Tian Dayton: If You Grew Up with Addicts, Healing Is a...
Trauma doesn’t show up in what we remember. It shows up in how we react.
This week, Tami Simon speaks with Dr. Tian Dayton—award-winning scholar, senior fellow at The Meadows, and author of Growing Up with Addiction: How Adult Children of Addicts Can Heal Family Trauma, Complex PTSD and Codependency—about what it means to grow up inside a family shaped by addiction, and what it actually takes to heal.
Drawing on decades of clinical work, her own lived experience, and her innovative Relational Trauma Repair (RTR) method, Dr. Dayton explores the neuroscience of relational trauma and the embodied, experiential path through it.
Join Tami and Tian to explore:
- Why addiction is a family disease—and how process addictions like workaholism and overeating leave the same marks as substance use
- How childhood trauma gets stored in the body, not the story—and why you can’t think your way out of complex PTSD
- The neuroscience of overreaction: why triggers feel present-tense even when they’re decades old
- Cognitive and somatic distortions—and how to recognize when the past is hijacking the present
- Psychodrama and Relational Trauma Repair: the power of talking to instead of about
- Timelines, social atoms, and letter writing as tools for putting fragmented memories back in order
- Why healing is a discipline—and what it means to take ownership of your own darkness as a path to freedom
Whether you grew up in a home shaped by addiction or simply recognize the patterns Dr. Dayton describes, this interview offers both a map and the courage to begin the journey.
Listen now and start where you are.
This conversation offers genuine transmission—not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together. Originally aired on Sounds True One.
