If you deny pain due to early loss and early trauma, then the world becomes very complicated. If we see that the child has certain needs and if you meet those needs that child will be just fine and if you don’t he’ll have to adapt somehow and those adaptations are the basis of dysfunction later on. That’s really simple.

If you’re denying climate change, the more educated you are, the more entrenched you are and you’re in denial. So it’s not that education leads to more openness, education leads to less openness. Because what it does is that the intellectual weapons that you gain and sharpen in the course of your post graduate education actually allows you to use your weapon and to marshal them in the service of your denial. But the denial comes first. So what I am saying is that there’s an emotional block. It’s not an existential block, we don’t need a stitch more research on what causes addiction. We don’t need one more bit of research on what causes violence, rape, psychopathic behavior, mental illness. We don’t need a stitch more research. I now that sounds like a radical statement in a society which is so research oriented and we’re whole intellectual industries, knowledge factories are based on having to gather more money for research to justify more jobs, to justify more papers, but I’m telling you, if we simply applied what we already know, if we simply do the lessons of what’s already been clearly shown, we would have a totally different world. So, even that need for more research is a factor of denial.

Whether from in the states or England I forget, they showed that childhood trauma maybe be a predisposing factor in addictions. More study is required. And I’m thinking what planet are these people living on? Are they not familiar with the hundreds of studies that are showing the relationship between trauma and addiction? Do they not know Adler Childhood Experience studies? Are they not aware of the data on brain development and trauma? What intellectual labyrinth have they been lost in for the last 50 years for them to come up with a study that says childhood trauma may be related to addictions, maybe, and that more study is required? So what I am saying is that the very need for research and intellectualization is actually a factor of denial. It represents denial and that denial is really people’s own emotional pain. So the block is that this stuff is painful and therefore we dare not look at it in ourselves and therefore we don’t open to its existence in others and then we have to look for all kinds of other reasons. If you deny pain owing into early experience and early loss and early trauma, then the world becomes very complicated and justify all kinds of complicated explanations. Yet, if we see that the child has certain needs and if you meet those needs that child will be just fine and if you don’t he’ll have to adapt somehow and those adaptations are the basis of dysfunction later on. That’s really simple. They call it simplistic. It’s not simplistic. It’s simple. The world is really very simple. We make it complicated because of our denial.