One of the hardest things for any human—addicted or not—is learning how to create a genuine sense of well-being and peace with reality. In fact, acceptance of reality often goes against our evolutionary design. If you were sitting in a burning forest, it wouldn’t serve your survival to sit down and meditate on impermanence—you’d need to run. This instinctive resistance to pain, fear, and loss is part of our wiring.
But this same survival instinct is reinforced—and distorted—when a child grows up in chronic stress. A child’s brain learns from patterns. If those patterns are filled with unpredictability, conflict, or danger, their nervous system adapts by staying on high alert. The fight-or-flight response becomes a default setting, not just a temporary tool. And what’s worse: in some homes, the adults themselves are the source of destruction. Emotional abuse, violence, or addiction in the household can crush a child’s developing self-esteem, warping their relationship to safety and love for life.
By now, the connection between childhood trauma and adult dysfunction should be obvious. But it wasn’t always. Fifty years ago, suggesting that addiction or emotional suffering could be traced to parenting deficiencies was controversial. Even today, in 2025, millions of people suffering from anxiety and addiction still don’t see the root of the problem—because the mind resists going there.
The mind relies on even negative patterns to create continuity. It hides pain as a form of self-protection. It buries early traumas in the subconscious just so we can get up, get dressed, and go to work—despite not receiving enough affection, guidance, or safety in our formative years. But these buried experiences don’t stay quiet forever. They leak out—through compulsions, obsessive thinking, depression, aggression, or a general inability to stay present.
The unhealed mind drifts. We spend our lives in a dream state—lost in rumination, fantasy, distraction, or anxiety. To be in the present moment is rare. But it's possible. One simple path to return to the now is this: notice your body. Notice your breath.
Try focusing on pain—not to fix it, but just to observe it. Feel your breath. If there's pain in your leg, place your attention there without judgment. That moment of observation is presence. But what often happens instead is that the mind spirals. We believe the pain will last forever. We internalize it. We blame ourselves. Then, negative thoughts about our looks, our height, our past mistakes, our imagined future rush in. That’s the sympathetic nervous system, hijacking our cognition. And often, our parents lived in that same system—never knowing it, but passing it down just the same.
This is why so many of us grow up with tension simmering just beneath the surface. It disrupts our inner peace, our clarity, our joy.
So what’s the way out?
It starts with awareness and desire. You have to want to feel better. You have to be willing to observe the pain. And eventually, you have to build new internal habits—small practices that regulate your system and expand your perception.
Let’s consider aging for a moment. When we’re young, we view old age as abstract—something that happens to other people. But eventually, it dawns on us: that could be me. We see the elderly walking slowly, bent with time, and realize we may end up there too. And what’s more—it’s not tragic. It’s victory.
Imagine arriving at 99 years old with a walker. That’s not failure—it’s a marathon completed. You’ve made it. You're exhausted. You need rest. That’s life: not a sprint, but a long-distance test of endurance, and hopefully, transformation.
We may never know what comes after this life, just as the fetus in the womb can’t fathom what it means to be born. But we can breathe, surrender to the mystery, and embrace the now.
Not everyone is ready for this message. Some people are in darker stages of development. Right now, somewhere in the world, someone is beating another person senseless—maybe even killing—for a paycheck. This isn’t excusable, but it is understandable—when seen through the lens of trauma, psychology, and emotional neglect.
If we peel back the brutality and examine the human behind the behavior, we often find someone who was never loved properly, who suffered developmental injuries, who never learned self-regulation, who never had a model of compassion or calm. Redemption, in those cases, is rare. For someone to face the horror of their actions may shatter them. It’s why many, like Charles Manson, doubled down on their persona—because sitting with their pain would destroy them.
And yet, even monsters like Manson had moments of stillness. He played the guitar. He sang love songs. Perhaps to feel something human. Perhaps to attract others. Perhaps to escape guilt. But in those moments, he was no longer in his rage-brain—he was seeking resonance.
We must stop idealizing or demonizing people—and start understanding them. Only then can we truly prevent future harm.
The takeaway?
If we want to change the world, we have to start with how we treat children. Every adult must learn about anxiety and nervous system regulation. We must study our inner worlds like scientists, healers, and artists—so we stop repeating patterns that destroy us and start building lives that free us.