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Natural Awakenings Naples and Fort Myers

New Concepts in Childhood Trauma and Addiction

Jan 31, 2021 01:04PM ● By Linda Sechrist

In the years since Fran Fidler began writing Tiny’s Wall: A True Story of One Man’s Battle to Overcome the Shame of Childhood Sexual Abuse, he found numerous tools for healing, learned about himself in workshops and retreats, and benefited from videos he watched, as well as from the fellowship of others in recovery groups. “I’ve never stopped learning, and when I found something that I resonated with, I felt as though it initiated a deeper level of healing that my thinking mind can’t comprehend,” says Fidler, who recently discovered the work of Gabor Mate, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.


“I appreciate Mate’s description of childhood trauma as a wound, and how he uses metaphor to describe how denial and avoidance cause tough and inflexible emotional scar tissue to build up over the wound. I resonate with his clarification that not everyone who ends up addicted was traumatized or abused in childhood, as well as his insight that all addictions originate in childhood trauma and emotional loss, and that the pattern carries over into adulthood. I can certainly agree with him when he talks about how society has failed to support addicts in their recovery process,” advises Fidler.


Mate’s words and those of Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, spoken during a popular TEDMED talk that has been viewed more than three million times, are those that Fidler believes are important to anyone with an addiction. Harris, California’s surgeon general, is known for linking adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress with harmful effects to health such as asthma, cardiovascular disease, cancer and lung disease later in life. “She affirms for me how my asthma and addiction are possibly linked to my childhood trauma that stemmed from the tough streets of South Boston, my foster home, my debilitating stutter, the verbal and physical abuse of my alcoholic mother and the memories of repeatedly enduring an unspeakable crime at the hands of a family member,” says Fidler, who names other helpful healing aides from the past—Brian Weiss, author of Many Lives Many Masters, and Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way.


Fidler hopes that all readers will resonate with his book’s message as well as with Mate and Harris. “There is life after healing from the memories and abuse. You can be healthy, athletic, have friendships and relationships, be married and raise healthy children. Sucking it up, working harder and being a nicer guy or a better athlete are short-term fixes that don’t work long-term,” he says.


Tiny’s Wall is available in paperback and Nook at the Barnes & Noble at the Waterside Shops, in Naples, and on Amazon.com, Kindle and iTunes. CDs read by author, as well as with family and friends important to Tiny’s Wall recovery and life today are available online at TinysWall.com.


For more information and discounted copies for groups or individuals, email [email protected] or visit TinysWall.com.