➡️ Get the full episode breakdown at Biology of Trauma® Podcast - Episode 163: Growing Up With Addiction Left a Trauma Your Body Still Carries
What happens when a child has to become the adult in the family? Dr. Tian Dayton, clinical psychologist and author of Growing Up with Addiction, joins Dr. Aimie for one of the most personal conversations on the podcast. Both share their own childhood stories of reading the room, managing a parent’s emotions, and the unspoken rules that shaped their nervous systems for decades.
This episode reveals how children in unpredictable families redirect their brain’s resources from play to survival, how addiction’s rhythms become the child’s operating manual, and why chronic survival physiology leads to digestive dysfunction in midlife. Whether addiction was part of your family or not, these dynamics may be running your body today.
In This Episode You'll Learn:
- (00:00) What happens when a child has to become the emotional manager of the family
- (02:58) What chaos actually looks like in a family that appears organized on the surface
- (05:00) How a child’s brain shifts from play and curiosity to strategizing and operating
- (07:23) The different physiological states of a parent in addiction: sober, craving, and under the influence
- (10:22) Why addiction spills beyond substances into food, process addictions, and mood cycles
- (14:55) The connection between protein deficiency, neurotransmitter production, and craving cycles
- (22:16) How the insula processes conflicting emotions and body sensations during overwhelming moments
- (27:51) Why chronic survival physiology leads to digestive issues, bloating, and gut inflammation
- (29:33) The perimenopause tipping point: when the body stops adapting to decades of unresolved stress
- (52:17) The Al-Anon principle that changed everything: love the person, separate the disease
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