The Drama of the Gifted Child, the German title of which was Prisoners of Childhood, was really all about the fact that stuff happens to us as children, negative things happen. Then, we adapt to those things by taking on certain defensive ways of being. And then, we live the rest of our lives from those defensive modes.

the more sensitive the child is, the more he or she feels the pain and stress of the environment. And the more affected they are. And the more that shapes their lives.

Outwardly successful, inwardly tortured.

And this has to do with the sensitive child. “The child is very open and can feel the pain and suffering going on in its immediate environment. The child is aware of his own body and can also feel the tension, rigidity, and pain in the body of the mother of anyone else he’s with. If the mother is suffering, the baby suffers, too. The pain never gets discharged. The organism does not develop the confidence that it can regulate itself, that things will happen the way they should, hence lack of optimism.”

not why the addiction but why the pain. So, if we understand that addiction, in every case, is rooted in some painful, internal experience, when you ask people what does the addiction do for you, they’ll say it numbs me. It soothes the pain. It makes me feel connected with other people.
It gives me a sense of control. It gives me inner peace. Well, the lack of inner peace, the lack of control, the lack of connection, they all are forms of emotional pain.

The reason why addiction treatment is failing is because physicians don’t understand it. They keep dealing with the effects, which is the addiction, and the behaviors, which are the effects of the addiction, but not the cause, which is the childhood distress.

the trauma is not what happens to you. The trauma is what happens inside of you. And, as a result of these traumatic events, what happens inside you is you get disconnected from your emotions, and you get disconnected from your body, and you have difficulty being in the present moment. And you develop a negative view of your world and a negative view of yourself and a defensive view of other people. And these perspectives keep showing up in your life in the present because they’re the stupid friends.
And so, the issue is not just to recognize what happened 10, 15, 30, however many years ago, but to actually recognize their manifestations in the present moment, and to transcend them. And how do you do that? By reconnecting with yourself, by restoring the connection with your body, primarily, and with your emotions that you lost. And once you do, when you’ve found these things again, then, you have what we call recovery.
Because what does it mean to recover something? It means to find it again. So, what is it that people find when they recover? They find themselves. And the loss of self is the essence of trauma. So, the real purpose of addiction treatment, mental health treatment, an

The trauma of omission where the parents, not that they didn’t love you, not that they didn’t do their best, but they were too stressed, traumatized, distracted themselves. Then, you didn’t get the kind of attention, and the kind of acceptance, and the kind of attuned being with that you needed. That itself can make you disconnect from yourself. A child needs that acceptance, that connection, that attunement. Our brain development requires it. Our emotional development demands it. And when we don’t get it, not because the parents don’t love us, but simply because of their own issues, we can also suffer that disconnection.
So, that’s what I call developmental trauma.