Tian Dayton > Quotes

“One of the problems with shutting down feeling is that we begin to live in our heads. We tell ourselves a story about what we think we’re feeling or what we think we should be feeling rather than feeling our genuine emotions and allowing words to grow out of them so we can accurately describe our inner experience. When we can feel our feelings and then translate them into language, we can use our reasoning ability to play a role in regulating our emotional experience.”
― Tian Dayton, The ACOA Trauma Syndrome: The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships

“Nothing is better, no reward greater than our true connection with ourselves, and through that we can reach out and really touch another. Working through trauma pulls us from the surface of life into the wellspring from which we learn who we really are.”
― Tian Dayton, Trauma and Addiction: Ending the Cycle of Pain Through Emotional Literacy

“Change also comes when we learn to do something different, to make choices in our thinking and daily routines that interrupt a downward spiral and create an upward one.”
― Tian Dayton, The ACOA Trauma Syndrome: The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships

“The sad outcome, however, is that the false self becomes so
well-constructed and adaptable—or garners so much acceptance, approval, or even power within the family that spawned it—that eventually the true self becomes lost to us (Horney 1950). We hide our true self so effectively that even we can’t find it. The false self is meant to absorb or take the pain that the child finds too overwhelming. The false self is largely unconscious. This false self is also sometimes seen as the “idealized self” (Horney 1950).”
― Tian Dayton, The ACOA Trauma Syndrome: The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships

“Children are naturally needy. When they feel that there is no room for their needs because the parents’ needs are sucking up all of the relationship oxygen, they develop circuitous ways of meeting their needs through others—codependency in the making. These kids often experience their parents’ needs as more immediate and important than their own. Children tend to feel that they are disappearing around their narcissistic parents. The message is strong that their parents are the center of the universe.”
― Tian Dayton, The ACOA Trauma Syndrome: The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships

“Otherwise, we may not understand how yesterday’s experiences are driving our behavior today. One-to-one therapy, 12-step programs, and group therapy are all places where this repair can occur. I have found the role-play techniques of psychodrama particularly useful here. Being able to momentarily inhabit the role of the confused, wounded, or even elated child, for example, allows the child within us to have a voice while the adult in us looks on.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Our experiences combine together forming a brain/body template, from which we operate throughout our lives. This may be one of the most important understandings we can have. Our early experiences literally weave themselves into our neural systems, becoming a neural basis for self-regulation and emotional sobriety.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Intimacy, with its accompanying feelings of vulnerability and dependence, brought up every insecurity, unresolved wound, and frantic hope I had stored in me. All chickens came home to roost.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“They may adopt elaborate defenses designed to look good or seem normal, withdraw into their own private world, or compete for the little love and attention that is available. In the absence of reliable adults, siblings may become parentified and try to provide the care and comfort that is missing for each other, or they may become co-opted by one parent as a surrogate partner, filling in the gaping holes and massaging the sore spots of a family in a constant low level of crisis. This is on-the-job training for codependency.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“This ability makes us more available to all of life. It builds self-confidence and inner strength.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Distorted reasoning can become intergenerational as children absorb, model, and live out their parent’s way of thinking about and handling distressing situations, and it can affect the health of relationships. Denial of someone’s behavior—for example, a distortion of the truth—is excessive minimization or rationalization. When we attempt to make distorted behavior seem somehow normal, we have to twist our own thinking to do so. Also, as children we make sense of situations with the developmental equipment we have at any given age; when we’re young, we either borrow the reasoning of the adults around us or make our own childlike meaning.”
― Tian Dayton, The ACOA Trauma Syndrome: The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships

“Too much time spent in a deeply dissociated state can contribute to PTSD. Additionally, lesser forms of dissociation can become an unconscious solution that can impair our ability to be “present” and to connect in other situations. For example, a child dissociating in a classroom where he’s scared may be a child who has trouble paying attention. Or an adult who dissociates in an intimate relationship may not be present enough to truly live in the relationship and understand it.”
― Tian Dayton, The ACOA Trauma Syndrome: The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships

“Simply bringing up the family’s problems causes other family members, who cannot and will not see their own pathology, to want to kill the messenger. Again, the message—the truth—threatens their survival as a system. WHEN”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“There are essentially three forms of memory, implicit or unconscious memory, explicit or conscious memory, and sensory or body/kinesthetic memory. Much of our childhood experience becomes part of our implicit (unconscious) memory and our sensory (body) memory.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Science can now illuminate why approaches like psychodrama, 12-step programs, group therapy, journaling, bodywork, yoga, exercise, and massage work; why one-to-one therapy can help us learn a new style of attachment; why changing the way we live and the nature of our relationships can change the way we think and feel, and vice versa; and why quick fixes don’t work but why a new design for living does.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“The lack of sharing genuine feeling in the addicted home can also lead to isolation, a common feature of depression.”
― Tian Dayton, The ACOA Trauma Syndrome: The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships

“December 28,

Today I am aware that I have some basic issues like abandonment. My fear of being left is so powerful and pervasive that I hardly identify it as fear. It takes so little to activate my feelings of rejection disinterest omega someone I love, a turned away head, those I care about having their own lives and relationships; these things are all frightening to me and have the capacity to mobilize deep feelings of anger, resentment and hurt. I read all sorts of deeper motives into this kind of behavior from other people and create scenarios in my mind where I am ultimately left, I realize today that I cannot have people in my life in a healthy, comfortable way if I am daily haunted by the fear that they will leave me.

I can live a comfortable life.

The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.
James Russell Loweell”
― Tian Dayton

“they assume another person will not want to meet their needs. So they attempt to meet their needs privately, within themselves and by themselves. Eventually they may feel uncomfortable even having needs, and so they try to hide them, even from themselves; they shut down that feeling within them.
Their own inner worlds can feel hazy and confusing to them while the worlds of others seem clear and distinct.”
― Tian Dayton, The ACOA Trauma Syndrome: The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships

“If I forgive, I’ll no longer feel angry at the person for what happened. In my experience, anger can still come up, but when it does, we remind ourselves that we’ve decided it isn’t worth it to hold on to it any longer.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Confrontation reduces the effects of inhibition,” reversing the detrimental physiological problems that result from inhibition. When we make a lifestyle of openly confronting painful feelings and we “resolve the trauma, there will be a lowering of the overall stress on the body.” Confrontation “forces a rethinking of events. Confronting a trauma helps people understand and, ultimately, assimilate the event.”
― Tian Dayton, Trauma and Addiction: Ending the Cycle of Pain Through Emotional Literacy

“It is also underscores why having a spiritual belief system, such as that in 12-step programs or faith-based affiliations, can be so helpful in personal healing and in restoring a sense of belonging to a community where one can easily access support and friendship. Having a spiritual belief system can play an important role in personal healing by providing both hope and a sense of security despite any ongoing familial and intrapsychic chaos. It can also help the person in pain to reframe suffering and give it positive meaning, which develops resilience.”
― Tian Dayton, The ACOA Trauma Syndrome: The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships

“Stay away from “victim thinking.” We need to understand that we may not have been to blame for being children in painful homes. However, we need to guard against getting too comfortable in the victim role. Change doesn’t happen by accident. Victim thinking can become entitled thinking and can interfere with our motivation toward change. Find other family models. Resilient children seek out other types of families as models. They often spend time with and marry into strong family networks.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“If ACoAs do not treat their own PTSD issues, they are at high risk for re-creating many of the types of dynamics that they grew up with in their own partnering and parenting, in one form of another. They likely do this without awareness, truly convinced that they are delivering the kind of care and attention that they never got. The problem is that their caring and loyalty may be fueled by some of their own unconscious and unmet needs and their children sense this and feel guilty and even resentful—but they don’t know why. If they felt underparented, for example, they may overparent; if they felt underprotected, they may overprotect; if they felt kept at a distance, they may even glue themselves to their children, suffocating them with more attention of a certain kind than is healthy.”
― Tian Dayton, The ACOA Trauma Syndrome: The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships

“The same taboos against genuine feeling that were in place in his childhood will clamp down around him all over again and he’ll become what we might call emotionally illiterate. He won’t put words to his feelings, much less talk them over. So the more frustrated his wife becomes, the more he’ll withdraw or blow up or freeze. In this vicious circle, a past issue comes to life in the present.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Trauma affects the internal world of each person, their relationships, and their ability to communicate and be together in a balanced, relaxed, and trusting manner. It affects their emotional sobriety or ability to self-regulate. Due to the trauma-related defenses of dissociation and numbing, and the active avoidance and denial that characterize addicted or dysfunctional family systems, family members may not attach words to the powerful emotions they’re experiencing. Consequently they often have trouble talking about, processing, and working through the pain that they are in. In this way they lose one of their most available routes to processing pain and developing emotional balance and sobriety. Individuals in addictive or abusive systems may behave in ways consistent with the behaviors of victims of other psychological traumas; in other words, they are traumatized by the experience.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“Because emotional and sensory memory are processed by and stored in the body, the most successful forms of therapy for trauma are experiential.”
― Tian Dayton, The ACOA Trauma Syndrome: The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships

“But even blessed and intelligent families lose it when their emotional problems overwhelm them. For our families it appeared to be alcoholism that led to relationship trauma … or was unhealed relationship trauma the prequel that led to using alcohol to self-medicate emotional pain?”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“After reading it, I knew I had a serious problem. I don’t drink, so that wasn’t it. But everything else that characterized addiction—”stinkin’ thinking”; the kind of thinking that is loaded down with circular rationalizations, distortions, and denial of reality that made you feel either you’re crazy or everyone else is; repeating the same dysfunctional relationship patterns over and over and over again—I had it all.”
― Tian Dayton, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance

“The effects of being traumatized in childhood don’t tend to disappear on their own; they tend to reemerge later in some form of overreaction, compulsive behavior, learning difficulty, intimacy issues, addictions, or process addictions”
― Tian Dayton, The ACOA Trauma Syndrome: The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships

“It’s a peeling back the layers of the onion one at a time, stage by stage, examining the thinking, feeling, and behavior that were learned and became engrained at each stage of development. Physical sobriety is fairly straightforward, and abstention or regulation are its mainstays, but emotional sobriety can be more elusive.”
― Tian Dayton, The ACOA Trauma Syndrome: The Impact of Childhood Pain on Adult Relationships