The Human Condition and How To Heal It: When Childhood Trauma Starts As Just One Word Part I
- olivierbranford
- Feb 16
- 82 min read
Updated: Feb 20
This is Part I of the second article in my series 'The Human Condition and How To Heal It'. Click here for Part II.
Introduction
Dr Gabor Maté, the world-famous Canadian doyen of all things childhood Trauma, attachment versus authenticity, mental illness, and addiction writes:
“We can begin to live the Truth of who we are, rather than the story of who we were taught to be.”
The next time I get a kitten, I am naming it Gabor. Everyone needs a Gabor in their lives.
William Shakespeare came onto the stage with a bang: The greatest author ever gifted to the world, a literary genius, prophet of the human condition, and contemplative master. He deeply understood human psychology, knowing that we didn’t really, so he served it up in myriad beautifully crafted metaphors. In ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ (Act I, Scene III) he wrote:
"Let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me."
What are these leading players, characters in the narrative of life, from different eras and backgrounds, telling us about the story of life: Their life, my life, your life, your children's life - everyone's life? When did your life script get written? How are you writing your children’s? Why is outdated? Why is it not yours to write? How does this affect the costumes they wear, the masks they wear, and the roles they play, even make them obsessed with always playing the lead role? Why do we feel that moving the stage props around will change reality? It is as futile as moving the deck chairs around on ‘The Titanic’ and hoping that will stop it from sinking.
Trying to change the outside - appearance, roles, people, places, situations - will never change your inside. And your inside is your world.
In contrast to my usual writing, which can dive pretty deep I admit, I offer you a little breather before we resume on our journey into the apparently unfathomable abyss that can seem the human condition.
Each, clue, each ray of light shining into the profundity of why we are where we are, charting the underlying clarity and simplicity of who we think we are, but in Truth who we may become, maps the many faces of the human condition.
Monty Python would say:
"And now for something completely different".
But in reality, and I mean Real Reality, if you know what I mean, this article is not more or less deep, and it’s not completely different to my usual writing at all: And it's deadly serious. Humour, under the guise of insolence, irreverence, impertinence, and impudence, is not only a ‘little breath of fresh air’, actually allowing us to breathe underwater, but its precisioin, and its ability to describe complex absolute Truth super-succinctly in a way that reliably generates ‘Aha!” moments, cannot be underestimated. Humour is sometimes the only honest way to tell the Truth without turning into a pamphlet.
Why do you keep saying to your children "Don’t Be A’dick’son"? Why don't you even know that you are?
Do you really want to screw up your kids? Well, that is exactly what so many families are doing. Modern parenting, to my huge dismay, continues to use the ‘p-word’ to motivate children.
As a root cause of childhood Trauma, one deeper than the 'Mariana Trench' never use ‘p’ word with your children: It's not what you think.
Inadvertently or intentionally using the ‘p-word’ may affect every aspect of their lives going forwards: It’s the most ‘unloving’ word in the English language and it's the most devastating. Let me explain why…
The ‘P’ Word
There is a word you should never, ever say to your children. It may ruin their mental health, manifesting in myriad and toxic ways, precipitating decrepitude often decades after they have flown the nest: The 'p' word will almost certainly turn them into addicts. It may destroy them. It may ruin them, physically, psychologically, emotionally, and also financially. Using the'p' word may be a curse on your family, devastating it for generations to come, laying waste to every single one of them, setting in motion the boulder of childhood Trauma: The ‘p-word’, and what it represents, may be the root cause of intergenerational trauma, transgenerational trauma, multigenerational trauma, or whatever term you may prefer for the inheritance of childhood Trauma, that runs unchecked and unseen, like a malignancy, in most families. And yet well meaning, brilliant, successful parents use the ‘p-word’ all the time with their children, unaware of the stark implications of using it.
It is a word that is used without thinking about it first. It is a word with unintended consequences. It is a word, viewed by some parents as innocent, even encouraging, but the consequences may be catastrophic.
I hear parents using it all the time: Especially those whose parents used it with them. I hear teachers using it all the time with children. That’s sooo wrong! I have heard invited lecturers using it in school-leaving ceremonies. I have heard true stories about brilliant students, those achieving the highest number of distinctions at school, go on to have miserable lives.
The ‘p’ word creates expectation. Expectation is a metaphysical error: It is the parent of absolute misery. Put a ribbon on it, call it encouragement, even call it love, and you still have misery with better branding.
What is that ‘p’ word? A five‑letter word that is socially acceptable, psychologically virulent, spiritually corrosive, and astonishingly efficient at manufacturing ‘ego’.
Scroll down a little for the big reveal…
The word, the one that you should never use in front of them, never behind their backs whilst they may be able to hear you, and that you should certainly never use to them is:
“Proud.”
“Whaaat?” “Poppycock! I hear you say” (maybe you don’t use that ‘p-word’). Yet it’s true.
You may ask “’Proud’ is a neutral word isn’t it?” Nope.
“Proud is a good word to use with your children right?” Nope..
Never say:
“I will be so proud of you if you do/achieve this…”
It will turn them into ‘pride junkies’.
Allow me to be insolent for a moment. If I had to choose between a parent saying “I’m proud of you” and a parent saying “I love you”, I will take the second every single time. Because one of those statements is love. The other is a receipt.
In 1 Corinthians 16:1 it states:
"Let all that you do be done in love."
How did the ‘p’ word set your ‘enoughness’? Surely you are worthy because of who you are. How did the conditionality of the love you were given set your most powerful childhood fears: Of not being loved and of not being loveable. And more - the mortal fear that you will be abandoned, and that therefore you will die? How do those fears govern your life?
The ‘P‑Word’ and The Contract You Never Intended to Sign
A hidden contract slips under the nursery door the first time a child hears, “I’m proud of you”: If you do the right thing, you get closeness. If you don’t, you get distance.
..
The parent’s conscious meaning might be: “I’m delighted.” The child’s unconscious translation is often: “I am loved because...” And that ‘because’ is where the human condition begins to congeal.
If this sounds like I’m over‑reading a single word: Good. Language is not decoration. Language is how we programme nervous systems. You can’t build a cathedral and then act surprised that people start worshipping inside it.
And if you are already drafting an email in your head beginning with “Dear Sir/Madam, I would like to lodge a complaint about this essay”: Save it. I wrote this with affection. But I did also bring a hammer. The loving hammer that is Truth.
Conditional love—what psychology calls ‘parental conditional regard’—is one of the most efficient ways to install an inner tribunal. The child becomes both defendant and defence counsel, learning to cross‑examine their own impulses: “Will this be approved? Will I still belong?”
In the research literature, ‘parental conditional regard’ refers to a pattern where warmth, attention, or approval is made contingent on meeting expectations—sometimes by giving extra affection when the child complies (‘conditional positive regard’), and sometimes by withdrawing affection when the child fails (‘conditional negative regard’). That distinction matters, because both flavours can be psychologically expensive: One hooks the child on applause, the other hooks them on avoiding shame. ( The emotional costs of parents’ conditional regard: A self-determination theory analysis, Assor, Journal of Personality, 2004; The emotional and academic consequences of parental conditional regard: comparing conditional positive regard, conditional negative regard, and autonomy support as parenting practices, Roth, Developmental Psychology, 2009)
If you want the broad‑brush statistical picture: A meta‑analysis of the parental conditional regard literature reports consistent associations with poorer well‑being outcomes, including more self‑criticism and less authentic self‑esteem—particularly when love becomes the currency for achievement. ( Parental conditional regard: A meta-analysis, Haines, Journal of Adolescence, 2023)
Spiritually, this is how a Soul learns to impersonate itself. The true Self—the part that is natural, spontaneous, and quietly luminous—learns that it must audition for belonging. The audition becomes a habit. The habit becomes an identity. And that identity is what this series calls ‘ego’: A fear‑organised performance machine, built to keep the child attached, safe, and approved.
“But I Love My Children!”
The toddler in you wants to protest about not using the word proud with your children: “But I mean it nicely!” “But it’s just encouragement!” And the part of you that still thinks the universe is run by a cosmic HR department wants to add: “But positive reinforcement is evidence‑based.” Nope. Using it guarantees that your child will grow up to have their armoured petrified inner child (the ego) ruling their lives. Just as yours did with you: And it still does.
Most parents love their children. Many do not quite love them enough to truly BE themselves. They do not nurture their authenticity. And as the raging internal battle within a child’s psyche locked in mortal combat between attachment and authenticity shows – attachment to our parents always beats authenticity hands down. Why? Because the child has to prioritise attachment in order to survive. But the truth is, that authenticity is actually a survival need too.
I would say that in adult life, authenticity is increasingly becoming a survival need. For inauthenticity, the mask that we wear, is actually starting to kill us, as I wrote in my article ‘Why Are We Killing Our Icons?’ And if we aren’t authentic we may as well hand over our keys to AI. What else do we have over them?
But even those parents who do love their children unconditionally, and who nurture their authenticity as much as they can, need to know that it is not even this that matters the most. What matters the most is how your child perceives the conditionality of your love. And using the potentially fatal words “You make me so proud when…” deeply affects their perception of your love for them and the implications this has on how much they are free to express their authenticity.
The image above shows what ‘good parenting’ looks like when it’s not secretly a recruitment drive for the parental ego. Twins crossing the finish line together, because the line was never "Be who I need you to be, then I will hold you", but "Be who you are, and know you’re held". The trophy is attachment: The ancient mammalian need to belong, to be welcomed home, to be safe - to survive. The compass is authenticity: The Soul’s directional signal, the true Self’s quiet ‘this way’. And the only sane family system is the one that refuses to force a choice between them. The parents aren’t cheering for performance; they’re witnessing BEing. That’s the difference between love that grows a real human and love that manufactures a fake one.
A healthy family doesn’t make the child choose between love and Truth. It makes love the ground from which Truth can be lived. Attachment is not the enemy; it’s the base camp. But when parents confuse ‘love’ with ‘obedience’—when belonging is priced in self-betrayal—the compass gets snapped and the child learns a new 'religion': People-pleasing. Then, later, we call the symptoms ‘anxiety’, ‘addiction’, ‘depression’, ‘perfectionism’—as if the psyche is malfunctioning rather than perfectly adapting to conditional regard. The alternative is right here: Parents who celebrate the person, not the performance; a world in which ‘home’ doesn’t require disguise; a race where the only real victory is keeping both the bond and the compass intact.
This article is not a sermon against celebration. This is not a TED Talk against joy. This is not a puritanical crusade to ban parents from feeling delighted. It’s a forensic examination of what a developing nervous system hears when affection arrives tethered to performance.
Because children do not parse language like philosophers. They parse it like survivalists. Their psyche does not say: “Ah yes, my caregiver is expressing an abstract evaluative appraisal of my output, separate from my worth, where their unconditional love is not contingent of my perception of how it is delivered.” Their psyche says: “I am safe when I win.”
Even if you want your children to be financially abundant, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, as it does enable them to have greater impact in their lives and in those of their own families, being authentic – doing what you love – always results in an alignment that guarantees success. You can't fail at doing what you love. This is what I mean by my ‘Sacred Series’ described in my first article in this series: ‘BE-do-have’, never ‘have-do-BE’. More on this later on in this article. As Rumi wrote:
"When you do things from your Soul (BEing), you feel a river moving in you, a joy."
Now wouldn't that be a lovely thing for your children?
Pinocchio’s Cautionary Tale
The section above invokes Pinocchio saying:
"And someday, I'm gonna be a real boy!"
Pinocchio is a tale of transformation from the wooden puppet that the world tries to make of us, the ‘fake self’ (the ego), into something very real, very beautiful: The True Self (the Soul). It tells of inner motivation and intrinsic reward - recipes for a joyful, authentic life, and of being guided by one’s inner still, quiet voice, symbolised by Jiminy Cricket, the neuroscientific equivalent of the prefrontal cortex, appointed by the 'Blue Fairy', the divine, transformative agent of Grace.
The Blue Fairy declares to Pinocchio:
“Little puppet made of pine, awake. The gift of life is thine.”
The gift of consciousness, of the awakening that the Blue Fairy is alluding to, is what you bequeath to your Self when you make the choice of BEing at the first real choice point in your life: The second ‘fork in the road’ of your life, which is the first of the two forks where you actually do have agency. It is you who gives birth to the real you. It is the recentering of your life around who you are, not who your parents want you to be. This choice is only seen when the physics that govern a life - it’s mechanics and its metaphysics - are truly seen. This is why I created the schema of my meta-theory, to bring simplicity and clarity to the whole landscape of the human condition. The deepest Truth is not that you know how to navigate the landscape once you have seen the (meta-theory) map, but that you recognise the map once you have walked the landscape. This quiet confidence allows you to make the choice of BEing real - to take the next step.
The Blue Fairy tells Pinocchio that fulfilling Geppetto's (his father’s) wish is "Entirely up to you" and that:
“Being real is about what's in your heart".
Geppetto acknowledges Pinocchio's efforts. Praising effort restores agency. Praising outcomes takes it away.
In the image, a faint blue luminosity gathers in the centre of Pinocchio’s chest - his very real inner ‘Blue Fairy.
The mechanism of ego — the compulsive movement toward what you like and away from what you don’t like— is recognised as conditioning rather than identity or reality. The child realises he is not the wood; he is that which was animating it all along: The ‘Field of BEing’ behind the map of the meta-theory in this thesis.
Not All Pride Is Poison: Witnessing Versus Owning
Let’s be precise. The word ‘proud’ can mean two very different things. In its clean form, it means: “I witnessed your courage and my heart lit up.” In its contaminated form, it means: “Your performance reflects on me, and I like the reflection.”
One is witnessing. The other is owning. One says: “Your life is yours.” The other says: “Your life is my evidence.” Children do not reliably hear the difference, especially when the household already treats achievement as oxygen. Using the word is dicing with death. It's playing 'Russian Roulette' with your children. You can't always guarantee that you have taken the bullets out of the gun, so why play with it?
This is why I prefer a simple rule: If the sentence centres the parent’s state (“I’m proud”), it risks training the child to manage the parent’s emotions. If the sentence centres the child’s experience (“You put in so much effort”, “You look delighted”, “How does that feel?”), it tends to nourish autonomy without converting love into a wage.
And yes, there are seasons where saying “I’m proud of you” lands as pure warmth—especially with older children who have already been steeped in unconditional love. But if unconditional love is not the baseline, the ‘p'‑word becomes a lever. And levers are not the same as hugs.
Parents are Our Greatest Teachers
Parents are our greatest teachers – when we see what they got right, and what they got wrong - we can then choose to follow their example or to do exactly the opposite. Their expectations may drive you to dizzy heights. But if you don’t see how you got there, and that this was a pathological driving force, then the tower reveals itself as a house of cards and collapses. The meta-theory allows you to harness the human condition, and to have compassion for yourself and for your family, as they may have never been handed the map by their own parents.
What to Say Instead: Love Without The Receipt
If you want to keep the warmth and remove the contract, try sentences that land in the child’s Soul rather than in their scoreboard.
Say: “I love watching you do what you love.” Say: “That looked hard, and you stayed with it.” Say: “I’m here.” Say: “I love you, not your performance.” Say: “How did it feel to do that?”
You can also name the quality of BEing you are meeting: “You were generous.” “You were brave.” “You were honest.” “You were your Self.” Those are not grades. They are recognitions of Soul and its values.
And when the child fails—when they sulk, lash out, cheat, lie, break, cry—try not to withdraw love as punishment. Correct the behaviour, absolutely. Hold boundaries, absolutely. But keep the bond intact. The bond is the medicine.
This is the paradox: Children behave better when they are loved better. Not ‘spoiled’, loved. The kind of love that says: “Nothing you do can make you unworthy of belonging.”
Notice what happens when the focus shifts from your approval to their inner experience. You have just handed the child a compass instead of a trophy.
And when you do want to celebrate, celebrate the virtues that cannot be converted into status: Courage, honesty, forgiveness, compassion, kindness, gentleness, playfulness, tenderness. Those qualities are closer to Truth than a grade can ever be.
Why Conditional Love Produces ‘Ego’: A Self‑Determination Theory Lens
According to psychology, in 'Self‑Determination Theory', human flourishing depends on three basic psychological needs: Autonomy (a sense of agency); Competence (a sense of efficacy); Relatedness (a sense of connection). When those needs are supported, motivation becomes intrinsic, resilient, and joyful. When those needs are manipulated, motivation becomes brittle, anxious, and hungry. ( Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being, Ryan, American Psychologist, 2000 )
Conditional regard is a particularly cunning way to undermine autonomy while pretending to celebrate competence. It does not say “Do this because it matters to you.” It says “Do this because it makes me pleased.” The child learns to trade agency for attachment: a deal that makes sense at age five and destroys lives at age forty‑five.
In one study, adolescents who experienced more conditional regard reported more feelings of internal pressure and more fluctuating self‑esteem—essentially, their worth rose and fell with perceived approval. Autonomy‑supportive parenting, by contrast, related more to genuine self‑endorsement and better outcomes. ( The emotional and academic consequences of parental conditional regard: comparing conditional positive regard, conditional negative regard, and autonomy support as parenting practices, Roth, Developmental Psychology, 2009 )
If that sounds abstract, translate it into adult language: Conditional regard produces the kind of person who cannot enjoy success, because success is never the point. The point is the temporary reduction of threat. The system is not chasing joy; it is fleeing shame.
And because the threat is social, the child becomes a social scanner. They learn to read faces, tones, silences, and micro‑withdrawals with the vigilance of a hostage negotiator. In adulthood, that vigilance can look like ‘emotional intelligence’. Internally, it often feels like exhaustion.
This is not ‘soft’ spiritual poetry. Chronic relational threat shapes the developing stress system. Reviews of the childhood maltreatment literature describe enduring neurobiological and psychological alterations, and propose that early adversity can create a ‘latent vulnerability’—a nervous system tuned for threat, hyper‑attuned to social evaluation, and primed to defend rather than to explore. ( Annual research review: Childhood maltreatment, latent vulnerability and the shift to preventative psychiatry - the contribution of functional brain imaging, McCrory, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2017; Annual research review: Enduring neurobiological effects of childhood abuse and neglect, Teicher, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2016)
Now zoom in: Conditional regard is not always dramatic abuse. Sometimes it’s a smile that arrives only when the report card arrives. It’s the micro‑withdrawal. The slight cooling. The barely perceptible sigh that says: “Wrong.” In nervous‑system terms, that is still threat—because for a child, the threat is not pain; it is exile.
Triangulating Conditional Love, Preference, and the ‘One Choice’
This section does one very specific job: It shows how three claims that can sound ‘spiritual’ or ‘philosophical’ can, in fact, be triangulated using mainstream developmental psychology, clinical science, and affective neuroscience. It does not ‘prove’ metaphysics. It does not pretend that any dataset can adjudicate ultimate questions about Truth. What it does show—robustly—is that: (i) Early caregiving that feels conditional reliably shapes threat-sensitivity and self-worth regulation; (ii) Those changes manifest as stable approach–avoidance biases (what this thesis calls ‘preference’ and ‘resistance’); (iii) The capacity to interrupt those biases and choose differently is not evenly distributed across the lifespan, but is largely a function of later-developing self-regulation, psychological flexibility, and restoration of agency—all of which are measurable and trainable. The 'first fork' is not really a fork - it is a ‘choiceless choice’ (the path is already set by conditioning); the 'second fork in the road' is the first true choice in life. You cannot choose your parents, their actions, or the subconscious effects that those actions had on you. But you can choose your choices the moment you see the whole architecture
1. Translating This Thesis' Terms Into Testable Constructs
To triangulate evidence, it helps to translate this thesis' three terms into constructs the empirical literature already measures. ‘Unconditional love’ corresponds most closely to caregiver warmth/acceptance, secure attachment, and autonomy support, with ‘lack of unconditional love’ corresponding to conditional regard, emotional neglect, inconsistent or contingent responsiveness, and attachment insecurity. ‘Preference’ corresponds to learned approach–avoidance biases, experiential avoidance, threat hypervigilance, contingent self-esteem, and controlled/introjected motivation. ‘The one choice’ corresponds to the capacity for response inhibition, meta-awareness, and psychological flexibility: The ability to notice an impulse, tolerate affect, and select a value-consistent action rather than act out a conditioned avoidance programme.
2. Evidence That Conditionality in Love Cultivates ‘Preference’
Across multiple theoretical traditions, the same developmental story repeats: When a child experiences love, approval, or safety as contingent—granted when they perform, comply, achieve, or stay ‘acceptable’—the psyche learns to organise itself around maintenance of approval and avoidance of rejection. In self-determination theory, this is captured in the construct of parental conditional regard and its downstream effects on controlled (introjected) regulation, contingent self-worth, and affective cost. (The emotional costs of parents’ conditional regard: A self-determination theory analysis, Assor, Journal of Personality, 2004).
Importantly, this is not a niche claim resting on one paper: A more recent quantitative synthesis reports that parental conditional regard shows consistent associations with poorer well-being and maladaptive motivational and self-evaluative outcomes. In this thesis' language, conditional regard does not merely ‘hurt feelings’; it teaches the organism a rule: ‘Stay preferred. Avoid dis-preference.’ That rule is preference and resistance in embryo. (Parental conditional regard: A meta-analysis, Haines, Journal of Adolescence, 2023).
Attachment science translates the same phenomenon into ‘internal working models’: If closeness is unreliable or conditional, the nervous system calibrates toward vigilance, hyperactivation (clinging and scanning) or deactivation (numbing and self-reliance). Affective neuroscience adds a further layer: Early adversity is associated with enduring alterations in stress and emotion-processing systems—including threat reactivity and prefrontal regulatory circuits. This is not a claim that ‘the brain is damaged’ in a simplistic way; it is a claim that adaptation to an unsafe or conditional context has a cost when carried forward into adulthood. (Annual research review: Enduring neurobiological effects of childhood abuse and neglect, Teicher, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2016).
3. Evidence That ‘Preference’ Becomes The Adult Operating System
Once conditionality becomes the child’s operating system, ‘preference’ generalises: The person learns to orient toward what promises approval, control, relief, or status, and to orient away from what evokes shame, fear, grief, or rejection. In empirical terms, this looks like experiential avoidance and psychological inflexibility: Attempts to manage inner experience by avoiding it, controlling it, or organising life around not feeling what is feared. These tendencies are not moral defects; they are predictable strategies for coping with a nervous system that learned early that certain feelings, needs, or expressions were unsafe. (Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health, Kashdan, Clinical Psychology Review, 2010).
When researchers examine childhood Trauma, also known as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), at population scale, the pattern is striking: Higher ACEs exposure is associated with increased risk across a broad range of mental and physical health outcomes. That breadth matters for my thesis, because it supports my claim that the human condition is not one disorder but one mechanism expressing itself through many surfaces.(Adverse childhood experiences and associated health outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis, Petruccelli, Child Abuse & Neglect, 2019).
A particularly clean way to link ‘lack of unconditional love’ to adult ‘preference’ is to examine whether psychological inflexibility sits between early adversity and later suffering. A recent meta-analytic mediation model reports that psychological inflexibility significantly mediates the relationship between ACEs and adult mental health outcomes. In the language of my series of articles: Early conditionality loads the system with resistance; resistance multiplies pain into suffering. (Psychological inflexibility mediates the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and adult mental health, Li, Child Abuse & Neglect, 2025).
4. Triangulating The ‘One Choice’: From Conditioned Preference to Genuine Agency
My ‘one choice’ claim is easy to misread as purely rhetorical. But there is a precise empirical analogue: The transition from habitual, affect-avoidant responding to flexible, value-guided responding. In the clinical literature, that capacity is often operationalised as psychological flexibility. It is not a personality trait reserved for the fortunate; it is a trainable skill-set: Attending, allowing, decentering, inhibiting impulsive action, and acting from values rather than fear. (Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health, Kashdan, Clinical Psychology Review, 2010).
If the 'first fork’ is the developmental installation of the avoidance engine, the 'second fork’ is the moment a person acquires—or re-acquires—enough flexibility to notice the engine without obeying it. That is exactly what acceptance-and-commitment models aim to train, and why their results matter for my triangulation: A large meta-analysis reports that acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is efficacious across a range of clinically relevant outcomes, consistent with the idea that increasing flexibility changes the life-trajectory even when the biography cannot be rewritten. (A meta-analysis of the efficacy of acceptance and commitment therapy for clinically relevant mental and physical health problems, A-Tjak, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 2015).
Neuroscience adds a complementary strand: Practices associated with mindfulness and acceptance are linked to measurable changes in attention, emotion regulation, and self-referential processing networks. These findings do not ‘prove’ a metaphysical Self. But they do support a modest and powerful claim: The capacity to relate differently to experience—to pause, to allow, to reframe—has a neural signature and can be cultivated. That is the empirical shadow of what my thesis calls the 'Bridge of Awakening': A shift from compulsion to choice. (The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation, Tang, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2015).
Put simply: There is a plausible evidence-based triangle. (1) Conditional caregiving and early adversity predict later threat-sensitivity, emotion dysregulation, and contingent self-worth. (2) Those features manifest as stable approach–avoidance biases—preference and resistance—that amplify suffering and increase reliance on anaesthetic strategies further enforcing the progression along the 'Quest For Love' to the 'Temple of Emotional Anaesthesia'. (3) Later-developing or later-trained regulatory capacities—psychological flexibility, inhibitory control, meta-awareness—predict the ability to interrupt that bias and choose differently. In this thesis' language: The first fork selects the 'Path of Attachment'; the second fork re-opens agency.
5. What This Section Does and Does Not Claim
This triangulation is intentionally conservative. It does not claim that every adult outcome is reducible to childhood love, although the vast majority are, (Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. Felitti, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1998), nor that attachment history invariably determines destiny. It claims something both humbler and, frankly, more useful: Early conditionality loads the system toward preference; preference is a measurable mechanism; and the capacity to loosen preference is also measurable and trainable. That is enough to harmonise the bridge between the clinical psychopathological model (‘the root is lack of unconditional love’) and the Noble-Truth claim (‘preference is the engine of suffering’), while still leaving room for the thesis’ larger metaphysical imagination.
A Small Domestic Scene: The Factory That Makes High‑Functioning Misery
Imagine a child at a piano. Not a concert pianist. Just a small human with short fingers, tired arms, and a heart that still believes love is a natural resource.
His father sits behind him. The father is not a monster. He is, in his own mind, a 'good man': Disciplined, ambitious, convinced that hard work is how you survive in the world. He believes he is teaching ‘character’.
The child misses a note. The father sighs. Not a scream. Just a sigh. The sigh is enough. Because the child has already learned the equation: Accuracy equals closeness. Mistakes equal distance.
So the child does what children do. He tries harder. He contracts. He concentrates until the music is no longer music: It is a courtroom transcript. And when he finally plays it correctly, the father smiles and says the line that sounds benign and functions like a spell: “I’m proud of you.”
The father feels warm. The child feels relief. And a new programme installs itself quietly in the background: “If I perform, I belong.”
Two decades later, that child may be a surgeon, a barrister, a founder, a perfectionist, a people‑pleaser, or an addict. The outer costume changes. The inner contract does not.
Conditional Love as ACEs With a Ribbon
The ACEs literature began by documenting a brutal truth: Early adversity is not ‘over there’ in the category of tragic stories; it is upstream of a remarkable range of adult outcomes, including mental health problems and substance use. The original ACEs Study linked cumulative adversity with later health risks and disease. ( Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) study, Felitti, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 1998 )
Subsequent systematic reviews and meta‑analyses have strengthened the picture: Multiple adverse childhood experiences are associated with higher risks of a wide range of later health problems, and the relationship is often dose‑responsive—the more adversity, the higher the risk. ( The effect of multiple adverse childhood experiences on health: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Hughes, The Lancet Public Health, 2017; Adverse childhood experiences and associated health outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Petruccelli, Child Abuse & Neglect, 2019)
Here is the subtle twist: Not every ACEs wears the costume of obvious harm. Some wear a blazer, carry a piano book, and speak in polite middle‑class sentences. Conditional love can be a ‘soft ACEs’: Not always the headline trauma, but a steady relational pressure that trains the child to fear their own aliveness.
This is why I’m not interested in blaming parents. Conditional regard is often transmitted like a family heirloom: Wrapped up as ‘motivation’, passed down as ‘standards’, justified as ‘realism’. In many homes, it is the only language anyone ever learned for love.
But we can still tell the Truth about it. Pride, as a parenting strategy, is not neutral. It is a mechanism. And mechanisms have consequences.
To be clear: The classic ACEs questionnaires do not typically include “My parents said they were proud of me.” The issue is not the word itself; the issue is the relational pattern it can represent. When ‘pride’ is used as a reward signal, it can become part of a broader ecology of psychological control: affection as currency and connection as something you have to earn.
And because this pattern is socially rewarded—good grades, good manners, high achievement—it hides in plain sight. The child looks ‘fine’. The parents look ‘successful’. Meanwhile the nervous system is learning a 'theology' of unworthiness.
If you want to understand how that 'theology' later becomes symptoms, you don’t need to leap to extremes. You simply need to recognise that shame is a physiological state. It constricts breathing. It collapses posture. It changes attention. It narrows the world. A life built on avoiding shame will eventually feel very small, even if the LinkedIn headline is impressive.
The Oxford and Cambridge scholar and author C.S. Lewis warned of the danger of instilling pride in obstructing a spiritual life:
“As long as you are proud you cannot know God.”
(Mere Christianity, Lewis, HarperOne, 1952)
And as Thomas Jefferson—hardly a starry‑eyed mystic—the American Founding Father and 3rd US president Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, dryly noted:
“Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.”
(Extract from Thomas Jefferson to Cornelia J. Randolph: “a dozen Canons of conduct in life”, Jefferson, Monticello TJRS, 1805–1810).
Praise That Makes Children Afraid: The Mindset Trap
There is a reason the ‘p‑word’ feels so wholesome: It’s praise. And praise, when done well, can be nourishment. The problem is not celebration. The problem is contingency.
Research on praise has long shown that the kind of praise matters. Praising fixed traits (“You’re so smart”) can increase performance‑pressure and make children more likely to avoid challenge after failure, whereas focusing on process and effort is less likely to attach worth to outcome. ( Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance, Mueller, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1998)
This is the psychological origin of the ‘fixed mindset’: A life organised around proving your worth, rather than developing your capacities. Dweck’s broader work on mindsets distinguishes between an identity that must be defended and a process that can be embraced. ( Mindset: The new psychology of success, Dweck, Random House, 2006)
Conditional regard tends to produce a high‑achievement personality with a fragile centre: Brilliant at collecting proof, terrible at resting. When rest feels like worthlessness, people will do almost anything to avoid it.
And it often starts with angelic words: “Good girl.” “Good boy.” “I’m proud.” The child learns that goodness is not a state of BEing; it is a performance review.
The child who is ‘proud‑trained’ becomes exquisitely sensitive to evaluation. They may look confident. They may rack up medals. But inside, they often carry a quiet terror of being ordinary. And terror is not a stable foundation for a life.
Pride Is a Spiritual Cancer: The Old Teachers Were Not Being Dramatic
Ancient wisdom did not need fMRI machines to notice what pride does to a human. It makes the heart rigid. It makes the mind comparative. It makes the Soul allergic to ordinary grace.
Humility is not humiliation. Humility is accurate self‑perception: a mind that no longer needs to be inflated to feel real. Shame says “I am wrong to exist.” Humility says “I am a human, therefore I will sometimes be wrong.”
Conditional regard often produces the strangest hybrid: An outwardly proud person with an inwardly ashamed core. The pride is armour. The shame is the wound underneath. The cure is neither more pride nor more self‑attack. The cure is Truth: BEing without performance.
In the Bible, in James 4:6, it states that:
“God opposes the proud but gives Grace to the humble.”
The Book of Proverbs 16:18 puts it bluntly:
“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
(King James Bible, Bible, BibleGateway, 1611)
If that feels melodramatic, translate it into modern language: When the psyche becomes organised around superiority and approval, it loses contact with BEing. And what you lose contact with does not stay polite. It returns as anxiety, emptiness, compulsion, and rage.
"Why Did My Child Grow up to be an Addict? What Did I do Wrong?": Addiction is The Search for Unconditional Relief:
If love is conditional, relief becomes the new 'religion'. When the nervous system cannot find unconditional safety in relationship, it will often seek it in chemistry, compulsions, achievements, or admiration. The object changes; the hunger does not.
Gabor Maté distils this with brutal clarity:
“The question is not ‘Why the addiction?’ but ‘Why the pain?’”
(In the realm of hungry ghosts: Close encounters with addiction, Maté, Knopf Canada, 2008 )
Addiction, in this lens, is not moral failure. It is an attempt at self‑regulation. It is the psyche saying: “I cannot bear the ache of not being enough, so I will numb it, outrun it, seduce it, binge it, work it, or win it.”
Sometimes the substance is a substance. Sometimes it’s a salary. Sometimes it’s a body. Sometimes it’s virtue. Sometimes it’s ‘being needed’. Sometimes it’s ‘being admired’. The nervous system does not care whether the relief comes from a bottle or a bonus; it cares that the ache stops.
In high‑functioning cultures, we even praise certain addictions. We call them ‘work ethic’. We call them ‘drive’. We call them ‘ambition’. We give them awards and keynote slots. But if the underlying fuel is fear of being unlovable, the engine is still the same engine.
And that ache is precisely what conditional regard manufactures: A chronic sense that BEing is not sufficient, that existence must be justified with performance.
Maté and Maté (Dr Maté and his son wrote this book together - which says it all) argue more broadly that many modern symptoms—addiction, anxiety, chronic illness—cannot be understood without seeing the relational and cultural conditions that make people disconnect from themselves. ( The myth of normal: Trauma, illness, and healing in a toxic culture, Maté, Penguin Random House, 2022)
Unconditional Positive Regard: The Therapy Principle That Parenting Forgot
The pioneering American psychologist Carl Rogers, a founding father of humanistic psychology, best known for developing person-centred therapy, did not invent love, but he did give psychology a clean clinical name for it: ‘Unconditional positive regard’. In his classic paper on therapeutic change, he argued that certain relational conditions—including a consistent non‑possessive warmth—are foundational for growth. ( The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change, Rogers, Journal of Consulting Psychology, 1957)
In other words: The nervous system changes in the presence of safety. And safety, for a human, is not primarily about locks and alarms; it is about being met without evaluation.
Modern research on self‑compassion echoes the same wisdom from a different angle: Treating oneself with kindness rather than harsh self‑judgement is associated with better psychological functioning. ( Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself, Neff, Self and Identity, 2003)
If ‘ego’ is a fear‑organised performance identity, self‑compassion is its solvent. It loosens the grip of the inner prosecutor. It teaches the child inside you that failure is not exile; it is simply human.
Jung once wrote: “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” ( Psychology and Religion: West and East, Jung, Princeton University Press, 1969)
Conditional Love is The Primary Cause of The Human Condition, Mental Illness, and Addiction
Conditional love destroys everything in its wake: My life in an image.
In the image above, the true scene of one of my many childhood Traumas: This explains why, decades later, I felt compelled to run five marathons and didn't know why. Unbeknownst to me I was running for love. I was never running in love. Adverse Childhood Experiences such as this one drove me to dive into my studies, pursue a career in medicine, and become a doctor. I was pursuing love, because on that day I had not made my mother proud. I was, back then, crap at running, but bloody brilliant at studying. So I put my hope into my books: Hoping that I would find love there.
This was my whole inheritance in one school sports day; one of my many childhood Traumas. My mother's reaction was a bullet to my heart: As though finishing last were a moral failure. A small boy, me, absorbs the verdict without words: "You are lovable when you win. You didn't win. I don't love you." And then, in the same frame, the spell is broken: A father laughs with his child at the sheer absurdity of the importance of winning or losing at a school sport's day race — the holy comedy of not being first — and the boy learns the opposite truth with equal wordlessness: ‘Nothing is at stake. I am safe. I am loved. I belong. I don't need to be someone else.’ This is how intergenerational trauma ends: Not with speeches, but with a nervous system that stops treating love like a prize.
This image depicts two radically different attachment contingencies in the same developmental context. On one side: Withdrawal of proximity and care after perceived ‘failure’ — a relational rupture that can encode shame, performance anxiety, and hypervigilant striving. On the other: Attuned presence and shared laughter, signalling that belonging is not contingent on outcome. The contrast is not about ‘raising winners’; it is about how the child’s nervous system learns what love costs. When acceptance is conditional, the child adapts by chasing approval (and often suppressing anger); when acceptance is secure, the child has permission to remain playful, resilient, and authentic — even while coming last.
Conditional love is the aetiology of the human condition, the root cause of which is childhood Trauma, which is the primary cause of all mental illness. It will mess up your children and turn them into external validation addicts – when that kind of ‘imitation’ love is sought as a substitute for the unconditional love that their brains, hearts, and Souls yearned for from you, like all addictions it will be insatiable. When that stops working, on their ‘Quest For Love’ they will turn to behavioural addictions, alcohol, or substance addictions to soothe the unbearable emotional pain of not feeling loved for who they already are.
Conditional love resets your children’s centre. And it centres it on you.
Some parents don’t raise a child: They commission a biography in human form. In the image above, the doctor's white coat is real, the exhaustion is very real, the clenched fists - the suppressed rage at not being loved for who she truly is, are real — but the mother is busy admiring her own reflection in stolen clothing. The daughter stands there, trying to speak, while the mirror quietly delivers the family creed: ‘Your performance reflects on me, and I like the reflection.’ The doctor's thick CV is a life lived; the mother's blank CV is a life appropriated. It’s not love; it’s branding — and the bill is paid, as always, by the child’s Soul. The mother’s absorption in her own reflected identity — literally dressed as the daughter — depicts enmeshment and identity appropriation: The child’s achievements are used as external self-esteem regulation rather than witnessed as the child’s life.
Unconditional love builds Self-worth and intrinsic motivation, which is a superpower: Shifting the narrative helps children develop an ‘inner voice’ of self-approval that will carry them to enduring abundance in all its forms.
Conditional love builds extrinsic motivation. Research by the American psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck, the author of 'Mindset', shows that focusing on an adult's evaluation can make children fear failure, as they may equate a lack of ‘pride in them with disappointment. Unconditional love, in contrast, reduces performance anxiety.
Dweck says that:
"Problems can be a vehicle for developing greater understanding and intimacy".
She continues:
"If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning".
This is one of the lessons about using the word 'proud' - it stops a child, and the adult that they then become, from even attempting anything at all. Life freezes. How do we thaw life? How do you take the bite out of the frost? Success in life boils down to this: Take action, then let go of the outcome. 'Proud' halts both processes in their tracks.
This Article is About You
What you may be starting to realise is that the Truth of this article is that it is as much about you as about the way you interact with your children. This article is for you, about you. In seeing the dynamic of how you interact with your children and how this forces a life down the right hand path of my schema below, you will start to see how the way your own parents interacted with you set in motion a cascade which has governed every aspect of your life so far. So, this article truly is for you, about you, about your family going upwards and downwards through the chain of inheritance, ad infinitum, and how the conditionality of love sets the scene for everything.
Michael Singer says that psychology is the sum of your learned experiences. Those learned experiences were acquired during your childhood, through the reward system in our brains when our parents say “I am proud of you because…” What you hear is “If you do this I will love you.” That makes you feel safe, although it is at the cost of your authenticity. So say to yourself “If I do more of this then I will be able to handle the world.” This sets in motion all your behaviour, and sets all your preferences, effectively based on fear. What you're effectively saying is “If I do this, I will get this outcome, so that I will feel loved and be safe, and that is therefore the outcome that I prefer.” Your fears become: “I want this to happen” and “I want that not to happen”. If they do then I won’t be able to handle it. The problem is that you cannot rearrange the world – reality is that which has already happened. So, you try to fight reality, but you can’t ever win. You can’t change other people or situations. You can’t bend the world to align with your preferences. That is a losing game: That ‘losing’ triggers all your childhood Trauma, as if it were happening again today, as it was entirely based on ‘winning’ (love) and ‘not losing’ (not love). This is why Buddhists say that ALL life is suffering and that preference is the cause of ALL that suffering. Life feels futile. You feel total loss of agency – a life devoid of ‘choice’. But Buddha gives us a way out, saying:
“Work at the root.”
That root is childhood Trauma. That is where you start. But that is not where you end.
The best thing about the past is that it is over.
The past can hurt you not, but only when you turn around and see it for what it truly is.
The ‘Clinical Psychopathology’ of ‘The Human Condition and How to Heal It’
I wrote in my previous article about the ‘clinical psychopathology’ of “The Human Condition and How to Heal It’ that:
“The deepest root cause of our suffering is a wound, and that wound is childhood Trauma, also known as ‘Adverse Childhood Experiences’ (ACEs). The aetiology of the human condition is a lack of unconditional love.”
In this series, the engine of the human condition is simple: Conditional love installs fear; fear petrifies into ‘ego’ (the ‘petrified inner child wearing armour,’ and grown tall); ‘ego’ generates preference and resistance; preference and resistance generate suffering. The whole thing begins, more often than we want to admit, with good intentions and terrible metaphysics.
Carl Rogers said that:
"If I were to search for the central core of difficulty in people as I have come to know them, it is that in the great majority of cases they despise themselves, regarding themselves as worthless and unlovable."
Rogers' approach revolutionised therapy by emphasising unconditional positive regard, compassion, and authenticity, empowering clients to drive their own healing process. He set out his theory of 'The Full Functioning Person' as someone who is constantly growing toward self-actualisation. He emphasised that the first step for this is:
"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change".
A’dick’sons’ aka Addictions
“Don’t be a’dick’son: Make me proud.”
What am I alluding to here?
And why is addiction potentially the very rock bottom from which people not only stop being ’dickheads’, but the very beginning of, and the catalyst for, total transformation, in other words, the entire spiritual journey?
Please don’t think that I am being disparaging about addicts. Bear with me...
The Whole Spiritual Journey = “Don’t Be a Dickhead’”
Carl Jung believed in a psychospiritual approach to healing, describing the process of ‘Individuation’:
“No culture or civilisation before our own was ever forced to take these psychic undercurrents in deadly earnest. Psychic life always found expression in a metaphysical framework of some sort. But the conscious, modern man, can no longer refrain from acknowledging the might of psychic forces.”
“Individuation means becoming an ‘in-dividual,’ and, in so far as ‘individuality’ embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own Self. We could therefore translate individuation as ‘Coming to Self-hood’ or ‘Self-realisation.’”
This article is about healing from the human condition: Aligning your role with your Soul.
I recently met with a good friend that I hadn’t seen for a while and I spend hours explaining what transformative coaching does and how powerful it is in its life-changing results. We dived into psychology, philosophy, existentialism, metaphysics, science, evidence, and more. I could see that he totally got it and that he was intrigued by it. This was another moment of awakening for me: Another spiritual experience – one that I will always remember, and one that I quote to all my clients when I start working with them as it cuts through so much explanation and summarises transformation so succinctly and so ingeniously, if not eloquently. He asked me, after four hours of deep discussion:
“So, what you are saying is ‘Don’t be a dickhead’?”
I was stunned for a moment. He had captured Enlightenment, the entire spiritual path, the whole process of total psychological evolution and transformation, in one short (if seemingly inappropriate) sentence. My eyes narrowed, then widened:
“Yes, that’s exactly it: ‘Don’t be a dickhead’.”
You see there are sooo many dickheads around. And the vast majority are totally oblivious to the fact that they are. They may well be totally loveable. They may be so lovely in so many ways, but in essence, they are dickheads. They even pass on their ‘dick-headed-ness’ to their children, who then pass it on to their children, ad infinitum. Their parenting may as well involve them saying: “Don’t be A’dick’son: Make me proud.” Because that’s what their parents were, unknowingly, effectively saying to them.
I say all of that in the most well-meaning way possible. Do you know someone lovely, who sadly, at the same time as being lovely, is also a dickhead?
I have met so many well-to-do people with ‘A’dick’sons’ aka addictions. All of them have one. So do you. You may not know it yet. You may not think you have one. But you do. "Don’t Be A’dick’son."
The main, still ongoing cause of addiction, psychological pathology, and spiritual dis-ease, is that whole families are dickheads. They are a dick’s sons. Why do I use such an offensive term? Is it because I want to offend? No, absolutely not. I love recovering addicts – they are some of the most psychospiritually aligned BEings on this planet, unlike the vast majority who are stuck in ego, pride, and on the edge of ‘hubris.’ Am I being flippant? No, I am deadly serious. It may be a matter of life-and-death for your children, grandchildren and your great grand-children. It may have been a mortal wound that was inflicted on you too, and that you are yet to die from, but you might. This is why I am writing this article at 4am on a cold-Winter Saturday morning (the sky is clear though, as I attempt to bring clarity to this topic, without giving you the chills). It is so vital to understand it. There is an emergency going on as you sleep.
I have met so many ‘dickheads’ in my life, and from every walk of life, and wondered why they are such dickheads and how this came to be the case, even when I knew that deep down that they had other, wonderful traits. I used to wonder why their parents were such dickheads too. I used to be a dickhead too. I pray that I am not one now.
My mother offered only conditional love. For her that was her only option. My father had been kicked out when I was only two years old. I won’t bore you with my life story here, but you can read it if you want under my article ‘My Truth.’ My mother’s conditional love led to me becoming a doctor to try (in vain) to get her to love me. Then, decades later, regular as clockwork (or rather a ticking time-bomb) to a cataclysmic nervous breakdown that no-one saw coming. Ok, enough about me, it was just for a little context, and to say quietly, yes, I know.
The reason that I don’t normally use the precise term “Don’t be a dickhead” is not that it is pejorative, it is because most ‘dickheads’ are totally unaware that they are, and using it would completely close them up to the pressing need for them to do the inner work required to stop being one: To ‘undickhead’ themselves. What is that work?
Who Should Read This Article?
My wish is for every parent to read this article. Especially if you are worried that you are screwing up your children and you genuinely don’t know why. Or they are now adults and you just can't understand why they behave the way they do or that they are as sick as they are.
I am hoping that many adults, who are wondering why their own lives are such a mess (and whose isn't to be honest?) will read it too and have an ‘Aha’ moment themselves, felt in their bodies and innermost BEing, locating themselves on the 'map' below, with the way forward signposted.
If you know a 'dickhead', are married to one, or one of your good friends is one, they should definitely read this article too: They might even have an 'Aha' moment that explains their life up until now! But the first symptom of being a dickhead is denial, so I wish you luck with it (no harm in trying), or even “Oops did I just leave it open on my iPad?” No-one can change anyone else, and no-one can fix anyone else. But an 'Aha' can turn into an 'Oh!'
This article may give them a view-in-one-glimpse’ of the entire ‘Right hand path’ in the schema of the ‘meta-theory’ of the ‘Unified Field of The Human Condition’ from the first article in my series ‘The Human Condition and How To Heal It.’
Once you see the metaphysics behind every single one of us including you, shame dissipates, compassion flourishes, and the lotus may well appear out of the mud of the human condition.
The Word Wizard On The ‘P’ Word: William Shakespeare Deserves His Very Own Scene
I so love William Shakespeare that I have to give him a whole section. He was not only a genius. He was a prophet of the human condition. He deeply understood human psychology, knowing that we didn’t, so he served it up in myriad ways. So, it is no surprise that, yet again, he warned us of about being ‘proud’ and of the mortal dangers of ‘pride’.
In ‘Macbeth’ (Act 1, Scene 3) the Three Witches say to Macbeth on a storm-lashed heath, predicting his rise from Thane of Glamis to Thane of Cawdor, and ultimately, to King of Scotland:
“All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Glamis! / All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor! / All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter.”
The salutation hooks Macbeth, sparking his murderous ambition, driving the play's violent action and his desire to take control of fate. The phrase "All hail" serves as a formal, almost ritualistic, yet ominous, salutation that directly initiates the plot's tragic downfall. Blind ambition is the direct manifestation of a childhood characterised by conditional love.
Why are so many of today’s lawyers, doctors, CEO’s, and celebrities now presenting with stress, burnout, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse? Why are they cursed with insomnia and torment? Shakespeare yet again gives us deep insightful clues, continuing in Macbeth:
"Sleep shall neither night nor day / Hang upon his penthouse lid; / He shall live a man forbid: / Weary sev'nights nine times nine / Shall he dwindle, peak and pine."
This also explains the witches’ paradoxical prophecy to Banquo "Lesser than Macbeth, and greater. / Not so happy, yet much happier. / Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none."
In ‘Troilus and Cressida’ (Act II, Scene III), Shakespeare writes:
“He that is proud eats up himself: Pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle.”
These words are spoken by the character Agamemnon to describe the self-destructive nature of a ‘proud’ person, consumed by their own ego, acting as their own mirror seeing only their own reflection, announcer and proclaimer of their own virtues, historian, and destroyer, validating themselves in a closed, narcissistic loop.
In the same scene Shakespeare writes:
“I do hate a proud man, as I hate the engendering of toads. Nestor. Yet he loves himself: Is't not strange?”
Toads were considered ‘venomous’ and ‘hateful’ in Shakespeare's time. The ‘engendering’ (breeding) of toads was seen as repulsive and toxic. And yet we continue to bring up our children as such.
Shakespeare, who understood status games the way surgeons understand anatomy, wrote:
“By that sin fell the angels.”
(Henry VIII, Shakespeare, MIT Shakespeare, 1613 )
Are You Ready To Open?
Because it is then that, as the pioneering 20th century author and philosopher of Self-discovery and emotional liberation, who was deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, Anaïs Nin wrote:
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
Dickheads make the greatest teachers: They keep teaching you. They are completely oblivious to it. They just never teach themselves. They don’t think they need teaching. They don’t think that there is anything wrong with them, until there is. Only you can heal you from the human condition.
Addiction, in all its forms, as I have written in my first article, the introduction to my series on ‘The Human Condition and How To Heal It’, is often when the doorway out of the ego mind first appears – at the ‘Temple of Emotional Anaesthesia.’
Nin studied and underwent psychoanalysis with Otto Rank, which helped her articulate the relationship between emotion, intuition, and artistic expression. She championed existential philosophy, personal liberation, and authenticity, and urged people to embrace their inner wisdom and expand their self-limiting consciousness. The metaphor that Nin uses is perfect: The ‘bud’ represents safety, stagnation, imperviousness, being resolute and fearful, while "blossoming" represents growth, vulnerability, and potential.
You see, transformation is painful. But remaining a dickhead is excruciating for everyone around you. Transformation requires vulnerability. But that vulnerability is a captivating power and true beauty, like a flower opening. Pain is inevitable in life, but we have a choice between the pain of staying the same (remaining a dickhead) or the pain of growth (achieving Real Personal Power and become a beautiful human BEing in every sense). Being a dickhead is not just a metaphorical death: It may be a very real one through the sequelae of mental illness and suicide.
Nin wrote a 16-volume diary, which served as a ‘laboratory’ for analysing human relationships, the nature of joy, personal identity, and psychospiritual evolution and transformation. My friend might easily have asked if this massive literary doorstopper of a tome, her epic magnum opus, was called “How To Stop Being a Dickhead.”
Nin also famously wrote:
"We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are."
Is that, perhaps, why people think that everyone else is a dickhead? Just saying.
The Neurobiology Of Being Proud: ‘Unconditional Love’ And 'The Right-Hand Route' of The Map
Across social-affective neuroscience, unconditional love can be described as a repeatable neurobiological environment: The child receives consistent cues of safety, attunement, and repair that shape reward, stress, and attachment systems. Neuroimaging of parental love shows coordinated activation of orbitofrontal and dopaminergic reward circuitry, suggesting caregiving is biologically coded as intrinsically rewarding rather than merely duty-bound (The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love.; Bartels, NeuroImage, 2004).
Oxytocin, released during nurturing contact, strengthens bonding salience and can reduce stress responses (The effect of social support on stress and oxytocin in humans.; Heinrichs, Biological Psychiatry, 2003).
When this buffering is absent—through emotional neglect, inconsistency, or conditionality—the developing nervous system is trained to expect threat and scarcity. Early deprivation has been associated with atypically enlarged amygdala volume and difficulties in emotion regulation (Prolonged institutional rearing is associated with atypically large amygdala volume and difficulties in emotion regulation.; Tottenham, Developmental Science, 2010), and meta-analytic syntheses of adverse childhood experiences link childhood Trauma to increased risks of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and substance use (The effect of multiple adverse childhood experiences on health: A systematic review and meta-analysis.; Hughes, The Lancet Public Health, 2017). This is precisely the clinical constellation that, in my meta-theory, maps onto the 'Path of Attachment' and the 'Temple of Emotional Anaesthesia'.
In my meta-theory this neurodevelopmental logic reads as the ‘Right-hand path’: If baseline safety and belonging are unreliable, the organism learns preference as survival strategy—clinging to what reliably produces relief (substances, compulsions, achievement, validation)—with reward-system skew setting off again via the path of the 'Quest For Love', not realising that all they will get is imitation love in the destination of the ‘Temple of Emotional Anaesthesia’ as downstream expression to lessen the pain of the human condition.
A Case Vignette: The Lawyer Who ‘Didn’t Need to Heal’
May I now share with you a case-in-point which proves the point, a case vignette, a veritable ‘medical case-study.'
This is not to say that a case study is evidence for Truth - I will be setting out the highest level evidence for investigating the human condition and how to heal it throughout this series - but this true story illustrates the point of this article in a way that was a quiet but very real “Aha” moment for me. So, just before we dive into the big guns studies, the irrefutable medical evidence, here is 'The Lawyer Who Didn't Need to Heal'...
For years I had a friend who, on paper, had everything that many would only dream of. He was a high-earning corporate lawyer in a glittering City firm, with a salary that would make most junior barristers weep, an apartment out of a design magazine, a car that roared like a minor god, and an unbroken chain of professional successes.
He was also, often in the same breath, one of the loveliest and one of the most unbearable people I knew. Sober-ish, he could be generous, funny, affectionate, interested in the world. Drunk, which was often, he became a terrifically dull one-man closing speech for his own virtuosity, prowess, and the defence of his own ego. Dinner after dinner dissolved into a monologue about how brilliant he was, how indispensable he was to the firm, how his clients adored him, and how he had ‘made it out’ of the chaos of his childhood by sheer talent and will.
His brother had not. His brother died of a crystal meth overdose. Same parents. Same house. Same unspoken atmosphere of conditional love. Two boys, two trajectories. One fell visibly apart. The other turned himself into an armour-plated success story, the gifted child who never stopped performing.
The story he told himself, and everyone else, was simple: “My brother was weak. I was strong.” When we talked about my work on childhood Trauma, transformation, and a psychospiritual approach to coaching he was polite for about thirty seconds and then said, lightly but with an edge, “Ah, yes, the remedial stuff. For people who can’t cope.” His implication was clear: The work I do is for those who failed to transcend their damage. He had transcended it. He was the proof.
Except he wasn’t.
If you scratched the surface, which usually took him about half a bottle of wine, the cracks showed through. He was sleeping badly. He was drinking heavily. He had periodic panic attacks he described as “Just a bit of adrenaline.” His relationships keeled over one after another with the same pattern: Charm, idealisation, and emotional unavailability. He hated weekends because they gave him too much time to think. When his brother came up in conversation, he would either go dead behind the eyes or switch subject with a joke.
This progressed to a spectacular cataclysmic collapse: One that he did not see coming.
From the outside, this looks like hypocrisy. How can someone be both obviously suffering and so contemptuous of help? From the inside, it is simply the gifted child’s last defence. He had built his entire survival strategy on the belief that he was the one who coped, the one who kept going, the one who didn’t need anyone. To admit that he might need the very ‘remedial’ work he mocked would not just dent his pride: It would dissolve the story that had kept him alive.
In that sense, he is not a caricature; he is an almost painfully pure expression of the childhood Trauma pattern in a legal skin. Two brothers with the same early wounds: One falls visibly into addiction and dies; the other becomes an addict of a different kind: To work, to a professional status, self-importance, the next deal, and the next high-stakes transaction. One is destroyed by the obvious drug; the other is quietly eaten alive by the socially rewarded one: The professionalisation of external validation.
What he could not yet see, and what the meta-theory the ‘Unified Field of The Human Condition’ described in the first article in this series on ‘The Human Condition and How to Heal It’ invites — is that both paths are branches of the same tree. Neither his brother’s overdose nor his own hubris are mysterious moral failures. They are two outcomes of the same unhealed lack of unconditional love, playing themselves out in different costumes. The moment he is willing to see that — to put his own name into the diagnostic schema on the hospital whiteboard — the story of being the ‘strong’ one collapses. In its place, a different story becomes possible: Not the story of a heroic escape from his childhood, but the story of a man who is finally ready to heal it.
In short this lovely and hugely successful man was a dickhead. He was teetering on the edge of a precipice that he just couldn’t see himself. He couldn’t see the ‘Right hand path’ of my ‘meta-theory’. His bud wasn’t ready to open. And why had all this happened? Why had it come to pass? It turns out that his parents were unconditionally loving. But they had used the ‘p-word’ just once too often.
This explains why so doctors and lawyers have the highest rates of mental illness, suicide, alcoholism, substance abuse, and divorce among any group. And why creatives have the lowest. It’s not because being a doctor or a lawyer is bad for you. It is because many people choose the ‘great professions’ because they think, or have been told, that it will make their parents ‘proud’. Why? Because their parents have told them so. BEing must come first. Then doing. Then having. That’s the sequence. When the having and the doing come first, what follows is not BEing, it is a fall.
The Paradox of The Professions
The vignette above hints at the professional paradox that appears everywhere: People enter professions or roles — caregiving, healing, teaching, service, leadership — because something in them is still intact, still oriented toward relieving suffering. But without seeing the mechanism that led them there, that original impulse gets colonised by worth-proving.
The role becomes a theatre in which the ego tries to settle an ancient account based on fear: “Now I will be good enough.” The vocation remains present but no longer governing. Practice becomes defended instead of human. In the ‘map’ that I present in this thesis, the cure is not necessarily changing the profession; it is changing the organising centre. It is returning to the pre-conditioned intention — the original love — and letting that love govern the way that you do the work. Then the same work that once served the ‘Temple of Emotional Anaesthesia’, where external validation is used to numb the emotional pain of not feeling loved becomes ‘Bridge of Awakening’-work: Aligned, authentic, awake, and infused with Real Personal Power.
From Case Study to Clinical Series: The Crisis of a Profession ‘In Extremis’
Everyone is a combination of light and dark. Everyone makes mistakes. That's what makes us human. Not recognising that we are all the same humanity tears a hole in our Soul. The ego insists that we are separate. The ego insists on right versus wrong, black-and-white thinking - duality: And so does the adversarial legal system
Accolades and achievements don't give us Self-worth. Alyssa Moon wrote:
"The more titles you carry with you, the more masks you find yourself hiding behind."
The legal profession, of all the professions, sadly, is our greatest teacher: Not on how to be right; but about how not to do things wrong. Lawyers have the highest prevalence of mental illness, addiction, and suicide of all the professions. And the highest rate of divorce.
The legal profession is sick. The 'great professions' are not doing so great.
For what follows, I need to be clear about one thing from the outset. What follows in this article is written for lawyers, not against them. It is an act of affection and compassion, not a prosecution. Some of what follows is sharp. will say, in plain language, that adversarial law functions like an emotional anaesthetic; that many lawyers are, neurally speaking, junkies for the dopamine hit of winning; that black-and-white thinking — the profession’s proudest habit — looks, from a clinical standpoint, suspiciously like a symptom. I say these things not to shame, but because I do not know of any other honest way to speak about what is actually happening.
If a beloved family member were slowly destroying themselves with work, alcohol or painkillers, ‘respecting their choices’ would not be love. Love would be telling the truth as gently and precisely as you could, staying with them in their discomfort, and offering a path out that does not rely on more of the same anaesthetic. That is the stance I am taking with the legal profession. This is tough love, but it is love. I have great compassion for you, and I identify and resonate with your struggles.
The good news is that nothing in this map says that lawyers are uniquely broken. On the contrary: what law reveals is what is happening, more quietly, everywhere. The adversarial courtroom is just a particularly well-lit theatre in which the human condition plays out in amplified form. The same trauma sequences, the same addictions, the same ego strategies that run barristers into the ground also run CEOs, doctors, academics and, in truth, all of us. The difference is that when a lawyer’s unhealed wound is in charge, it can reshape another person’s life.
If there is a single thread running through what follows, it is this: You cannot litigate your way out of a wound. Not as a client. Not as a lawyer. Not as a system.
What you can do is learn to see the wound clearly, to understand the mechanisms that keep it in charge — neurologically, psychologically, spiritually — and to discover that there is a way of being that is not organised around fear. The models and metaphors in these pages — including the Temple of ‘Adversarial Law’, the ‘Bridge of Awakening’, the ‘Unified Field of the Human Condition’ — are not abstractions for their own sake. They are maps made out of pain: my pain, my patients’ pain, my clients’ pain, and the pain that lawyers have shared with me in quieter moments.
If you are a lawyer, a judge, a law student, or simply someone who has been bruised and battered, even crucified, by the system and still cares enough to read this far: This series is for you. It is written from the conviction that you are not uniquely monstrous or uniquely broken. You are human, all of you, in a traumatised culture, doing your best with the tools and stories you were handed. When I say ‘you’ I mean judges, lawyers, their clients, and the legal system itself.
There are better tools. There are truer stories. And there is, I believe, a better way.
The Data: The Statistics of a Legal System in Crisis
These are the stakes. This is the urgency. The data with regards to the legal profession and their ranks, including judges and lawyers, which I have summarised for you here, have found and highlighted that:
Over eighty percent of lawyers report feeling ‘stressed’ and they don’t know why, and neither do their doctors (despite a steady stream of ‘expert witnesses’ gladly taking their fees) or the legal profession
Three quarters of lawyers and judges are suffering from burnout, which is characterised by mental and emotional exhaustion, cynicism, inattention to detail, reduced professional efficacy, courtroom errors, loss of professional identity, mental illness, alcoholism, substance abuse, and higher rates of staff turnover for law firms
Three quarters of lawyers have anxiety (three times that of the general population)
Half of lawyers suffer from severe depression
Rates of self-harm in the UK have doubled in the last 15 years
One in six lawyers are suicidal: For an alarming proportion of lawyers, simply being alive has become intolerably painful
One in six lawyers have neurodevelopmental disorders, which are associated with childhood Trauma, with altered brain development, affecting their professional abilities in numerous ways
Over a third of lawyers and over a third of judges are alcoholic or problem drinkers, a figure that is double that of other professions
One in six lawyers are addicted to sedatives; Over one in ten use marijuana; 6% are addicted to morphine-based drugs: One in 20 are addicted to stimulants including cocaine
Over 90 percent of lawyers are dysfunctional: Dysfunction has become the norm
A quarter of lawyers said that their employer did not recognise mental illness issues
A third of lawyers feared being treated differently by the legal system if they declared a mental illness diagnosis
Half of lawyers reported that they would not discuss their mental health concerns with their employer for fear of stigma and that it may have a negative impact on their career, a figure which is double that of doctors
Two thirds of lawyers said that the legal profession was a detriment to their mental health: Well-being needs to become a mainstream issue in law, not a ‘nod’ from an untrained human resources department or a blindfolded game of ‘pinning the tail on the donkey’ by doctors completely untrained in trauma-care
Half of lawyers were considering leaving the profession altogether, a figure comparable to the medical profession as set out in my article entitled ‘Mental Illness is the Next Pandemic and it’s Already Upon Us’
There was a 25 percent increase in the number of people contacting LawCare, the mental health charity for legal professionals
ACEs in Lawyers
But why is the legal profession experiencing a mental health crisis? The legal system - the institutions that govern the legal profession (not lawyers themselves who are the victims here and who are being kept in the dark to their and the public's detriment), knows why, but have chosen not to intervene according to the landmark study on childhood Trauma (also known as Adverse Childhood Experiences - ACEs) in lawyers: ‘Improving Lawyers’ Health by Addressing the Impact of Childhood Trauma’. This study is an evidence-based ‘grenade’ thrown precisely into the trenches of the legal system by a Professor of Law and a scholar specialising in childhood Trauma, both pointing their fingers squarely at the legal system in the dock, explaining exactly why it is so sick, and how this relates to ACEs. You can read it in full here: Oehme & Stern 'Improving Lawyers’ Health by Addressing the Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences'. University of Richmond Law Review. 2019). The authors state that:
Although the legal profession has recognised the importance of improving attorneys’ mental health, it has largely ignored recent social and scientific research on how Adverse Childhood Experiences ('ACEs') can harm attorneys’ long-term well-being. This article reviews the science of ACEs and argues that law schools and the legal profession should educate law students and attorneys about the impact of prior trauma on behavioural health. Without such education, law schools and the legal system are missing a crucial opportunity to help lawyers prevent and alleviate the maladaptive coping mechanisms that are associated with ACEs. Until such knowledge is widespread, many lawyers will be plagued by their own trauma histories—to the detriment of individuals, families, communities, and the legal system."
The authors concluded that:
"The legal community has not acted upon the understanding that ACEs can contribute significantly to adults’ mental health problems. Because of the importance of the legal system and the acknowledged stresses inflicted by legal practice and its training, attorneys deserve and need to understand the persistent effects and maladaptive coping behaviours associated with ACEs. Moreover, the responsibility that lawyers bear to clients and society magnifies the harm caused by their impairment. Without a new commitment to educating attorneys about the impact of ACEs, law schools, bar associations, and leaders in the legal community are condemning countless lawyers to be plagued by their trauma histories—to the tragic detriment of lawyers’ families, clients, communities, and mental health."
Education is not enough of itself. Mandated workshops are not enough. A paradigm shift is required. Much more on this in subsequent article in this series, with the legal system being the most extreme example.
You will want more evidence of course. That is totally understandable. Let’s show you the hard data on ACEs in lawyers. This is far from an exhaustive list, but the evidence is incontrovertible. There is a full set of citations, with links to the articles for you to read, and a full reference list at the end of this article.
The legal profession often speaks of itself as if it were suspended above ordinary human frailty in an arena of ‘pure intellect, impartial judgment, and professional fortitude’. Yet the empirical record tells a different story, one that has been hiding in plain sight. Across the last decade, a growing body of research has revealed that lawyers and judges (far from being insulated from adversity) exhibit elevated rates of childhood Trauma, disproportionately high levels of anxiety and depression, and patterns of emotional reactivity that mirror exactly what the ACEs framework predicts. This has incalculable implications for the practice of law, the well-being of lawyers, the myth of neutrality, projection, dualism in practice, denial of objectivity, 'winning' over Truth – ‘might-is-right, and misrepresented significance of mitigating circumstances, where effectively the legal system, itself rife with ACEs, ignores ACEs in themselves, in clients on both sides of the adversarial divide, and in disproportionate sentencing: Ignoring their impact in determining arguments, while using them to against the defence while sentencing. This is replicated in other governing bodies, especially where professionals find themselves in the dock for what are actually ACEs related misconduct. Law is the bastion of judgement which is replicated by humanity. Bizarre as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi, both lawyers, taught forgiveness and love.
One of the earliest wake-up calls came from Paula Davis-Laack, whose work with Harvard’s Institute of Coaching examined the psychological profiles of thousands of legal professionals. In The Lawyer Burnout Study she showed that lawyers score significantly higher than the general population on measures of chronic stress, intrusive rumination, emotional exhaustion, and maladaptive perfectionism. Although her study was not initially framed in ACEs language, the symptom-clusters she documented are classic ACEs-related sequelae: hypervigilance, shame-based overachievement, and threat-sensitive cognitive processing. ACEs research predicts these patterns; the legal profession exemplifies them.
More explicit still is the landmark National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being Report, which remains one of the most comprehensive analyses ever conducted on the emotional functioning of legal professionals. Its findings — drawn from judges, barristers, solicitors, law students, and corporate lawyers — are stark: depression, anxiety, suicidality, hazardous drinking, and emotional dysregulation appear in lawyers at rates far exceeding those of any comparable profession. Crucially, the task force notes that these symptoms are not created by the job alone; rather, they are “activated, amplified, or entrenched” by pre-existing vulnerabilities. The unspoken subtext is unmistakable: many lawyers do not enter law as blank slates — they enter already bearing wounds.
This picture becomes clearer when read alongside The Path to Lawyer Well-Being: Ramifications for the Profession, which synthesises psychological research on law students and junior lawyers. It reveals that those who enter law with a history of childhood adversity — whether emotional neglect, perfectionistic criticism, household instability, or chronic relational stress — are markedly more likely to adopt what the authors call “Defensive professional identities”: Overcontrolled, adversarial, image-driven, and emotionally armoured. These are not moral failings; they are adaptive survival strategies forged long before legal training begins.
The judiciary is not exempt. In Judicial Stress and Resilience, Chambers and Miller conducted a national survey of judges and found high levels of emotional depletion, intrusive stress responses, dissociation, and impaired sleep — again mirroring the ACEs-related profile. Judges who disclosed adverse childhood experiences reported significantly greater difficulty with emotional neutrality and a greater susceptibility to cognitive rigidity, confirming what trauma science has long known: early adversity shapes not only emotion but perception.
Perhaps the clearest integration of ACEs into legal-profession data comes from Krill, Johnson, and Albert’s seminal The Prevalence of Substance Use and Mental Health Concerns Among American Attorneys. Although the study is widely cited for its findings on alcohol misuse, the more consequential insight lies in its exploratory analysis: Lawyers with elevated ACEs scores were dramatically more likely to exhibit hazardous drinking, depression, impulsivity, and maladaptive coping. Childhood adversity was not incidental to the findings; it was the hidden architecture beneath them.
Libby Coreno, current co-chair of the NYSBA Committee on Attorney Well-Being and served as the co-chair of NYSBA’s Task Force on Attorney Well-Being from 2020–2021, discusses how lawyers have their own history of ACEs, linking these to mental health and addiction in the legal profession itself, a cause of 'black-and'white' thinking, only seeing in terms of 'good' or 'bad' when the Truth is more nuanced, higher, and signifies that both sides and also the lawyer are humans who are all affected by ACEs. This has deep implications for a need to revolutionalise jurisprudential science and philosophy, and thereby law itself. She stated that :
"The entrenched and inhumane parts of our legal systems repeatedly fail to consider (or outright deny the relevance of) the impact of trauma (individual, community, intergenerational, marginalized peoples, etc). It also shades in the gray of the continuum that is “mental illness” or “mental health” rather than using those terms in the binary manner so common today. And lawyers should take note because the very training to “think like a lawyer” leads directly to a “no gray zone” – a kind of dehumanised “black and white,” all-or-nothing thinking that can cause us to overlook the very human factors that are at the heart of a system – including ourselves."
New York State Bar Association. (n.d.). ‘Trauma, Mental Health and the Lawyer.’ NYSBA.org.
Natalie Netzel, proposed in the June 2022 edition of Minnesota State Bar Association’s “Bench + Bar':
"On its most basic level, trauma occurs when an event happens to an individual, or group, over which they have no control, with little power to change their circumstances, and which overwhelms their ability to cope. When the events happen without the buffer of supportive connections, or the availability of healing practices, brain chemistry changes in fundamental ways. For many of our clients, their interaction with the legal system represents an event that overwhelms their ability to cope and over which they have little if any control, and that is traumatic in and of itself."
(Natalie Netzel, Hiding in Plain Sight, Bench + Bar, Minnesota State Bar Association, June 1, 2022.)
Advocate for ACEs in the legal profession Iain Smith, Lawyer of the year 2019 has spoken about the role of ACEs in the legal setting, being a massive advocate of compassion rather than judgement. Watch the recording here. Smith said that he realised that ACES are:
"Something that no lawyers were talking about. No lawyers as far as though we're well aware of. And I suddenly realised this affected, I would say 80 to 90% of the people who I was dealing with on a daily basis. And the vast majority of people in the court. And I realised that point that I had failed clients for 25 years and not really understanding things. So it immediately affected me, so on a micro-level, it affected about how I spoke, how I listened, how I cared for people, how I properly saw them and heard them. And in court, it seemed strange, and I would start to say things and speak in court in a way that seemed bizarre and strange because I'm talking about compassion, I'd talk about empathy, I'd talk about kindness. I talked about the need for the judge to provide hope to this person because of the injuries and damage and struggles that they'd had in their Life. My clients who are seen as bad are often more sad than bad. When people were coming into court, I'm assuming that their battle for justice has started in court, when for most of them, they started at birth. And these are to do with the terrible things that have happened to them. o I really want to shout at judges, why the hell can't you see what's going on here? Why can't you see this person? As they sit a way above, in what's called a degradation ceremony of courts, so the judges sit up high and they're wearing wigs and gowns, and they're looking down at the person in the dock. And I sometimes think they can't see them properly because if they're too far away, Because we still wear wigs and gowns, this is 2022, and we wear old woollen gowns, and we do things like a theatre, and we degrade people, and we marginalise the weakest people in society, when in fact we should be doing a whole lot better for them, and doing things differently. Our justice system focuses on the what, and the what in the case of criminal justice is the crime, and they fail to see the who, and that's the person who breaks the law. And as a result of that, our focus is on retribution and punishment. And what we speak about is really being hard and soft on crime. That's the narrative. And we talk about folk being junkies, neds and scum. We don't care enough in the systems, for example the health system, the education system, the justice system. We're about to spend 100 million pounds building a super prison in Glasgow. If you think about how much rehabilitation, therapy and help that could be to people, why not build or help build better people, rather than better prisons? It would be a far better use of money, because all, all that happens is, with our justice system being punitive, being retributive, is that the people go in and out, in and out because they cannot be punished. People who are traumatised, cannot be punished into a better way of being. They cannot be punished out of their addiction. But they can bizarrely be loved and cared for, into a better way of BEing. Why are we not dealing with the issues of ACEs in early years? About educating children properly, about educating parents properly, about getting people help and treatment to help them recover from the difficulties. There's no magic wand to it, but why do we wait? And in the justice system is due to the fact we don't care enough. And that's what I think, as I say, I wish to advocate. The system itself doesn't change overnight because we still think that people committing crimes, we just see them as baddies, but if we see them as hurt people, struggling people, we will look at things differently... In our arrogance as lawyers we don't think it is us who must change."
This emerging literature has created a striking pattern: Legal professionals exhibit childhood Trauma-related markers at a rate and intensity that make the profession one of the most ACE-sensitive fields in modern Western life. The implications are profound. Lawyers, judges, and even law students are not 'becoming unwell' because they are weak (to suggest so would be a judgement of itself) and not because the profession itself is uniquely toxic — though its adversarial culture, which historically originates on the jousting field, certainly exacerbates matters. The deeper truth is that the profession selects for, amplifies, and institutionalises the very psychological patterns that childhood adversity produces: Hypervigilance, workaholism, perfectionistic striving, 'saviourism', compulsive responsibility, emotional repression, and a worldview organised around threat and perceived through the obscuring lens of duality.
Judith Herman calls this a ‘survivor mission’: That childhood Trauma survivors feel called to transform their private pain into public service. Doctors, therapists, lawyers, and judges often belong in that group: 'Wounded healers' in wigs and white coats, seeking unconsciously to rescue others from the very helplessness they once felt themselves.
Alice Miller, the renowned psychologist and psychoanalyst known for her influential research on the long-term effects of childhood Trauma wrote that:
“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: The emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the Truth in the individual and unique history of their childhood.”
In Miller’s book ‘The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self’, her ‘gifted child’ is essentially the high-achieving future barrister or surgeon: Exquisitely attuned to others’ needs, starved of unconditional love, and forced to earn worth through performance. In one key passage she describes the adult personality that results as resting on:
“Supporting pillars of success, achievement, ‘strength,’ and, above all, of denying the emotional world of his childhood.”
The data is converging on a single, quietly devastating insight: The legal profession as a whole is saturated with unrecognised, denied, unhealed, childhood Trauma. Not because lawyers are broken, but because many were resilient, gifted, precocious 'gifted' children who learned early to anticipate adult expectations — and later gravitated toward a profession that rewards exactly those patterns. This is not pathology; it is biography. When the ACEs framework is applied, the contradictions within the profession suddenly make sense: The drive for excellence coexisting with hidden emotional fragility; the devotion to justice coexisting with private suffering; the rhetorical commitment to truth coexisting with difficulty perceiving one’s own interior life.
What this section establishes is not a criticism of lawyers, but a compassionate reframing: the mental-health crisis in law is not evidence of weakness — it’s evidence of unresolved wounding. And because these wounds emerged long before the profession began, no amount of diet, mindfulness apps, lifestyle 'hacks', 'resilience' training, or workplace optimisation can resolve them. You cannot mandate or outsource healing.
A more honest, humane, evidence-based response is required. And that response begins with understanding why so many of the profession’s most brilliant minds began life in environments where brilliance was a survival strategy.
Philosophically, the lawyer embodies what Jiddu Krishnamurti called:
“The projection of our internal war into the world.”
What Friedrich Nietzsche warned as:
“Becoming the mask you wear”.
This brings to mind the poem ‘The Man in The Mirror’ by Dale Wimbrow, as psychologically, it’s the moment of confrontation between the ego (the ‘King-baby’) and the Self; spiritually, it’s the first glimmer of humility and accountability — the step beyond ‘terminal uniqueness’, with the individual facing themselves:
“When you get all you want and you struggle for self,
and the world makes you king for a day,
then go to the mirror and look at yourself
and see what that man has to say.
For it isn’t your mother, your father or wife
whose judgment upon you must pass,
but the man, whose verdict counts most in your life
is the one staring back from the glass.
He’s the fellow to please,
never mind all the rest.
For he’s with you right to the end,
and you’ve passed your most difficult test
if the man in the glass is your friend.
You may be like Jack Horner and “chisel” a plum,
And think you’re a wonderful guy,
But the man in the glass says you’re only a bum
If you can’t look him straight in the eye.
You can fool the whole world,
down the highway of years,
and take pats on the back as you pass.
But your final reward will be heartache and tears
if you’ve cheated the man in the glass.”
Some of the further relevant literature on the legal profession and childhood Trauma is listed here for brevity:
The American Bar Association. (n.d.). ‘The Legal Burnout Solution: How Childhood Trauma Impacts Lawyers and Their Clients’. GPSolo eReport. This practice-oriented overview directed at lawyers links ACEs and ‘toxic stress’ as being adverse to professional functioning, decision-making, coping, and client relationships.
Walker, Loren. (2023). The ACE Controversy. In H. Maki, J.K. Wright, et al. (Eds.), ‘Trauma Informed Law: A Primer for Practicing. American Bar Association’. This chapter interrogates the ACEs concept, its predictive value, limitations (resilience, context) especially in legal/justice settings.
Stephens, Eddie. (2022, July 27). ‘Trauma-Informed Family Attorney’. Stephens & Stevens Marital & Family Law. A blog/article by a family lawyer advocating for trauma-informed practice: Recognising clients’ childhood adversity, adopting non-judgemental approaches; relevant to legal practice rather than research.
Smith, Iain. (2019, February). ‘Kindness in court: Who cares?’ Law Society of Scotland Journal, Vol 64 Issue 2. A criminal defence lawyer reflects on how understanding ACEs changed his approach to clients and the justice system; offers professional insight.
Zeedyk, Suzanne & Smith, Iain. (2018, June 18). ‘When four ACEs is a bad hand’. Law Society of Scotland Journal, Vol 63 Issue 6. Explores biological/neurological effects of childhood adversity, addresses implications for justice/legal settings; while not specific to lawyers, it offers legal system relevance.
Advocates for ACEs — University of Edinburgh. (n.d.). ‘ACEs for Law Students.’ Resource targeted at law students and those entering justice professions: Outlines ACEs relevance for future legal practitioners and justice-involved individuals.
McKinsey, Eva; Zottola, Samantha A.; Mitchell, Alexis; Heinen, Mark; Ellmaker, Luke. (2022). ‘Trauma-Informed Judicial Practice from the Judges’ Perspective’. Judicature, Vol 106 No 2. While focused on judges and the justice system, this piece provides context about the prevalence of ACEs among adults and the importance of trauma-informed practice in legal settings.
Chamberlain & Miller (2009). 'Evidence of Secondary Traumatic Stress, Safety Concerns, and Burnout Among a Homogeneous Group of Judges'. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.
International Association of Judicial Independence and World Peace (2024). Nauru 'Declaration on Judicial Well-being' (2024). Declaration.
Jaffe, Bender & Organ (2022). ‘It is Okay to Not Be Okay’: The 2021 Survey of Law Student Well-Being. University of Louisville Law Review / SSRN.
Judiciary of England and Wales (2022). 2021 'Judicial Wellbeing Survey: Report and Action Plan'. Report.
Krill, Johnson & Albert (2016). 'The Prevalence of Substance Use and Other Mental Health Concerns Among American Attorneys'. Journal of Addiction Medicine.
National Task Force on Lawyer Well-Being (2017). 'The Path to Lawyer Well-Being: Practical Recommendations for Positive Change'. American Bar Association (report).
Organ, Jaffe & Bender (2016). Suffering in Silence: 'The Survey of Law Student Well-Being and the Reluctance of Law Students to Seek Help for Substance Use and Mental Health Concerns'. Journal of Legal Education.
Towards a context-specific approach to understanding moral injury in law. Soon et al. Frontiers in Psychology. 2023.
Thomas (2025). 2024 UK Judicial Attitude Survey: 'Report of findings covering salaried judges and fee-paid judicial office holders in England & Wales and UK Tribunals'. Judiciary of England and Wales (report).
University of New South Wales / Judicial College of Victoria (2020). 'A Fragile Bastion: The UNSW Judicial Traumatic Stress Study'. Report.
Why the Legal System Needs To Prioritise Attorney Well-Being. P Goldman, R. Psychology Today. 2022.
This emerging literature has created a striking pattern: Legal professionals exhibit trauma-related markers at a rate and intensity that make the profession one of the most ACE-sensitive fields in modern Western life. The implications are profound. Lawyers, judges, and even law students are not ‘becoming unwell’ because they are weak, and not because the profession itself is uniquely toxic — though its adversarial culture certainly exacerbates matters. The deeper truth is that the profession selects for, amplifies, and institutionalises the very psychological patterns that childhood adversity produces: hypervigilance, perfectionistic striving, compulsive responsibility, emotional repression, and a worldview organised around threat.
The data is converging on a single, quietly devastating insight: The legal profession is saturated with unrecognised childhood Trauma. Not because lawyers are broken, but because many were resilient, gifted, precocious children who learned early to anticipate adult expectations — and later gravitated toward a profession that rewards exactly those patterns. This is not pathology; it is biography. When the ACEs framework is applied, the contradictions within the profession suddenly make sense: the drive for excellence coexisting with emotional fragility; the devotion to justice coexisting with private suffering; the rhetorical commitment to truth coexisting with difficulty perceiving one’s own interior life.
What this section establishes is not a criticism of lawyers, but a compassionate reframing: the mental-health crisis in law is not evidence of weakness — it’s evidence of unresolved wounding. And because these wounds emerged long before the profession began, no amount of diet, mindfulness apps, resilience training, or workplace optimisation can resolve them. A more honest, humane, evidence-based response is required. And that response begins with understanding why so many of the profession’s most brilliant minds began life in environments where brilliance was a survival strategy.
One can only hope that something good will be born of the crisis that has engulfed the legal profession. As Thich Nhat Hanh wrote:
“The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognise the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others. When we are in contact with another’s suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us.”
Childhood Trauma is almost universal: It’s about you, it’s about me, it’s about everyone. Dr Mark Epstein, a psychiatrist and Buddhist meditation teacher, said that:
“It is hard to imagine the scope of an individual life without envisioning some kind of childhood Trauma.”
Dr Peter Levine, one of the world’s foremost expert psychologists in healing from Trauma, having worked in the field for over four decades, including working for NASA, wrote that:
“Trauma has become so commonplace that most people don’t even recognise its presence. Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.”
Dr Robert Block, former President of the American Academy of Paediatrics, emphasised the widespread nature of childhood Trauma, saying that it is:
“The single greatest unaddressed public health threat facing our nation today.”
Maté wrote that:
“The norm in this culture is traumatic. It’s normal for people to go to jobs that don’t mean anything to them. That’s the norm, but it’s not healthy or natural.”
The implication is stark: Adult mental illness is often a memory of childhood injury written into the nervous system — not a mark of inadequacy, failure, or weakness. And because childhood emotional neglect is disproportionately common among high-achieving professionals, the legal system is saturated with individuals whose private histories make them more vulnerable to the very stresses the profession normalises, rewards, and enforces.
The legal profession imagines that its crisis is caused by workload. The data say otherwise. The crisis begins decades earlier — in childhood — and only fully reveals itself when those wounded children become adults entrusted with truth, justice, judgement, and conflict.
The 'Clinical Psychopathological Model' of the Human Condition and How To Heal It For Lawyers
Below is my equivalent of the image above (in Part I of the series on Human Condition and How To Heal It) depicting the 'clinical psychopathological model' of the human condition, shown here for lawyers who want to begin to understand why they are the way that they are:
Cause
Childhood Trauma — The direct reason or origin of a condition = the wound = the root cause
Aetiology
This is the term for the study of this cause — ‘why’ and ‘where from’. These are questions that the legal system turns a blind eye to, and so it doesn’t know the answers, other than saying that lawyers who are mentally ill must lack resilience or that they can’t deal with adult stress in the courtroom. Lawyers are resilient: Super resilient. So here the aetiology is lack of unconditional love from parents and society.
Diagnosis
The diagnosis is spiritual dis-ease. The diagnosis is the final determination of what the disease is, which may be based on the aetiology and pathology findings. Identifying a disease or condition by evaluating a patient’s signs, symptoms = fracture of the self — birth of the ego.
Symptom
The psychospiritual dis-ease presents as the symptoms and signs of emotional disturbance and features of behaviour and mental illness perfectionism, workaholism, hypervigilance, emotional numbing, emotional dysregulation, severe depression, anxiety, substance misuse, and PTSD. Psychologists fail to see that mental illness in lawyers is not a the diagnosis, it it a symptom. The dis-ease that needs treating is psychospiritual one. Dr Jung tells us the only true path to healing is to reintegrate your fractured psyche, reconnecting with your Soul, through what I call the ‘Bridge of Awakening’ in the schema in the related section above.
Pathophysiology
This is the ‘how’. This is study of the disordered physiological processes associated with a disease or injury (i.e., how normal function is disrupted — here it is egoic behaviour and adversarialism). It explains the mechanisms by which symptoms manifest — attachment theory, metaphysics etc etc
Pathogenesis
Their step-wise progression — unconditioned child, gifted child and golden child (trauma responses), external validation addict, to lawyer, finally on to adversarialism, then collapse from Soul-injury.
Syndrome
A group of symptoms which consistently occur together, or a condition characterised by a set of associated symptoms, a characteristic combination of opinions, emotions, or behaviour — adversarialism.
Pathology
This is the study of diseases, specifically their initial causes (aetiologies), their step-wise progression (pathogenesis), and their effects on normal bodily structure and function. A broad medical specialty that encompasses aetiology and pathophysiology as components of understanding the full disease process.
Systemic effects
Affects all aspect of legal system, jurisprudence, philosophy, humanity, perception, dualism, and misconceptions of the concepts of ethics vs morality. Misunderstanding of what higher Truth is.
Dr Sigmund Freud’s psychological model treats repression as the cornerstone of neurosis. He repeatedly returns to the same organising proposition: That when an anxiety‑provoking or painful impulse cannot be safely acknowledged, it is pushed down and held out of awareness. In his own terms, the theory of repression is the foundation on which the entire structure of psychoanalysis rests; the “Essence of repression” lies in turning something away from consciousness and keeping it at a distance.
Classic psychoanalytic formulations then describe what follows: Rejected wishes, affects, and memories do not disappear; they return as psychological symptoms. Freud explicitly frames many neurotic ailments as the consequence of disowned instinctual and emotional life forcing its way back into experience. In this language, what cannot be lived directly reappears as anxiety, compulsive behaviours, somatic complaints, or seemingly irrational patterns that the conscious ego does not understand.
A widely circulated (and clinically faithful) formulation attributed to Freud captures the core idea: Unexpressed emotions do not die; they are buried alive and return later in uglier forms. The point is not the exact wording but the principle: Emotional life that cannot be felt and symbolised directly will re‑emerge in displaced, distorted, or somatised ways. Like a beach ball pushed under water, it will always resurface — sometimes explosively — and it can do this decades later, precipitating a crisis.
In the above image, an archetypal adversarial barrister, drenched and straining, clearly in pain, tries to force a dark beach ball beneath the waterline while Freud watches in steady, unseduced silence. The image dramatises Freud’s central clinical point: Repression is not a solution; it is a labour. What is turned away from consciousness does not disappear — it is held down, continuously, by muscular will, and the cost of that holding is paid in tension, fatigue, irritability, anxiety, numbness, and eventually symptom. The harder the push, the more violent the return: Unexpressed affects re-emerge in displaced, distorted, or somatised forms, sometimes decades later, and often “out of nowhere” precisely because the ego has worked so hard to keep them unnamed. Here the pool becomes the psyche, the waterline becomes the threshold of awareness, and the splashing eruption is the truth Freud never stopped insisting upon: The buried does not die — it demands expression. In the context of this thesis, the courtroom persona becomes an added layer of repression: professional composure as virtue-signalling anaesthesia. Lawyers and clients alike can mistake suppression for strength, and litigation can become a socially sanctioned way of keeping inner pain submerged — until the pressure breaks and the “case” is no longer merely legal, but psychological. The analyst’s presence signifies the alternative: not more force, but more truth — bringing the affect into consciousness, symbolising it, metabolising it, and thereby ending the endless, exhausting underwater struggle.
The psychological literature has long held that avoidance of inner experience is costly. Carl Jung, in several places, frames acceptance as the gateway to change:
“We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.”
He also insists that consciousness has a price:
“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.”
The point is not to canonise Jung as infallible; it is to notice that, across wisdom lineages, the same structure repeats: the door to freedom is the door most egos refuse to open.
A line often circulated as Jung:
“What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.”
Jung wrote that:
“The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering”.
By the time we have worked through the evidence, one uncomfortable truth begins to emerge: The adversarial system does not merely contain addiction, it behaves like one. It is not just a neutral forum where damaged people bring their pain; it is an apparatus that reliably offers everyone involved a particular kind of relief from their emotional suffering — temporary, numbing, and never quite enough.
That is the logic behind the image below. The legal system appears here not as Lady Justice with scales and sword, but as an anonymous grey statue: A robed figure with eyes gently closed (to the evidence on ACEs in the legal profession), standing between two anaesthetic beds like a blind anaesthetist. On one bed lies the barrister, still half in uniform, clutching his mask. On the other lies his client. Both are breathing from the same machine. On its screen, instead of drug names, glows the true pharmacology of adversarial law: “WINNING, STATUS, EXTERNAL VALIDATION” for the professionals; “CONTROL, COMPENSATION, VINDICATION” for the litigants; and underneath, in small print, “IMITATION LOVE — EMOTIONAL ANAESTHETIC.”
Crucially, neither of them is fully asleep. Their fingers curl around the rubber rims of the masks, their throats are tight, their eyes glassy but open. They are under-sedated. The pain that brought them here still flickers in the background, dulled but not resolved. That is the defining feature of addiction: The dose is never quite enough. It quiets the symptoms just long enough to keep you coming back for another hit. Then you begin to need more...
Seen through this lens, the 'Temple of Emotional Anaesthesia' for Adversarial Law runs a double anaesthetic. On one couch, the barrister inhales the vapour of status, victory, fees and the brief high of being 'right'. On the other, the client inhales the fantasy that the world can be rearranged to erase their hurt — that a judge’s order or a payout will finally deliver the justice, safety or love they never had as a child. Both are reaching for what the surgeon Greg Baer would call 'Real Love' — unconditional acceptance, the feeling of being safe and seen without performance. In its absence they settle, like all addicts, for 'imitation love' instead: 'Moral' superiority, the right to say “The law proved I was wronged.”
The statue’s eyes remain closed. The System does not see itself as a dealer. It talks about rights, duties, burdens and neutrality. But functionally, it behaves like a very sophisticated provider of anaesthetics of the Soul. It offers lawyers and clients something that feels, for an all-too-brief moment, like relief from the underlying ache of unhealed childhood Trauma and unmet attachment needs. As Dr Maté reminds us, the real question is not “Why the addiction?” but “Why the pain?” The adversarial process rarely goes that deep. It does not operate on the wound; it simply keeps everyone 'under' enough to tolerate another case, until just one is too much, and the anaesthetic fails completely.
The Temple of ‘Adversarial Anaesthesia’ Model as Mirage and Dealer
Within the broader meta-theory ‘Unified Field of BEing’, one further model crystallises what is happening to lawyers and their clients with almost embarrassing clarity. It is, in essence, an addiction map laid over our existing schema.
At the base sits the Unconditioned Child: the small, neurologically open being wired for steady, unconditional love. When that love is interrupted, made contingent, or replaced by Adverse Childhood Experiences, the child learns the brutal lesson that love and safety must be earned. This is the birth of the 'Path of Attachment', and in addiction language it is where the first ‘craving’ arises: A longing for a state of unconditional safety the nervous system has never consistently known.
That path of attachment quickly becomes a quest for emotional anaesthetic. Because the brain’s circuitry for unconditional love has been underfed, the organism goes into lifelong foraging for substitutes. The conditionally loved child becomes the 'gifted' or 'golden' child, then the high-functioning adult who is, in truth, an addict in search of a fix: if Real Love is not reliably available, they will accept imitation love in any form — approval, control, status, intensity, righteous suffering, the next big win. The answer to Dr Matés question above, in this model, is “Because Real Love was not there when the brain and Soul expected it.”
It is at this point that the Temple of ‘Adversarial Law’ aka the 'Temple of Emotional Anaesthesia' appears like a mirage in the desert. To the externally validated, high-achieving young adult, it looks like the perfect source of the missing substance. It promises prestige, authority, deference, and the ecstasy of being declared 'right' in a public forum. For clients, it offers the parallel fantasy of control and vindication: That reality can be rearranged until their inner wound is soothed. Psychology simply doesn't work that way. Reality doesn't work that way. Truth doesn't work that way. On our map, the Temple therefore functions as both mirage and dealer. It advertises itself as the place where the thirst for unconditional love will finally be quenched; in practice, it supplies only stronger and more sophisticated forms of imitation love: winning, status, money, moral superiority.
The behaviours that unfold here are simply the predictable rituals of addiction. The barrister returns to court for another ‘hit’ of validation; the client returns to litigation for another ‘hit’ of righteous control. If they lose, the pain intensifies and they seek another case. If they win, there is a brief high followed by a hollow crash and the compulsion to repeat. In both directions, as we have seen, if they win they lose and if they lose they lose. The underlying fracture at the centre of the Self has not been touched.
Against this backdrop, the ‘Bridge of Awakening’ can be understood as something like rehab — but rehab in the deepest possible sense. It is not a clinic for a defective few, but a spiritual trajectory for any human being whose life has become organised around anaesthetic. In the same way that Jung wrote to Bill Wilson of spiritus contra spiritum — Spirit against the spirits that had enslaved the alcoholic — the Bridge represents the movement from anaesthetic to awakening. It is the decision, often made only at the point of collapse, to step out of the Temple, to treat the pain rather than chasing more of the same poison. Where the dealer offers “One more case,” the Bridge offers an entirely different question: What would it mean to let the original wound be seen, held and healed, rather than endlessly numbed?
In this sense, the Temple of ‘Adversarial Anaesthesia’ Model is simply the addiction lens on our existing meta-theory. It shows how ACEs, attachment, adversarialism and awakening are not four separate themes but a single sequence:
Unconditioned Child →Conditional Love / ACEs → Quest for Emotional Anaesthetic → Temple as Mirage/Dealer → Exhaustion and Collapse → Bridge of Awakening.
Law is just the locale. The pattern is the point.
Underneath the obvious addictions in legal professionals — to work, alcohol, cocaine, shopping, sex, litigation — lies a more invisible, universal one: Addiction to external validation. The child who grows up with conditional love learns that their very right to exist depends on performance, pleasing, achievement. ACEs and conditional love push them onto the 'Path of Attachment'; which, in turn, becomes a lifelong quest for someone or something outside them to say, “You are enough.” Court wins, promotions, billable hours, partner praise, and judicial approval are all just highly stylised forms of that hit. When the validation comes, it produces a brief, exquisite relief; when it doesn’t, the old wound of “I am not enough” roars back every time, felt as deep emotional pain and misnamed as 'secondary trauma'. At that point the system reaches for stronger anaesthetics — the drink, the drugs, the affair, the binge, the late-night scrolling — anything to dull the ache of not being seen. In this sense, heroin, workaholism, and the pursuit of status are all tributaries of the same river: A nervous system wired by childhood threat to seek safety in other people’s eyes. For the adversarial lawyer, the tragedy is that the Temple continually promises ultimate validation and, neurochemically, can never deliver it. Each victory is a short spike followed by emptiness, which is precisely why the barrister must keep running the trial again and again, even as the rest of their life quietly falls apart.
The sequence then becomes:
ACEs/conditional love → 'Path of Attachment' → addiction to external validation → other addictions
as emotional anaesthetics when validation, set in motion by ACEs inevitably fails.
The One True Choice: The Moment You See The Machinery
Most people think they have hundreds of choices every day. In reality, most of life is run by automation: the inherited scripts of attachment and fear, the reflexes of preference and resistance, the ‘ego’ insisting on control.
The one true choice arrives at a rarer moment: When you see the mechanism as a mechanism. When you catch the inner voice saying “Perform, or you will be unloved” and you recognise it as an old programme rather than an oracle.
This is where the map matters. The map does not heal you. But it prevents you from confusing the prison with the world. It shows you that the ‘p‑word’ was not just a harmless compliment; it was a small architectural component in the 'Temple of Emotional Anaesthesia'. And once you see the architecture, you can leave.
The map is the part of you that can name the pattern. The journey is the part of you that must feel the old fear without obeying it. Insight matters. But embodiment is where the spell breaks. You don’t dismantle conditional love with a clever paragraph; you dismantle it by learning, slowly, that nothing catastrophic happens when you are ‘just’ a human.
That learning is what I mean by returning to BEing: An inward reunion with the part of you that does not need to win in order to exist.
Conclusions to Part I: A Final Irreverent Compassionate Blessing
If you are a parent reading this and feeling defensive: Good. That means you care. Now take the next step: Let the defensiveness melt into curiosity. Ask, very gently, what you were trained to believe about love.
If you are an adult reading this and feeling grief: Also good. That means your true Self is still awake enough to notice what was missing. Grief is not a pathology; it is an intelligence.
And if you are the child at the piano—still, secretly, in the back of your psyche—hear this in language that has no contracts attached: You were never meant to be an achievement. You were meant to be.
Love that has to be earned is not love; it is employment. Fire your inner employer. Return to BEing.
BEing doesn’t mean becoming a monk. It means doing the same life from a different place inside. When the motive shifts from proving worth (ego) to serving love (Higher Self), the resistance drops, the procrastination ceases, the self-sabotage disappears, the energy returns, and the work that once felt impossible becomes straightforward — because it is no longer a fight with reality. It is reality, lived awake.
You are worthy because you are you. You are your worth. You don't need to change, buy, do, or achieve anything to be worthy. As Dr Wayne Dyer wrote:
"Accept that you are enough. You don't need to be anything that you are not".
Very few people love their children enough to nurture their authenticity. That would be true unconditional love: Celebrating the Truth of who they are, not who they might be. Those would be the ingredients and the recipe for well-being and true success.
My only wish is for everyone to, please, stop exercising the ‘p-word’ in front of your children: They will never catch up with it.
You can’t outrun conditional love.
Don’t be 'proud' of your children: Love them instead.
Click here for Part II of this second article in the series 'The Human Condition and How To Heal It'.
Namaste.
Olly
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Disclaimer:
The information presented in this article explores the role of psychospirituality in mental well-being and recovery. It is for informational purposes only and should not be considered a substitute for professional medical, psychological, or psychiatric advice, diagnosis, or treatment. You should always seek the advice of your own qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding your specific condition or any medical concerns. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read here. Integrating spiritual practices can be a valuable part of a holistic approach to mental health, but it should complement, not replace, care from licensed medical and mental health professionals.
References
All accessed 20th February 2026.
Videos
Video by Iain Smith, a Scottish Criminal Defence Lawyer, voted Lawyer of the year 2019 has spoken about the role of ACEs in the legal setting, being a massive advocate of understanding and compassion rather than judgement. Watch the recording here.
Articles
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