Tian Dayton: If You Grew Up with Addicts, Healing Is a Discipline

Tian Dayton: You know, it’s not a disease that happens to one person. It’s a disease that happens to everyone. And I adored my father. So his falling apart was a very sad thing for me, and I kept trying to put him back together again.

Tami Simon: In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Dr. Tian Dayton, a hugely accomplished person. She’s an award-winning scholar and an expert on the healing of trauma, the practice of psychodrama, and facilitating healing for adult children of alcoholics. She has a PhD in clinical psychology and is a senior fellow at The Meadows.

She also has developed an innovative approach for helping people work through trauma. It’s called RTR—Relational Trauma Repair—and we’re going to learn more about that. Dr. Tian Dayton is the author of 15 books, including a new book from Sounds True. It’s called Growing Up with Addiction: How Adult Children of Addicts Can Heal Family Trauma, Complex PTSD and Codependency. Tian, welcome.

Tian Dayton: So nice to be here, Tami. Thank you for having me.

Tami Simon: As a way for our listeners to get to know you, tell us a bit about your own personal story of growing up with addiction and how that informed the writing of this book.

Tian Dayton: It has informed the writing of my life, basically. We were—I would call us a happy, knitted, successful, resourced family—until addiction slowly, brick by brick, pulled that apart. My father was an alcoholic, and he started drinking. Quite frankly, my mother and father lost a baby—their third baby—at two days of birth. And in those days, you didn’t mourn. She had spina bifida. It was a blessing. But you needed to mourn also. And my parents didn’t know. We didn’t know about disenfranchised loss. We didn’t know about any of this stuff. And my father started to drink. A friend of his said, “Why don’t you just drink a little? It’ll take the edge off.” And he just drank a lot. He had an alcoholic setup, so he slowly—alcoholics, when it’s only alcohol, go slowly, and the family kind of goes with them.

Tami, it’s not a disease that happens to one person. It’s a disease that happens to everyone. And I adored my father. So his falling apart was a very sad thing for me, and I kept trying to put him back together again. Actually, my publisher at Health Communications a long time ago did a film called The Process. And in the beginning of it, I used this: “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men just couldn’t put my father back together again.” And that was the ICU scene and the 11 days of slow death. He was a house of cards falling apart, but he was falling apart many years before that. And so were we.

Tami Simon: When you introduce Growing Up with Addiction, you write about how some of us may recognize ourselves because a parent or grandparent was addicted to a substance—

Tian Dayton: Yes.

Tami Simon: —but it might be a so-called process addiction. And I wonder if you can explain what that is. That’s where I saw myself in Growing Up with Addiction—with a father who I would say is a workaholic and a mother who had challenges with overeating, and it plagued her whole life. And how that can also create some of the same patterns that we have to work with as adults.

Tian Dayton: Well, you bring a perfect example. Overeating has so much secrecy with it, and so much dysregulation and so much preoccupation. It’s a process addiction, as is work, as is sexual acting out—you can call it addiction, you can call it process addiction, you can call it compulsion. The way they happen, from the trauma perspective, is that there’s something inside that needs filling, something inside that needs quieting down. And for example, food—sweets and flour—are wonderful dopamine hits, so you can dose it. You know when you need cookies, when you need marshmallows, when you need to stop by the place. And so there’s a lot of secrecy with both of those. The workaholic is staying away, maybe for longer periods of time, ignoring the family, and very preoccupied. And also there’s the complication of the workaholic being successful, maybe. So it’s celebrated in our culture. Does any of that sound like it hits?

Tami Simon: I think you’re pointing it out. And I wanted to start here—I want to begin with a quote that is towards the beginning of Growing Up with Addiction, where you write, “Trauma shows up less in what we remember and more in how we react.” So it’s how we see ourselves growing up in a family of addiction, and as adults looking at our reactions to things. And I wonder if you can talk about what kinds of reactions we might have as adults where you could say, “Hmm, that looks to me like it might be some kind of underground trauma that’s flaring.”

Tian Dayton: Well, there are sort of two parts to that. One is cognitive distortions—and that is the meaning we make as children. Growing up with addiction or dysfunction, reality is denied. In alcoholic households, reality is denied. Where process addictions are pretty intense, reality is rewritten, and you are punished for naming what you see. In my family, you could really do whatever you wanted to do, but if you said it, you were in trouble. If you said the emperor has no clothes, you were really being impolite. But if you just acted out and did not-good things, nobody mentioned it. Nobody addressed it.

So children try to make sense of the world they’re in, and the sense they make in a chaotic world—where people are denying what is in front of them, where people are rewriting reality—is: “I must be doing something wrong. I’m obviously a bad child, or they wouldn’t be falling apart like this. They wouldn’t be blaming me for their moods. I must not know how to keep them happy.” Those are some of the cognitive distortions. We personalize things. We make everything about me. And children are kind of egocentric anyway, so that’s one piece of it. And the overreaction part is how the brain processes trauma. Is this of interest to go into?

Tami Simon: Please.

Tian Dayton: Okay. So when you’re terrified—and let’s face it, a little child with a raging parent is frozen and terrified—your thinking mind quiets down, your hippocampus quiets down, and your limbic system, where fight, flight, freeze lives, where the adrenaline rush comes and the blood flow comes, revs up.

So in these scary moments, fight, flight, freeze, and fawn are the reactions the body has, and the nervous system along with this is bracing. It can’t breathe, it can’t settle. It can’t feel comfortable in relationship. It can’t find the peaceful middle of anything because there’s no peaceful middle in a chaotic home.

So children learn to anticipate problems. They learn to blame themselves. They learn to project their pain, make it about somebody else. They learn to feel bad about themselves and hide their shame and hide their painful feelings. So later, because the thinking mind has not made sense of the experience as a child—no one helps a child in an alcoholic home. The alcoholic certainly doesn’t say, “I must have scared you to death being drunk like that. Let’s talk about it.” That doesn’t happen. And then the enabling parent rarely sits down and says, “This must feel very chaotic to you.” More likely they say, “Everything’s fine, go and play, get your homework done.”

So because the limbic system processes emotion and records sensory data—sight, sound, smells, all of that—your body when it’s revved up is gathering all of this sensory data in the scene. Your nervous system is on alert, your thinking is down-regulated so you’re not making sense of what’s going on, and your hippocampus is down-regulated so there’s not a timestamp to the memory and there’s no order, because it’s the hippocampus that creates context and order.

What’s left is a lot of emotion and a lot of potential triggers from sights or sounds or sirens or whatever, but no understanding of what’s being triggered because it was never woven together for meaning. Which means when someone triggers you, you think it’s the person triggering you who’s causing your big reaction, and then you get angry with them.

In Vietnam—in that era—if a soldier came back and they were in a Target parking lot and a car backfired, they hit the ground, because their body told them danger was near. Their body felt the battlefield was there. For us, with C-PTSD, relational trauma—relationships are our car backfiring. Vulnerability, trust, need, wanting to love, feeling scared of it. When we get triggered, it’s a very vulnerable thing, and a lot of people with very little recovery just go straight for the jugular of the other person, straight for the blame. They will say to that person all that they didn’t get a chance to say to that parent. They have no idea they’re doing it. They really think it’s the person triggering them causing the pain. They need to pull it back. They need to pause. They need to wonder, “What in me is causing such a big reaction?” And they need to question themselves and get curious. Really, it’s quite a beautiful journey when you surrender to it.

Tami Simon: Now, there’s a lot here in what you’re saying, Tian. And at one point, before you started explaining how this operates at a nervous system level, you said to me, “Are you interested in this, Tami?” And you might have asked that question because I had a kind of blank look on my face. And I want to speak to this for a moment, because sometimes—and I notice this in reading Growing Up with Addiction and in listening to you now—I hear somebody saying something that’s really important and, instead of getting under it and into my nervous system, I can kind of go into a dream place a little bit where my mind isn’t as sharp, but I’m sort of in a dreamy, kind of timeless, strange zone. And I wonder if you can speak to that—to whoever might be listening to our conversation and, as you’re talking, noticing different kinds of responses coming up for them. Maybe like the one I’m sharing or maybe something different.

Tian Dayton: Well, in psychodrama, which is what I do to heal people, we have something called a psychodramatic trance state. And I believe that’s a re-patterning brain state. And if I may be personal—you are a famous meditator and spiritual person, and that part of your mind you might have more access to than the average person, and less fear of just allowing it to kind of reflect and go back and see what might be coming up and wonder about yourself. I don’t know if I’m hitting anything accurately.

Tami Simon: I think you’re saying something really important, and what I really want to drive to in this conversation is the re-patterning—the possibility of re-patterning. And I’m going to start here by reading a quote from Growing Up with Addiction. It has to do with when we don’t feel safe. You gave the example of someone coming back from Vietnam, hearing a sound in a parking lot, and hitting the floor. Different people may experience triggers in different ways, but in that moment they don’t feel safe. And you write: “Healing isn’t about convincing yourself that you’re safe. You can’t just think your way out of complex PTSD, because trauma isn’t a story in your mind. It’s stored in your body, your nervous system, and the reflexes that activate before you even have time to think. Trauma lives not just in memory, but in muscle, fascia, breath, and heartbeat.” Beautiful writing there, Tian.

Tian Dayton: Thank you.

Tami Simon: So my question to you is: if we can’t talk ourselves into feeling safe, what can we do to have a sense of calming ourselves down in order to engage in the kind of re-patterning that you’re saying is possible?

Tian Dayton: Well, I feel like I’m sitting in a long line of spiritual people in listening to you—including yourself. So: breath. You start with the breath. If you can come back to the breath and just do even breathing, you’re going to start to make the sympathetic and the parasympathetic more even, which will calm your nervous system. That’s the yoga breathing, alternate nostril—but any breathing will help.

One thing I learned observing meditation early on in my twenties is that the mind has its own capacity to heal itself. That if you sit long enough in meditation, your body will, in its stillness, produce what needs to come up. So I think if you—just as you did—sit with what’s coming up… that’s what most people don’t want to do: just sit with what’s coming up and wonder about it. It’s the questioning, the curiosity, the evaluation, the talking, the telling of a story from a bit of distance—that’s what helps us heal now. It’s allowing the body to feel safe enough to connect feeling to sensation, a word or feeling to sensation.

And what I do in RTR is create experiential moments so that as feeling arises, you can hang with it a little bit, and then you name it, and suddenly it gets a little more spacious. And you’re in a room of other people doing a similar thing and they’re kind of in the same place, and then you translate it into words and share it. So it’s a very simple process of learning emotional literacy, because what your body was shutting down, it’s now getting open to. The mind is coming out of the body—bottom-up processing. The reasoning, the thought, the piecing things together is coming from the body, and then the witnessing mind is making sense of it as it arises.

And because trauma is a fragmenting experience—the sights are here, the sounds are there, the person is there, the situation is sort of foggy—this is a very simple process, but it heals trauma because trauma fragments, and sitting with, observing, and making sense of it heals. And it heals very well in co-regulatory fields with other people. Steve Porges—the first time I encountered Steve Porges’s Polyvagal theory, he said, “Healing is through co-regulation.” I think religious places, temples, 12-step meetings—people are healing through a kind of limbic resonance and co-regulation. Horses do it too. Herds do it. The limbic system starts to vibrate outward a little, and you regulate each other.

So there is the healing that happens within the self, and then there’s the healing that happens within a community. And in a 12-step room, for example, you hear like-minded people sharing from a kind of common ground. You’re struggling, maybe. So then you learn to listen without shutting it down, jumping up, arguing, because there are ground rules.

Tami Simon: Tell me more about the kind of co-regulation that could happen, for example, in a 12-step group. Because I could imagine someone who hasn’t participated in one saying, “Great, I’m with a bunch of people who are as messed up as I am. How is that actually going to co-regulate me?”

Tian Dayton: Because it’s not about the story—it’s about the capacity to sit with what you’re feeling and translate it into words. So it can make the journey from the body to the mind, and you can share it with yourself, reflect, share it with another person, and then listen to what they have to say. It’s a very simple process, but it’s amazing how many people can’t let it happen.

Tami Simon: What is going on when we name it? Because I know that’s one of the first steps—name it, and then reframe it. But just in naming it, why is that so valuable and beneficial to us?

Tian Dayton: There’s such an emotional unconsciousness that happens with trauma. You become a stranger to yourself. If you can’t allow yourself to feel what’s inside of you—or you’ve got to call it something else, because it was unacceptable to call it what it was—then getting in touch with a feeling that’s coming up through your body and saying, “That feels like my anger. That feels like my anger. It’s not about this moment. I’m not going to make it about somebody else and say they’re angry at me”—that’s a common thing we do; we feel people are angry at us when we’re angry at them—you’re naming it to get it into the right place.

And that’s a little bit of liberation. But then you’re also getting curious about what’s inside of you. And once you can put words to feelings and feelings to words, you can start to fit them together and fill in the gaps—put the pieces of the puzzle back together that got fragmented through trauma. Keep in mind, in families where there’s trauma, nobody’s talking to each other about that. They’re talking to each other about everything else, so it doesn’t get resolved. Without a good cry or a good talk, it just sits in the system in unconsciousness—unnamed freight.

Tami Simon: Now, you developed a method called Relational Trauma Repair. Why did you feel, first of all, that a new method was needed? What was missing out there in the field? And then describe to us what Relational Trauma Repair is.

Tian Dayton: I am a psychodramatist, and psychodrama really healed me. I think I was 30 when I experienced my first psychodrama, and I just thought, “Whoa.” And then I tried—

Tami Simon: For people who don’t know what it is—

Tian Dayton: Oh, sorry. Psychodrama is a role-playing method developed by J.L. Moreno and later continued by his wife, Zerka Moreno.

And it is talking to, not about—that’s the whole beauty of it. It’s embodiment. For example, if someone is in my office and they’re talking about their mother—a lot of thoughts, the story gets maybe a little complicated and tangential—I might say, “If she were sitting in that chair, what would you say to her?” And because it’s a direct encounter, because you’re talking to and not about, your body comes in. You’re less separated from your body in the story in your head. And suddenly you’re saying what you mean: “Mom, why didn’t you see me? Why didn’t you like me? Why didn’t you—?” And then here’s the key, which is the crown jewel of psychodrama: role reversal. You reverse roles. And then you become the mother, talking back to yourself. And paradoxically—you’d think you’d leave yourself and have less of yourself—by becoming more flexible in your role repertoire, you learn empathy for your mother. Because you’re standing in her shoes. It’s not an act of will, the empathy. You’re embodying her. You suddenly realize, “Wait a minute—everything wasn’t about me. She was scared to death.” She made it about me, or I made it about me, but it was about so many other things, her own history. Just by sitting in it. So these simple role plays are very curative, and the reframing is in the process.

Tami Simon: Okay, hold on, because I really want to put this under a magnifying glass for a moment. Thirty years ago, when you engaged in a psychodrama practice, you said it changed you. It healed. What? What happened? Tell us—take us to that place.

Tian Dayton: Good question. Because something very specific happened. Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse, who was then kind of a pioneer in the ACOA and codependency movement, came to our house. I was always trying to get my family to get help. So we corralled everybody who was older than eight or ten, and we all went into the basement for two days. That was pretty amazing in and of itself.

But Sharon said, “Okay. Sculpt the family. Choose people to play your family members—or use the real people—as you see it.” And first of all, the question for me was mind-boggling. I get to see it my own way? There was the liberation of just knowing: we each live in a different family. We each see it differently.

And then watching all my family members sculpt their version of the same family was profoundly liberating for me, because it gave me permission to have a different experience. We were on our way to move to London at the time, and I remember getting there and just thinking, “Wow. This is a whole ocean. This is the boundary I’ve been needing—an ocean.” And it just kind of catapulted me into my own ability to leave a system, because it coalesced the system in front of my eyes so I could see it as dysfunctional—

Tami Simon: That’s helpful.

Tian Dayton: —and wonderful.

Tami Simon: And in terms of this role reversal practice—if somebody wanted to try this, what would you suggest? How might they be able to try this even on their own, as a way to look at a situation differently?

Tian Dayton: I would put a warning label on it—like on cigarettes: “Caution.” But as long as that’s there: talk to the chair. Or talk to a part of yourself. If you’re struggling with a frozen part of yourself mentally, place that part of yourself in a chair and just talk to it. In other words: “I see your frozenness. I see your struggle. I don’t know what to do with you. You’ve got me stuck.” And then tell yourself to reverse roles, go and sit in the frozenness, and talk back to yourself—and you will find that part of you having a voice. Because as the Frozenness, I will surprise myself. I’ll say, “Well, you never took any interest in me before. I’ve been serving you all your life. What would you have done if I weren’t here freezing for you, so you could just go to school and have lunch and go to parties?” So getting that kind of dialogue with an internal part of self is very releasing. Or you can do it with somebody else. You can talk to your dog—

Tami Simon: —and they talk back too.

Tian Dayton: Yes, exactly. Dogs are there all the time.

Tami Simon: Okay. Now I want to go back to the creation of Relational Trauma Repair. Why you did it, and how relational trauma is different from other kinds of trauma.

Tian Dayton: Yes. There’s event trauma and there’s relational trauma. Event trauma is a car accident. Event trauma is an attack. Event trauma is a momentary rage. Event trauma has a beginning, middle, and an end, generally speaking—and that is PTSD. And the remarkable part about it is that because of the way the body stores traumatic memory unconsciously—it doesn’t have a label, it doesn’t have a connection, it’s never been made sense of—event trauma goes into a kind of dead zone. And that’s why you can get triggered days, months, years, decades later and explode, because your body gets triggered and you still don’t know why you’re exploding. That’s the post-traumatic stress reaction.

C-PTSD is relational. That’s when it’s the drip, drip, drip of criticism. It’s expectations that are cruel. It’s everything that doesn’t allow you to be you and to be comfortable and to feel safe. Or think of a baby in your arms: all a baby wants is you. All a baby wants is to connect. And if you disconnect, that is a traumatic experience for the baby. For your listeners—Ed Tronick, a wonderful psychologist, did something called the Still Face Experiment. Google it. In four minutes, you’ll be changed. When you see what it does to a baby not to be mirrored or seen.

And then—why did I start this particular model? I work in the addictions field, and people don’t have the training to do psychodrama well, usually. But addicts and people in recovery, codependents—they love psychodrama, love the way it feels. But you need to do it pretty well to have it work in the addiction space. And there were budget cuts in New York in the eighties. All my trainees were coming and telling me they had groups of 30 and 35 people and they were supposed to give them therapy. This was the managed care phase. So I really thought: I know sociometry—that’s the kind of group dynamic, concretized part of Moreno’s system. What can I do to extend sociometrics that I love but that aren’t quite enough? They don’t last long enough. They don’t do enough.

So I came to a group with feelings written on pieces of paper, and I just invited everybody to walk over to a feeling they were experiencing. I had to come up with something that could give therapy to 35 people, and the only way you can do that is by mobilizing the group. I knew I had to find points of connection. So there was common ground on the pieces of paper, and people would walk over to a feeling, share it, and then the people around them would be their links. They would be healing each other over common ground. They would be hearing each other. They’d be on different pieces of paper all over the room.

And then it incorporated movement—I got people out of their chairs. If you work in a treatment center, people are coming in like this. Getting the body moving was a big thing. That meant the limbic system and the emotional and sensorial system was waking up. And then it was a simple thing: “What are you feeling now?” That’s a choice that names it for you. And then all you have to do is share why you chose it, which is emotional literacy in the making. Then you listen as other people do, and you don’t leave the room, you don’t argue with them, you don’t throw something—and all of this is healing. And it can last for 45 minutes.

Then in treatment facilities—they do psychoeducation, which I love. It’s so respectful. So I just put it all on the floor instead of putting symptoms on a chalkboard, which makes everybody think they have everything. I put them on the floor and gave people a choice: Which one do you identify with? Which one do you not identify with? Which one did your family struggle with? So that’s intergenerational, family-of-origin work. This little simple process was not simple at all. And it could sustain a group of 35, and they would heal each other. And to watch it happen—I have watched it now in most of the cities in the country and in Europe, and it works the same every time. It works with a thousand people and it works with 10 people. It’s people healing people. You just have to have the structure so the brain can relax and the nervous system can predict.

Tami Simon: I pulled this headline out of Growing Up with Addiction: “Name it, reframe it, rewire it.” And in our conversation so far, I think we’ve talked some about having enough awareness to name what you’re feeling—the reactivity—and how that might have been something that came from your family system. But I want to understand more about the reframing and the rewiring in particular.

Tian Dayton: Well, the reframing in psychodrama and in RTR happens through the process itself—through role reversal. You’re reframing through casting your version of the family and watching others cast theirs. You’re putting things in perspective, giving things different frames. It doesn’t have to land in one frame. The reframing would be a process—seeing it differently, becoming more flexible in your perspectives, getting out of your own head and being able to see from other points of view.

And then the rewiring—the neurobiology. We sort of think we’re all wired when we get here, but babies in fact are not fully wired at all in their nervous systems when they’re born. A lot of the neurological wiring for emotional regulation occurs outside the womb. That is why rocking and touching and cooing and skin-to-skin contact is not just a nice thing for little babies. It is a crucial part of how they wire their emotional balance. And if they don’t get it, they are dysregulated.

Tami Simon: Right, so let’s talk to the dysregulated listener who is joining us. They’re identifying with this, and I think they understand what you’re saying about breathing as a way to regulate the nervous system when they don’t feel safe. But the patterns that were formed early on seem pretty well-worn. It doesn’t seem easy to rewire. From your experience—and I know you have so many years of experience working with people in the addiction and trauma healing field—this is what I want to learn more about.

Tian Dayton: It’s a really deep, important, and core question. There are a lot of ways to regulate a nervous system, and I think you have to do them all—all the ones that work. Pick the ones for you, whether it’s biking or nature or walking with a friend or doing breathing or meditating or all of the above. Eating regular healthy food. It’s a discipline. It’s a new design for living. It doesn’t just happen. And people get frustrated. People with trauma want to think themselves better. It’s just marvelous, you know—”Why am I still reacting like my mother? Why am I—?” They want to come for a week of treatment and be done. And that is not how it works. It is a learning to live differently.

So the first place you need to learn to live differently is in your own body. You have to start letting your body talk to you—self-care, rest when you’re tired. If you’re being with people you don’t want to be with, pull back a little bit. If you are doing things you don’t want to do, try to stop doing as many of them, or find an attitude that can give you a better chance at doing them with pleasure. It’s emotional literacy. It’s getting in touch with your body. It’s retraining your nervous system. It’s accepting yourself. And it’s some discipline.

Tami Simon: It’s interesting to hear you use that word, because I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anyone talk about healing as a discipline. And so tell me—you used that word kind of tentatively, but yet you’re also making a point in a strong way.

Tian Dayton: Yes. Well, treating so many ACOAs and addicts and so forth, there’s a time along in recovery—I consult in programs that do that initial month of treatment; I obviously work there and have worked there, but primarily I work outpatient. The initial recovery is just regulating the nervous system and starting to open to the idea of change. Good treatment centers feel like—there’s a lot of backslapping, volleyball, tears, laughter. They really let the nervous system start to relax and start to sound like humans.

But there’s a point—and it’s frustrating, and that might be why I’m having a hard time getting the words out—it’s very frustrating as a therapist to hear people say things like, “Why haven’t I changed? Why haven’t I gotten better?” And what I really want to say at that time—and occasionally do—is: find the best feeling you can find. Make it your job to live a good life. Make it your job to pay attention to the thoughts you’re thinking. Pay attention to the way you’re seeing the world and seeing yourself, and develop better attitudes, develop clean morals, develop all the kinds of simple things that create happiness. And it’s generally stability. It’s often having a good moral compass. It’s often being regular. That’s the kind of thing 12-step does for people. When people think, “Oh, it’s the God thing”—no, it’s good orderly direction and support along the way.

And I think also, Tami, it’s a spiritual awakening. I personally think—if I’m going to be really honest—

Tami Simon: Please, lay it out. Don’t hold back.

Tian Dayton: I think God is everywhere. I think God is—I think to deny God is to deny the self, at some level. To be able to live in this universe we live in and not wonder about the intelligence that created it—and who cares if it’s a God or a million intelligences? Who cares? It is something beyond understanding. And I think there is a kind of awakening that happens through meditation. Some people get it through drug experiences. I kind of worry about that coming back as part of therapy; I’m not sure what I think of it. But I think it’s perfectly okay if it opens a door—as long as you discipline yourself to stay in that room. So: discipline yourself. If you have an awakening, then know that you’re capable of it and find it sober. If you let yourself go down a rabbit hole of negativity, find a way not to. If you just kind of accept the mean side of you, find a way to be nicer. I think people are just happier when they take ownership—take ownership of your own negativity, take ownership of your own darkness, and mine it.

I had a trainee come in today who’s been doing RTR, and they work with an Orthodox Jewish community. He said—he’s got this wonderful accent—”People in his community say, ‘I don’t want to open this can of worms.'” And he said, “What can of worms? It is your can of gold.” And I was just stunned at what he said. It’s Jungian—the gold is in the shadow. Mine your own shadow. Get to know this side of yourself, accept that it’s there, and grow it up. Enlighten it. So that’s what I mean by discipline. I don’t know that that’s a very satisfactory answer—and it’s maybe why I don’t talk about it more.

Tami Simon: It’s a tough love answer and I like that. To be honest, it’s the kind of tough love I need to hear. So I’m grateful to you, Dr. Tian, for bringing it. “Why hasn’t this method worked? Why hasn’t that worked? Come on, why haven’t you—?” This kind of blaming—I’m going to blame all the therapists I’ve tried—and right, you’re just putting it right back on the power of choice.

I want to go back to earlier in our conversation. You wrote in Growing Up with Addiction—you started the chapter and said, “If you don’t get anything else from this book, read and reread this chapter.” So I sat up straight and paid very careful attention.

And you wrote about how trauma can make us prone to cognitive distortions, and you’ve shared a little bit about what some of those might be—”It’s all my fault” when something happens, or, one of my own cognitive distortions: I’m going to blame X, Y, Z person, very strongly, before I even think about it. But the interesting thing is that in the same chapter you talked about somatic distortions—and this I found extraordinary. So why don’t you bring our listeners up to speed on how growing up with addiction could create somatic distortions in how we receive the world?

Tian Dayton: Well, I was sort of making up a category, because cognitive distortions are the thoughts and the personalization and the black-and-white thinking that comes out of a dysregulated nervous system. We think, feel, and act in dysregulation.

I was once giving a talk—in Vancouver, in Canada—and there were 200 or 300 people. I had done a book called Emotional Sobriety and I was trying to describe what that was. Finally, out of sort of desperation, because they all looked blank, I said: “Emotional sobriety is living in four, five, and six. Dysregulation is going from zero to ten and ten to zero with no speed bumps in between.” That’s dysregulation. That is ground zero of cognitive distortions—and it is also a somatic distortion, because it’s a nervous system dysregulation.

The nervous system patterns out even more strongly than the thoughts, and then our thoughts follow. It starts in the body. So if your somatic distortion is that when you are around conflict you start to freeze, your body is remembering how it handled that conflict and it just goes there right away. And the path out of it is pretty simple. You just have to sit there and go: “I’m freezing again. Why am I freezing? Why am I freezing in this situation?” And then try to stay out of blaming—which is really challenging, because of course you won’t want to. It’s hard to say, “I’m freezing,” rather than “You are this and that.” But it’s really: “Why am I reacting like this? Because I’m the only one I can change here.” And that’s where the liberation is—what’s going on in my body that I can own and translate, what’s going on in my mind that I can own and translate. So even if this other person doesn’t change at all, I will have some consciousness around what’s going on with me.

And once you get that consciousness—and it’s often historical—you’ll often go back to: “Gosh, my mother made me so terrified all that time” or “I felt so criticized by her.” You’ll find out why you’re so triggered. And then the beautiful thing is: it will kind of lift. And that person isn’t changing at all. But you see them differently, because you’ve made sense of it—and you’ve made sense of it starting with your body. Because your body doesn’t lie, and it will follow the same path until you wonder about it. And what will come out of that somatic distortion is the thought distortion and the behavioral distortion.

Tami Simon: You write in Growing Up with Addiction about how we can understand triggers as teachable moments. So for those of us who can recognize, “Oh, I know that’s when I was triggered”—how could we make it a teachable moment?

Tian Dayton: Easily, really. Because once you’re in a triggered state, the window is open. Stuff is starting to come out of you. What you need to do is not throw it at the other person—take a pause and say, “Why am I reacting like this? Why is my reaction to this not-very-big exchange enormous?” And there will always be a reason. Triggers are overreactions, so they are based on a past that is not staying in the past. That’s the hippocampus brain part again. The brain doesn’t organize memories so they have a clean past, present, and future. All the memories are on top of each other, mixed together, undifferentiated.

So I use timelines to get that clear, so that you can start seeing.

Tami Simon: Tell me more about that—and how I might be able to use a timeline. Give me a little example.

Tian Dayton: When Bessel van der Kolk’s work was coming out in the eighties, I was putting it together with psychodrama in my head—how is this working together? But my clients, when we were talking about trauma, just kept fogging out. When we would talk about what happened that hurt, it became very obvious they had what was then thought of as memory loss. I have now come to think of it as just unconscious stuff that hasn’t ever been reasoned through and put into order. It acts like memory loss, but the memories are all still in there. That’s why they’re giving you a problem.

So I started saying, “Put a timeline. Take a piece of paper, on the long end divide it into segments by five, and just enter in what you remember that happened that was either terrifying or that was a significant dynamic”—covering both event and relational trauma. And as people did that, the fog started to lift. It’s a very simple act, but it starts to put things in order, which means your nervous system can start to see some structure, your brain can start to see some structure, and everything isn’t just piled up over one period.

Another thing people would observe: “Well, I had so much trauma in these young ages, and then nothing bad really happened between this age and that age, but I felt bad all the time.” Well, that’s when you can’t resolve something—it’s still living inside of you, with all of the cognitive distortions and all of the reactivity and all of the fears.

That’s why you want to process as you go. I remember one of the most interesting observations: someone said, “Since I entered recovery in my forties, I’ve had trauma, but I don’t register it as trauma because I’m processing it as I go.” So you want trauma to have a beginning, middle, and an end. It doesn’t naturally, but a timeline will help achieve that. It will help the brain relax, restore order, put things in the past that are in the past and in the present that are in the present, so they stop seeming to be the same. That’s the core of the overreaction—the past is intruding on the present, coming out as an overreaction, getting pinned on the present—and it really screws up people’s present lives, because they are convinced it’s real right now.

Tami Simon: When you go to create a timeline, and let’s say you’re working on what happened from conception to when you started talking—what part of you is filling out the timeline at that point? Like, are you imagining that this happened?

Tian Dayton: The group helps a lot with that. I love doing this in a group, because then I stretch it out on the floor, put age-zero-to-five cards on the floor, and I just say, “Go to an age where you’re still frozen, where you still have work to do.” The babies, when they’re going to each other—the toddlers, when they’re going to each other—talk to each other, so they start to hear what they’re sharing, and things clear up, because together they’re making sense of their own youth. If you do it alone, it’s much easier—you just have to be a little more relaxed about what doesn’t get entered into that timeline, because a person by themselves may just not be able to recall.

Tami Simon: Now, you mentioned, Tian, that people who have suffered from addiction love the embodied sculpting and psychodrama work in particular. Why is that?

Tian Dayton: The nervous system relaxes because trauma is dis-embodying. When you freeze, when you flee—fight, flight, freeze, fawn—it’s a disembodied experience. You’re in your head, you’re trying to read everybody else, you’ve left yourself. You’re in your head trying to stay safe, managing other people, but forgetting about yourself. So psychodrama has a role that is you. You’re sitting there as yourself, and then you’re reversing roles with another part of yourself or another person, and then you’re returning to yourself. And that in and of itself is restorative—just to inhabit, on the stage or what we call the stage on the floor, the role of self.

Tami Simon: Another curiosity: this term that you coined—”relational reliving.” Help me understand that more. And my follow-up question: how can we become more aware when we’re in a relational reliving moment? How can we have more awareness of that ourselves?

Tian Dayton: That’s a good question. I think it becomes a habit to question yourself. So as much as possible, be willing to see what you’re bringing to the party before you react. Take a pause. Or—more often what happens, and I speak from personal experience—you react, and then you think, “Why am I so heated up? Why is this getting to me?” My signal is: if I have to talk to my husband about something going on 15 times, I eventually start thinking, “Maybe I’m bringing something from my past. Maybe this is triggering something in me.” If the person who’s triggering me is not a huge part of my life, but they can really get under my skin—that’s historical triggering.

So what is required of me is to take a pause, to become willing to see what it is, to sit in that uncomfortable moment with myself—where I’m just going, “It’s just her. If she would just stop doing this, I would stop feeling like this”—and just say to myself, “Okay, just for a minute: wonder if there’s a historical piece here.” And then, of course, once you’re willing to wonder, it comes.

Tami Simon: Okay. One final question for you. I don’t know if I’ll ever make it to an RTR experiential psychodrama, but I want to gain some of the value. And in your book, Growing Up with Addiction: How Adult Children of Addicts Can Heal Family Trauma, Complex PTSD and Codependency, you offer a lot of different practices that someone could do on their own. I wonder if you can share one final example here with our listeners that they can work with as part of their own healing process.

Tian Dayton: I hope it’s okay if I name three, because three are popping into my head: letter writing, timelines, and social atoms. They’re all in the book and they’re all described. The social atom will give you a sense of the system you grew up in or the system you want to create—it will give you the role relationships. The timeline will help you put things in order, and also in order with yourself: who was I when I was three? Who was I when I was seven? What do I want to say to that person? You can do that empty chair exercise and talk to the various parts of yourself, reverse roles—or you can write a letter, which is the most easily available. It is two roles: the writer to the part of self, or to the other person.

And it’s remarkable how much direct encounter you feel writing a letter, and how much relief. It’s quite wonderful. And you can share the letter not with the person you wrote it to, but with a friend or a partner or whoever is near that you trust. It’s very evocative, because again—you’re talking to, not about.

Tami Simon: I’ve been talking with Dr. Tian Dayton. She’s the author of the book Growing Up with Addiction: How Adult Children of Addicts Can Heal Family Trauma, Complex PTSD and Codependency. Thank you, Tian, for this deep conversation. It brought up a lot, and thank you for your terrific suggestions for the path through.

Tian Dayton: Thank you so much. I’m so glad to be here.