Bill Gifford

Trauma generally falls into five categories: (1) abuse (physical or sexual, but also emotional or spiritual); (2) neglect; (3) abandonment; (4) enmeshment (the blurring of boundaries between adults and children); and (5) witnessing tragic events.

Trauma, big T or little t, means having experienced moments of perceived helplessness.

The most important thing about childhood trauma is not the event itself but the way the child adapts to it.

Children are remarkably resilient, and wounded children become adaptive children.

The problems begin when these adaptive children grow up to become maladaptive, dysfunctional adults.

This dysfunction is represented by the four branches of the trauma tree: (1) addiction, not only to vices such as drugs, alcohol, and gambling, but also to socially acceptable things such as work, exercise, and perfectionism (check); (2) codependency, or excessive psychological reliance on another person; (3) habituated survival strategies, such as a propensity to anger and rage (check); (4) attachment disorders, difficulty forming and maintaining connections or meaningful relationships with others (check).

One reason this approach has proved less effective in the psychological realm is that mental health and emotional health are not the same thing.

At the Bridge, I learned that children don’t respond to a parent’s anger in a logical way. If they see me screaming at a driver who just cut me off, they internalize that rage as though it were directed to them.

Family pathology rolls from generation to generation like a fire in the woods taking down everything in its path until one person, in one generation, has the courage to turn and face the flames.

That person brings peace to his ancestors and spares the children that follow.”
I wanted to be that person.