Episode 136: Why You Always Feel Responsible for Everything: Hidden Signs of Complex PTSD from Childhood with Dr. Tian Dayton

Many adults struggle with patterns they can't explain: feeling responsible for everything, working harder than everyone else without realizing it, or getting triggered by chaos even when their current life is stable. They might find intimacy difficult, feel disconnected from their emotions, or notice their nervous system going into overdrive in situations that don't seem threatening.

What they don't realize is that these patterns often trace back to growing up in chaotic environments where they had to become the adult in the room as a child. The truth is, when children are forced to take on adult responsibilities - managing emotions, solving problems, or keeping the family together - it rewires their nervous system in ways that show up decades later as chronic overwhelm, relationship difficulties, and an inability to recognize their own limits.

In this episode, Dr. Tian Dayton joins Dr. Aimie to explore how early relational trauma and chaotic family dynamics create lasting patterns in our nervous system. You'll discover why traditional talk therapy often isn't enough for trauma resolution, how movement and body-based approaches can complete what words cannot, and why environments like 12-step programs can create the perfect container for nervous system healing.

You'll hear about:

• [2:00] The hidden signs of early relational trauma and why chaos is so hard to identify

• [5:30] How children adapt to become "project managers" in dysfunctional families

• [8:00] Why some people feel like the "crazy one" while others become the "uptight one"

• [9:00] Understanding "thwarted intention" and how it creates emotional blocks in adulthood

• [12:00] How sense memory gets triggered in relationships and intimacy

• [14:00] The critical importance of early touch and bonding for nervous system development

• [18:00] When nervous systems "freeze" and brace for danger with intimate partners

• [21:00] Why 12-step programs create ideal conditions for trauma healing

• [27:30] The power of "limbic baths" and co-regulated nervous system states

• [32:00] How "act hunger" and movement help complete unresolved trauma responses

• [35:00] Why the body needs catharsis and energy release for true healing

Whether you're recognizing your own patterns from a chaotic childhood, supporting someone who grew up in dysfunction, or you're a practitioner working with clients who have early relational trauma, this episode provides both the understanding and practical approaches needed to break generational cycles and create lasting healing.

Dr. Tian Dayton is a leading expert in psychodrama therapy have developed her approach of Relational Trauma Repair and is the author of numerous books on trauma, addiction, and family dynamics. 

Helpful Links Related To This Episode

Resources/Guides:

• Biology of Trauma book - how the body experiences and holds fear, pain and overwhelm, and how to heal. Pre-order now and, at the time of this recording, you’ll get over $350 in bonuses included! Those bonuses are only for the pre-order window (before Sept 23). 

• Foundational Journey - If you want to be guided through The Essential Sequence laid out in my book, join me and my team for this 6 week journey into your inner world to create calm aliveness with somatic and parts healing practices. This lays the foundation to do the deeper work safely. These are a specific sequence of 42 different daily practices I have found that change one’s biology and health symptoms the fastest.

Related Podcast Episodes:

• Episode 45: Can Adoption or Childhood Trauma Cause Bipolar Disorder? with Dr. Christina Bjorndal

• Episode 48: How to Heal Bracing and Hypervigilance with Cat Dillon

• Episode 58: Parenting in a Traumatizing World: The answer Our Children Need with Dr. Gordon Neufeld

• Episode 73: Early Attachment Shocks: How Unexpected Stressors Can Cause Developmental Trauma & What To Do

Related Youtube Videos: 

• What You Need First Before Processing Your Childhood Trauma | Dr. Aimie Apigian

• Early Relationships Shape Biology: Attachment Insights | Dr. Aimie Apigian

Growing Up in Chaos: How Childhood Dysfunction Rewires Your Adult Nervous System

Marie contacted me after listening to my podcast on childhood trauma patterns. At 35, she was a successful marketing executive who appeared to have everything together. Yet she found herself constantly exhausted, struggling with chronic digestive issues, and unable to relax even during vacations.

"My friends say I'm the most responsible person they know, she wrote. "But inside I feel like I'm barely keeping it together."

What Marie didn't realize was that her childhood experiences of growing up in an unpredictable, chaotic household had rewired her nervous system in ways that were still affecting her decades later.

What Does Growing Up in Chaos Actually Look Like?

Many people don't recognize childhood chaos because it doesn't fit the dramatic images we see in movies. Chaos in childhood often looks surprisingly normal from the outside.

The biggest myth I see is that we've called stress trauma. We've called trauma stress. We don't know the difference. And the result has been devastating for our health.

Dr. Tian Dayton, a leading voice in psychodrama and trauma therapy, explains that chaos is hard to pinpoint and difficult to make concrete. In chaotic families, everyone passes responsibility around. People don't acknowledge when balls are being dropped. There's constant rewriting, denial, and gaslighting.

The child sees the dysfunction clearly but everyone else acts like nothing is wrong. This creates a profound inner tension where the child starts questioning their own reality.

My definition of trauma is anything that for any reason at that time overwhelmed your ability to understand, process and respond. For a child, trauma often comes down to one simple thought: "I don't know if I'm going to be okay."

How Trauma Gets Stored in Your Body Through Patterns

I first learned how to recognize patterns when I was going through medical school. It's how we diagnose any health condition. We look for patterns in the lab panel. We look for patterns in the imaging. We look for patterns in the story.

My brain was trained to look for patterns everywhere. Then I started noticing something fascinating with my foster-adopted son Miguel. He'd go from a playful child one minute into a raging, out of control human body flying at me in the next second. At first, I didn't see the patterns. But then I recognized them—every time I told him no, every time we had a moment of connection.

There are patterns that trigger him, and this is the pattern of what he does when he gets triggered. I started seeing the same patterns in my patients with chronic health conditions.

I started to see emotional patterns in those patients with autoimmunity, and then I developed autoimmunity myself. That's when I realized it wasn't just other people who'd had trauma. I'd also had trauma. I didn't know it, but it was still stored in my body.

Understanding How Your Nervous System Keeps You Alive

Our nervous system's whole purpose is to keep us alive. I remember working with patients who had tried to commit suicide, and their nervous system was still fighting for them to stay alive. Mentally, they were done, but their nervous system refused to give up.

The nervous system shifts between different states in order to best keep us alive. Right now, as I write this, my nervous system feels safe. It's in a parasympathetic calm state. But if there was an immediate threat, everything would shift.

When our body goes into the trauma state, everything changes:

• Our thoughts become hopeless and full of shame

• We feel physically heavy

• Our breath rate slows down

• We shut down into being "half alive"

It's a whole state shift that takes over our whole body, not just one aspect. It doesn't just take over our mind—it takes over everything.

The Biology of Trauma^®: How Our Biology Perpetuates Our Patterns of Stress and Overwhelm

Every chronic health condition has trauma patterns driving it. This isn't just a theory—it's what I share in my book based on years of clinical observation.

Not only does trauma impact our biology, but that biology creates a feedback loop and keeps our nervous system stuck in that trauma state.

Take autoimmunity, for example. Autoimmunity has this trifecta that you have to have in order to develop it, and one aspect is environmental exposure to toxins. We're surrounded by toxins now, so that's easy to acquire. But once autoimmunity develops, it creates an effect on the nervous system that decreases your capacity.

Anything that exceeds our capacity will put us physiologically into the trauma state. This creates what I call a body trauma loop—constantly cycling between stressed and overwhelmed, anxiety and collapse.

Understanding Thwarted Intention: When Your Body Holds Back

One of the most profound concepts Dr. Dayton discusses is thwarted intention. This happens when our natural impulses to act, speak up, or express emotion get blocked.

In chaotic childhoods, children learn that certain emotions aren't safe. They may freeze when they need to speak up, shut down when they feel angry, or disconnect when they need comfort.

When we are overcoming a threat, we are in movement. If we go into a trauma response, that movement stops. We need to repair those movements that we didn't finish.

Examples of interrupted movements include:

• Speaking up for ourselves (even years later)

• Completing physical movements that were interrupted

• Releasing what the body held back

These blocked responses create what trauma therapists call "incomplete actions." Your body remembers what it needed to do but couldn't, and this unfinished energy stays trapped in your nervous system.

How Childhood Patterns Show Up in Adult Relationships

Dr. Dayton's work with psychodrama demonstrates why movement and expression are crucial for healing. She explains that when children couldn't fight back, speak up, or defend themselves, that energy remains trapped in their system.

Growing up with constant gaslighting and denial teaches children to distrust their own perceptions. They see problems clearly but learn to dismiss their observations when others deny reality.

In adulthood, this shows up as:

• Chronic self-doubt about your emotions

• Minimizing your experiences when others dismiss them

• Struggling to trust your instincts about people and situations

• Taking responsibility for others' emotions while neglecting your own

The Three Levels of Repair for Lasting Healing

The lasting impact that trauma has on our mind, on our body and our biology are just ones that need to be repaired. When we repair them, it allows our body to engage its natural healing strategies.

I don't have to teach my body how to heal. It knows how to heal by itself. I saw this repeatedly in surgery—make a clean incision, provide the right conditions, and the body heals itself.

The three levels of repair are:

1. Beliefs (Mind Level)

We need to repair those fragmented, still hurting parts that are still stuck in fear. That young version of me standing in front of her dad feeling ashamed? She needs repair.

2. Somatic Movement (Body Level)

When we are overcoming a threat, we are in movement. If we go into a trauma response, that movement stops. We need to repair those movements that we didn't finish.

Sometimes this means:

• Speaking up for ourselves (even years later)

• Completing physical movements that were interrupted

• Releasing what the body held back

3. Cellular Repair (Biology Level)

Without the reset to safety, our body has held on to that trauma, and it's created accumulative damage over the years.

This damage includes:

• Oxidative stress (which creates generational trauma)

• Immune system dysfunction

• Digestive system damage

• Brain inflammation

Breaking Generational Trauma Through Biology

Here's something powerful: Oxidative stress is what creates the generational trauma that gets passed down through our epigenetics. Now that we know this, we can actually repair generational trauma and break the cycles.

You're not stuck with inherited trauma. There's repair that we will want to do for our immune system, for our digestive system. We want to repair the walls of our intestines so that it's not leaky and causing all of this inflammation.

The Healing Power of Structure and Safety

Recovery from childhood chaos requires creating the structure and safety that was missing in early development. This is why 12-step programs and other structured healing environments can be so effective.

Dr. Dayton describes 12-step meetings as a "limbic bath" - a regulated environment where your nervous system can learn to settle. The predictable structure, clear boundaries, and consistent format provide what chaotic childhoods lacked.

Elements that create healing structure:

• Predictable beginnings, middles, and endings

• Clear guidelines for interaction

• Time limits that prevent overwhelm

• Focus on personal responsibility rather than fixing others

• Connection to something larger than yourself

Practical Tools to Start Your Repair Journey Today

There's this self embodiment that has to happen. We can't run to other people to fix us, to save us. We've got to learn a certain level of self regulation, self embodiment, self awareness for ourselves.

Priority #1: Quality Sleep

If there's only one thing that a person could do for their trauma work, I think this would be it—get better quality sleep. This has the greatest impact on your nervous system regulation than almost anything else.

I got myself an Oura ring to measure sleep quality, not just quantity. What if I stop eating earlier? What if I take magnesium? There's all these things that we can invest in to improve our sleep.

Priority #2: Blood Sugar Balance

Our blood sugar levels really impact our internal stress, our anxiety, where that point is where we will cross from a stress into trauma response and overwhelm.

Priority #3: Align with Your Circadian Rhythm

Get outside. Get natural light as early in the morning as you can when you wake up. Don't look at your phone first thing. Go outside and look at the sunrise.

It's actually a time when you can get free red light therapy. Red light therapy is amazing for your mitochondria, which will help you have more energy, which will help you be less triggered.

The Truth About Mental Resilience and Trauma

The trauma that we experience in our life, even when we avoid it, it doesn't go anywhere. We can stuff it down. We can shove it down. It doesn't go anywhere. It's still waiting right there for us.

If we really want to be mentally strong, we need to go pull those weeds from the root, not just at the surface level. This is the only way to create true mental resilience, not something we're faking.

Recognizing Your Patterns: Signs You Grew Up in Chaos

Many adults don't recognize the impact of childhood chaos because it's been their normal for so long. Here are signs that your early experiences may still be affecting you:

Relationship Patterns:

• Difficulty trusting your own perceptions

• Taking responsibility for others' emotions

• Shutting down during conflict or intimacy

• Working much harder than necessary to feel secure

Physical and Health Patterns:

• Chronic health issues that doctors can't fully explain

• Digestive problems, autoimmune conditions, or frequent illness

• Difficulty recognizing when you're tired, hungry, or stressed

• Sleep problems or feeling tired even after rest

A Message of Hope: Your Body Knows How to Heal

The title of my book, The Biology of Trauma, is actually a message of hope. I didn't have any hope for myself until I learned this science. The science gave me the insights to know the repair and the sequence to what my body needed.

I started making more progress in therapy than I'd ever been able to do before, because now I was looking at it at all the levels that needed repair. I wasn't just trying to address my inner fears without also addressing the inflammation they had created.

For Marie and Everyone Asking "Is This Just Childhood Issues?"

Marie, to answer your question directly: Your nervous system is telling you that it is holding onto the past through the trauma pattern showing up in you barely holding things together on the inside while feeling responsible on the outside. 

Just trying to think your way out of these patterns is not the right tool for you.

Yes, the exhaustion, digestive issues, and inability to relax are patterns of a Biology of Trauma^®. If those experiences from childhood are making you sick decades later, they weren't just difficult. You were resilient because you survived. And that resilience came at a cost.

The good news is, your body knows how to heal. It just needs intentional repair. Not just anything in whatever order—intentional, strategic repair based on the science of how our body went into the trauma response and what it needs to come out and return to a sense of true safety, support and aliveness.

Helpful Research

• The relationship between household chaos and child, parent, and family outcomes: a systematic scoping review

• Effects of positive and negative childhood experiences on adult family health

This Episode Is For: 

✓ Adults who feel responsible for everything

✓ People triggered by chaos in their environment

✓ Those working harder than everyone without realizing it

✓ Anyone with difficulty in intimate relationships

✓ People disconnected from their emotions

✓ Those who were "mature for their age" as children

✓ Practitioners working with early relational trauma

✓ Adult children from dysfunctional families

✓ Anyone seeking to break generational trauma patterns

What You'll Learn

Listen to Dr. Tian Dayton explain how chaotic childhoods rewire your system. Discover hidden signs of relational trauma and family "project manager" roles. Why "crazy one" or "uptight one" roles persist into adulthood. Understanding thwarted intention creating adult stuckness and sense memory triggers. Why early touch matters for development and nervous systems freeze. Why 12-step programs work through structure and limbic bath co-regulation. How movement completes trauma responses and why catharsis beyond talk matters.

Early relational trauma rewires your system—body-based healing completes what words can't.

Listen to Episode 136 with Dr. Tian Dayton →

Disclaimer

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The information shared reflects my clinical expertise and research, but every person's biology and healing journey is unique. Always consult with qualified healthcare providers before making changes to your treatment plan or starting new interventions. If you're experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact emergency services or a crisis helpline immediately.

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