Recovery Embodied: An Introduction

Many of us carry lifelong childhood wounds that have defied definition and existed behind a closed door. Through a series of written reflections shaped by a lifetime of recovery and years of trauma-informed clinical work I hope to help others open and walk through this door and view what healing those wounds and coming home to ourselves can truly mean for us, for our loved ones and for generations ahead.

Despite the years of education I have received, I believe that the most important knowledge I have to offer others is my story. Stories are how humans make meaning. Plato wrote “stories shape the soul far more than instruction.” My story reveals where that soul shaping and healing began for me, where it is today and how it continues to inform every dimension of my professional work.

Before We Come Home

There is a quiet truth I have discovered that applies in my own life and in the lives of many I have had the privilege of knowing. The truth is that we humans are more disconnected from ourselves than we realize. We adapt early. We learn to perform, to excel, to manage, to anticipate, to soothe. We learn to disconnect and dissociate. As children we became who we needed to be in order to navigate our families and the emotional climates into which we were born. Along the way our True Selves may have slipped underground. This occurred not because we were weak or flawed, but because it was not safe to be wholly ourselves. Some professionals call this Codependency. Some call it the Game of Dissociation. Some call it Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD). Some call it mental illness or personality disorder. Some cite a growing list of substance and behavioral addictions.

Mainstream medicine has often labeled as disorders the following: depression, anxiety, addiction, ADHD, bipolar, borderline traits, some levels of autism and schizophrenia and narcissism. Today these disorders are starting to be understood as expressions of unmet developmental needs and relational trauma rather than chemical imbalances or broken brains. Whatever words we use a pattern of cause and effect is being revealed. The truth is that we learned as children to leave ourselves long before we ever learned who we were.

Thankfully there is a pathway home from wherever we exist today. Whether one’s inner life feels like a 2 on a scale of 10 or closer to an 8, the invitation is the same. How free from past trauma does one want to be? I have experienced living long stretches at a 2, believing that was simply how life worked. Today I live much closer to an 8 or 9 and I can say without hesitation that the hard journey is worth it.

Why The Recovery Work of Developmental Trauma Matters

After forty years in personal recovery, and decades of immersive trauma-informed training and self-study, I now find myself in a season of meaning, purpose and clarity I didn’t know was possible for someone with my history. My clinical path was shaped in part by training in the Meadows Model of Developmental Immaturity (aka Codependency), the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) Survival Strategies, and mentorship within the trauma and recovery field. That clinical path unfolded alongside my personal healing path through the original “12 Steps” and their further evolution. Each has supported the other every step of the way.

At this point in my life I want to offer something back, not as a guru or someone who has “arrived,” but as a man who has spent decades trying to understand why so many of us have felt anxious, compulsive, ashamed, disconnected, overwhelmed or simply not enough. This series of reflections will be for those who want their lives to make sense. My writing will be directed to the person who longs for inner quiet, to the person who wants to stop repeating old patterns, to the person who still wants to love and be loved and to the inner child who never stopped wanting to be seen. I write in honor of my brother and my parents who absolutely did the very best they could with what they were given and in honor of the countless clients, families and friends who have suffered longer and more deeply than anyone should have to.

Why This Work Often Speaks Quietly to The Helpers

I have noticed that the work of recovering from childhood trauma often resonates, sometimes unexpectedly, with those of us who help others as a career: therapists, physicians, nurses, clergy, teachers, leaders, caregivers. Many of these helpers did not arrive in their roles by accident. Across my own recovery and clinical training, I have noticed a pattern. Helpers frequently come from families where hyper-responsibility, emotional labor, vigilance or invisibility were early survival skills. What later in their lives looked like competence, empathy and strength often began as adaptation. This is especially true in the addiction treatment world.

One of the great, often unspoken truths of recovery is that addicts can only be reached by other addicts. The extraordinary success of the 12-Step movement rests on this simple reality - a suffering alcoholic can hear another alcoholic in a way no outsider ever could. That is not a flaw of the system. It is its genius. At the same time, it creates a paradox. Those who have devoted their lives to helping others recover from addiction are most often people who have known profound suffering. They are wounded more deeply, often unconsciously, than they outwardly present but are heroes doing heroic work.

A quiet modern echo of old wisdom is emerging. It invites those of us who work in healthcare, recovery, and helping roles to tend the same inner terrain we so readily recognize in others. Many who care deeply also carry deep histories. Their own healing journeys, rather than diminishing their work, may be what allows their work to reach its next, more sustainable expression. Their journey perhaps even contributes in small but meaningful ways to restoring connection in a world that has forgotten how wounded we all are.

The trauma frameworks that underpin my clinical work include ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families), developmental and attachment clinical models, CPTSD research and somatic approaches. All point to a quiet but important truth. The truth shows that while many of us heal from chemical dependency, a deeper underlying developmental trauma often remains only partially addressed. This unhealed trauma can continue to express itself through non-chemical process addictions, relational struggles, over-functioning, burnout and quiet disconnection.

I write this series with deep respect for the people who built recovery on lived experience and mutual identification. I believe we stand at the edge of a meaningful expansion in emotional healing - one that brings trauma resolution more fully into a field that has already saved countless lives.

Why We Disconnect and Why the Journey Back Matters

I absolutely believe Developmental Trauma is a pervasive and largely unacknowledged public health issue. Developmental Trauma is not simply about what happened in childhood. It is about what had to happen inside a child for that child to endure what occurred or what failed to occur in the years when he or she was dependent and vulnerable. As children we did not choose hyper-responsibility, hyper-competence or the roles we played in our families. We did not choose to become invisible, accommodating or emotionally numb. We did not choose to lose our bodies, our instincts or our sense of worth. We did not choose patterns of addiction, intensity or identity confusion. We did not choose to mistrust what was safe and trust what was wrong but familiar.

Children, even through adolescence, do not have the capacity to choose their path accurately or interpret or meaningfully change their environment. Adults, however, do get to choose their way back along the recovery path. As adults we are able to understand and recover from Developmental Trauma. Trauma, at its core, is a biopsychospiritual disconnection from Self. Recovery, real embodied recovery, is the return of the Self that never disappeared but hid itself in pain. Recovery is not about blame or victimhood. It is about truth. Humans are physiologically designed to avoid looking back; the human nervous system prioritizes survival over insight. Despite this, across multiple cultures and centuries, wise traditions have pointed to the same conclusion - a life worth living requires turning inward toward what was once too painful to see.

What Recovery Means to Me Now

For decades the word recovery has meant sobriety from substances. Then, the term sobriety came to include freedom from compulsive behaviors around money, sex, food, work and control. That foundation is important. Today, however, recovery needs to mean something broader and more existential than sobriety.

The addiction treatment field was among the first forced to confront the human suffering that lies beneath behavior: shame, attachment rupture, nervous system dysregulation and survival strategies formed early in life. Behavioral insights now extend far beyond substance abuse. Many of the struggles we label as mental health diagnoses, relationship and parenting problems or career issues can be understood through a shared lens of Developmental Trauma and the adaptations one develops to manage pain and disconnection.

Recovery, as I understand it now, is the restoration of regulation, relational capacity, agency, spirituality and embodied presence. Recovery is a reunion with the parts of ourselves we were forced to abandon in our formative years. Recovery is something we do not only for ourselves, but also for our loved ones, our children and in quiet honor of the generations before us who never had a real chance. Mom, dad, Chris…I know what was in your hearts and I sense you are all smiling.

Dr. Laurence Heller, the developer of NARM writes: “The spontaneous movement in all of us is toward connection and health. No matter how withdrawn and isolating we have become, or how serious the trauma we have experienced, on the deepest level…there is in each of us an impulse moving toward connection.”

What Begins the Journey Back

Each of us experiences moments when we realize our old ways of living no longer work. Pain and futility can then become a gift as we see things more clearly and begin to seek a different way of being. Sometimes the gift is a tangible external crisis. Sometimes it is heartbreak or loss. Sometimes it is a therapist saying something we did not expect. Sometimes it is the death of a loved one. Sometimes it is the realization that the life we built was constructed on an injured foundation.

My own moments of pain and futility were many. Each one broke me open a little more, humbled me a little further and returned me to myself in ways I could not have predicted.

A Brief Note on What Comes Next

This initial installment lays the groundwork for future written reflections on whole-person health and embodied recovery, practiced one day at a time. The next two installments will draw upon nearly forty years of lived experience, recovery and training and are meant to establish context rather than provide quick answers to healing, growth and integration. To paraphrase Plato we are works in progress. We are journeying along a path of “becoming” toward a state of “being” our True Selves.