Sounds True: Insights at the Edge Tian Dayton: If You Grew Up with Addicts, Healing Is a Discipline
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Apr 14, 2026 
Tian Dayton, clinical psychologist and psychodramatist who helps repair relational trauma, discusses how addiction reshapes whole families and creates lifelong patterns. She explores psychodrama, body-based practices, co-regulation, naming feelings, and why disciplined, embodied work is key to healing. Practical tools like timelines, letters, and role reversal are highlighted.
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Why Triggers Feel Like Present Danger
- Trauma often shows up not as memories but as reactivity driven by a downregulated hippocampus and an activated limbic fight/flight/freeze/fawn system.
- Because sensory data is stored without context, triggers can feel like present danger and provoke outsized reactions toward others.
Use Breath Then Community To Reconnect Body And Mind
- Start regulation with breath and meditative stillness to even sympathetic and parasympathetic activity and allow the body to produce what needs to come up.
- Then create experiential moments in co-regulatory groups to translate sensation into words and build emotional literacy.
Relational Trauma Repair Scales Group Healing
- Relational Trauma Repair (RTR) mobilizes groups by placing feelings on paper and having participants physically choose and share them to create links and co-regulation.
- Movement, choice, naming, and listening let large groups (30–35+) self-heal through structured sociometry.
