACAs, we overfocus on one

trauma to pin a lifetime of big and small hurts on. We look for the

causative event or dramatic rupture, and in that searching, we miss

the pattern of pervasive injuries resulting from the slow erosion of

safety, trust, and connection. Unpacking these patterns is what this

book is about.

My father was an alcoholic, and I was the child closest to him. I

loved him, and most of the time, I knew how to reach him. “You’re

just so good with him, Tiannie. Go and see what you can do” was

the general request—­ at first just from my mother, then eventually

from everyone. So by the time I was five or so, I was the child sent in

to talk my father out of leaving the house in a drunken rage, to get

him to come to dinner, or to calm him down after he’d thrown a fit

at the hotel front desk because he didn’t like our accommodations.

I’d be on the sidelines in the lobby, protected in public, but once we

were all settled in our newly assigned resplendent rooms, I would

do my part again to soothe Dad’s mood. I had no understanding

that the scotch in his hand was the real mood soother. I thought it

was all me. I thought I was just “so good at my job.” And when the

alcohol wasn’t available, I wasn’t so good at it, and I worried.

At first, I was directly sent in to do this job. But eventually, I didn’t

need to be asked; I just knew. This assumed responsibility stayed

with me throughout my life, forever tethering me to my father in

ways that felt both like deep love and devotion and an unfair bur-

den. I was the twenty-­ three-­ year-­ old child who stayed with him

through eleven gruesome days in the ICU, as one by one his organs

gave way—­ his lungs from smoking, his liver from drinking, his throat

from esophageal cancer. I was the child who was there when he

finally passed. The one who closed his eyes. The one who spoke to

the doctors, picked out the casket, and said goodbye to the precious

man I loved so much, a man who had killed himself by inches. And

no one else seemed to think that was odd, because by then it was just

my job. He was just my job.

All throughout those sleepless days and nights, a nursery rhyme

kept looping in my head:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

In some barely conscious way, I felt I had failed in my most

important job: keeping my father alive. Getting him sober.

Your story may be different, or it may be stunningly similar. It

might not involve an addicted parent at all, but it very well might

involve addiction in a grandparent or other family member. Maybe

you grew up with a parent who suffered from mental illness or

a traumatic injury. Perhaps they were emotionally unpredict-

able or dealing with a serious process addiction (like overeating,

overspending, gambling, or sexual addiction) that changed your

family functioning. Any of these scenarios can lead to complex

post-­ traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD) and codependency, which

is ultimately what I faced in the aftermath of my father’s addiction

and death. If you can relate to growing up in a family that seesawed

between emotional extremes, like intense closeness alternating

with feelings of emotional alienation, you’ll likely recognize your-

self in these pages. Because at its heart, these chapters are each

about the lasting impact of childhood relational trauma, the confu-

sion and dysregulation it leaves behind.

I’ve written this book after fifty years of marriage to an adult

child of an addict and forty years of working in the field of addic-

tions. Over that time, I’ve come to understand—­ both personally

and professionally—­ what it means to have grown up around my

father’s alcohol, smoking, and sexual addictions and the deep

damage they inflicted on our family. I’ve also spent decades wit-

nessing how addiction and dysfunction have shaped the lives of

Introduction 3my clients and what it takes to truly break free from that legacy.

Today, we have the gift of greater awareness, better research, and

a rising emotional literacy that my generation was only beginning

to glimpse. With more openness, language, and support available,

healing can now be more direct and more compassionate. I wrote

Growing Up with Addiction to help make your journey out of that

legacy a little smoother."So good at my job".

Click here to watch: Food Addiction: How We Use Food to Shift Our Internal State

Hello Friends and Colleagues,

This is a podcast I did on the Friendly Berlin Circle with Dr. Aimie Apigian author of The Biology of Trauma. The episode speaks for itself. It grew out of a podcast I did with Tami Simon where she interviewed me about my recent book Growing Up with Addiction. She asked a great question…. “What about growing up with a parent’s disordered eating?” I find this whole approach to thinking about disordered eating fascinating, because we talk about the impact it has on children. On the family. We often refer to traits or trauma becoming intergenerational…..but let’s face it, everything is intergenerational…..heart to heart, hand to hand. Who we are speaks louder than what we say……have a listen. I have excerpted a chapter below from my book to fill out the subject a bit more for you.

Process Addictions

When we can’t manage what is activating us, we want to make it go away, to medicate it, to get the uncomfortable sensations in our bodies and feelings that erupt from them to stop! And that’s where process addictions come in.

Simply put, process addictions are the hiding places for unprocessed pain. They are the seemingly ordinary, everyday, repeated behaviors or habits that we use compulsively to numb pain that is slowly becoming big on the inside. If it had a voice, our unprocessed anxiety or pain might say, “This feels like too much for me to manage. I want relief from what’s going on inside of me, and I know how to get it.” The arm that automatically reaches out for something sugary or starchy, the body that can’t stop exercising, the shopper who can’t say, “Maybe another time”—all are looking (frantically) for temporary relief from feelings that they believe they can’t manage on their own. What makes process addictions so insidious is how easily they weave themselves into the fabric of daily life, masquerading as habits or even personality traits.

How Process Addictions Come to Have a Life of Their Own

We often assume that addiction is about chasing pleasure—the high, the buzz, the relief. But neuroscience tells a more nuanced story.

But according to the work of Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson, dopamine—the brain chemical long thought to signal pleasure—isn’t only about liking; it’s also about wanting. Neuroscience has discovered something counterintuitive but crucial: dopamine doesn’t actually surge when we get the reward; it surges when we anticipate it. This means the brain isn’t fixated on the substance or behavior because it feels good—it’s fixated because it once did and we think it will again. The anticipation itself, the promise of relief or pleasure, can feel intoxicating—like a kind of dry high.

But once you overeat, or engage in an affair, or overbuy, shame and regret kick in pretty fast. So it’s the memory of that early feel-good experience that happens on the first few bites, or as you make plans to hook up, engage in sex, or go shopping that lights up the reward circuitry. And the surrounding cues also get wired in—a bar stool, a smell, paraphernalia, lighting up a cigarette or joint, being hearted on social media or the ding of a phone or slot machine—become magnetic. So we start to crave the cue, the promise, not even the reward itself.

You might find yourself going back to the gym for a second workout, even when your body is aching and exhausted. Or staying up past midnight to get to the next level of a video game or clicking “add to cart,” knowing full well that the rush will fade by morning. Or returning again and again to a relationship or even relational dynamics that leave you raw and unraveling. And somewhere inside, you’re asking yourself the same question: Why do I keep doing this, even when it makes me feel bad later or doesn’t even make me feel that good for long?

This is the painful, confusing loop of a process addiction—when the thing you feel compelled to do isn’t a substance, but a behavior that promises relief. Shopping, restricting food, bingeing, working, scrolling, exercising, gambling, seeking sex or attention—these aren’t inherently harmful. In fact, they often start as coping tools, or even sources of strength or resilience. But when you start to feel like you can’t not do them—when stopping floods you with anxiety, shame, or emptiness—you may be caught in a pattern that’s bigger than willpower.

That little thrill you feel right before you check your phone, walk into a store, or step on the scale? That’s the dry high in action—your brain lighting up in response to a cue it’s learned to associate with relief, reward, or escape. Over time, the brain tags these cues as intensely desirable—even if the reward itself is disappointing or short-lived. We start chasing the cue, not the outcome. This is called incentive salience, a neuroscience term describing how the brain assigns motivational importance, the “wanting,” to certain cues or experiences. It’s the process by which something neutral or ordinary (a sight, sound, smell, or thought) becomes powerfully attention-grabbing and emotionally charged because it has been linked to reward or relief in the past.

But there’s another layer: the more you repeat the behavior, the more the brain adjusts. It adapts by downregulating, dulling your dopamine receptors and releasing less dopamine in response to the same cue. This means the behavior that once felt thrilling now barely registers. And yet, you may feel even more compelled to do it, just to feel something or to give you relief from an emotion that you don’t want to experience. It becomes less about seeking pleasure and more about avoiding anxiety or emptiness. What once gave you a lift now just helps you not fall apart.

That’s what makes process addictions so hard to spot—and even harder to explain. There’s no chemical dependency in the usual sense. Often, there’s no dramatic “bottom.” On the outside, you might look great. People might even praise you for your discipline, your drive, your beauty. But inside, you feel stuck in a self-sabotaging loop. You keep doing the thing—working, restricting, spending, scrolling—but it doesn’t work anymore. The soothing doesn’t soothe. The thrill is gone. Yet the pull is still there.

Trauma Complicates This

Trauma complicates this. If you grew up in chaos, neglect, or emotional unpredictability, your nervous system may have adapted by looking outside yourself to calm what was happening inside. Maybe work made you feel safe. Maybe restricting food gave you a sense of control. Maybe compulsive sex carried the promise of intimate connection and shared pleasure.

And to add another layer to this cycle, just when you need relief the most, downregulation kicks in. The brain, overstimulated by the same reward loop, starts to go numb. The behavior no longer gives the high it once did—and neither does anything else. Joy, rest, intimacy . . . it all goes flat. Life loses color. The very behavior that’s draining you starts to feel like the only thing that might bring you back to life. It doesn’t. But the memory of the hit—the hope that it might—keeps you coming back.

This is the heartbreak of process addiction. That if only you had more willpower, more gratitude, more self-control, you could stop. But what you’re caught in isn’t a failure of character. It’s a loop—wired by unresolved or self-medicated pain, reinforced by brain chemistry, and powered by the very human need to feel okay inside your own skin.

Getting out of that loop doesn’t start with discipline alone.

It starts with understanding.

It starts with compassion—for the part of you that latched onto something, anything, that made the chaos quiet down.

You can begin to ask, gently:

What is this behavior trying to manage?

What part of me still calls out for safety, care, or connection?

And when you start to listen, instead of override or shame yourself, something begins to shift. You stop fighting yourself. The clouds sort of part and more clarity is visible. And this is a way to self-regulate…….you breathe through….see through….and because you are willing and capable of doing both….you learn. It’s a way to process feelings that you might have medicated that leaves you feeling more whole, not less. More alive, not depleted. You unlock your own cycle.

Common Process Addictions

Here are some of the most common process addictions I have seen over my years working with relational trauma and addiction:

• Overeating: Using food, particularly binge eating or emotional overeating, to numb distress, self-soothe, or regulate emotions rather than or in addition to physical nourishment and enjoyment.

• Food restriction and dieting: Compulsively restricting food intake, obsessing over “clean” or “healthy” eating (orthorexia), or engaging in cycles of yo yo dieting to exert control, manage anxiety, or suppress deeper emotional pain.

• Compulsive sex activities: Engaging in compulsive sexual behaviors, such as excessive pornography use, affairs, or risky encounters, to escape painful emotions or trauma.

• Workaholism: Using excessive work, long hours, or professional achievements to avoid emotional discomfort, personal struggles, or relational difficulties.

• Compulsive exercise: Exercising obsessively to regulate emotions, gain control, or numb distress, sometimes at the expense of physical well being and relationships.

• Shopping/compulsive buying: Engaging in impulsive or excessive shopping to relieve anxiety, boost mood, or fill an emotional void, often leading to financial and relational strain.

• Compulsive screen use: Excessive use of digital devices, including social media, gaming, and/or streaming, to feel good, self medicate, or avoid real life emotions, responsibilities, or social interactions.

• Compulsive gambling: Repeatedly engaging in gambling despite financial and emotional consequences; chasing dopamine highs to escape deeper pain and shame.

• Compulsive self harm: Self harm becomes a silent cry for relief. The cycle is heartbreakingly familiar: Tension builds, action is taken, and emotional release floods in, only to be followed by guilt, shame, and renewed tension.

• Compulsive risk taking: High risk behaviors provide an adrenaline rush that temporarily masks emotional pain. But as tolerance builds, the risks must grow bigger to deliver the same relief.

• Compulsive love and fantasy: Escaping into obsessive crushes or falling into cycles of infatuation and losing interest to avoid real intimacy, to cope with emotional pain, or to soothe unresolved attachment wounds. Fantasies of perfect love or obsessive infatuations offer escape routes from real vulnerability.

• Compulsive raging: Habitually using explosive anger, outbursts, or conflict to release emotional tension, suppress vulnerability, or feel temporarily powerful. Over time, rage becomes a dysfunctional form of emotional regulation, damaging relationships and increasing chronic stress.

• Compulsive hoarding and withholding: Accumulating excessive possessions and struggling to discard items because of emotional attachment, fear, or anxiety. Withholding can also manifest as compulsively keeping resources (money, love, information, or support) from others—or even from oneself—to feel in control, avoid vulnerability, or exert power in relationships. Both behaviors often stem from scarcity fears, attachment wounds, or deep insecurity.

Why They Feel So Familiar

One of the things that makes process addictions so familiar, seductive, and powerful is how they mimic the dynamics of your past. Gambling or spending, for instance, might recreate the unpredictability of living with an alcoholic or mentally ill parent. Workaholism could mirror the perfectionism you relied on to navigate a chaotic or critical household. In all cases, process addictions signal that we’re chained to something, whether it’s a feeling or a sense of closure that we can never quite attain……or emotions that we just can’t bear to face…... We can choose to self medicate…..or to pause, breathe and give ourselves time just to feel what is in us rather than act out. Here’s a tip, try not to make what you’re feeling about everyone or everything else…not that it isn’t….but just for this reflection simply observe it as it lives inside of you. Be an internal witness to the workings of your own, inner world. Be your own teacher, guru, guide or observer. You’re the only one you can really change…so start there.

I hope that you found this interesting…..I certainly did! If you want to learn more please click on this link….

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/1649634242/?bestFormat=true&k=growing%20up%20with%20addiction&ref_=nb_sb_ss_w_scx-ent-bkser_k0_1_25_de&crid=W4WMGAN9KX9O&sprefix=growing%20up%20with%20addiction#:~:text=essential%20guide%20to-,healing,-wounds%20of%20growing

It is summer, my husband and I are gardening, cleaning closets and spending time with family. It’s easier to slow down, be in nature and take deeper breaths. So I wanted to write this week about one of my favorite topics, the flow state.

There is a particular quality to certain hours. Maybe you write in your journal, go for a walk in nature, bring order to a room and when you surface, the light has shifted. More time has passed than you realized. And you feel, somehow, lighter. More coherent. More yourself. Calmer and lighter. Or you share that sacred space your child or grandchild enter when they draw a picture or play with something.

Flow is a Studied Phenomenon

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi pronounced roughly Me-high Cheek-sent-me-high, was a Hungarian-American psychologist who spent decades at the University of Chicago investigating a simple question: what actually makes life feel worth living? Not in a philosophical sense, but an observable, measurable one. What is happening in the moments people report feeling most alive?

He studied artists, athletes, surgeons, chess players, factory workers, rock climbers. What he found, again and again, is that people were describing entering a common state of consciousness he came to call flow. Flow is essentially a state when you feel completely absorbed in an activity whether playing gold, painting or cleaning a closet. And in this state the self seems to fall away, time distorts, and action feels almost effortless. In flow, people reported feeling strong, clear, in control, and unselfconscious.

“Happiness does not simply happen. It must be prepared for and cultivated by each person.”

His 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, became one of the foundational texts of positive psychology, the field he helped build alongside Martin Seligman. Its central argument was both generous and demanding: we have more agency over the quality of our inner experience than we think. What I like is how easy flow activities are to incorporate into your life. It is available to anyone who “get” it and wants to incorporate into the day or week.

What the conditions look like

Csikszentmihalyi identified what those conditions are, and they’re worth knowing because they’re practical. Flow tends to show up when:

• The challenge slightly exceeds your current comfort zone, not so hard it creates anxiety, not so easy it produces boredom. That edge is where flow lives.

• You have a clear goal, even a loose one. Direction matters.

• The activity gives you immediate feedback, the closet is finally cleaned out and organized, the put lants, the picture feels full.

• Your attention is genuinely absorbed. No phone. No divided focus. The task has all of you.

• You’re doing it for its own sake, not for an outcome or an audience, but because something in you wants to.

That last condition is one I find myself coming back to. Intrinsic motivation, doing something because it feeds you, not because it produces something is so important to add to our lives in a culture that has monetized nearly every form of personal expression or made what you “get” more important than what you experience. Flow tends to happen in the spaces where we haven’t yet turned our pleasures into performances.

What’s happening in the brain

Neuroscience has been catching up with what Csikszentmihalyi observed clinically, and the findings deepen the picture considerably. During flow, activity quiets in the brain’s default mode network — the circuitry responsible for self-referential thinking, rumination, the inner critic, that endless loop of “am I doing this right?” and “what do people think?” When that network dampens, something opens up. Attention networks engage with unusual efficiency. You are fully present and fully capable, and it doesn’t feel like effort. Researchers call this transient hypofrontality — a temporary softening of the prefrontal cortex’s self-monitoring function that lets deeper, more automatic processing take over.

Recent research has found that flow also enhances connectivity between the brain’s executive control and default mode networks — a pattern linked to improved creativity, emotional regulation, and resilience. In other words, the absorbed state isn’t just pleasant. It is genuinely restorative at a biological level.

Some doorway activities that let you enter a flow state:

One of the things I love most about Csikszentmihalyi’s work is how democratic it is. Flow doesn’t require a special setting or a special skill level. It requires engagement. Here are some of the many potential activities that can take you towards flow and the research supports all of them.

Journaling

Freewriting quiets the editor. The page absorbs the noise in your head and effortlessly integrates scattered thoughts.

Walking in nature

Soft fascination, attention held gently, without effort or agenda, the sensorial satisfaction of hearing birds and insects, feeling breezes, seeing green and moving your body..

Golf

Each shot is a complete loop: aim, execute, receive feedback, reset.

Drawing & painting

The hand knows before the mind does. Visual making and crafting is deeply absorbing and involves movement as well.

Jogging

Rhythm, breath, movement , the body finds its cadence and the mind follows.

Playing a sport

The body takes over. Decision-making becomes fluid and can feel automatic.

Cleaning & organizing

Tactile, concrete, engaging, immediately satisfying and produces a result that you can enjoy living in. Deeply underrated as a flow entry.

Playing music

Even a simple melody, strumming a guitar, demands the full present moment. It is soothing, creative, spontaneous.

Gardening

Slow, sensory, alive, in nature. Hands in the dirt, being with alive and growing and plants and flowers, smelling, seeing, being tactile and purposeful, creating something beautiful.

Woodworking

Carpenters can seem so grounded. They are creating something that takes attention, time, skill and creativity. And at the end, they have accomplished a goal.

Cleaning and organizing deserve a particular mention, because people often dismiss them as chores. But if you think about what they actually involve: a clear goal, immediate visible feedback, a task that engages your hands and eyes fully, involves movement and has a beginning, middle, and end. That’s the architecture of flow. In other words the closet you reorganize on a Saturday afternoon may be doing more for your nervous system than you realize.

Video games

And yes, video games. I am including this because we all might have observed our child or grandchild emerging calmer and boys especially, even learning some social skills if they play with friends. Research has measured flow during gameplay using EEG and physiological monitoring. Well-designed games are, structurally, near-perfect flow environments: escalating challenge, constant feedback, clear goals, full immersion. The distinction to make is the difference between intentional gaming, playing something you enjoy at a level that genuinely engages you, and the passive, compulsive scrolling that mimics engagement without producing it. One restores. The other, the compare and despair of social media depletes and rather than building social skills can lead to a sense of disappointment. I worry about this the same as you do. Playing a game together with a common goal is so different in my mind (and according to research) from looking for who and how to be and what to think on a social media that that presents a manufactured self-image that often has little to do with normal life.

Why Hobbies and Creative Interests are Medicine

There’s a reason people who have real hobbies, things they do regularly, for their own sake, that ask something of them, tend to seem like they have something real that grounds them. It’s not that knitting, journaling, scrapbooking, golf or painting makes life’s problems disappear. It’s that they create reliable islands of flow in the week, and those islands do something important. And creativity can even be a back door to working issues though or integrating emotions surrounding them and giving them a creative, imagistic language.

Flow activities give the ruminating, self-monitoring, anxiety-generating parts of the mind a genuine rest. Not the false rest of scrolling, which keeps those circuits firing, but actual neurological quiet. And when you return from that state, an hour of walking, biking or jogging, an afternoon drawing, a morning in the garden, you tend to come back clearer. More integrated. As if some background process finished running while you weren’t watching.

This is what people are really pointing to when they say they love their hobbies. It isn’t just enjoyment. It’s the feeling of having been somewhere real, somewhere that called on them fully and gave something back. Csikszentmihalyi referred to these as“optimal experiences,” and the research on their long-term effects on wellbeing, mood, and resilience is consistent and clear. They add to life, they build resilience and a general sense of well-being.

The integration effect

Here is yet another factoid of interest. We tend to think of a mental break as doing nothing, lying on the couch, zoning out, stepping away. And sometimes that’s what feels good. But flow offers another lens of what constitutes a break: a break that is also a resource for well-being. You enter scattered and emerge feeling more whole, more integrated, aware and/or relaxed. The fragments of the day, the unfinished thoughts, the ambient anxiety, the low hum of everything undone, seem to have been sorted somehow while you were “somewhere else”.

The research points to several mechanisms to explain this subtle state shift: the reset that comes from quieting the default mode network, the mood effects of dopamine and norepinephrine released during absorbed, motivated activity, and something more sort of core, the experience of acting in full alignment with your attention and your capability and resilience building, which leaves a sense of felt competence and wholeness that carries forward into the rest of the day.

Why protecting this state matters today

I know we all think a lot about the current state of affairs….or try not to think too much about it. We live in what researchers have called the distraction economy, an environment engineered to fragment our attention and keep us in a state of low-level stimulation that mimics engagement without the depth that makes it restorative. The result, at scale, is what so many people describe: tired but wired, busy but unfulfilled, moving fast but not going anywhere that feels genuine or real.

Csikszentmihalyi’s insight, developed over decades, across cultures, studying everyone from surgeons to assembly line workers to artists, was that the capacity to direct our attention is essentially the capacity to shape the quality of our inner life. Flow is not a luxury. It is not a reward for people who have their lives together. It is a basic human need, and giving it to ourselves can so easily be incorporated into normal activities like walking, cleaning, holding a baby, playing a game, setting up drawing for a child or journaling for a few moments. Flow can be free, constructive and resilience building…it’s just an easy way to build a sense of well-being into our days.

Phil Diaz, a longtime voice in the addiction field, used to paint a picture of what it looked like for families when a parent finally got sober. It went something like this:

You wait for this moment. And when it finally comes, you’re still confused.

Suddenly your parent has a whole new group of friends — people with no last names. “I’m going out with Joe M, Jean S, and Will S, see you later!” When they were drinking, at least you knew where they were. Passed out on the couch. Home. Now they’re going to places called meetings. New habits, new people, new priorities. Before, it was the using that mattered more than you. Now it’s the recovery.

Different problem. Similar feelings. You know you’re supposed to feel happy but something is still hanging around. And that something is the residue of unresolved attachment trauma.

Here is what happens in families that have lived with addiction and relational trauma in families like mine, and maybe like yours.

The disease of addiction and the long term impact of trauma doesn’t just live in the person who’s using. It lives in the whole family. The abuse that happened day to day went inside of you. So everyone needs help, everyone needs recovery. The dynamics that surround addiction and abuse live on in the habits everyone develops just to get through the day. In how you learned to adapt to dealing with people you love and call family also being people who cause you great pain and fear.

It lives in the nervous system of the child who learned, very early to attend to the needs of others while shutting her own down. To anticipate. To worry quietly about what was coming so you could head it off at the pass by anticipating another person’s needs or desires and meeting them, even at your own expense. To figure out, all in her own, little head, how to keep everyone calm so the bad thing wouldn’t happen.

When the people who are supposed to keep us safe become the source of our fear, something breaks down in ways that don’t have easy words. We stop trusting that the world is predictable and orderly. We develop hyper-vigilance, a constant low hum of readiness. Always bracing. Always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And we get so used to carrying that anxiety that we stop identifying it as anxiety.

It just feels like who we are.

So in my own family when my parents divorced and my father was no longer the center of the storm, something interesting happened. Something that took me years to understand.

Our family went looking for someone else to blame.

The fingers we once pointed at Dad, we now pointed at eachother. We were a wound looking for a culprit, someone to blame for the pain we couldn’t name. After all, weren’t we supposed to be fine now that we had surgically removed the addict? Now that he was no longer throwing our day into chaos, coming in drunk, yelling, raging?

But we weren’t fine. We just didn’t understand how growing up with addiction becomes a family disease. And how it has a pattern that takes on a life of its own. One that is just harder, much harder, to see.

Here’s why that pattern is so tricky to identify, let alone break.

Inside each of us who grew up in that kind of pain, there is an unconscious tangle of unresolved feeling. Grief that was never grieved. Fear that was never soothed or understood. Attachment wounds that never fully healed, because the people who were supposed to do the soothing were the ones causing the wound.

That pain doesn’t just sit quietly. It lives in the body. It waits. And it is always, always looking for an explanation for why it still hurts.

So when someone in our present life does something, sometimes something innocuous that shouldn’t become a huge deal, say they take a tone of voice, an attitude or even a body position that our hyper-vigilence tells us could lead to pain or a blow up, that old wound recognizes something. It gets “warmed up” or activated.

And what happens next is the part that costs us so much in our relationships: we take the full unresolved weight of everything that was never healed, everything that was never named, everything we never got to say or feel or grieve, and we place it, unconsciously, onto the person standing in front of us right now. We over-react and insist because we feel it so strongly that the person in front of us is causing all of our pain.

Therapists call this transference, we transfer pain from old relationships onto new relationships. But in families shaped by addiction and trauma, it isn’t just a clinical concept, it’s a way of life. The present person becomes the stand-in for every past wound. And then there is really no resolving the current conflict because it wasn’t only about them. It was partly (at least) about everything that came before them that never got resolved. So our current conflicts are burdened by our legacy wounds, our “old baggage” but we don’t know it. We truly think it is the person we’re with that is responsible for all of the pain we feel so we just don’t get to the real issues that still need attention. And this is how we recreate pain from the past in our relationships in the present.

The cruelest consequence is what it does to intimacy and to our parenting.

Because closeness is what triggers us. The people we love most, the relationships that matter most, are precisely the ones that reach into that old unhealed place. Our current feelings of dependency and vulnerably re-activate all of the old feelings of the child inside of us, who felt dependent and vulnerable way back when. And then we use the same strategies we used to stay safe as a kid, in our adult relationships today. And they are as immature today as they were back then.

We try to build lives that look connected but are, in some essential way, managed. Curated. Safe. Or full of conflict that we can’t find our way out of.

Then we wonder why intimacy feels so hard.

We wonder why we keep having the same fight with different people.

This is what trauma does, it dysregulates the nervous system, that elegant, exquisitely sensitive system designed to bring us back to balance after a scare. When trauma is chronic, when the chaos, confusion and hurt never really stop, the nervous system loses its way back to center. It gets stuck swinging between two poles: shutdown and high activation. Collapsed and flooded. Frozen and frantic.

Zero to ten, ten to zero, nothing in the middle, and half the time we don’t even know how we got to either end, nor how to find middle ground again.

Our thinking goes black and white. We act our feelings out or we shut them down entirely. We yell or we go silent. We cling or we disappear. We can’t think and feel at the same time, which means we can’t think about what we’re feeling. Can’t put words to it. Can’t sit across from someone saying something difficult and actually stay present, because we’re either flooded and reactive, or we’ve gone quiet and shut the door.

The emotional middle ground, that livable, breathable place where we can feel without being swept away, becomes harder and harder to find. We lack a felt sense of where it is and what it feels like.

In my book Growing Up with Addiction I use this symptom list to introduce the rest of the chapters that basically explain it in depth and offer strategies for healing it. See if you identify with any of these.

Emotional dysregulation: You may experience strong

emotional waves on a continuum from intense reactions

to emotional numbness, making it hard to sense a middle

ground.

Emotional flashbacks: You might suddenly feel flooded

with intense fear, shame, or helplessness, as if the past is

happening all over again—­ yet without a clear causative

memory to explain the reaction.

Chronic shame and guilt: A sense of guilt, shame, or self-doubt

may linger, even if you try to push it away or mask it

with achievements, analysis, or self-­ criticism.

Anxiety and hypervigilance: Your nervous system may

feel like it gets stuck on high alert, constantly scanning for

potential threats even in safe situations. This can lead to

persistent anxiety or a sense that something bad is about to

happen.

Depression and hopelessness: At times, joy or motivation

may feel out of reach, leaving you emotionally drained or

disconnected from things that once mattered to you.

Dissociation: You might feel distant from your emotions,

surroundings, or even your own body, experiencing

moments of fogginess or detachment as a way to cope.

Relational Symptoms

Trauma affects the way you connect with others, making trust,

closeness, and communication more complicated to develop and

maintain.

Trust and attachment issues: You may struggle to trust

others or maintain emotional closeness, instinctively

protecting yourself out of fear of abandonment or betrayal.

Or you might alternate between anxious clinging and

pushing away or disconnecting.

Fear of intimacy: Emotional or physical closeness may

make you anxious. Vulnerability can bring fears of rejection

or loss, or you may not know how to maintain your sense of

self while allowing another person to do the same.

Codependency: You may feel responsible for managing

others’ emotions and behaviors, believing that another person’s

well-­ being—­ or approval—­ determines your own sense of

safety. This can lead to self-­ sacrifice, people-­ pleasing, or

even attempting to control others’ choices to maintain your

own sense of stability. To avoid conflict or abandonment,

you may fawn, prioritizing agreement, self-­ erasure, or even

identity fusion over autonomy.

Relationship reenactments: You may find yourself trapped

in repeating relational dynamics that mirror childhood

trauma, unconsciously recreating familiar patterns of hurt,

control, or neglect.

Fear of abandonment: Even subtle signs of distance or

withdrawal may trigger intense anxiety and emotional pain,

making relationships feel fragile or unpredictable.

Physical Symptoms: Trauma often leaves an imprint on the body as well as the mind,

showing up in subtle and not-­ so-subtle ways.

Chronic pain or tension: Unresolved trauma can

manifest as headaches, digestive issues, muscle tension,

or pain—­ symptoms that often flare up under stress.

Sleep disturbances: Falling or staying asleep may be

challenging, with anxiety, racing thoughts, or trauma-related

nightmares disrupting rest.

Hyperarousal: When the nervous system stays on high

alert, you may feel jumpy, overly sensitive to noise or touch,

or easily overwhelmed by your environment.

Identity and Existential Symptoms

Early relational trauma can shape your sense of self, making it hard

to feel solid in who you are or what gives your life meaning.

Uncertainty about who you are: If you’ve spent years

adapting to others’ expectations, you may struggle to know

what you want or believe.

A persistent feeling of emptiness: You might carry a sense

that something is missing—­ an emotional void that feels

hard to fill.

Loss of meaning or purpose: Trauma can make it hard

to feel like your life has a steady thread running through

it, leaving you feeling detached from your inner world or

unmoored to your own history. Over time, you may lose

touch with the inner compass that once guided you.

If you identify with many of these symptoms please know that there is no reason to just live with them. This is why I wrote Growing Up with Addiction, to explain how disowned and denied pain manifests in a life, maybe in your life and passes down through the generations. I give you journaling processes to understand how it might manifest for you and I help you know what life changes you can make to turn the tide for you and your children and grandchildren. There is hope and healing everywhere if you just take the first step.

Mental Health Awareness Month — May 2026

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Most of us picture addiction a certain way. The falling-down drunk. The needle. The obvious, undeniable, impossible-to-miss rabbit hole an addict sails down. And sometimes it does look like that. But more often, far more often than we talk about, it doesn’t.

More often, it just confusing. There is quiet disappearing of the person you thought you knew, to whom you mattered because they still matter to you. In a friend, the long swaths of time when you just don’t manage to get together, the constant excuses, the questioning of yourself.

Addiction can creep in at the edges. It can show up as a gradual dimming, a slow rearranging of priorities, a person becoming less and less available to the life they’re supposedly living. The people who care about them notice something is off long before they can name what it is. They just know that something has shifted. That the person in front of them is somehow not quite there the way they used to be.

Friends or relatives drop ball, stop returning phone calls as often, decide not to get together at the last minute, start texting instead of talking…..there are longer and longer gaps between communications until you kind of drop out too because it feels like rejection. And if they aren’t giving anything back you don’t want to be the one constantly keeping things going, so relationships begin to unravel in small, almost imperceptible ways. A vague and growing sense of hurt and disappointment replace a sense of building and enjoying.

This is what I want to talk about for Mental Health Awareness Month. Not the dramatic bottom, but the long, quiet slide that precedes it. Because if we can learn to recognize the early signs, the behavioral changes that don’t yet have a big shape, we may be able to reach someone before the crisis arrives. And if we can’t, we can at least stop thinking it is us.

The excuses multiply.

Everyone cancels plans sometimes. Everyone has a hard week. But when the excuses start stacking up, when there is always a reason not to show, always a logistical problem, always something that came up….and when those excuses begin to feel slightly off, slightly rehearsed, slightly too detailed, something might be going on behind the scenes.

The person using has to manage two lives simultaneously. That takes an enormous amount of creative energy. The excuses are part of the management.

The mornings get later.

This one is easy to rationalize. They’re tired. They’re working too hard. They’re a night person. But a pattern of late starts, slow mornings, difficulty engaging until well into the day, especially when this is new, when it wasn’t always this way, can be the body metabolizing what it took in the night before. Hangovers don’t always look like someone clutching their head over a toilet. Sometimes they just look like unavailability. Fog. The inability to quite show up before noon.

Strange health complaints appear.

Anxiety that seems to come from nowhere. Stomach problems. Headaches that have no clear cause. Sweating. Shakiness. Heart palpitations. The body is remarkably honest even when the person isn’t. These physical symptoms can be the nervous system in the early stages of withdrawal, not dramatic withdrawal, but the daily micro-withdrawal of a body that has become dependent on a substance to regulate itself. A person may go to doctor after doctor seeking explanations that no one can quite find, because the explanation isn’t something a blood panel will easily reveal. And doctors so often drink themselves; they don’t understand addiction. They join their patient in trying to find a cause for “unsteadiness” that has nothing to do with alcohol or drugs.

They need a lot of “private time.”

There is healthy privacy and there is the privacy of concealment. When someone begins to need more and more time alone, when there are periods of the day or evening that are off limits, unexplained, guarded, this can be the architecture of active use. Time alone to use. Time alone to recover from using. Time alone to manage the mood that comes with withdrawal. The private time isn’t really private in the way rest or solitude is private. It is occupied. It is scheduled around something.

They become increasingly self-focused.

Not selfish in the way we usually mean it, not deliberately unkind. But gradually less able to hold other people’s needs in mind. Less available for the small, ordinary exchanges of care that hold relationships together. Conversations that used to go both ways start to feel one-directional or highly orchestrated….managed. Plans get organized around their schedule, their comfort, their needs, not because they’ve suddenly turned into a bad person, but because managing a dependency takes up an enormous amount of interior bandwidth. There is simply less of them available for anyone or anything else.

They withdraw from things they used to love.

Hobbies drop away. Social invitations go unanswered or declined. They stop showing up for things. family dinners, a regular exercise class, a friendship that used to matter. Addiction is isolating by nature. The world slowly narrows to what feeds the dependency and what doesn’t. Everything that doesn’t starts to fall away, quietly, one thing at a time.

Their emotional range flattens or swings.

They may seem fine, almost too fine, in the hours when they’ve engaged in their mood altering substance or behavior. Then irritable, restless, edgy in the hours when they haven’t. Or the reverse: flat and unreachable, then briefly warm and present, then flat again. The people around them often find themselves unconsciously tracking these cycles without fully knowing why, noticing, without being able to name it, that there is a pattern to when their person is available and when they are not.

Money becomes strange.

Not always dramatic. Not necessarily missing wallets or empty bank accounts. But small financial inconsistencies. A vagueness around spending. Unexplained withdrawals. A reluctance to talk about money that wasn’t there before. Substances cost money, and the management of that cost requires a kind of secrecy that often bleeds into other financial conversations.

Their social world changes

Addicts find new friends, they like hanging around with other people that use, around whom they can enjoy their substance without self-consciousness. They have drinking buddies, people to eat (read: gorge) with or refrain from food with. Pals who also smoke a lot of weed, friends who use drugs for anything from “breakthrough experiences” to a way to achieve a sense of connection and belonging.

Other Compulsive Behaviors Take Bandwidth and Time, Too

I won’t go into this in too much depth but know that drugs and alcohol aren’t the only forms of compulsive behaviors. Disordered eating, for example…wondering “are they eating?” They don’t eat in front of me but they keep gaining weight.” Are they purging? Did I see them spitting something into their napkin? Are they just pushing food around their plate but really not eating much at all”?

Then there are gambling, over-exercising, out-of-the-order sexual behaviors, there are many forms of addiction and compulsivity that can make you think you are slightly losing your mind when you are around them.

They react to concern with disproportionate defensiveness.

This is one of the most telling signs, and also one of the most painful for families. A gentle inquiry, you seem tired lately, are you okay? is met with anger that seems far too large for the question. The defensiveness is not really about you. It is the compulsion protecting itself. It is the addiction refusing to be seen. When a caring question is treated like an accusation, something is being protected.

Living alongside someone who is using, even before you know for certain that’s what’s happening, is distressing and disorienting. You find yourself second-guessing your own perceptions. Wondering if you’re being unfair, overly suspicious, too sensitive. The explanations that almost make sense, the occasional good days that seem to disprove your concern can make you feel like you’re the one with the problem; that you just get obsessive, can’t roll with things or that you’re overly critical or intrusive.

You’re not.

What you’re experiencing is the confusion that is part of this illness. You’re sensing the air around you changing when hiding and protecting a compulsive behavior and the secret world that surrounds it, takes precedence over everything else. You’re hearing the muffled cry for help, and you’re at the same time feeling them push you away. Addiction is, among other things, a disease of denial and that denial extends outward, into the family system, into the workplace, into friendships and the people who care about the person using. Families begin to doubt their own perceptions not because they are wrong, but because they are being consistently told they are. Friends wonder if their friend is mad at them or losing interest in the friendship. Family members feel sad, resentful, confused and gaslit. The workplace is often the first system to call it out because the standards and structure are the clearest, the addict isn’t showing up either physically or mentally. In more intimate relationships, we get lost in their excuses. We fill in what is missing. We try to compensate for what isn’t there.

If you recognize someone you know or love in these descriptions, listen up: you do not need to extract a confession. You do not need irrefutable proof. You do not need to wait for the crisis to seek support for yourself.

Al-Anon exists for exactly this reason. Therapy exists for this. Community exists for this. The people who love someone struggling with addiction are not secondary to the story. They are living their own version of it, and they deserve their own help.

You are allowed to name what you see. You are allowed to trust your own experience. And you are allowed to reach for support before the worst happens or before you become so wrapped into this disease of gaslighting and denial that you lose yourself along the way. You are allowed to take care of your mental health when someone else’s problems are impacting you.

That, too, is a form of early intervention. Please take care of yourself because if you don’t, well….this is a cunning and baffling disease and it is highly contagious, it messes with your mind. Try Alanon. Those rooms hold the greatest knowledge and awareness of what is going on with you because those in them have lived it, too. You will not have to explain yourself, they will get it. Just settle into a chair and listen. Share if you wish or don’t. Throw a couple of dollars into the collection basket and let the understanding and peace of the program work on you to counteract the way the disease of addiction has been working on you. You will be welcomed even if no one says it.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. If something in this piece resonated, I explore in more depth how living with addiction changes who you are on the inside in my new book, Growing Up with Addiction.

Click here to view……. try

The most primary bond

No attachment in human life is more fundamental than the one we form with our mothers. We don’t choose it, negotiate it, or earn it. We are simply inside of it — quite literally, before we draw our first breath. We grow within her body. The nutrition that sustains our earliest cellular life adjusts moment by moment, chemically calibrated by her own physiology to meet our changing needs. And then, after birth, the nourishment continues: breast milk, the most perfectly tailored food in nature, shifts in composition not just from woman to woman but from feeding to feeding, from morning to evening, responding to who we are and what we need in real time.

Her skin is the first surface we know. Her arms are not merely comfort — they are ontology. They tell us we exist. They tell us we are safe, that we have a place in the world, that we are valued and held and seen. The warmth of a mother’s body is not a luxury for an infant. It is as necessary as oxygen.

Which brings us to why the mother wound runs so terribly deep.

A survival bond

The attachment we form with our mothers is not merely emotional in the ordinary sense of the word. It is a survival bond. Without this person — without her feeding us, warming us, attending to our cries, bringing her face close to ours — we would die. This is not metaphor. A human infant abandoned to its own devices does not survive. The mother, or her substitute, is the literal precondition of our continuing to exist.

The nervous system of a small baby knows this, even if the baby cannot articulate it. When the bond ruptures — when there is neglect, coldness, unpredictability, narcissistic withdrawal, or emotional unavailability — the alarm that fires is not merely one of sadness or disappointment. It is existential. It feels like death, because in the original context in which our nervous systems were wired, it was.

This is why working with maternal attachment wounds is unlike working with almost any other wound. The grief is disproportionate to the adult mind — it seems too large, too consuming, too bottomless. But the adult is not the one who was wounded. The wound belongs to the child who once believed, in every cell of her body, that without this particular love, she could not survive.

The still face — and what love means to a child

In the 1970s, developmental psychologist Ed Tronick designed one of the most affecting experiments in the history of attachment research: the Still Face Experiment. A mother engages her infant warmly, mirroring, smiling, responding. Then, on cue, she goes blank. Expressionless. Still. The baby immediately tries everything in her repertoire to re-engage her mother — pointing, vocalizing, reaching, smiling. When nothing works, she collapses. She turns away, slumps, withdraws.

The experiment lasts only minutes. But it illuminates something essential about the relational world of early childhood. Tronick put it with memorable precision:

“For a child, love is like oxygen.”— ED TRONICK

Babies don’t just want love. They need it to survive — not only emotionally but physiologically. The research is unambiguous: infants deprived of attunement and warm relational contact fail to thrive, regardless of whether their physical needs are met. Love, in early life, is not a feeling. It is a biological requirement.

The architecture of attachment — Ainsworth’s four patterns

Building on the foundational work of John Bowlby, developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth identified the ways in which early caregiving shapes the strategies children develop for managing closeness, need, and fear. Her research gave us a vocabulary that remains indispensable.

TYPE I

Secure

The caregiver is reliably present and responsive. The child explores freely, returns for comfort, and trusts that connection will be there when needed.

TYPE II

Anxious-Ambivalent

Inconsistent caregiving produces a child who clings, escalates distress to ensure response, and cannot be fully soothed even when the parent returns.

TYPE III

Avoidant

A caregiver who consistently withdraws from emotional need teaches the child to suppress need. Connection is sought through competence, not vulnerability.

TYPE IV

Disorganized

When the caregiver is both the source of fear and the source of comfort, no coherent strategy develops. The result is collapse, confusion, and profound relational instability.

These are not just childhood patterns. They travel with us. They become the invisible operating system beneath our adult relationships — the way we regulate closeness, tolerate uncertainty, respond to perceived abandonment, and relate to our own need.

Healing the mother wound, at its root, means revising this operating system. It means going back to the original wound — not to wallow in it, but to know it, to grieve it, and ultimately to release it.

In the room — one woman’s opening

I want to tell you about Melissa. She came to therapy carrying what so many children of narcissistic mothers carry: a bewildering combination of longing and numbness, loyalty and rage. Her mother had been beautiful, accomplished, and entirely elsewhere. Not absent in the physical sense — she was there, at the dinner table, at the school play — but absent in the way that matters most. Her gaze passed through Melissa rather than landing on her. She found fault with precision and ease, as though criticism were a form of intimacy.

In a session that I have never forgotten, we worked with an empty chair. I asked Melissa to speak to her mother — to say what had never been said, to give voice to the child who had spent decades waiting to be truly seen.

EMPTY CHAIR — MELISSA SPEAKING TO HER MOTHER

“Why didn’t you want to be with me?”

“Why were you always finding fault with me?”

“All I wanted was for you to want me. To take pleasure in my company. To enjoy me.”

“I would have done all the rest if you had just done that for me. I would have been fine. I would have figured everything else out. I just needed to know that you wanted me there.”

The room was very quiet after she said those words. There are moments in clinical work when the truth arrives with such simplicity that it silences everything around it. This was one of them.

Grief as the gateway

By opening that wound rather than sealing it further, Melissa began to do something she had never been able to do before: she began to grieve. Not the mother she had lost, but the mother she had always had — and never quite felt like she had. The mother who was physically present but emotionally unreachable. The mother whose approval was a horizon that kept receding.

Grief, in this context, is not defeat. It is the most honest form of acknowledgment — and acknowledgment is where healing begins. Over time, and it did take time, Melissa found her way toward something that surprised her: forgiveness. Not the kind that excuses or minimizes, but the kind that is possible only after you have allowed yourself to fully know the loss. She forgave her mother not only for who she was, but for who she wasn’t. For the gaps. For the silences. For the fault-finding that was never really about Melissa at all.

And in forgiving her mother, she found she could begin to stop doing to herself what her mother had done to her. She made a quiet, private vow: she would not reject herself the way she had felt rejected. She would not be her own harshest critic, her own still face.

Finding other mothers — and becoming one

Part of Melissa’s healing involved learning to receive what she called “surrogate mothering” — not converting other women into mother figures in a way that would eventually collapse under the weight of that need, but allowing herself to experience, in smaller doses, what it felt like to be valued. To have someone take pleasure in her company. To be enjoyed, simply, for who she was.

This may sound like a modest thing. It was not. For a woman who had spent her life believing — somewhere below conscious thought — that she was fundamentally unwantable, the experience of being genuinely delighted in by another person was quietly transformative.

And it changed how she mothered. This is the part that matters so enormously — not just for individuals, but for families, for generations. Before her work, Melissa had oscillated between two poles with her own children: a clinging, anxious closeness that asked too much of them, that subtly made them feel responsible for managing her fear of loss; and a sudden withdrawal into coldness when the fear of losing them became unbearable and she preemptively shut the door. She was, without meaning to, passing down the very wound she carried — asking her children to hold what she could not hold herself.

Unfelt pain travels. It finds its way through us and into the people we love most, not because we are bad parents, but because the body keeps the score, and what we have not grieved we tend to act out. The work Melissa did — the grief, the forgiveness, the slow building of self-regard — interrupted that transmission.

The mother wound is not a wound we choose, and it is not one that heals quickly or without cost. It asks us to return to the most vulnerable place we have ever been, to feel what we worked so hard not to feel, and to stay there long enough to actually move through it. That takes courage. It takes support. It takes, often, a good therapist, a safe relationship, or a community that can hold the work.

But the alternative — carrying the wound unfelt, letting it shape our relationships, our self-regard, our parenting — costs more. It costs us the full version of ourselves. And it asks our children to pay a debt they did not incur.

Today, on this particular Sunday in May, I find myself thinking about all of that — about how complicated the word mother can be, how much joy it holds, how much grief it can hold alongside that joy. I think about the mothers who were everything to their children, and the mothers who were not able to be. I think about the children who grew up into adults still waiting to be seen.

If that is you — if somewhere in your body there is still a child waiting — I want you to know: the waiting can end. The wound can be opened and tended. You can come to know the loss fully, and you can find your way to the other side of it.

That is the work. And it is some of the most important work any of us will ever do.

Transforming pain into something expressed is the stuff of great poetry, art and theater. It’s also the stuff of healing. I use role play as my therapeutic method. I often witness moments that take my breath away with the sheer power of their truth and authenticity.

Even now — even after many decades of doing this work, they still stop me in my tracks.

It’s the moment when something frozen surfaces. Not as a memory you can put into words, but as a moment that has no words. The kind of frozen pain that is arrested expression and becomes a weight in the room that everyone can feel but no one can quite reach. A kind of emotion that the whole room wants to turn away from. Or turn towards…… depending. Hidden under layers of time but pulsating now in the room, present, immobilized but also urgent. A silent scream.

I saw it again this week.

We were doing a training in Relational Trauma Repair at Alina Lodge when the protagonist stopped. Not paused. Stopped. Her jaw locked. Her legs looked like they wanted to run but couldn’t find permission to move. She stood bravely trying to face empty chairs in front of her that represented family members from her past who had hurt her deeply. Stood with straightend back but her chest folded inward, just slightly, as if it was trying to protect something old and breakable that lived behind her ribs. Tears pressed against the inside of her eyes that couldn’t fall.

And you could feel it. The whole room could feel it.

This wasn’t someone having a reaction. This was something much older than that. This was decades of learning — spoken and unspoken, delivered through silence as much as through words — that emotion was not safe to express. That feeling had to be managed. Contained. Silenced. Her body had absorbed that lesson so completely, so loyally, that it was doing its job in real time, right in front of us.

What looked like stillness was actually an embodied inhibition. A held-back impulse to flee. To cry. To rage. All of it there. None of it moving.

And standing in that room with her, I felt it too. That secondhand freeze that moves through a group when something real is trying to emerge and can’t quite find its way through. It’s one of the most delicate moments in this work. For the person inside it. For a therapist. Or for a group bearing witness.

What do you do right there in that moment to heal rather than retraumatize?

When something is present but frozen? When the words are jammed somewhere between the chest and the throat and the jaw has become a wall?

As a psychodramatist who uses role play I would say you give the feeling somewhere to go.

But to understand why that matters, I have to tell you something about where, let’s call her Sheila, came from.

As a child, she had been left. Not in the dramatic, sudden way we sometimes imagine abandonment. In the slower, quieter, more ordinary kind — the kind that doesn’t announce itself but leaves its marks anyway.

Her parents had placed her with extended family, the father’s parents that he grew up with and an aunt and uncle. And they knew. They knew what was in that house. They knew about the alcoholism, the volatility, the things that happened behind closed doors and sometimes not behind them at all. They knew. And they left her there anyway. A child, surrounded by chaos she had no framework for and no adult to make sense of it with.

She was told to behave. Expected to behave without being told and sometimes punished for breaking rules she didn’t know were there.

She was told not to speak up about anything.

She was told — in so many words, and in so many more that were never said out loud — to stay out of the house as much as possible. To make herself scarce. To not be a problem.

So she didn’t speak, at least she didn’t say anything that really mattered. She learned not to.

Her feelings had nowhere to go, so they went nowhere. They stayed inside her, unspoken and unwitnessed, year after year, calcifying into something that lived in her body long after she’d left that house. Long after she’d built a whole life somewhere else. Long after she thought — maybe she thought — that she was over it.

And now here she was. And so were those frozen feelings.

Trying to speak to the people who had hurt her. Trying, finally, to say what that child never got to say. And her jaw — only in this, only in this — would lock. Would tighten until her words came out muffled and strained, as if her body was muzzling itself even after all this time. As if the little girl’s silence had been stored there, in that hinge, in that muscle, waiting to be enforced again every time she got close to the truth.

In every other context her jaw was fine. It was only here. Only when the past pressed up against the present, when the urge to rage met the urge to collapse. Only when she tried to speak to the people who had taught her, without meaning to or maybe meaning to, that her voice was a problem.

The body remembers everything. Even what the mind has filed away. Even what we’ve explained to ourselves, metabolized into stories, turned into something we can talk about at dinner parties without crying. The body keeps the original record.

And this is the part that doesn’t get said enough.

When we experienced relational trauma perhaps as a child— the kind that happens slowly, in the context of the people who were supposed to protect us. our brain reorganized around survival. The prefrontal cortex, our capacity to think and reflect and hold perspective, went offline in those threatening moments. And when those same feelings locked still in the body get triggered in the present, that same alarm soundlessly sounds and we freeze all over again. A moment of disconnection. Someone leaving a room. Facing an empty chair in therapy. The body doesn’t say this reminds me of then. It says this is happening again. The alarm sounds again. And the body reacts.

So the past doesn’t feel like the past. It feels like now.

Once theses hidden, frozen moments get re-triggered, there is no then in the body. Only now.

This is why a random expression or expulsion of this anger doesn’t heal it, it just drags pain from the past into the present to be expressed at the wrong time and place.

Just releasing emotion — venting, exploding, letting it out — can bring momentary relief, but it doesn’t resolve what’s underneath. It can even create more confusion. Because the feeling doesn’t land where it belongs. It scatters. It lands on whoever is nearby. And then there’s shame on top of everything else.

What begins to shift something in my experience is more precise than just release. It’s directed expression. Expression that has a focus and containment. That belongs where it lands and lands where it belonged.

And this is where the empty chair becomes something more than a technique.

I simply asked “Who would you like to speak to, including your child self? Whoever needed to be there first.

And something changed immediately in the room. What had been circular and internal and stuck became directional. She wasn’t talking into the air anymore, into memory, into the nowhere that feelings go when they have nowhere to go. She was talking to someone. To the person who had hurt her. Even if that someone was constructed. Even if it was a chair.

The relationship was present. And in the presence of relationship, something in her body knew what to do.

She started slowly.

The jaw still pulled against her. Her hands gripped the arms of her chair. But she began. Quietly at first, halting, sentences that stopped before they finished.

You knew. You knew what was there and you left me anyway.

And then something cracked open.

Not dramatically. Not the way it looks in movies. Quieter than that. More private. More real.

She told them what it was like to be small in that house. To eat meals in silence while the adults drank and the tension rose and she tried to make herself invisible. To lie in bed at night and listen. To grow up understanding, with the bone-deep certainty that children develop, that her job was to take up as little space as possible. To not be a burden. To not be a problem. To be, as much as possible, not there.

She told them what it cost her.

And the jaw, as she spoke, began to loosen.

We added a role reversal.

She sat in the other chair. She took on the posture of her father. Sat in his defensiveness, in his unknowingness, in his shut down inner world and looked back at herself.

And something shifted that no amount of insight could have created. She didn’t just understand her father. For a moment, she inhabited him. Felt something of the smallness inside that too. The fear. The limits. The way people pass on what they haven’t healed, not because they don’t love you, but because they don’t know how to carry it themselves.

Perspective didn’t just become intellectually available.

It became felt.

This is why movement matters. Why voice matters. Why action matters — even symbolic action, even a chair that stands in for a person who isn’t in the room. What role play and role reversal allow to happen.

Trauma isn’t only held in what happened. It’s held in what didn’t get to happen. What was stopped. What was silenced. What was never completed. The impulse that never got to move. The cry that was swallowed. The rage that got converted into a tight jaw and a very well-behaved child.

When those things begin to move — even a little, even inside the safety of a constructed scene — the endless loop of past hiding inside present begins to loosen. Not only because something was discharged. But because something was felt, expressed, completed.

The brain starts to reorganize. The prefrontal cortex stays more online and can make sense of what took place. The hippocampus begins to place the experience in time again. The nervous system registers something it has never quite registered before:

That was then.

This is now.

What I witnessed this week wasn’t only something stuck.

It was the beginning of movement.

That locked jaw. Those held-back tears…….were signs of the child adapting to stay connected to those she needed to provide, food, shelter and care. A loyalty, a survival need that made complete sense then.

But she isn’t in that house anymore.

They don’t make sense now.

And the work — patient, careful, relational work — isn’t to override that old survival need or loyalty, or explain it away, or convince her she should have spoken up all along. It’s to create a space safe enough that the body can finally ask: do I still need this? Can I say now what I couldn’t say then, feel now what I couldn’t feel then, do now what I couldn’t do then and move on. Can I choose something else?

When I entered recovery, I thought I was solving a problem once and for all. What I discovered was that I was beginning a journey, one that turned out to be a profoundly spiritual path.

I think what makes recovery a spiritual path is that it asks the same things every genuine wisdom tradition has always asked of us.

Are you willing to be honest, even when it’s hard? Are you willing to feel what you’ve been numbing? Are you willing to explore your part, even when someone else’s part was larger? Are you willing to unpack and take a deep look at the story that keeps you stuck, the resentments, the grievances, the identity built around what was done to you and orient instead toward seeing your work as freeing yourself rather than fixing everyone else? Can you make your own choices as to how you want to live your life and be in your relationships?

Recovery, whether from the trauma of living with addiction or from addiction itself, doesn’t ask these questions in temples or monasteries. It asks them in church basements and community centers and therapists’ offices, in coffee shops, in the middle of ordinary life. It explores them in and through relationships that hurt and heal and hurt and heal again, in the middle of the triggers and the amends and the slow, unglamorous work of becoming more whole.

That is the spiritual path. Not somewhere else. Right here. Right now.

My husband and I spent five years with an ashram in our twenties. We learned there what a practice was. It wasn’t only a way of changing our thinking, it was a way of changing who we were and how we were. The way we ate, spoke, meditated and exercised; the attitudes that we adopted to see life not as something to be gotten through and figured out once and for all but as a constantly unfolding spiritual path towards a more enlightened way of being. A path that was always revealing more of ourselves to us, if we learned to see the circumstances of our lives as grist for the mill of personal growth.

Through this understanding that spiritual awakening is a process and practice not only an event, I could understand what the 12 steps call a “new design for living”. That recovery isn’t only about changing your attitudes, although it’s indeed about that, it’s about changing the way you live so that your day to day actions become cumulative and produce different fruit, different outcomes. So that you can live life as a path to be discovered rather than a battle ground to be conquered.

When we grow up in homes shaped by addiction, chaos, or emotional unavailability, we become extraordinarily skilled at not feeling. We learn to shut down, to go numb, to dissociate — all so we can stay connected to the very people who keep disconnecting from us, in all the small ways that matter most. But those feelings we shut down don't go away. They get stored in the unconscious world of our minds and our bodies. And they wait.

But we don’t know they are there because the link between our thinking mind and our frozen feelings gets broken. Recovery is about repairing that link. And it’s not only our own feelings that we’re recovering, its also our relational feelings; all of those emotions we felt for, with and sometimes as (read: codependency in the making) another person.

Recovery isn’t only about who we are inside of us, but also who we are in relationship to others. All of those relational moments and interactions that flash-froze mid-air.

How Our Past Shows Up in Our Present

The unconscious doesn’t often speak in words. It speaks in behavior, what we do, how we act in the relational dynamics that we recreate over and over again that keep us stuck in re-litigating our past in our present. In speaks though the language of the body; in tightening and bracing, in a sudden wave of dread that feels bigger than the situation causing it, in a tone of voice that makes you go cold, in a facial expression that triggers something ancient before your thinking mind has time to catch up ….if in fact, it ever does. It recreates itself as we read the faces of everyone else while forgetting to read our own. As we insist that what we see is the only possible version of the truth of what’s happening. Reading danger whether or not it is there and misreading calm or normal ups and downs because we fear unconsciously that things will fall apart and we won’t know how that happened.

But what we often don’t understand is that the storm we’re bracing for isn’t only what’s happening outside of us, but what is going on inside of us. All of those frozen, shut down and denied inner states from the past that are being activated by and made about our present.

And so when something in the present moment touches one of those stored memories — a raised voice, a withdrawal, a look of contempt, a door slammed — the body responds as if it’s sailed back to that frozen moment in our pasts. But we don’t know that’s what is happening so our skewed reaction is a mystery to us. Consequently we cannot own our side of an argument because that part of us is unavailable to us, stored somewhere in a file with no key words, no tags which makes that window into our past, effectively slammed shut.

But if we can learn to see these unconscious activations as part of our path of self discovery, we’ll see that the outsized, irrational, “too much” reaction we’re having does fit somewhere inside of us. It’s perfectly calibrated to something real. It just belongs to then, not now. And when we make it about now we repeat and recreate our past in our present. We feel now, what we couldn’t feel then, but we project it at the wrong person, in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

This is what I mean when I say “let your triggers be your teachers”, in my book Growing Up with Addiction; let them light a path to the you …..you have shut down. If we can get curious rather than defensive when we’re triggered — if we can ask what is this really about, and where does it come from? — then the very moments that used to hijack us become doorways into our own interior. Life itself becomes the curriculum. Relationship itself becomes the spiritual practice.

I’ve long been struck by what happened when the Dalai Lama encountered the Twelve Steps. He recognized in them something deeply familiar — a technology of awakening that parallels the wisdom at the heart of his own tradition. He saw them not only as a program for addicts and family members, but as a path for anyone serious about living with integrity, staying accountable and belonging to something larger than the self. He recognized the discipline of accountability, the power of showing up “one day at a time” and the healing alchemy of community and co-regulation.

I am thrilled to share this podcast I did with Tami Simon of Sounds True/St Martin’s Press publishers of my recent book Growing Up with Addiction

Tami has a way of pulling on the threads that matter to listeners…..and bringing intentions, ideas and longings out of her authors that they didn’t even know were there…..

Doing the audio for this book myself, felt like I made a direct connection with readers which is every writer’s dream….The feeling of talking you through the exercises in my own way, at my own pace, was a little out of body….

Then talking to Tami……felt like an honor….I hope you will give this a listen……

This book is so very important to me, it represents both my personal recovery as an ACA……and the path to healing I so deeply WISH for you if you grew up with addiction, dysfunction or relational trauma/cPTSD in your home…..

Click here to find on Amazon

Fifty years ago, Marty Mann sounded this somber alarm that millions of families were living with addiction without the knowledge or support they needed. Today, while the science and understanding of addiction have advanced dramatically…..

families and communities too often still struggle with an unheard, silent cry.

“There is no time to lose… Much has been written for the alcoholic rather than for the far greater number of people who must cope with the alcoholic: families, friends, neighbors, employers, and colleagues.”

Marty Mann, 1958

I am so excited to be with these industry leaders who have worked together for decades to create and sustain movements and advocate for addicts and family members who grew up in the dark shadow of addiction.

Hosted by Dr. Tian Dayton and Samantha Quinlan, this free event brings together leading voices whose work, through advocacy, clinical practice, research, and methodology has shaped the evolution of understanding addiction and its impact on families over the past fifty years.

HEARING FROM PIONEERS AND FOUNDERS

The guests joining this event are not simply observers of the past fifty years acknowledging the hidden, silent pain of these forgotten families. They are the people who brought the plight to light and have done the work to make Marty Mann’s alarm bells come to light and life. Clinicians, advocates, researchers, and leaders in recovery whose collective work moved the conversation from stigma and silence toward knowledge, healing, and genuine understanding. They are, in the truest sense, pioneers.

GUEST SPEAKERS

Aimie Apigian • Paddy Creedon

Tian Dayton • John Driscoll

Ahmed Eid • Jeremiah Gardner

Sheila Gilheany • Patricia O’Gorman

Ryan Hampton • Kevin McCauley

Jerry Moe • Jimmy Mooney

Dawn Nickel • Marion Rackard

Denise Bertin-Epp • Gary Seidler

Nikki Soda • Jaime Vinck • Greg Williams

Sean McGowan

THE THEMES

Framed by the title 50 Years of Understanding: Growing-Up with Addiction, the event connects important milestones in the field:

• Guest reflecting on modern trauma-informed approaches to healing families and children affected by addiction

• Marty Mann’s early call for public education and awareness how advocacy has shaped progress

Together, these perspectives highlight how the field has moved from simply identifying alcoholism as a problem to understanding the complex relational and developmental realities surrounding addiction.

The conversations throughout the day will reflect on:

• how public understanding of addiction has evolved
• the experiences of families and children growing up in addictive environments
• advances in trauma-informed care and relational healing
• lessons learned from five decades of advocacy, research, and treatment
• the work still needed to support individuals, families, and communities

MARTY MANN, NCAAD, AND OPERATION UNDERSTANDING

Marty Mann was one of the most influential early advocates for alcoholism awareness in the United States and a central figure in shifting public perception of addiction. At a time when alcoholism was widely viewed as a moral failing, Mann spoke openly about her own recovery, helping to reframe it as a treatable health condition requiring understanding, education, and care.

In the 1940s, she became a founding member of what would become the National Council on Alcoholism (NCA) later known as the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (NCAAD). Through this work, Mann led a national movement focused on public education, early intervention, and reducing stigma. Her efforts helped establish alcoholism as a public health issue, influencing both policy and clinical approaches for decades to follow.

Mann’s leadership was not only professional, but personal. Working in the 1950s and beyond, she navigated both the stigma of addiction and the realities of being a gay woman at a time when such identity carried significant social risk. Her lifelong partner, Priscilla Peck, was part of her life throughout this period. Together, these elements reflect a life shaped by both conviction and courage.

This work reached a defining moment with Operation Understanding, held on May 8, 1976, in Washington, D.C. Organized by the National Council on Alcoholism, the event brought together fifty-three public figures—spanning government, medicine, media, business, and entertainment—who publicly identified as recovered alcoholics in a unified effort to challenge stigma and advance national awareness.

It was a landmark moment. For the first time at this scale, leaders across sectors stood together to assert that alcoholism was not a personal weakness, but a condition requiring collective understanding and response. Operation Understanding marked a shift from silence to visibility, and from individual struggle to shared responsibility.

Marty Mann’s legacy is not only in what she said, but in what she set in motion: a movement that continues to expand our understanding of addiction not only for those experiencing it, but for the families and communities living alongside it.

I sincerely hope you’ll register and attend for free or view the day later at your convenience!

Click here to register for this very special DAY

https://50years.slidespiel.com/

Our co-host Dr. Tian Dayton’s latest book, Growing Up with Addiction, brings the issues of developing an identity in the midst o addictive behaviors forward through a deeper, more integrated understanding of how trauma and addiction function within the family system and why, without recovery, we carry the trauma of growing up with addiction throughout our lives, recreating old pain in new relationships.

We Thank Our Collaborators: We Do this Work Together!

Alongside this, the voices gathered for this event reflect the breadth of advancement across the field each contributing to the shift from awareness to deeper relational, developmental, and trauma-informed understanding.

Together, this gathering creates a rare moment to reflect not only on how far the field has come, but on the collective work that continues to shape a more informed and compassionate response to addiction, one that centers not only those struggling with substances, but also the families and children living alongside them.

This event is supported by services that are themselves pioneers’ that helped build the field of adult children of addiction and have spent decades advancing understanding and care.

Caron Treatment Centers: A nationally recognized leader in addiction treatment, Caron integrates evidence-based care with a whole-person approach to recovery. With decades of clinical expertise and a strong focus on family systems, Caron has played a significant role in advancing treatment models and professional education across the field.

https://www.caron.org/

She Recovers Foundation: A global nonprofit movement dedicated to supporting women in or seeking recovery from substance use, mental health challenges, and trauma. SHE RECOVERS® creates safe, inclusive spaces that honor diverse pathways to recovery and amplify the voices and experiences of women worldwide.

https://sherecovers.org/

GXC Events: A not-for-profit organization focused on advancing mental health, addiction care, and wellbeing through global collaboration and professional education. Through initiatives like the Global Exchange Conference, GXC brings together multidisciplinary leaders to share knowledge, build partnerships, and support innovation across the care continuum.

https://gxcevents.org/

The Meadows: An internationally respected treatment organization known for its pioneering work in trauma, addiction, and co-occurring disorders. The Meadows has helped shape the integration of trauma-informed care into treatment, combining clinical excellence with a deep understanding of relational and emotional healing.

https://www.themeadows.com/

High Watch Recovery: One of the oldest and most respected addiction treatment programs in the United States. High Watch carries a historic connection to the early recovery movement and to the legacy of Marty Mann, making their participation particularly fitting for a conversation reflecting on fifty years of progress.

https://highwatchrecovery.org/

Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation: One of the most established and influential organizations in addiction treatment and recovery advocacy. Hazelden Betty Ford has been instrumental in shaping modern approaches to care, education, research, and public awareness, with a legacy spanning clinical innovation and national impact.

https://www.hazeldenbettyford.org/

Relational Trauma Repair (RTR): RTR offers structured, experiential, and research-based processes designed to integrate psychodrama and sociometry into clinical practice. Used across treatment, outpatient, and individual settings, RTR supports emotional regulation, insight, and meaningful change through accessible, adaptable therapeutic tools.

https://relationaltraumarepair.com/

Mobilize Recovery: Mobilize Recovery is a national initiative focused on expanding access to recovery, reducing stigma, and driving systems-level change. Through advocacy, public engagement, and community mobilization, it elevates recovery as a critical part of the national conversation.

https://www.mobilizerecovery.org/

I sincerely hope you’ll register and attend for free or view the day later at your convenience!

Click here to register for this very special DAY:

https://50years.slidespiel.com/

“Adult Children of Alcoholics don’t know what normal is.”

Janet Woititz

Author, Adult Children of Alcoholics

When We Talk About Addiction, We’re Talking About a Family

April is Alcohol Awareness Month.

For a long time I have felt that the words alcoholic/addict have felt desensitized, clinical or distant, buried under images of celebrities in sunglasses entering treatment, their heads tilted downward … dogged by the flashing lights of paparazzi.

But here is what I know professionally, as a psychologist, and personally, as an Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACA): there is nothing distant about it. Because for every one addict entering treatment, or not entering treatment, there are seven others deeply affected by living with addiction and all that surrounds it.

Addiction in a family couldn’t be more up close and personal. It is my story, my family’s story and maybe your story, too. It has shaped my life and maybe yours.

I don’t say that because I regret it, I don’t. Recovery has given me back my happy childhood and so much more. It has led me to awaken inside.

I say it because it it true. And maybe it’s true for you, too.

As we talk about alcohol awareness it is distressing to me as an ACA that the focus so often still remains on the addict. We are preoccupied with their dilemmas, will they get sober? Will they stay sober? Just the way we were preoccupied as kids.

But what about us? What about the family? What about all of us who as kids silently hurt inside, who didn’t know who to talk to about what was going on in our homes, who were scared to bring friends over because we never knew what (or who) might be there when we opened the door? What about us? Year after year we grew up with the mind, heart and soul bending relational dynamics that surrounded the addict; we grew up in a sea of other people’s denial and shame…..trying to hide, trying to help, trying not to hurt. What about us?

Because addiction doesn’t live only in the person who drinks or uses. It lives in the whole family. It lived in my family and maybe in yours, too.

It lives in the child who learns to read the facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, posture and moods of everyone at the breakfast table, before they settle into their own chair. In the teenager who perfects the art of anything from invisibility to acting out, who finds other houses to spend the bulk of their time in, who finds warmth, love and reliability (or escape) outside of their home. In the adult who, decades later, cannot explain why they can manage crisis smoothly, but predictable calm makes them want to scream; why intimacy feels risky, and relationships are intense. As a psychologist I am constantly being asked…..

Why do these effects last so long? When will I finally get past all of this?

The answer is not a short one and in this article, although on the longer side, I am trying to outline some of what makes this a POST traumatic stress syndrome in which pain from childhood can show up in adulthood and change the way we partner and parent. Do not despair, the answer isn’t in latching onto the latest fad or grabbing onto the next bright idea. The answers, your answers will come a day at a time as you learn to use what triggers you as your path to self knowledge and inner growth. Trust me, this journey is worth it.

Addiction of any kind becomes a family illness because one parent’s addiction doesn’t stay inside them. The pain and chaos radiate outward. The behaviors that surround a drunk or high state — the moods, the unpredictability, the silences and the explosions — seep into everyone until they become the very atmosphere of the family. They get absorbed into the walls, into the nervous systems of children, into the unspoken rules about what is safe to feel and say and need.

What passes from generation to generation is not the alcohol itself. It is everything that surrounds the alcohol — the behaviors, the emotional states, the distorted ways of relating that form when a family organizes itself around a substance rather than around each other.

We can treat the substance use. We can count the days of sobriety. But what we cannot so easily treat — what too often slips beneath the radar — are the long-term traumatizing effects that addiction leaves in the people who loved the person drinking or using. Those effects don’t disappear when the bottle is put down. They stay inside each person who absorbed them, and they keep generating dysfunction long after the substance is gone.

Throughout childhood, these hidden wounds throb silently beneath the surface — inside each person, each relationship, the family as a whole — ever threatening to break through at the slightest provocation. And because naming things gets you into trouble in an addicted home, most of us never had words for what we were carrying. We didn’t even know it was there.

So everything that addiction left in its wake — the distorted thinking, the hypervigilance, the mistrust, the depression and anxiety — followed us through childhood and into adulthood without ever being called by its name.

And here is the critical point: these wounds surface most intensely in the two places we are most exposed, most needed, most unable to keep our guard up.

In the way we love a partner. And in the way we raise our children.

This article is about this invisible inheritance. About the wounds that travel, not in the blood, but in the behavior, the nervous system, the unconscious twisted logic we hand to our children even when we are trying our hardest not to.

We can get sober from a drug. We cannot get sober from the trauma it left behind — until we see it clearly enough to name it.

The Nature of Trauma: Why We Don’t Know We Have It

The very nature of trauma is that we cannot fully feel it. Consequently, we don’t know we have it, nor do we understand how we pass it along.

The first thing we have to understand is that the parent-child relationship means survival for the child. The parent holds the keys to the house, the car, the food supply, and the love supply. So rupture with the parent means rupture with the self for the small child. The next thing to understand is that when children are hurt in these very primary attachment relationships, and the parent isn’t cuddling or talking them back into a state of calm and co-regulation, they lose their path to self-regulation — because children learn to self-regulate through successful co-regulation. So the child has no choice but to bury that hurt, to minimize, deny, and pretend it isn’t there... so they can keep going, so they can stay connected to the parent who is so primary to their survival, and the family who is their home. When children have to hide this pain from their parents, they also have to hide it from themselves. So they grow up unconscious and unaware of the pain they carry.

And that is one of the reasons it has such a lasting hold on us.

We can’t get better from something we don’t think we have.

When a child grows up in a home organized around addiction — around a mix of love and care interwoven with unpredictability, fear and emotional unavailability — their developing nervous system does what any nervous system would do: it adapts. It learns what it must do to stay connected.

Children in these homes do not go numb or dissociate or bury their true emotions because it’s their preference. They do it because they figure out that it’s their way to stay connected in a family that constantly feels like it might fall apart.

But when the parent you love is the one hurting you, it becomes a double whammy for any child. Because not only are they being hurt, but the person nature meant for them to turn to for love, support and to understand what just happened is the one hurting them. And probably even blaming them.

Children cannot afford to see this clearly. So they do what children do. They go along with their parent’s denial and pretend everything is fine. Or they internalize the problem and make it somehow about themselves. They reason that they are somehow too much. Too needy. Too sensitive. That love is supposed to feel like this.

Kids in these families become remarkably, heartbreakingly adaptable. They learn to perform competently, to manage the moods of others, to disappear, to over-function, to become the family hero or the family clown or the family scapegoat. Sometimes they develop what clinicians call a false self, a version of themselves that works better in their family than being who they truly are and feeling what they truly feel. They invent strategies that allow them to remain connected to the family system, even when that system is killing them inside.

And part of this adaptation, well most of it really, is unconscious, they don’t know that they are doing it and they don’t know why they are doing it, they’re kids just getting by. Trying to make sense of addictive behavior that makes no sense. Trying to create a patch of safe ground to stand on when the rug is regularly being pulled out from under them.

This lack of solid ground, this distortion and denial of what’s happening, and sense of emptiness where a predictable home structure should be, is traumatizing for a developing child who is trying to build a self, to understand their own feelings and piece together a working model of the world and their place in it.

Sarah, 38, came to therapy presenting with what she described as “anger management problems.” She was a devoted mother, a high-functioning professional, and by all outward measures, nothing like her alcoholic father. She had left that house at 18 and never looked back. It took fourteen months of therapy before Sarah could say, quietly, “I think I’ve been bracing for something my whole life. I just never knew what. It’s like I feel haunted inside but I can’t see what’s haunting me.” She had cPTSD. She had never once thought of herself as having experienced relational trauma in her childhood. She thought she was just “a little touchy, difficult, or had exceptionally high standards.”

How Trauma Travels: Unconscious Attachment Wounds and Cognitive Distortions

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” James Baldwin

What I have observed over the years is that two of the main vehicles through which pain gets passed down are unconscious, frozen, and unresolved attachment wounds and cognitive distortions, through the way we learned to love, and learned to let love in.

Children learn what they live, not what they’re told. They absorb the emotional climate of their homes the way they absorb language: unconsciously, seamlessly, integrated with facial expressions, gestures and intent, all that give a language an embodied meaning beyond the words. When a child grows up watching a parent manage emotion through substances, they don’t learn that addiction is bad. They learn that feelings are bad, that they can be unmanageable, even dangerous; that real emotion should be denied, escaped or suppressed.

And when what they feel is denied or rewritten by their parents, they learn not to trust what they feel and sense.

If you grew up inside the distorted mirror of addiction and family dysfunction, where your reality kept getting redefined according to what needed to be denied, rewritten or hidden on any given day, your mind had to get very efficient, very quickly. It learned to scan for danger, fill in gaps, anticipate reactions, and explain unnamed hurt, anger and pain.

It also learned to laugh, because humor was one of the few tools available to a child trying to right a world that addiction had turned upside down. There is a reason ACAs are often wickedly funny. Graveyard humor is adaptive intelligence too, a way of naming the absurdity without being destroyed by it, of saying I see what is happening here when everything around you, is telling you not to see.

Cognitive distortions are part of this same adaptive intelligence. But rather than reveal truth through humor, they hide it through a distorted lens.

Cognitive Distortions: The Little Lies We Live By

Cognitive distortions are habitual, automatic patterns of thinking that feel completely true but systematically distort reality; reflexive, snap judgements made under stress. They arise outside of conscious control, what clinicians call “automatic thoughts”, and over time become knee-jerk responses that leave no room for reflection.

When it comes to growing up with addiction, these distortions don’t develop randomly. They develop as the mind’s attempt to make something confusing or painful make some sort of sense — to impose order on a home where order kept disappearing.

At their core, they are protective attempts to wrap something up fast so it feels more manageable. But over time, they can become rigid rules, and we defend them ferociously. This is one of the primary ways the dysfunction that surrounded addiction gets carried forward into our partnering and our parenting, into the next generation. The emotional map we drew growing up inside the distorted mirror of addiction becomes the map we pass, without meaning to, to our children. In twelve-step rooms there is a colloquial term for this: the twisted logic used to explain the warped behaviors surrounding addiction — “stinkin thinkin.” It’s not a genteel term, but it’s an honest one that carries the scent of truth — and in recovery, honesty is where healing begins.

Some of the most common cognitive distortions that can become cognitive biases are:

Black-and-white thinking, or the inability to hold nuance, emerges from a nervous system that operated in extremes between high activation and shut down because the middle ground feels like standing on ice. Nuance requires inner balance; it asks us to sit with our feelings. That’s too anxiety-provoking when you’ve learned that feeling might mean falling apart. Extremes feel weirdly safer — they take us out of middle ground into rigid positions, onto hard ice.

Catastrophizing. The nervous system has a tendency to treat uncertainty as imminent threat — it’s part of what psychologists call “our natural negativity bias.” A delayed text becomes rejection. A conflict becomes proof the relationship is over. A mistake at work becomes evidence of fundamental inadequacy. The emotional brain, trained on unpredictability, keeps scanning for what might go wrong and often finds it, even when it isn’t there.

Mind reading — assuming you already know what others think of you, and that it isn’t good, was once a survival skill, a way of anticipating a dangerous mood before it erupted; now it fills relationships with conflicts about feelings that were never actually expressed or, for that matter, even felt.

Hypervigilance to others’ emotional states — many ACAs become exquisitely sensitive readers of the room, tracking micro-shifts in tone, body language, and facial expression. This was once a survival skill: reading a parent’s mood before they even walked through the door could mean the difference between a calm evening and a frightening one. In adulthood, this same skill can make relationships exhausting, because you are always, always watching. But hypervigilance is not the same as accuracy. You can misread the present moment because you are seeing it through a frightened childhood lens — and then, because the feeling is so convincing, insist that what you are misreading is what is actually happening. In doing so, you discount the other person’s real experience, and the gap between you widens.

Emotional reasoning fuses feeling and fact so completely that reassurance cannot reach it: “if I feel something this intensely, I must be right.” The feeling itself becomes the evidence — it feels like a fact, the ultimate truth and nothing from the outside can dislodge it. You can get very defensive of your position, treating your feelings like facts and insisting that you’re right.

Personalization — the deeply ingrained assumption that what others feel or do is about you. When a parent’s drinking felt like your fault, or their moods felt like your responsibility to manage, you learned to locate the cause of things inside yourself. This can show up in adulthood as chronic guilt, over-apologizing, and a reflexive assumption that when something goes wrong, you are probably to blame. In twelve-step rooms this is sometimes referred to as a form of “dark narcissism.”

Minimization and denial — sometimes the mind’s way of coping is to shrink what’s happening, to normalize the abnormal, to insist that things are fine when they aren’t. This can go on for decades.

Should statements — the relentless inner voice cataloguing all the ways you fall short, carrying the perfectionistic standards either absorbed from a critical parent or self-generated as a desperate attempt to stay in control of an uncontrollable world.

And finally, disqualifying the positive: the inability to receive a compliment, accept praise, or let love in, because to do so is to risk hurt and disappointment once again, while circling through and recreating pain or anger feels somehow more reliable, more familiar, and less exposed.

Cognitive distortions become part of a map — an internal working model of the self. But when we carry these unreflectively into our adult lives, they become one of the primary ways we recreate dysfunction from previous relationships in our current ones. Not because we mean to. But because we are still navigating by a map we don’t even know we’re living by. This is the trickle-down effect of addiction: the behaviors pass down, often morphing into other forms of compulsive behavior, even when the drinking doesn’t.

Some of the distorted conclusions children come to about themselves sound like this: I am responsible for other people’s emotions. My needs are a burden. If I am not perfect, I will be rejected. Love means losing myself. I cannot trust my own perceptions.

That last one may be the most devastating of all. When a child is repeatedly told that what they saw, heard, or felt wasn’t real, they learn to gaslight themselves — to override their own inner knowing before anyone else can. Then their inner knowing, the inner compass they would need to correct their distorted map, is the one that has been slowly dismantled.

These beliefs operate silently, shaping every decision about who to love and how close to let them get. We carry them forward without knowing we’re carrying them — misreading intention, shutting down when closeness is offered, reacting to the present as though the past is still happening. Because for the brain and nervous system, it is.

So the work isn’t simply to “correct the thought.” It’s to gently bring awareness to it, to slow it down, and to begin to ask: Is this reactive thinking coming from now… or from then?

That small question opens space. And in that space, something new becomes possible — more choice, more flexibility, more truth.

The same is true of unresolved attachment wounds — perhaps even more so, because attachment goes deeper than thought. It lives in the body, in the nervous system, in the space between people. What I have observed over decades in the lives of clients, families and friends who grew up with addiction is that two of the main vehicles through which intergenerational trauma travels are unconscious, unresolved attachment wounds and cognitive distortions. It is to those attachment wounds that we turn next.

How Unconscious Attachment Wounds Pass Down Through Partnering and Parenting

When we fall in love, or have a child, the very feelings of need, closeness, and dependency that were once fraught with fear and even danger begin to re-emerge. Unconscious attachment wounds get activated by intimacy, but we don’t know that’s happening.

They show up not as clear memories, but as sensations, reactions, and emotional surges that seem out of proportion to the moment. When we have a conflict, without realizing it, we begin to relive unresolved dynamics of our family of origin in our family of today. Because the nature of trauma is that we lose the ability to separate past from present, we wind up saying what we couldn’t say then — but we say it now, to the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

For many of us, attachment carries the same emotional double message we knew as children. Part of us longs for closeness, for the ease and safety we may not have had enough of, while another part remains watchful, braced for the moment things shift. We may move toward connection with an open heart, only to feel something tighten as it deepens. Or we hold back, not because we don’t want love, but because some part of us has learned that closeness can turn, quickly and without warning.

This is the quiet legacy of early unrepaired attachment wounds — our frozen pain from the past, pushing forward into our present. It’s how we recreate pain from yesterday’s relationships in our relationships today.

A pause can feel like rejection. A shift in tone can feel like loss. A moment of distance can activate old abandonment feelings. Not because that’s what is happening, but because our nervous system and our brain are reacting as if no time has passed. When our reaction feels bigger than the moment, it usually is.

This is why it matters so much that we begin to see our own part in the conflicts we find ourselves in — not to blame ourselves, but to free ourselves. It is one of the ways that recovery becomes a path to self-realization. Because as long as we are reading today’s relationships through the distorted lens of yesterday’s unrepaired hurt, we will keep misreading them. We will project old pain onto new people. We will hear old threats in new voices. We will fight old battles in new relationships.

Clinical Vignette: Elena and David

Elena, 35, and David, 38, came to couples therapy on the verge of separation. Both were children of alcoholics, though neither initially connected this to their presenting problem, which they described as ‘communication issues.’ In sessions, a recurring pattern emerged: when conflict arose, Elena would escalate, louder, more desperate, pursuing, while David would go completely silent and retreat to a still face or at home, another room. Neither could understand the other’s response. Gradually, it became clear that Elena’s pursuit was her childhood self, trying to get an emotionally unavailable parent to respond; David’s withdrawal was his childhood self, protecting himself in a home where engagement could mean danger. They were not, in the deepest sense, fighting with each other. They were fighting with ghosts. This reframe, offered gently, over many months along with my use of developmental timelines, social atoms (family maps) and many role plays, all part of my embodied model Relational Trauma Repair (RTR), created slow, meaningful, experiential change. It helped them to template new ways of relating.

Intimacy with a partner asks us to be curious, about another person, and also about ourselves. It asks us to sit with not-knowing, to risk being seen, to tell the truth even when the truth is uncomfortable, and to listen with the same respect to a partner telling their truth. It asks us to keep showing up when things get hard rather than shutting down or blowing up. These aren’t typically the skills we develop in addicted family systems. So we enter intimacy not knowing how to manage conflict, because tuning in with ourselves and sharing authentically was often discouraged — and owning our side, hearing another person, valuing their experience, and finding middle ground weren’t the skills we learned growing up with addiction.

How We Recreate Our Frozen Childhood Pain with Our Children

Attachment is not simply a feeling — it is a biological imperative. From the moment we are born, we are wired to seek closeness, comfort, and connection with the people who care for us. When that early attachment is secure, it becomes an internal foundation we carry forward — a quiet confidence that we are lovable, that others can be trusted, that the world is basically safe. But when early attachment is repeatedly disrupted, frightened, or left unrepaired, it leaves something else behind: a nervous system that learned to brace, a heart that learned to guard, and a self that learned to survive rather than to trust.

These wounds don’t announce themselves. They wait.

Few things in adult life are more reliably triggering than the two experiences that matter most: loving a partner and raising a child.

A partner who loves us asks us to be vulnerable. A child who needs us asks us to be present. Both of them, simply by existing and needing, reach directly into the places we have spent a lifetime protecting.

We give what we got — or sometimes the desperate opposite of what we got, once again reflecting the black and white behavioral dysregulation that grows out of trauma. No middle ground. But whether we replicate or reverse, we are still being driven by the same unresolved pain.

Because parenting doesn’t just ask us to love. It asks us to regulate — over and over again, in the most ordinary moments. A child’s tantrum, a slammed door, a defiant stare. And in that split second, before conscious thought has any chance to intervene, the nervous system responds. Not to the child in front of us, but to the child we once were. We are triggered back into our own unfinished story — and we react from there, from then, from that small frightened self who never got what they needed. We don’t mean to. We don’t even know it’s happening. But in that unguarded moment, what we received becomes what we give.

Nothing illustrates this more quietly or more painfully than Marcus.

Marcus was 42, a gentle and thoughtful man who had worked hard to build a life that looked nothing like the one he grew up in. His father had been a violent alcoholic, his mother chronically depressed. Marcus had sworn his children would never know the kind of fear of him that he knew as a child. And he meant it completely.

One evening, his seven-year-old threw a tantrum at dinner — crying, throwing a fork, the ordinary drama of a tired child. In an instant, Marcus was no longer in his kitchen. He didn’t hit his son. He did something that in some ways cut just as deep: he went utterly still. Face blank. Eyes empty. He left the room. His son cried for twenty minutes.

And here is where everything converges. Here is where conflict gets recreated and passed on — or repaired and restored. The same moment. Two very different outcomes.

Scenario #1: How dysfunction gets passed down

The scene ends here with Marcus leaving — shutting down in plain sight or walking out physically, the door back to connection slamming shut. This is trauma re-enactment. Not repeated by intention, but by nervous system memory. It is not a failure of love — ACAs love their children ferociously. It is a failure of resources never fully developed: the capacity for self-regulation, the emotional vocabulary, the felt sense of how to find each other again. Without those tools, the rupture simply stays. And a child left alone in that rupture learns, once again, that disconnection is how things end. The wound passes down.

Scenario #2: How healing happens and you simply move on

Marcus reflects. He comes back.

He recognized that his overreaction belonged more to his own history than to his son’s tantrum. So he returned, owned his big reaction, and met his child with warmth and understanding. They found each other again — and in finding each other, they each found themselves. A scary rupture became a reconnection. That moment of repair became a template, a new experience of what is possible between two people after things go wrong.

“I couldn’t figure out what happened,” he told me that week in session. “I wasn’t angry. I was just... gone.”

It didn’t need to be perfect. It never does. Children don’t need perfect parents — they need parents who come back. Who keep trying. Who let love be the thing that closes the distance.

Why We Hold On

So why, knowing all of this, do we hold on? Why do we grip our rigid conclusions so tightly? Why does the black and white thinking persist, the catastrophizing, the pushing away of love, the bracing, the control?

Because when we are triggered, hurt, or overwhelmed, we regress. In an instant, we are no longer a grown adult navigating a difficult moment. We are a child again, grabbing for the only life preserver we ever had: our distorted, rigid, fiercely held conclusions about how the world works and what we have to do to stay safe in it.

And here is the thing: it still sort of works for us. The sense of control returns. The overwhelm recedes. The ice underfoot feels, briefly, solid again. But it doesn’t work for the relationship.

In a partner conflict, especially if our partner has similar attachment wounds, we become two wounded children in adult bodies, saying now to our spouse what we couldn’t say then to our parents.

And this is another way that pain from one generation gets passed into the next.

Awareness: The Beginning of the End of the Cycle

You cannot treat the symptom without understanding the system. You cannot understand the system without being willing to follow the river backwards, sometimes two or three generations, in and out of the places where pain pooled and was left to sit. And it is hard to do that in a family that has spent generations not talking about it, not because they were dishonest, but because silence became baked into the system itself. Because the river, buried, gave the illusion that it was contained. Above ground, it felt like it might flood everything.

Addiction to drugs and alcohol may not appear in every generation. A family may seem to have turned a corner, moved on, gotten past it. The bottle has been put down. The chaos has quieted. And yet the river keeps moving underground. Because what travels is not the substance. What travels is everything the substance was managing — the hidden wounds, the twisted logic, the frozen pain. The fear, the shame, the grief, the rage, the loneliness: all of it unprocessed, unnamed, still flowing. It lives in the way a mother holds or cannot hold her baby. In the way a father’s footsteps in the hallway still make a grown adult’s heart rate climb, decades later, in a house that father never entered.

The unresolved grief, shame, and rage don’t simply disappear. They travel. They metabolize in the next generation — in the grandchildren of alcoholics. They show up as anxiety, depression, somatic illness, relational dysfunction, and sometimes addiction. Children don’t need to be abused to be harmed. Growing up in a home organized around a parent’s unprocessed trauma — where certain feelings are forbidden, where the child must manage the parent’s emotional state — creates its own version of the childhood that produced the parent.

The wheel turns. Unless someone decides to stop it. Unless ACAs take their own recovery from complex PTSD seriously. Healing is a process and not an event. If the nature of trauma is numbness, is not knowing, is living around the wound rather than working through it, then awareness is not merely a therapeutic goal. It is the courageous, difficult, transformative choice to see what we have been hiding and to feel what we have been shutting down and denying.

It is recovery that turns the tide. In my last chapter of Growing Up with Addiction I make a plea: that we as ACAs or those with cPTSD stemming from family trauma take our recovery as seriously as an addict takes theirs. Throughout the book I lay out the problems and the solutions, there are plenty of each. What I have learned is that most everyone can heal if they are willing to do the work. And if and when they do, the benefits of one generation’s healing will pass along to the next as surely as the unresolved wounds pass down when no healing is attempted. And here is the alchemical truth I have observed over my forty years in this field. Both increase. Untreated wounds do not stay the same in the next generation; they become more complex. And treated wounds don’t stay the same either — they heal

When my own father died of alcoholism we sang the traditional Easter song of resurrection at his funeral. The Greek culture mourns openly at funerals as it also sings of the resurrection. Loss and hope, death and resurrection, live together in the heart. This helped me so much when I was twenty-three, as his death was so fraught with both light and darkness, love and forgiveness and mixed with family pain and resentment.

How Addiction Mirrors Loss and Rebirth

April is Alcohol Awareness Month, and this year Western Easter, Passover and Orthodox Easter sit near to each other in the same April calendar. All of these ancient celebrations carry within them the very same story that recovery asks us to live: the story of being lost, of being in darkness, of feeling dead or trapped inside, and then, slowly, miraculously, coming back to life.

If you grew up in a home where addiction was present as I did, you knew a particular kind of numbness. You learned to pretend closeness because relying on it wasn’t safe. You lived with hyper-vigilance, managing everyone else’s feelings before or too often instead of your own; and somewhere in the middle of all that managing, you lost a part of yourself. You went underground. You didn’t feel dead, exactly, but you didn’t feel fully alive either. You lived in a liminal space that the mystics and the ancient stories know well.

“Recovery is not just about stopping. It is about returning — to yourself, to your body, to your feelings, to your life.”

That in-between place is exactly where the spiritual path begins for every great spiritual tradition. The Twelve Steps have always understood this, too. The first three steps aren’t about willpower. They are about humility, surrender and faith, and the radical, terrifying, liberating honesty of saying: I cannot do this alone.

1. “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.”

2. “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

3. “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

As an ACA, who at 25 married another ACA, this is where I began my recovery path. There was no such thing as an ACA then; we were nameless, and we were supposed to be fine now that we were out of the house. But we weren’t fine. My husband and I were functional and thriving by many counts, happy to be together and over the moon to be parents. But we weren’t fine. We were each carrying the darkness of growing up with addiction inside of us. I turned to a book by Vern Johnson called “I’ll Quit Tomorrow” and realized in those pages that we were acting out “dry drunk” behaviors, the kind that those who stop drinking or using exhibit when they don’t embrace recovery, when they “white knuckle it”. We didn’t drink, but we had absorbed the behaviors that surrounded it, the ones we modeled. So I began there, with the first step, because even though I didn’t drink, I had grown up in its blast radius and was deeply impacted, “I admitted I was powerless over the way alcohol had affected me.”

We didn’t have a name then, but I had faith, and faith began my journey from numbness to being able to feel the goodness of my life. It also gave me the will to do the work of excavating intergenerational pain so as not to pass it all along unexamined; to feel it for myself rather than leaving it in the “darkness” for the next generation to carry.

There is a death that happens in addicted families. It is not the death of the body, but rather the death of a part of the inner self. Children who grow up with parental addiction often describe a feeling of emotional numbness, of having learned to shut down their own inner world in order to stay connected to the family they both needed and feared, loved and hated. They/we “walk on eggshells”; we “wait for the other shoe to drop”; we are hyper vigilant. We function on the outside, but on the inside parts of us are frozen. We learn to perform normalcy while quietly carrying inner losses that we cannot name, describe or even feel much less grieve.

W.B. Yeats wrote Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgment and these lines have stayed in my head since I was nineteen and first heard them: “Did he die or did she die? Seemed to die or died they both”? In my case they stayed with me because I had experienced an inner death and thought that my family - beneath the forced gaiety and outward accomplishment - had as well.

In the Christian tradition, Easter is the story of death and resurrection, of something that seemed finished, over, sealed in stone, rising again into light.

True recovery, the kind that goes beneath the surface — is resurrection. It is the process of returning to the parts of yourself that went underground. Feeling feelings you buried long ago. Grieving losses you were never allowed to grieve. Finding your own voice after years of silence or of making yourself invisible. This does not happen overnight. It happens the way Easter itself happens in the northern hemisphere: slowly, against the cold, one tiny pink bud and green shoot at a time, until one morning you look up and somehow it is spring.

A day at a time is not a cliché. It is a spiritual practice. It is the practice of being present, of showing up for this one day, this one hour, this one breath.”

A day at a time is not a cliché. It is a spiritual practice. It is the practice of being present — of showing up for this one day, this one hour, this one breath. The mystics call this the Eternal Now. The Twelve Step rooms call it keeping it in the day. Whatever name you give it, it is the same ancient wisdom: you cannot heal the past in one movement, and you cannot live in the future without first being here. And you carry your past inside your present until you don’t, until you find your own light in darkness. Recovery teaches you to inhabit your own life again. That is nothing short of miraculous. That is resurrection.

Passover: From Bondage to Freedom

Passover tells the story of a people in bondage, enslaved, suffering, longing for a freedom they can barely imagine. And then the slow, hard, uncertain journey out. Not a single dramatic escape, but a forty-year wandering through the wilderness, learning a new way to live after so long in chains.

Anyone who has loved someone with an addiction, or who has struggled with one themselves, knows what bondage feels like. Addiction is a form of captivity. It captures the person who drinks or uses, yes; but it also captures everyone around them. The family system organizes itself around the addiction. The silent rules taught by Claudia Black: “don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel

” take over. Everyone plays their role. The caretaker, the peacemaker, the one who disappears, the one who achieves and hopes that achievement will fix what cannot be fixed by achievement. The whole family becomes enslaved to a secret, to a pattern, to a way of being that has entered the family system through a drug in one person that produces behaviors that everyone perpetuates one way or another.

The Passover Seder asks each person at the table to experience the Exodus as if it were their own, not as ancient history, but as personal story. We were slaves in Egypt. We were in bondage. And we were freed. This is the invitation that recovery extends as well. Not to stay in the story of your wound, but to move through it. To name what was Egypt for you, what held you captive, what you inherited, what you carried that was never yours to carry and then to begin the long walk out.

Forgiveness

And in the Orthodox tradition forgiveness is central to Easter. The crucifixion is an act of radical forgiveness, and the resurrection is its vindication. What’s easy to miss is what happens after: Jesus appears to Peter, the one who denied him three times, and offers him three quiet chances to reaffirm his love, one for each betrayal. Acknowledgement of a transgression and an opportunity for repair. In the Orthodox tradition, the Sunday of Forgiveness falls just before Lent begins, where congregants bow to one another and ask forgiveness before the journey toward Easter can even start. You cannot enter the resurrection without first clearing that ground. Recovery understands this as do steps 8 and 9, making amends; you need to forgive yourself and make reparations with others. You need to put down what you have been carrying. So forgiveness is less about the other person, than about your own freedom. It is how you roll the stone away.

Recovery is a journey from darkness into light. And the wilderness, that uncertain, uncomfortable place between who you were and who you are becoming, is not a detour. It is the path itself. In that wilderness, you learn what you value. You learn what you are made of. You learn that manna, enough for today, (not more, not stored up for a future you cannot control) is its own form of grace. A day at a time. One day at a time, you cross the wilderness. One day at a time, you find your way to a life that belongs to you.

What I want to say to anyone reading this who grew up with addiction in their family, who felt the numbness, who lived in survival mode, who learned to perform ‘okay-ness’ while quietly going under inside, is this: your recovery can be a spiritual path. Not a burden, not a project, not a problem to be solved. A path. You can learn to use your triggers as teachers pointing to your most unconscious pain, the kind that you can’t really get to without it being triggered because it is so very hidden and frozen.

These ancient rituals are not just stories. They are maps. They tell us that the darkness is not permanent. That the stone can be rolled away. That the sea can part. That what feels like the end can be the beginning. That the part of you that went underground to survive - that went quiet, that went numb, that went away - can come back. Is already trying to come back. Is waiting, like a seed in the cold ground of April, for enough warmth to rise.

Four decades ago I attended the Liturgy of Love on the island of Patmos in Greece, where the apostle John was banished and received his Book of Revelations. The service lasts for hours, and in the Orthodox tradition you stand for all of it, on your feet, in the dark and then in the light. The Gospel is read aloud simultaneously in Greek, Latin, Arabic, English, every language at once; the idea being that the resurrection speaks to all people in every language at once. Somewhere in those long hours, I felt the presence of my father as the sober, happy man I trusted that he was and is…..somewhere in heaven.

Recovery gives you back to yourself. And that is a sacred thing. And it is meant to be shared and passed on in order to keep it.

This Alcohol Awareness Month, whether you are in recovery yourself, whether you love someone who is or whether you are just beginning to look honestly at what you grew up with, I invite you to see your healing not as a medical project or a self-improvement plan, but as something older and deeper than that; a return, a resurrection, an exodus from everything that held you captive, into a life that is fully, freely, blessedly your own.

So that one day at a time you will be part of the AA Promises coming true. And as Promise Two says, “We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it” because you will feel grateful for whatever brought you into awareness, into spiritual light.

Picture a little child standing in their footy pajamas, holding their favorite cuddly, looking up at a 40% angle at the very person they need and love, who is also making them feel confused and shaky inside. The child is in an impossible bind, the very person they long to move towards for comfort and safety, is the one hurting them.

So the child adapts.

They quiet their needs. They manage their feelings. They become watchful, pleasing, accommodating. They learn, often without knowing it, to shape themselves around the emotional needs of others while dismissing their own.

They learn to fawn.

What else could they possibly do to make it safely to bed? To wake up to breakfast? To get to school? To have a home to come back to. In their eyes this was the only way they could stay connected and ward off aloneness. They did what they needed to do, they fawned to keep their little show on the road. It felt like a solution, a resolution, albeit it at their own expense. It gave them a sense of being able to do something.

In homes where dysfunction, addiction, or abuse go unnamed, children learn to look inward for answers. In the absence of anyone taking responsibility for the scary moments, the disrupted dinners, the impenetrable silence, they take responsibility. They question themselves.

They grow up wondering what they did wrong.

When pain isn’t acknowledged, it doesn’t disappear. It gets absorbed. The child becomes the explanation for what cannot be spoken, carrying a quiet sense of self blame that can last long after the moment has passed.

There is no shortage of blame in these environments.

And when no one claims responsibility for the hurt, or when it is placed on you, you begin, slowly and almost imperceptibly, to accept it as your own.

This is a a sort of ground zero for fawning and cognitive distortions (see my earlier article).

They grow out of a developmental, relational trauma that comes not from a single overwhelming event, but the quieter, more pervasive kind that builds over time. The kind that lives in the body, in relationships, in the spaces between what was needed and what was actually given. In the gap between what we actually felt and what we were told not to feel.

I’ve been working in the trauma and addictions field since the 1980s, back when we were just beginning to understand PTSD through the work of Bessel van der Kolk. Around that same time, Judith Herman introduced the concept of complex PTSD (cPTSD), a more layered form of trauma that develops not from a single incident, but from ongoing, relational wounding. Most people I’ve worked with carry some combination of both that come to have a life of their own. They live on as unresolved attachment pain, as cognitive distortions formed in moments of fear, and as the lingering imprint of sexual, physical, or emotional abuse.

Over time, this pain becomes a kind of internal engine, driving behavior from far beneath our conscious awareness. It shapes how you see yourself, how you interpret others, how close you allow yourself to get, and how quickly you pull away.

It becomes, in many ways, the unseen architecture of a life.

But there is a deeper question beneath all of this, one that sits at the heart of relational trauma:

Why are children so vulnerable to stress in the first place? Why does developmental trauma take such a powerful, lifelong hold?

The short answer is that it happens in the context of the relationships we need most. The people we turn to for safety are the very ones who may also be the source of fear, confusion, or unmet need. And because of that, the experience doesn’t just hurt, it organizes how we come to know ourselves.

The longer answer unfolds from there.

© Tian Dayton, PhD — The Developmental Vulnerability Loop

The Closed Loop

At the center of the circle is the child. And at the center of the child’s experience is a single organizing truth:

I need you to survive.

This is a biological reality. A child depends entirely on a caregiver not only for physical survival, but for emotional regulation and a sense of safety. The attachment system is designed to ensure proximity, because throughout human evolution, closeness to a caregiver has meant survival.

When that caregiver is also a source of fear, however, the system becomes conflicted. The child is neurologically wired to move toward the very person who may also be the source of distress.

This creates a dissonance the developing nervous system cannot resolve and has trouble holding.

Approach and avoidance. Safety and danger. Love and fear.

Rather than resolving the paradox, the child organizes around it.

And that organization becomes a closed loop, shaping perception, identity, and relationship patterns in ways that can persist long into adulthood.

Then later in adulthood, when the child within us who carries these unlooked at wounds gets triggered, we project the pain and blame that is still unnamed and make it about who or what triggered it, unaware that the pain fueling our overreaction, is in part historical and says as much about us as the person we’re over-reacting to.

An Immature Nervous System

We now put scientific words on a phenomenon that is all too obvious; children are not born with the ability to regulate their own emotions. Not yet.

They depend on co-regulation. They borrow calm from a calm adult. They borrow safety from a safe presence. Over time, with enough of those experiences, that capacity becomes internalized. Each experience of calm co-regulation lets them lay down the neural wiring to make it their own. They develop the capacity to self-regulate.

But what happens when the caregiver is the source of the distress?

When the parent is dysregulated, unpredictable, unavailable, or frightening, the child’s nervous system still reaches outward. It signals: something is wrong, help me come back to safety.

And no one comes. Or they blame, yell, humiliate or hit.

It’s a double whammy for the child, not only are they being hurt and want to get away, to flee somehow ……but the person they are wired to move toward to restore them to a sense of safety and calm ….is the one hurting them.

This is where attachment and trauma begin to intertwine.

Trapped: No Way Out

Adults under threat have options. They can leave, resist, reach for help, make a plan.

A child cannot.

Fight risks losing the very attachment they depend on. Flight is not possible. There is nowhere to go. Even freeze, while protective in the moment, leaves the body holding what it cannot process.

So the child adapts.

They stay. They manage. They become vigilant, compliant, invisible, or overly responsible. Not because they want to, but because there is no alternative.

They are, quite literally, trapped.

There is no way out that does not cost them something essential.

The Child’s Meaning Making: Cognitive Distortions

Children are not selfish. They are self organizing.

In early development, they do not yet have the capacity to understand a parent’s behavior as separate from themselves. They cannot think: my parent is struggling, or this is about something outside of me.

So they ask a different question:

What did I do?

And more urgently:

What do I need to change to make this stop? How can I fix it? How can I help my parent feel better, like me, smile at me?

In a home where fear, confusion, or instability are repeated, this becomes the child’s way of making sense of the world. Not just “I did something wrong,” but “something is wrong with me.”

This is how shame takes root. How cognitive distortions form. How a child begins to organize around the belief that they are the problem and should be able to come up with a solution and the quickest solution? I need to change. I need to own and struggle with what my parent is disowning.

The Logic of Fawning: Identity Under Construction

This is what makes developmental trauma different.

When adults experience chronic stress or abuse, it is deeply painful. But they bring to it an already formed sense of self, some internal reference point for who they are, what they deserve, and what is happening to them.

Children do not have that yet.

The self is still under construction. And what gets built into it are the lessons learned in the environment they cannot leave.

This is what becomes normal.

I am too much.
I am not enough.
I have to earn love.
I am the problem.

It’s my job to take care of my parent and put other people’s needs before my own. But the problem is, you often read other people through a distorted lens so their needs you imagine you are attending to may have as much to do with you as them. (I’ll write more on that in a further article)

These are not just momentary thoughts.

They become identity. They become our misguided path to perfection…..behavior…solution.

Fawning says: if I can become what you need me to be, do what you need me to do, I can stay connected. And if I stay connected, I stay safe.

And it is core to the relational trauma. Fawning requires a human threat, a dependency bond, and a need to preserve the connection with the very source of the danger. And we learned it and did it because it often worked to smooth things over so that we could restore a sense of safety when we felt scared and alone. A “sort of” sense of safety anyway.

Understanding this is the first step in changing it.

If this feels like you, you might consider subscribing as I continue to tease out issues related to cPTSD and read Growing Up with Addiction where I explain these issues in more depth and discuss how they become embedded in how we partner, parent, work and form friendships.

And how to make meaningful and lasting change.

There are ways we learn to stay connected to others…..that slowly disconnect us from ourselves. Fawning is one of them. It’s a trauma response that often goes unseen and unidentified, precisely because it works so well.

Fawning is a concept that really matters when understanding how we, as children who grew up with relational trauma and addiction, understand what happened, that caused us to override our own internal instincts. It’s one of the trauma responses that is recently getting more attention, fight, flight, freeze and FAWN. “We are threading a fine needle when we fawn… says Ingrid Clayton author of Fawning, “neither risking greater harm through fight or flight, nor shutting down completely.” Her words beautifully encapsulate a behavior that is so natural when trying to remain connected but carries with it a quiet background hum of subtle self abandonment.

When you grow up with addiction and relational trauma in the home, your genuine emotional responses are often unwelcome. You learn this early. You cry and it escalates things. You get angry and it becomes about you being difficult. You feel scared and there’s nobody available to help you make sense of that fear. You dare to call out the elephant in the living room, “Why is Dad acting so weird? Why is mom still in her room?”, and you get in big trouble. So what do you do? You do what any little child would do who wants to stay loved and accepted by other family members. You adjust, you adapt, you bend yourself into pretzel shapes to try to stay connected to everyone else, even at the expense of staying connected to yourself. After all, connection is more crucial to survival than processing genuine feelings. You need food, shelter and care to survive and you have to be able to depend on the adults in your home to supply that. You have you have to matter to them.

But living with addiction or relational trauma creates an inevitable sense of abandonment in children, an invisible hole inside. When the parent or parent’s you depend on put their relationship with a drug, or their own narcissistic needs, before their relationship with you, it becomes your job to stay connected.

That horrible feeling of losing your parent to a drunken or high state, of trying to find your “real” mommy or daddy inside their inebriation, or under an inpenetrable mask, is disturbing and destabilizing. So you have to learn to stay connected to a moving target. You have to find them wherever they have gone……and in order to do that, you make up the short fall. You learn to pick up the slack, to care harder, do more….to over function to compensate for their under functioning. And you try to find them in the strange and disconnected world they enter through the portal of a drug or live in behind their wall dysfunction.

You stop leading with your own feelings and needs and you start scanning outward. You pay rapt attention to every facial twitch, expression, eye roll, or shift in mood that flickers across other people’s faces. The micro-expressions of others, become your inner compass. You become exquisitely attuned to everyone else’s emotional state, (even when it means numbing your own), because that information is what you start to rely on to stabilize yourself.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the direction of your attention reverses.
Outward becomes primary. Inward becomes distant.

The cost of that strategy? You lose touch with or get confused by your own inner signals, because reading the room takes precedence.

I’ve spent forty years working with people who grew up with addiction and or relational trauma as well as with addicts themselves, and what I’ve seen again and again—underneath the people-pleasing, the hypervigilance, the chronic self-erasure—is a nervous system that has learned to orient outward in order to stabilize.

When, as children, we try to say what we feel or name what we see and are met with denial rather than validation—when we’re told not to feel what we’re feeling, that it’s wrong somehow—we begin to mistrust our own inner experience. Over time, that mistrust deepens. We lose confidence in our own perception. We can no longer rely on our inner signals to guide us.

So we look elsewhere.

We reach outside of ourselves for answers. We borrow language, beliefs, ways of being that seem like they might work. We try to attach them to ourselves, whether they fit or not.

It’s codependency in the making

Too often, we reduce codependency to a set of behaviors. We think if we just adjust those behaviors, we won’t be codependent any more. Or we believe that if we can set strong enough boundaries, we’ll finally be able to manage other people and feel better ourselves. Our solutions carry the scent of our chronic outward focus. If we could only fix them……we could settle down inside.

But codependency isn’t just behavioral. It’s a relational trauma response.

And trauma doesn’t respond to quick fixes. It requires something much deeper and much more engaged with our own, unconscious parts of self. A willingness to drop down inside and stay there long enough to feel what was once too much to feel.

No shortcuts. No bumper stickers.

So How Do We Heal: How Do We Change Inside?

In order to heal we need to come in touch with what’s going on in our bodies and our nervous systems as well as out thoughts. Eugene Gendlin described what he called felt sense as that in-the-moment awareness of what’s happening inside you. Not the thought of a feeling, but the actual physical texture of it. The tightness in the chest. The shortened breath. The hollow feeling in the stomach. The way dread lives somewhere between your throat and your shoulders. The felt sense is how we know what we know before we have words for it. And for those who grew up in addicted homes, that channel gets turned way, way down.

To get to those hidden inner states, I use psychodrama and embodied methods of healing. “Psychodrama is one of the most effective treatments of PTSD and developmental trauma that I am familiar with, wrote Bessel van der Kolk author of The Body Keeps the Score, in his endorsement of my book Treating Adult Children of Relational Trauma. “Psychodrama helps to make our inner world visible and manifest what we struggle with, not so much by words, but by actions, making the invisible observable and measurable. Operating in a space where important people from our past are recreated in the living present, and where we can experience and manifest our confused inner world, we can finally say the words that were never spoken, and allow feelings to emerge that could not be expressed back then. Working with others in three-dimensional space, as psychodrama does, can not only uniquely create a timeless experience where past and present can merge to help us reconfigure our mental alignment, but also provide profound reparative experiences.”

When you stand in your own shoes, and then reverse roles and stand in someone else’s, your perspective expands. The nervous system responds in a way that insight rarely touches. I developed Relational Trauma Repair (RTR) to make these processes more accessible. And because I wanted to bring this work into my recent book Growing Up with Addiction I adapted these processes to the page. I wanted to provide a place for readers or listeners, for you, to process emotions that the text brings up.

Step one of RTR starts somewhere simple: Where is it in my body? How does it feel? And then the question that opens everything up: If that part of me had a voice, what would it say? This is Peter Levine’s work in giving the body a voice, from his model Somatic Experiencing.

From there, the work deepens chapter by chapter. Social atoms and family maps provide the context, helping you see the relational world you grew up in, where trauma took root, and how it shaped the way you move through relationships today. Timelines trace how it developed, how it gets carried forward and reenacted across a lifetime. It’s one thing to sense something in your body. It’s another to see the landscape that created it, and to follow the thread of how it grew, to talk to the ten year old still collapsed inside of you then reverse roles and become that inner child, talking back to yourself. To give this inner part a voice and a place in the context of your life.

For those healing fawning, and its deep overlap with codependency and relational trauma, all of this is genuinely radical. Because your whole operating system has been built around attending to everyone else, turning that attention inward and trusting that your own inner experience is worth listening to, isn’t just a skill. It’s an act of rebellion and self-reclamation.

You were taught to look outward to stay safe. This is how you learn to come home.

My father never got sober.

I am pretty sure that is why I have spent my life in the addictions treatment world helping others get sober.

But what not everyone understands is that the ultimate goal for both addicts and their families, who come to mirror all of those convoluted and heartbreaking relational dynamics that surround addiction, is emotional sobriety.

Emotional sobriety is not simply about stopping drinking. It is about learning how to live inside the life you actually have.

It is something deeper than abstinence. It is being able to comfortably live inside your own heart, mind and behavior, to see it more deeply and to stop being so afraid to be who you are and to let others be who they are.

Addiction is not only a disease of the body and the mind. It robs you of your soul—the part of you that can live the life you have, accept your flaws and the flaws of others, stop holding yourself to impossible standards that can only lead to disappointment.

It is about learning to stop filling the empty “God shaped hole” inside of you with drugs, alcohol, food, consumption or whatever and instead beginning to fill it with life itself, with all of its daily reality and its potential for a quiet life-giving sense of connection.

Breakfasts with friends. Time with children and grandchildren. Time for love.

My father never got sober.

But Paddy Creedon did.

And he has made it his life’s work to help others do the same.

When I was a teenager the pain I felt inside could not be described in ordinary language. But it could be touched by poetry.

Poetry is the voice of the soul. It captures in verse and metaphor what everyday language cannot quite reach.

As a teenager I read poetry over and over again searching for pieces of myself that might be captured and mirrored back to me through the brilliance of someone else’s words. I was looking for a place where my soul could touch another soul to make sure I was still there.

Poetry gave my pain a shape.

A container to hold it in.

A way not to simply forget about the parts of me that had nowhere else to go.

“The old woman of the river threw a lifeline, hang on I have you now.”

My father never found that kind of recovery.

But when I read the poem below, by Paddy Creedon from his book No Small Talk, I sometimes imagine that if my father had ever gotten sober, if he had ever found his way back to himself, that perhaps his days, might have looked and sounded something like this.

After My Battle

For Clodagh
by Paddy Creedon

Wounded warriors, battle weary,
Aimlessly trekking slowly home,
Troubled broken minds, evoking
deeds of fear inside a lost anger,
Calling to mind the hurt of others,
Futile I cried, reach out, the reply,
The old woman of the river threw
a lifeline, hang on I have you now.

That was then and this is now,
Lives rescued, turned around,
Posthumously but not just yet,
Now walking each other home,
Lost lives restored, rebuilt and
exhumed, a loved forgiven me.

“Now walking each other home.”

Recovery can be exactly this, wounded warriors walking each other there. What the founders of AA discovered could happen when addicts found each other and could do together what they couldn’t do alone

Picture by Hugh Creedon from No Small Talk by Paddy Creeden

If you have ever watched someone you love struggle with addiction, you know that recovery is rarely a straight road. Sometimes it is simply people helping each other walk home.

But these shortcuts can have a shadow side if they were formed to make sense of dysfunctional family dynamics. And when that’s the case, they can keep us stuck in repetitive loops; we have the same fight over and over again.

Where does this begin? Let’s look at the magical mind of the child for clues.

Children are exquisitely sensitive to emotional cues. They are constantly scanning the faces, voices, and body language of the adults around them. “Why is Dad tightening his face like that. Why did Mom suddenly drop her head and go quiet. What just happened in the room?”.

When the tension is between the parents, children are often left make sense of what they are picking up all by themselves, because the adults who would normally help them understand their big feelings, are busy managing their own. And if there is no grown-up circling back, the meaning made in those heated moments sticks around.

Let’s be real, a certain amount of this happens in every household. But when parents repeatedly don’t own and manage their own emotions well, when they deny what’s happening and rewrite everyones’s reality to make it more palatable, kids get stuck carrying their parents disowned feelings as alive states inside of them. And all too often they explain their growing anxiety and the tension pulsing through the house …..by blaming themselves. “If only I didn’t say these things, if only I could hold onto to my hurting feelings and never talk about them, my parents wouldn’t have to get so upset. If only I were different, things would be OK”.

Why do these distortions of thinking gain such intensity?

Children’s capacity to learn in the early years is almost explosive, their minds are astonishingly powerful. They can pick up languages without an accent or take apart a clock as play. Their young absorbent minds, alive with billions of brain cells forming new connections, are constantly trying to organize experience, make meaning, and build mental maps that help them understand and navigate the life around them. And they remember the conclusions, whatever they were, that they came up with and use them as mental maps.

The meanings children create about what is happening around them do not simply disappear as they grow older. Over time these interpretations become familiar pathways in the mind. They repeat themselves often enough that they begin to feel like truth rather than interpretation. They travel quietly into adulthood and can continue shaping how comfortable we feel in our own skin and in the shared space of closeness with others. We layer the meanings we formed long ago onto present day relationships without realizing that we are doing it and the immaturity of the logic we came up with then, comes along with them. So in our most intimate spaces as adults, where we’re the most likely to get triggered, we can regress the most.

As Gabor Maté reminds us, many of the patterns we struggle with in adulthood began as intelligent adaptations to environments where our emotional needs were not fully met. What may look like dysfunction later in life often began as a child’s best attempt to stay connected, stay safe, or stay loved.

In other words, these patterns were not random.
They were learned.
And they were learned in relationship. and that’s where they get repeated. When those childhood survival states get activated, thinking becomes simplified and more absolute. The nervous system narrows its focus and begins organizing experience into basic categories such as safe or unsafe, good or bad, success or failure.

Below are some of the most common cognitive distortions that tend to develop when the mind has spent years trying to make sense of what felt senseless.

Black and White Thinking
Seeing situations in extremes. Everything feels either completely good or completely bad, with very little room in between.
If we fight, the relationship must be ruined.
If something goes wrong, the whole situation feels like a failure.

Catastrophizing
The mind quickly jumps to the worst possible outcome. A small problem suddenly feels like evidence that something terrible is about to happen.
If my child is upset, it must mean I have failed as a parent.
If something goes wrong at work, everything may feel like it is about to fall apart.

Emotional Reasoning
Assuming that because we feel something strongly, it must be true. The feeling itself becomes the proof, a fact, evidence.
I feel abandoned, so I must have been abandoned.
I feel ashamed, so there must be something wrong with me.

Personalization
Taking responsibility for things that are not actually within our control. When something goes wrong, the mind quietly turns the blame inward.
If Dad is drinking, it must somehow be because of me.
If someone is upset, I must have done something wrong.

Discounting the Positive
Letting compliments, successes, or good moments slide right past us. Positive experiences are minimized or explained away.
They said I did a good job, but they probably did not really mean it.
Anyone could have done what I did.

Overgeneralization
Taking one painful experience and turning it into a rule about life. A single moment becomes evidence for how things will always be.
I got hurt once, so I will probably get hurt again.
If it happened before, it will happen every time.

Shoulds
Holding rigid expectations about how we or others are supposed to behave. These inner rules can leave us feeling constantly inadequate or disappointed.
I should never need help.
I should be able to handle everything on my own.

Mind Reading
Assuming we know what others are thinking or feeling without ever checking it out. The mind quietly fills in the missing pieces of the story, often in ways that leave us feeling rejected or criticized.

A pause in conversation can suddenly feel like disapproval. A brief look away can be interpreted as judgment. The mind rushes in to explain the silence or the shift in tone.

They did not call back, so they must be angry with me.
She looked away, so she must not like what I said.

We react strongly to situations that do not fully warrant the reaction or jump to conclusions before we have all the information. Somewhere inside we may even recognize that the reaction feels larger than the moment. Yet the mind moves so quickly that it can be difficult to pause. When these distortions get triggered, we are often reacting not to what actually happened, but to the story our mind created when we were young feeling scared and vulnerable. And because part of examining them includes feeling those very, we resist doing it. But the momentary grief we feel, often turns out to be much faster than grinding through the old pattern over and over again.

When we begin to name these patterns, something interesting happens. What once functioned as a child’s survival strategy slowly reveals itself as an old habit of mind rather than a present day truth.

Awareness does not change everything at once. But over time it allows us to move from automatic reactions toward more conscious responses. Instead of living inside patterns shaped by the past, we begin to respond to what is actually happening in the present. And we get to know ourselves and what drives us.

If this lands with you, I take a deeper dive into this subject in my book Growing Up with Addiction and I am writing a series of articles exploring issues of growing up with addiction and dysfunction. Subscribe for free if you’d like to get more.

Parenting doesn’t simply ask us to care for and raise a child. It reawakens the same emotional circuitry through which we first learned what closeness felt like.

When we become parents, something profound happens inside both our psyche and our nervous system. We are transported back into the emotional world of our early life. Holding our baby brings us into the feel of being held. Their scent, vulnerability, and innocence tap into a primordial urge in us to bond and respond. Love and a need to be close erupt in us that we hardly imagined we were capable of, something we had forgotten but now remember. It can feel powerful, rapturous, almost sacred.

And it can also feel overwhelming. The child we once were still lives inside the parent we have become. The intense love, need, and bonding we once felt toward our own parents begins to return in reverse. The same system that organized our earliest experiences of love, safety, fear, and loss, our attachment system, becomes activated all over again. If we are not aware that this is happening, we can confuse our past with our children’s present.

Separating Our Past from Our Child’s Present

Parenting does not unfold on a blank emotional canvas. It takes place inside the living memoir of our own attachment history.

For this reason, it becomes important to distinguish between two children: the child inside of us, our inner child, and the child outside of us, our actual child. If we cannot make this distinction, our emotions can easily become confused with theirs.

Sometimes this overlap is harmless. In fact, it can deepen empathy. We mysteriously seem to know what they are feeling, or at least believe we do. But…and this is an important but…if we are still carrying pain that had to be pushed aside while growing up, that very pain can awaken when our children reach the same age or developmental stage where those earlier experiences first took root.

In grief theory this is called an age correspondence reaction.

When our children reach the same developmental age or emotional/developmental stage where we ourselves carry unprocessed attachment wounds, their behavior can activate the emotional state we lived in at that time. But we don’t know that’s what’s happening so we start assigning our feelings to them, we make them carry our past into their present. When the ages or stages line up, the emotional memory can re-awaken and we feel now, what we couldn’t feel then, what we shut down because expressing it felt unsafe. Without realizing it, we may begin responding not only to the child in front of us but also to-or- as, the child we once were, the child part of us.

And here’s another heads up, even as an adult it may still feel unsafe to us to feel those old hurts, because the feelings of fear we had then, are still part of the wound. And this is the sort of awful part. That’s why we feel it as theirs. We just never named and claimed it as inside of us.

If we do not recognize what is happening, we may begin responding to our child through the lens of our own unresolved past. Their normal developmental struggles can become infused with feelings that actually belong to us, attachment wounds with our own parents, losses that were never mourned, humiliations from school, old relational disappointments. You name it!

This is one reason parenting can sometimes feel far bigger than the moment in front of us.

A child refuses to listen.
A teenager pulls away.
A baby sounds out an alarm in the night.

And suddenly the intensity of our reaction seems disproportionate. We may feel overwhelmed, anxious, angry, or strangely helpless without quite understanding why.

What is often happening in these moments is precisely this age correspondence reaction.

The nervous system does not store experience only as story.
It stores states.

Fear.
Longing.

Pleasure, satisfaction.
Hypervigilance.
Confusion.

These states can remain quietly organized in the body for decades.

The attachment system is powerful precisely because it is designed to endure. As children we attach deeply to our parents because our survival depends on it. Later, as adults, we attach deeply to our children because their survival depends on us.

In both cases the same biological architecture is involved: limbic resonance, the social engagement system, the autonomic nervous system, and the brain’s emotional memory networks.

From a neuroscience perspective, the brain’s threat detection system is especially sensitive to relational cues. The amygdala continuously scans for emotional signals that resemble past danger or loss. The insula registers internal bodily sensations that signal emotional activation. The hippocampus helps place experience in time.

But when earlier experiences were overwhelming or never processed, that time-stamping function can remain incomplete. So the experience didn’t get understood, brought to closure and stored away as already having happened, as over. It lives inside of us as a frozen and unclosed wound. It hasn’t been finished. But again, we don’t know it.

As a result, the nervous system may react to a present moment as if it is an earlier one. The past and present live overlapped inside of us because trauma froze them as a blended state.

Your child may be nine years old.

But the emotional response rising inside you may belong to your own nine-year-old self.

Let me give you an example.

Judith came to therapy shortly after the birth of her first child. She described feeling strangely distant from her baby. Breastfeeding felt difficult and uncomfortable. The constant closeness required to care for an infant left her feeling trapped and claustrophobic rather than tender and connected. While some of this is normal, her’s was in the way. She felt ashamed of these reactions and worried that something was wrong with her.

On the surface, nothing in Judith’s current life explained these feelings. She was happily married and over the moon about having a child with the man she loved.

But as we explored her early history, something important emerged.

Judith’s father had disappeared from the family when she was six months old. Her mother, suddenly needing to support the household, had to travel extensively for work. Judith was lovingly raised by her grandparents, but the transition had been sudden. The rupture from both parents occurred at the exact developmental moment when infants are forming their first deep bonds of safety and continuity.

The trauma was never discussed.
The loss was never processed.

Life went on, a new family formed, Judith thrived in it and/but…the losses from that earlier period just sat there silently inside of her. They sort of had nowhere to go and no one wanted to “rock the boat” by bringing them up. After all, she seemed fine.

However her attachment system didn’t get that particular memo. Now sitting with her own infant daughter, Judith’s nervous system was entering that same developmental landscape again. The closeness of caring for a baby did not only evoke maternal tenderness. It also stirred the preverbal imprint of having once been the baby who lost her parents.

Once we recognized this, something inside Judith shifted almost immediately.

She was not failing to bond with her baby. She was encountering the historical block locked inside her own early attachment rupture.

In situations like this, a psychodramatic process can help separate past and present in a very concrete way.

As she brought these memories forward, I gestured to two chairs in my office.

“What if this chair could represent your daughter and the other chair could be you as a six month-year old? What would you like to say to your daughter?”

Judith leaned in: “I cannot imagine how anyone could leave you now that we know you. How could he? I could no more leave you than leave me, I love you so much, I am your Mommy….for ever and ever. How did he live with himself?”.

Judith leaned over and let the tears come, grief she had never had the space to have, tears that were never before connected to the life she had lost, because when they tried to come out, they were simply called “tired”, “hungry” or an “ouchy”. Now she gave her self the permission to cry and enter that wound so it could finally begin to heal.

Once her feelings had run their course I invited Judith to talk to the child inside of her. “You poor baby, you lost too much, too fast. But you got through it, we got through it and now you have everything you always dreamed of. Don’t let your….our….frozen pain keep us from it. Please come with me into this life we’re creating. I will love you. I won’t leave you”.

Once these two became separated in the room, the emotional fog and confusion began to lift. The past became separated from the present and the inner child became unblended from the child Judith carried in her arms.

This is one of the quiet miracles of psychodrama.

When we externalize internal experience in space, the nervous system can reorganize it and reintegrate the old memory …now infused with new experiences of safety and understanding. The past begins to locate itself in time rather than living inside our reactions.

And we can parent the child in front of us.

The work does not remove emotion. You may still feel the surge when your child struggles at an age that was difficult for you. But now there is recognition.

You can pause.

You can notice the younger part of you stirring and offer that part some care instead of letting it drive the moment.

Over time this distinction becomes a form of generational repair and reparenting.

Because when you separate your child’s present from your own past, you are doing more than regulating a reaction. You are interrupting the quiet transmission of unprocessed experience across generations.

Your child no longer has to carry feelings that began long before they were born.

And the child you once were finally receives something that may have been missing: recognition, compassion, and a place in the story where their pain can be recognized and held rather than silently repeated.