Why Childhood Trauma Keeps Showing Up in Your Relationships | Dr. Tian Dayton

Why do the same relationship patterns keep showing up in our lives?

Why do we struggle with people-pleasing, over-functioning, emotional reactivity, difficulty trusting others, or constantly managing everyone else's emotions?

In this powerful episode of Trauma Meets Recovery, Dr. Mark McNear sits down with renowned psychologist, author, and trauma expert Dr. Tian Dayton to explore how childhood trauma, addiction in the family system, and early survival strategies continue to shape our adult lives and relationships.

Dr. Dayton shares insights from her newest book, Growing Up With Addiction, and explains how many of the behaviors that helped us survive difficult childhood environments can become obstacles to healing later in life.

Topics discussed include:

• Childhood trauma and relational trauma
• Adult Children of Addiction (ACA/ACOA)
• Why the same relationship patterns keep repeating
• Codependency and hypervigilance
• Emotional sobriety and nervous system regulation
• Process addictions and self-medicating pain
• Triggers as teachers
• Psychodrama and trauma recovery
• Healing through connection and self-awareness

One of the most powerful takeaways from this conversation:

"You can't think yourself better."

Trauma is carried not only in the mind, but also in the body, nervous system, and relationships. True healing requires more than understanding—it requires connection, experience, and recovery.

Whether you're navigating childhood wounds, addiction in your family history, relationship struggles, or your own recovery journey, this episode offers hope, insight, and practical wisdom for healing.

Subscribe for more conversations on trauma, recovery, mental health, resilience, and healing.

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Learn more about Dr. Tian Dayton:
Instagram: @tiandaytonphd
YouTube: @tiandayton6150
Website:  https://relationaltraumarepair.com

#TraumaMeetsRecovery #TianDayton #ChildhoodTrauma #TraumaHealing #RecoveryJourney

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to the Trauma Meets Recovery Podcast, where we share stories of resilience, recovery, and hope. Join us as we sit down with survivors, authors, and leading experts to discuss their experiences and insights, exploring the path towards healing and the power of the human spirit. Now here's your host, Dr. Mark McNear.

SPEAKER_02 0:22

Hi, and welcome to Trauma Meets Recovery Podcast. My name is Dr. Mark McNear, and I am pleased to be with you today. I am grateful to have with me today my friend, Dr. Tion Dayton. Dr. Dayton is a licensed psychologist. She is a senior fellow at the Meadows. She's an author of, I think it's 16 books. We're going to talk about that. But also, she is an expert on issues of addiction, trauma, and recovery. And I am very proud to be able to call her my friend. Hi, Tian. Welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Hi, Mark. Nice to be here. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_02 1:01

So I was talking about us meeting, and it's kind of a funny story. People get to see the finished product, but they don't see how much how much goes into this. You know, the fact that we first connected and there was something with the computer where we couldn't get online with each other. So we talked for an hour. And then you were like, I know what we'll do. We'll do Zoom. And I was like, I don't know Zoom, but we'll do it. And and so we got together and we taped the whole episode, but we didn't hit the record button. So I the thing I'm really pleased about though, out of all of that, is that I've gotten to be friends with you, and and I am proud to be able to call you my friend.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

I'm proud too. I mean, let me just tell people as we're on this story, that the reason we weather this, or the reason I weathered that, is because I liked you and I liked what you're about. And we've talked about this, Mark, that a lot of these podcasts are done by people who are kind of interested in the subject, right? This is your subject. You're a PhD, you're a doctor. This is my subject. I'm a PhD, I'm a doctor. And what we know about this subject ups the level of what people can get from the podcast. And we agreed there's not enough of that out there. So I'm thrilled to be walking this journey with you. And uh and we can do good work together.

SPEAKER_02 2:40

Absolutely. So let's dive in. Let's dive in your newest book, Growing Up with Addiction. You are a prolific writer, and I remember you talking to somebody and saying that you were the youngest, and so you've had a lot to say. And and so there's, you know, there's all these books. But yeah, growing up with addiction, I have been through it twice now, and and and it's just an excellent book, but it's a different book. And I want to start out with that, and I want your take on that.

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Well, my friend, who's also a therapist, said what's different about your book now, because she's been with me through these books, uh, she said, you're talking about relational trauma. Nobody's doing that. Nobody's talking about how this manifests in the home. And that is what's interesting to me, Mark, because that's where I began as an ACA. And that's the problem I've been spending my life trying to solve is what happened to my family? What where did we get this thing that happened so long ago that still has this continual life? And one of the books I did along the way was called the ACA trauma syndrome, ACOA trauma syndrome. And I wanted to make the connection for people between uh CPTSD and being growing up with any form of trauma, that it manifests, not you you get through it as a kid, oftentimes. It's when you try to have a family of your own that it starts to manifest. It's when you try to fall in love that it starts to manifest. Because everything you experienced in those early dependency relationships gets triggered when you fall in love again, gets triggered as you raise children and they come to be your the age you were at the time you were traumatized. And then kind of all hell can break loose. And if you don't know that's happening, that's where marriages fail. It's where uh parent-child relationships erupt and freeze and can't get past the conflict. And there's so much to know just here in this juncture. That's why I felt I wanted to write another book that zeros in on that. And I hope I did, Mark. I keep questioning myself, and I there are so many more things I would have said, but so I'm glad to say them now.

SPEAKER_02 5:09

You know, it's it's interesting, Tian. I I was talking to somebody the other day in in prep for us meeting today, and and uh she has had a history of addiction in her childhood, and she said that you know she was so glad, you know, that I had recommended the book, you know, to her because she said that throughout just even the first or second chapter, she was like, Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. And I think there's something really powerful. Well, I know there's something really powerful when people can step into that and and feel like somebody is telling their story. Yeah, you know, and so I do think that you've accomplished your goal with it. I want to go to one of the vulnerable things you talk about in the book, one of the many vulnerable things you talk about in the book, and that is Tian, that idea of your job description.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

Oh, you mean of taking care of my dad? Well, you know, um that was my job to take care of my father. If I tell you a story that's not in the book, I'm sure, uh, you'll understand exactly what it was. I was my father's favorite child. Uh, I was the youngest. I adored him. He was beginning to go toward retirement. He had time to spend with me. I followed him around like a puppy. And I can imagine having a little girl like that when your lonely heart was not being filled, must have felt very good to him. And we were so similar. So one time, I must have been about four, not more than five, uh, dad had stormed out of the kitchen in a rage, yet again, drunken rage, and gone down. We had all these staircases in our house. So he went down several staircases to the garage and pulled, uh, went to leave. And my mother said, Go and see if you can talk to him, Tiani. So I marched down all these staircases, you know, little legs, it probably took me a while. And I um I got him to come back up. And the story told to me over the decades was he came up and boy was he sheepish. He looked pretty darn sheepish, is my mother's phrase, right? My mother's no longer living, but I somewhere along the line while she was alive, um, I had a screen memory. If if you haven't had a screen memory, you just can't relate to this. But in therapy, I was telling that story, and then a screen lifted, and I saw what really happened. And what really happened was that I remember as a little girl thinking, you know, wanting to act big like a grown-up. So I and I had a big, I had a lisp as a little girl, and I went, and here's what I really did. I a screen lifted, I saw these. My father always drew a Cadillacs. This was a Fleetwood Cadillac with dark green fins. I saw the back of the fins absolutely clearly, and then I realized I was standing with my hip, hands on my hips. This was part of the story saying, Where do you think you're going? And that was the most big girl thing I could think of to say. My mother used to quote that part of the story. The part no one knew is that I was standing behind his car saying it. And he looked sheepish because he almost ran over me. He almost killed his favorite child. And um that's what addiction does. And I couldn't remember it as a child. I couldn't afford to remember it till my 50s or so. So that's the ACA trauma syndrome, that those kind of moments are somewhat routine. And in my case, I was congratulated for being so good at my job. And I was so good at my job that I laid myself down over the coals over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_02 9:22

You know, so so for you and I, I think we could agree that we learned a lot in grad school.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 9:32

But our real training was in our childhood, and we learned to attune to people. Yes. And and that it has a cost.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Well, your story is remarkable, I think. Um I don't know when and how you want to tell it, but yours is remarkable. And maybe uh I I think more remarkable, but I always undercut my own story. Um we learn to fawn, we learn to placate, we learn to fix, we learn to shout when shouting is called for, we learn to leave when, but everything we learn is designed to manage someone else.

SPEAKER_02 10:19

Well, that's good. That I'm I'm gonna go right into you're jumping ahead of me. I'm gonna jump, I'm gonna interject right here, Tian. You talk in the book about developing a skill set, oh, uh managing other individuals' emotions within the family and and having no clue of what we're feeling.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

No clue. Because we're not there, we're all outwardly focused. This is what codependency is it's hypervigilance in my book, and it's it's a trauma response. We're so scared as kids of what's going on outside of us while you know cuddling up and being sweet and having lunch, dinner, and playing with the dog and while uh the rest of life is going on, but some deep hum of fear is always there enough so that we develop the habit of managing other people and not being there ourselves because if no one helps a child tune in on themselves, a child doesn't really learn to uh value what's going on inside themselves. I don't want to say you don't know. I learned early on, and here was the way I reasoned, Mark. I thought, if I don't say this out loud, no one knows that I'm happy in my mind. So obviously the message I got was don't let yourself look too happy. Now, I don't understand that because my family was, you know, had a lot of joy and laughter and so on. But I think I had an older sister who, if I looked happy, would just cut me off. And so I learned to hide how happy I was on the inside.

SPEAKER_02 12:12

It sounds crazy, but uh, so that it is crazy. I mean, that's that's what you we're not crazy. We we carry some of the craziness with us, but you know, I think that you know, you saying it sounds crazy, it was crazy. And the thing is we internalize that and what was adaptive, and I always say this what was adaptive back here is not adaptive here, it's maladaptive.

SPEAKER_00 12:41

It's maladaptive, yeah, and that's where your being a doctor and my being a doctor is so important because we don't just use the words, we understand what we're talking about and describing, and I think that's an important thing to get out here on the podcast world, Mark. Um, we don't want a lot of glib, quick answers. You know, we we we want to be able to answer in depth. So, what are we talking about? What are you talking about there? Um, you could perhaps say it best, but I'll say my version of it. Absolutely. So maladaptive if you grow up in an alcoholic home, there's the added thing of an alcoholic home that the trauma is coupled with um somebody who's in a drunken or a high or spaced-out state. So it's a dissociative narcissistic state that you're living with. If you happen to have the bad luck of being, in my case, my mother was quite narcissistic and wonderful and fun and all of it. And dad's was not narcissistic, but his disease was narcissistic. So when he was in his disease, I had two very narcissistic parents that didn't leave much room for me to focus on myself. My hands were full, full, full. And the maladaptive part is that we need to understand, and I want to say this like 15 times the power of projection and transference in our later relationships. You know what I'm talking about, Mark. That if you I can take my husband, for example, um, I will talk about his transference towards me, but it's um he's his mother was an alcoholic. My father was an alcoholic, he was closest to his mother, I was closest to my father. So when we get into a certain state, I can see him when he's seeing me as his drunk mother. And once that gets started, he cannot see me as his wife. He's in a transference, and it always gets kicked in by something I'm actually doing, a tone I'm taking that feels like his mother or a uh a way of phrasing something. It will be triggered legitimately, and I might be acting in a way that is selfish or that's critical or something that is reminiscent of the trauma he experienced, but that's where it ends. I'm sober. I I mean I've never I've never been an addict of any kind. I like working things out. I love working, and but that's not useful to him when he's in that transference. Nothing can be worked out, and I have probably the same setup in the reverse. Um I happen to have this idea though, Mark, of um it's a chapter in the book, use your triggers as as uh teachers, I think I called it. They're our best information. I love being, I mean, I I embrace being triggered because I'm I know that unconscious material is being gotten to. And this stuff is so defended against, which you know I know. Any really kid who grew up with this kind of trauma knows. We don't go there, we don't know it's there, and until it is unconsciously triggered through some other experience. We're not going to get in touch with it. So when I am triggered, I try to make myself sit with the trigger and do what the Buddhists call withdraw your projections. You know, sit with them yourself. I mean, in program, it would be the Al-Anon position is, you know, one finger towards somebody else, three back to the self. And that is um examine them as me. Examine them as mine. And here's the leap of faith. Even if it is about the other person, and of course it part it always is in part, the person I can do something about is myself. So to spend all my energy analyzing them, I mean, I can't resist, Mark. I, you know, I just can't resist, so I do that too. But I try to use these triggers as as gold mines of unconscious material and process the pain.

SPEAKER_02 17:11

Which which brings me to a quote that you have in the book, and I I think it's the the uh a title of the chapter too, is that you can't think yourselves better.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

Oh right. I love that line.

SPEAKER_02 17:23

Could you say more about that?

SPEAKER_00 17:25

Yeah, you you know, having spent 40 years in a career with people who initially always want to think themselves better, I have spent also those 40 years understanding the neurobiology of that. When I started my career, we didn't know about trauma. We didn't know about carrying emotional pain in the body as well as the brain. It's both and it's both and anyone who says different, Mark, just doesn't understand the subject. It's both and we carry it in the mind, we carry it in the body. And anyone who doesn't understand that is still in the talking head phase. Um, we are not talking heads, we are interrelated systems. So whatever I internalize through the way my brain experiences trauma and the way my body and nervous system processes trauma is part of what needs healing. And if I try to tell myself a story about what happened, and I even have a brilliant story about what happened, but I wonder why I'm not healing, that's why. Healing has to be multi-layered and it needs to be relational.

SPEAKER_02 18:50

So as as somebody steps into this process, and it's a daunting process, I would say, and a very threatening process. And that's why and and so many people I think put that off because there's a lot of pain, you know. But as as we've talked about this, but I I want to have you kind of highlight what does it look like to step into this because feelings have been the enemy, emotions have been taboo, you know, and now you're sitting with somebody, where would you where would you bring them to begin with?

SPEAKER_00 19:26

I always want to know what you're thinking at the same time. Um just since we've known each other, we we've grown, Mark. Just since in the few years we've known each other, I see how much we've grown. Just by stepping in. So one can step in in so many ways. Some people step in through journaling, some people step in through 12 steps, some people step in through therapy. Find the right therapist, though. Some people step in through group therapy. I find that a safe entry because you've got the whole you'll get triggered like crazy, but you will have the group for support. Um, some people step in through creative disciplines, you know. I stepped in through theater a million years ago. I learned in theater that I started to grow personally. So what you're stepping into, however you step, is the awareness that there is a self within you that is hidden. This is true. That's why Jung's shadow work is so popular, because we all carry a shadow. The um, and what Jung talked about is if you don't uh learn into go into your shadow and process what's there, you are you live it out as fate. Now that's a fool's journey through life, and it makes me angry when I see it, because it doesn't have to be that way. We each have the privilege of stepping in one way or another. And that's that's my best answer because um I don't want to be uh I have my way of stepping in. And would you like to hear that specifically?

SPEAKER_02 21:12

Yeah, let me let me just backtrack for a second, and then I'm gonna invite you into that. That idea, and I love that, Tian, that there's not one way. And and and and I love that that you were like, yeah, there's this and there's this and there's this because we're all different. And even though we have similarities with our stories and and there's there's those connections, we're all individuals and we all approach this differently. And and so to have that, like Bessel talks about, you know, there's not there's not like, oh, I'm a trauma therapist and I do this.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 21:43

You know, and then like kind of like you have the market on it because you do this. Yeah. But but that that you, you know, that you have a toolbox. And you know, so so yeah, I want to invite you into talking about, you know, one of the ways maybe that you would, you know, start to work with someone.

SPEAKER_00 21:59

And then One of the ways Bessel's and Bessel and I connected early on was that I do psychodrama and Bessel uh loves psychodrama. Now, the reason I loved it long before I met Bessel was because um I I got my personal healing through psychodrama. I used to drag my family into therapy, and one of my draggings, uh, my mother knew a woman called Sharon Wiggscheider Cruz, and she did what Virginia Satir then called sculpturing, and it was psychodrama. Uh you talk to rather than about. Nobody's saying, tell me about your trauma. They're saying, Who do you want to talk to? And what Sharon asked that was so phenomenal and life-changing for me was we got we dragged our whole family into it in the basement of my parents, my my father, mother and stepfather's house. We had everybody above nine. We must have had 20 to 30, you know, we were all stuffed in the basement. And Sharon said, okay, the four of you siblings, or I think we include the the in-laws had that option too. Sculpt the family as you see it. I just remember thinking, are you serious? I get to see my family in a different way from the rest of my siblings. I'm Greek. You were all supposed to see everything the same. And I saw everything differently. So I sculpt, I was fascinated by the way other people saw us, and I was fascinated by the way the in-laws saw us also. Um, I don't even remember the way I sculpted it. I just remember how freeing it was to do so, and how freeing it was to see other people seeing it differently. And of course, you do. You all, I mean, we have a an age span in our family, four children, but many years between us. I think I'm the I'm the youngest, so I think my brother is eight years older than I am. So we all were born into a different constellation, and we all, being Greek, we did everything in order. We even sculpted the family in order. I wouldn't have dreamed of taking a turn until everybody else had taken theirs. I think my husband uh might have passed. I don't think he sculpted it. I think he saw it as my family's, I don't remember him doing that. But it it was enlightening and it freed me remarkably. Then I I came back. We went to London for a couple of years, much more freed up, had a wonderful time, came back, and I went to a five-day treatment for my ACA issues with Sharon. And that was it for me. I thought I'm I I need this five days a week. I guess I'll become a I'll change into being a full-time therapist. That's how I thought about it. I'll help others, I'll take care, I'll fix everybody.

SPEAKER_02 25:06

Yeah, and I was gonna say what started in the back of that car, you know, standing in the back of that car, fast forward. You're like, I know what I'm gonna do. Something novel. I'll start helping people when you started doing it back then. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

Oh man. Anybody I need help, even me. I don't even have to tell myself I need help.

SPEAKER_02 25:36

Well, and I want I want people to hear that that in treatment we learn a lot of times that sometimes we're the last to find out. Everybody, everybody's a brilliant sentence. Yeah, everybody around us knows. Like when I've had issues with addiction, and you know, my my wife knew, my daughter knew, you know, they knew the dis I was the last one to find out, and and and it's a humbling but really rewarding path.

SPEAKER_00 26:06

Well, it's interesting you say that because um as as having an addiction that's clearer to see, and addicts have something to look at and you get humble faster. ACAs don't get humble, right? It's my kids see stuff in me that I just have to say, Tian, listen because they know you. And you know, when I have learned to listen, it feels so good to be known. And they're they're quite, you know, it's like being hit with a soft glove, you know, it's like being like that, because not that they don't sometimes just yell and say, but it uh but they don't have to usually because I really value their point of view. And um and I'm willing to be, you know, there I would do anything before I lose them. I would even change, right? Even examine myself. But oh what I want to say though, Mark, so I don't forget, is the reason I decided, okay, I guess I do need help, is because I started to have a jealousy toward my clients, and this was it. You know, it was a mild form, but I just thought, why am I just admiring them so much that I envying something that they're experiencing in my group? And the the reason was that they had the guts to just raise their hand and say, I need help. And I didn't. I where would I have learned it? I I raised my hand and I said, You need help. Um, so then when I began to raise my hand and say, I need help, and it's not that I hadn't gotten help, I'd gotten a ton of help. I just hadn't, you know, fessed up. And this and it didn't take me forever, but it it was, you know, a few years into it before I realized, wait a minute, there's a whole part of me that is not stepping forward. And when I did, um seas of a tough, I mean, you know, stepping forward, it felt like uh it felt like I could get killed. It felt like no one would want to be around me, it felt like I would clear the room. Um it felt like I could get in big trouble.

SPEAKER_02 28:31

And such a it it it it's such a paradox because on one hand, you know, uh doing it brings about freedom, but it fee it feels like death, you know, and and in some ways symbolically it is the death of certain things, but there's you know just that tension in moving toward help. And I and I as a therapist, you know, it took me a lot of years to get to the point where I'm like, you know, I gotta get help for these things. And you know, I think that it's so freeing, and I want people to hear that that we struggle.

SPEAKER_00 29:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:06

You know, it's not like okay, now we we we have arrived. I mean, you know, we still work work and rework, and and I love that that you talk about welcoming those triggers, that that they're a good thing, you know, when you can sit with them.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

I mean, why would we be in this field? I think I'd be doing something else. I mean, I am fascinated with the human condition, so I am truly fascinated. But this is uh demanding work if you do it well. And why would I want to work with addiction? I don't I'm not addicted to anything. Why would I if I weren't trying to heal myself surreptitiously? And then I I think my courageous act was to say I need help.

SPEAKER_02 30:00

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 30:02

And to, you know, the first oh no, that's okay.

SPEAKER_02 30:06

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 30:07

The first Al-Anon meeting I went to when I discovered I needed help. Um, you know, I I was early on in being a therapist to my credit, uh very early on. But I I was sat in an Al non meeting for one full year, expecting nothing and getting everything. And the big thing I got was that I went in thinking when I rose raised my hand and shared, other people in the room would kind of very quietly kind of pick their things up and you know, and leave the room, right? I thought I'd clear the room because what I shared was my mother used to say, you have a poison tongue, you have a, you know, everybody in my home, if I tried to tell the truth, was basically saying, shut up. And to say you have a poison tongue, I didn't have a poison tongue at all. I was just saying dad is drunk and we should do something, you know. I mean, there's nothing poison about it. I had a healthy tongue, really. But um I was so afraid that I would lose everything. So I that's why I hid.

SPEAKER_02 31:22

So I want to switch gears for a minute and go to another part of the book, and that is the whole idea of addictions and process addictions, and sitting, you know, sitting with so many times we're left with process addictions. And first I want to ask you if you would if you would define process addiction as opposed to substance addiction, and then talk a little bit about what you talk about in the book as far as sitting with the pain as opposed to trying to subdue the pain.

SPEAKER_00 31:52

Right. Okay, so process addictions are things like, I mean, addiction addiction is associated with drugs and alcohol, and that's what our treatment has been centered around, etc. But when you bring trauma into the picture, it widens everything because what you're doing with an addiction, if you see it as self-medicating, is self-medicating unresolved pain. You're finding a way to manage it that is chemical, so you don't have to do the human thing of sitting with it and doing the next thing crying, yelling, hurting, crawling under the blankets, you know, whatever you do, finding help. Um, process addictions are really follow that same pattern, only maybe you're using food to self-medicate, or sexual acting out to self-medicate, or speeding down the Long Island Expressway on your motorcycle at 2 a.m., or um gambling or gaming or the internet, but anything that kills the feeling or manages the feeling so that you can emerge better. Now, the tricky thing is we eat all day long. We there's nothing wrong with watching a uh movie or something to enjoy yourself. Um you know, some of the other sexual uh love is a pleasure and a wonderful thing. But when these things start to become compulsions that you can't control and they take you over and you become secretive, and they take on such a big life of their own that the rest of shopping, you know, uh that the rest of you get subsumed and your life starts spinning out of control, they are a problem.

SPEAKER_02 33:42

You once told me a story, and I and I want to kind of rack your memory a little bit and be like, Do you remember you told me about the woman driving with the marshmallows?

SPEAKER_00 33:52

Oh, that's an op. Yeah. I couldn't believe it when I saw it because I was in the back seat. Um, she was weight issues, and when she got in, she said, Oh, I forgot my snacks just a second, and she came back with an unopened bag of those puffy orange marshmallowy things. And I thought, you know, that's her snack. I mean, that's that anyway, so she just put it down next to herself, opened it, and I sat in the back seat, and I was in the back seat for a good hour or an hour and a half. And every time, every time there was traffic, there were bucket seats, so I could see this clearly. Every time there was traffic, every time there was stress in the conversation, anytime there was something not huge, just something that wasn't feeling smooth, I saw just a hand reach over, and it was dose specific. There was a, you know, a two-reach, two marshmallow problem, a three marshmallow problem, uh, and then everything would be smooth and fine, and the laughter was there and the light voice. And so you really saw how dose-specific sugar is, or white flour, or whatever turns the sugar in the body, and how much it is a dopamine hit that feels relaxing. And I do want to say that um my husband and I don't particularly drink, but we have uh several social friends who do. And that's always tricky for us because the cocktail hour for us seems like a waste of time because we want to just have dinner or um only a waste of time if it keeps us from having dinner. But what what I mean to say is people have found a way to manage their lives. So as long as something doesn't take your life over, it doesn't have to be so dysfunctional. What I noticed is that it affects people's health later in life at my stage. It starts to affect your health, but they might function well. So there's a process addiction and there's normal use, is what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_02 36:08

Normal. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, and I think that it's it's what I have seen is it it's clearly related. You know, the big bag is kind of related to the nervous system being that, you know, dysregulated.

SPEAKER_00 36:24

Yep, that's everything in trauma. I the way I describe it in in my uh a long time ago, I wrote a book called Emotional Sobriety. And as this other book came out, uh Growing Up with Addiction, suddenly that became an Amazon bestseller. It's my own, it's an old book, but it still has a strong message. And this is what it is trauma dysregulates us. We go from zero to ten and ten to zero, we go from shutdown to high activation with no speed bumps in between. We don't have a felt sense of normal. Normal living is in four, five, and six, and it expands. You know, normal isn't small, it's not flat. That's where the big living is because we can feel and think our way through life. It's great. I couldn't believe it when I started to get the hang of it. We don't have to get relief from being shut down by having a rage or having uh an overactivation, and then get a relief from being overly activated by shutting down. That's the dance of death, right? I mean, that's what you referred to as survival. When we're little babies, connection to the parent is survival. But when my husband, uh when I first started forming a family with him, I wanted to follow him out the door when he went to work. I wanted him to put me in his pocket and just take me with him. And I didn't want to, once I bonded again at that level, it felt like survival. I had not let myself bond like that at that level. But once I did, I just felt I can't survive without you for not consciously. And once he was out the door, I was fine letting him out the door.

SPEAKER_02 38:17

Yeah, such extremes for us.

SPEAKER_00 38:21

Just that feeling about what am I gonna do without you this close, like I was a child.

unknown 38:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:29

So I have about 8,000 more questions. So I'm not gonna go through 8,000, but I have one more for you. You ready for it? And that is, Tion, what has trauma taught you?

SPEAKER_00 38:41

Well, I think to appreciate the life I have. I think um I heard a phenomenal speech by a woman actually I saw in person who had uh gave something at the Academy Awards. I think there had been a documentary, she was a Holocaust survivor, and she she had married her American soldier, Jewish husband who had rescued her. And at the ceremony, she said, I still understand the magic of a quiet evening at home. And that's I I couldn't get over the first 20 years of being with my husband. And um 50 years later, it's still I still experience the magic of a quiet evening at home, the magic of last memorial day, just that our family has fun together. I still can't believe that at some level, that we could just have a week and it rained. We had two and a half days out of three of pure rain, and we still had a just a fun, relaxed weekend. Uh, that was not a part of my childhood. We would have uh not beyond uh when I was eight. It it ended pretty much there, but I did have those seven and a half years. Uh cough, cough. Um so that's what traumas taught me. The that to be still alive in the world with my husband, that to have children and grandchildren who are healthy and oh wonderful people, that these are the things in life that matter. That um I get it. Yeah, I'm sure you do. And that this matters. What we're doing now matters. Yeah, who we are who we are today matters. Those are that's it.

SPEAKER_02 40:48

Let me ask you, Tiana, if people want to learn more about your work or your books, where would you direct them?

SPEAKER_00 40:54

Uh Tian Dayton.com. I have everything there. Please uh sign up with my Substack, it's free. YouTube uh Tian Dayton PhD. Those three places, Mark.

SPEAKER_02 41:11

Thank you. And Tian, thank you for this time today.

SPEAKER_00 41:14

Thank you. I always love doing our podcasts. They're um special. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 41:21

Thank you for joining us on the Trauma Meets Recovery podcast. If today's conversation spoke to you, we would love for you to like, subscribe, or share the episode with someone to learn more or connect with us. Visit our website at trauma meets recovery.com. Until next time, be gentle and kind to yourself.