The playing field wasn’t level to begin with: On childhood trauma and the fruitless comparison game.

MENTAL HEALTH & WELLNESS • April 15, 2018

The Midnight Scorekeeper

She’s sitting at her laptop at 11 PM, her coffee long cold, reading the LinkedIn post for the third time.

A former classmate — they graduated the same year, from the same university — has just been promoted to VP. She’s sharing gratitude, tagging her mentor, posting a photo of herself beaming. The comments are full of congratulations. And something in the woman at the laptop tightens, hardens, turns inward.

Why am I not there yet? What’s wrong with me? She has it so together. I’m so far behind.

She closes the laptop. She doesn’t sleep well. In the morning, the thought is still there — quieter now but persistent, like a bruise she can’t stop pressing.

If this is familiar, I want you to stay with me through this post. Because what I’m going to offer you isn’t a pep talk about gratitude or a list of ways to get off social media. What I want to offer you is something more fundamental: a different frame entirely. One that starts with a truth that rarely gets named directly.

The playing field was never level to begin with.

If you grew up with childhood trauma — if your early years were shaped by emotional neglect, chronic instability, abuse, or any environment where safety and attunement were not reliably present — then comparing your life’s progress to peers who didn’t carry that history isn’t just painful. It’s also deeply unfair to you. And it’s physiologically and psychologically inaccurate.

This post is about why. And about what a more honest, more compassionate comparison might look like instead.

What Is the Comparison Game in Trauma Recovery?

In my years of clinical work, I’ve noticed a pattern that shows up in nearly every driven woman I work with who carries a childhood trauma history. Somewhere in her — usually not far beneath the surface — is a quiet, relentless scorekeeper. She tracks other people’s milestones. She notices who got promoted. Who married well. Who seems unburdened. Who got somewhere she hasn’t yet.

And the scorekeeper rarely stops to ask: But what were the starting conditions?

That’s the comparison game. And for women who grew up in environments where emotional safety wasn’t reliable — where they had to spend their developmental years managing chaos or walking on eggshells or taking care of the adults around them — this game is a setup. You cannot win a race that was never designed to be equal.

The comparison game is painful for everyone who plays it. But for trauma survivors, it’s also deeply inaccurate — because it treats fundamentally unequal circumstances as if they were the same. And that’s the part I want to dismantle with you here.

What makes this particular comparison so insidious is what psychologists call social comparison theory — the innate human tendency, first identified by Leon Festinger, PhD, social psychologist and professor at MIT, to evaluate ourselves relative to others as a way of establishing self-worth and calibrating our place in the world. This drive is deeply wired. But it was designed for comparison between people on roughly equivalent footing. When the comparison is structurally unequal — when one person grew up with reliable love and the other spent their childhood in survival mode — the mechanism misfires. It delivers verdicts that feel like truth and are actually distortion.

What Is Childhood Trauma?

Childhood trauma is, in my experience as a therapist, one of the most misunderstood terms in the clinical vocabulary. Many women I work with initially resist the word entirely. “Trauma” feels like it belongs to someone else — someone whose experiences were obviously worse, more dramatic, more undeniably bad.

But trauma, by clinical definition, isn’t determined by the severity of an event in isolation. It’s determined by whether your available coping resources could metabolize and process what happened to you. A child without adequate emotional support is more vulnerable to being traumatized by events that a child with a secure, responsive caregiver might process more readily. The same event can produce very different outcomes depending on what surrounds it.

And critically, childhood trauma isn’t only the events that are easy to name from the outside. It absolutely includes acute, identifiable events — an assault, a significant loss, a car accident. But it also includes the quieter, slower, more diffuse traumas: the chronically unpredictable parent. The home where love felt conditional. The childhood spent managing a parent’s emotional state rather than developing your own. The persistent absence of attunement — of being truly seen, truly heard, truly known.

These complex, relational, sometimes invisible forms of trauma can have as profound a developmental impact as more visible events — sometimes more so, because they’re harder to name and therefore harder to begin healing. If you’ve ever wondered whether your history “counts,” I’d encourage you to read more about why so many driven women struggle with that exact question.

The Science: What Trauma Does to the Developing Brain and Nervous System

This isn’t just a matter of perspective or framing. The developmental impact of childhood trauma is measurable, documented, and profound. The research is unambiguous on this point.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher at Boston University and author of The Body Keeps the Score, has spent decades documenting how traumatic experience is stored not just in memory but in the body — an insight that grounds approaches like somatic therapy. In his foundational work, van der Kolk demonstrated that childhood trauma — particularly when it occurs in the context of relationships with caregivers — fundamentally reorganizes the way the brain processes threat, regulates emotion, and forms a sense of self. The nervous system that develops under chronic threat is a different nervous system than the one that develops in relative safety. It isn’t weaker. It adapted to survive. But those adaptations come at a cost when the threat has passed and ordinary life is supposed to resume.

Judith Herman, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher at Harvard Medical School and author of Trauma and Recovery, articulated that complex trauma — the kind that occurs repeatedly within relationships, especially in childhood — produces a distinct and profound set of effects that go beyond the symptoms associated with single-incident PTSD. Herman’s research identified disruptions to the survivor’s sense of safety, self-concept, and capacity for trust that can persist well into adulthood. Her framework helped the field understand that the impact isn’t just about individual events — it’s about what chronic relational injury does to a developing psyche over time.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study — one of the largest investigations of childhood trauma and adult outcomes ever conducted, led by researchers Vincent Felitti, MD, and Robert Anda, MD, in partnership with Kaiser Permanente and the CDC — found dose-dependent relationships between adverse childhood experiences and a wide range of adult health and life outcomes. More adverse experiences in childhood correlated with greater challenges in adulthood: higher rates of depression and anxiety, more difficulty in relationships, increased rates of chronic illness, and more. The study gave us something invaluable: hard, population-level evidence that what happens to you as a child shapes the architecture of your adult life.

What this science makes clear is that two people who graduate from the same university, who seem to be starting the same professional race, may be carrying profoundly different neurological, physiological, and psychological loads. One may have spent her childhood in a stable home where she was encouraged to explore, fail safely, and return to secure attachment. The other may have spent those same years in a state of chronic vigilance, her developing brain wired for threat-detection rather than for curiosity and risk-taking. On paper they look like peers. In reality, they are not running the same race.

How It Shows Up in Driven Women

The comparison game shows up differently in driven, ambitious women than it does in the popular imagination. It’s rarely dramatic. It’s not usually a spiral of obvious self-pity. It’s quieter than that — and more dangerous, because it can wear the costume of motivation.

What I see consistently in my work with clients is that the comparison instinct in trauma survivors often presents as relentless striving. If she’s just further ahead, she tells herself, then the inner unease will resolve. If she just closes the gap between herself and the people she compares herself to, the feeling of being fundamentally behind will lift. So she pushes harder. She takes on more. She sets higher bars and clears them and then sets higher ones still — and the sense of being behind somehow never goes away.

This is because the comparison game, for trauma survivors, is rarely actually about the other person. It’s about a wound that predates any comparison — a core belief, usually formed in childhood, that she is not enough. That something is missing in her. That she is behind in some way that is fundamental rather than circumstantial.

Meet Maya. She’s a 38-year-old product director at a Series B startup. By every external measure, she’s succeeding. She has a team she’s proud of, a salary she once would have found unimaginable, and a life that looks, from the outside, entirely together. But in our work, what emerges is a constant, low-grade sense of being an impostor — of waiting to be found out. She tracks her peers obsessively: who got funded, who got promoted, who was featured in a trade publication. Each of their milestones lands in her body like an accusation. They made it. You haven’t. Not really.

When we go back in time together, what we find is a childhood in which achievement was the primary currency of worth in Maya’s home. Her parents — themselves driven, themselves anxious — praised outcomes and questioned shortcomings. Love was present but conditional in its texture, always tinged with evaluation. Maya learned early that being enough was a performance, not a state of being. She could achieve her way there, momentarily, but the achievement never quite stuck. There was always another bar.

What she’s doing now, at 38, tracking other people’s LinkedIn milestones at midnight, isn’t ambition. It’s an old wound looking for resolution in the wrong places. The playing field in her childhood wasn’t level — and no VP title is going to make it so.

Or consider Camille. She’s a 44-year-old physician — board-certified, respected, genuinely brilliant. She runs a practice she built herself. She also grew up in a household marked by a parent’s untreated alcoholism. By the time Camille was twelve, she was functionally the emotional manager of her household — tracking her parent’s moods, mediating conflict, making sure younger siblings felt safe. She didn’t have a childhood in the traditional sense; she had a job.

Now, in her forties, she compares herself to colleagues who seem to have work-life balance she can’t find, who seem emotionally lighter, who seem to have figured out something she hasn’t. What’s wrong with me? she wonders. I have everything. Why do I feel like this?

What Camille didn’t have — what her colleagues may well have had — was a childhood where she got to be a child. Where someone else managed the family’s emotional weather. Where she got to develop her own inner life rather than subordinating it to everyone else’s needs. That developmental work — the kind that happens when a child is reliably held and attuned to — doesn’t disappear just because she grew up and built an impressive career. It has to be done eventually. And the fact that she’s doing it now, in therapy, while running a practice, while being a parent — that’s not failure. That’s extraordinary.

But the comparison game doesn’t care about that. It just sees the gap.

Both/And: You Can Be Impressive and Still Be Healing

Here’s what I want to offer you as a frame — one that I return to again and again in my clinical work because it does something that neither toxic positivity nor relentless self-criticism can do: it holds both truths at once.

You can be genuinely accomplished and still be carrying wounds that haven’t fully healed.

You can be ahead of where you started and still behind where you might have been with a different start.

You can be proud of yourself and still be grieving the childhood you deserved and didn’t get.

You can be doing well and still need more support than it might look like from the outside.

The comparison game operates in either/or logic. Either I’m succeeding or I’m failing. Either I have a right to feel proud or I have a right to feel hurt. Either I’ve overcome my history or I’m still held by it. This logic is a product of the same black-and-white thinking that trauma often instills — the all-or-nothing nervous system response that develops when a child’s world is fundamentally unpredictable.

But human lives, especially the lives of people healing from complex histories, don’t fit in either/or boxes. They’re both/and. And learning to hold that duality — to say yes, and rather than yes, but — is one of the central tasks of trauma-informed therapy.

I want to be specific about what the Both/And frame makes possible. When Maya can say “I am genuinely good at my work and I am still healing from a childhood that taught me my worth was conditional on performance,” something shifts. The compulsive comparison loses some of its grip, because she’s no longer using other people’s LinkedIn feeds as a referendum on whether she’s fundamentally okay. She can hold the complexity. And complexity, as any good therapist will tell you, is where healing actually lives.

When Camille can say “I’m a capable physician and I’m someone who never got to have a real childhood, and I’m doing that work now, at 44, and that’s not failure — that’s incredible” — the comparison to her lighter-seeming colleagues starts to look like what it actually is: a comparison between apples and oranges.

The Both/And frame doesn’t erase grief. It doesn’t minimize what you’ve had to carry. It just stops requiring you to pretend you haven’t had to carry it. And for women who grew up in homes where that pretense was survival — where the right thing to do was always to minimize, to cope, to keep going — being given permission to stop pretending is itself a significant form of healing.

The Systemic Lens: Why the Playing Field Was Never Level

I want to widen the frame here, because the comparison game doesn’t just happen at the individual level. It happens within systems that are themselves structured unequally — and those systems interact with childhood trauma in ways that deserve to be named directly.

We live in a culture that is deeply invested in the mythology of the level playing field. The meritocracy narrative — the idea that success reflects individual effort and talent, and that everyone who tries hard enough can reach the same outcomes — is one of the most powerful and most damaging stories in our collective imagination. It’s powerful because it’s partly true: individual effort does matter. It’s damaging because it’s incomplete: individual effort matters a great deal less when the conditions for that effort are radically unequal.

Childhood trauma is not randomly distributed across the population. The ACE Study data is clear that adverse childhood experiences are more common among people who experience poverty, housing instability, community violence, racial discrimination, and other structural stressors. The woman comparing herself to a peer who grew up in a stable, affluent, two-parent household isn’t just contending with individual family differences — she may be contending with the cumulative effects of generational disadvantage, systemic racism, economic precarity, or all of the above.

Even within households of similar socioeconomic status, access to emotional resources — to parents who had themselves been given the tools to attune to their children’s needs, who weren’t themselves traumatized, who weren’t drowning in stress — is not equally distributed. Parental mental health, access to support systems, cultural contexts that do or don’t normalize emotional expression — all of these shape what a child receives, and none of them are within a child’s control.

What this means is that the comparison game is not just psychologically inaccurate for trauma survivors. It’s also structurally inaccurate. The peer who seems to have it together may have had structural advantages — in terms of parental health, economic stability, community resources, cultural belonging — that are invisible when you’re looking at her LinkedIn photo.

I’m not saying this to encourage bitterness or to suggest that others’ achievements aren’t genuinely theirs. I’m saying it because the playing field narrative — the one that whispers you could be there too if you were just better — is a lie. And it’s a lie that trauma survivors are particularly vulnerable to believing, because the shame that often accompanies childhood trauma already has you half-convinced that the problem is you.

It’s not you. It was never you. It was the conditions.

A Path Forward: Comparing Yourself to You

None of this means you have to stop caring about growth. You don’t have to stop being ambitious, or driven, or hungry for more. Those qualities — however they developed — are yours, and they’ve probably gotten you places that deserve acknowledgment.

But there is a more honest, more compassionate, and ultimately more useful comparison available to you. And it’s the comparison that is almost never made in the midnight LinkedIn spiral: the comparison between who you are now and who you were before.

Where were you five years ago in terms of your understanding of your own patterns? Your capacity for emotional regulation? Your ability to name what you need in a relationship? Your willingness to set a boundary, or ask for help, or choose yourself when you had previously defaulted to everyone else?

If you’ve been doing any kind of healing work — in therapy, through books, through community, through sheer hard-won self-awareness — then that comparison is almost certainly more favorable than the one you’re making when you’re scrolling at midnight. And it’s the one that actually measures something real about your life.

This doesn’t mean bypassing the grief. Part of what makes the comparison game so painful for trauma survivors is that it’s often grief in disguise — grief for the childhood that didn’t happen, for the developmental time that was lost, for the starting conditions that were harder than they should have been. That grief is legitimate. It deserves space, not dismissal.

In my clinical work, I often invite women to do something deceptively simple: write a list of what they’ve had to overcome that their comparison target hasn’t. Not as an exercise in resentment, but as an exercise in accuracy. Because if you’re going to compare — and the pull to compare is deeply human and largely unavoidable — you might as well do it on a complete balance sheet rather than half of one.

The other piece of the path forward is getting support that’s actually calibrated to where you’re starting from. Not generic productivity advice. Not a morning routine that was designed for someone whose nervous system came online in a fundamentally different context than yours did. Something that accounts for how your nervous system was shaped, and meets you there. Something that understands that the race you’re running has been harder than it looks, and treats that as information rather than excuse.

That’s what trauma-informed therapy can offer. That’s what the Fixing the Foundations course was built to provide. And it’s what I hope this post has offered, even in a small way: not a pep talk, but a reframe. Not toxic positivity, but honest acknowledgment.

You were never behind. The playing field just wasn’t level. And knowing that — really knowing it — changes everything about what healing looks like and what you owe yourself as you do it.

If anything in this post resonated with you, I’d encourage you to explore the free quiz on the site to learn more about the specific childhood wound that may be shaping your patterns, or to reach out through the connect page to start a conversation about what support might look like. You don’t have to figure this out alone — and you don’t have to keep running a race that was never designed for you.

You are not behind. You are in the middle of something. And that’s a very different thing.

Related Reading

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.

Felitti, Vincent J., et al. “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 14, no. 4 (1998): 245–258.

Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Publishing, 2013.

Brown, Brené. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. New York: Gotham Books, 2012.

How It Shows Up in Driven Women

There’s a particular cruelty in the comparison game for driven women with childhood trauma histories, and it has to do with the very adaptations that made them capable of building impressive lives. The ambition, the discipline, the capacity to push through — these didn’t arise in a vacuum. For many of the women I work with, they arose specifically as responses to early environments that were unsafe, unpredictable, or emotionally withholding. Achievement became the mechanism for earning love, or safety, or the sense that they were worth something. The drive to perform was inseparable from the wound that powered it.

And then — here’s where the comparison game becomes especially insidious — those very achievements become the measuring stick. Because she’s succeeded by external metrics, the scorekeeper can’t give her credit for the incredible amount she’s overcome to get there. Instead, she compares her current position to someone who started with more: more stability, more attunement, more consistent support, more access, more bandwidth that wasn’t consumed by managing an unpredictable home environment. She sees only the external picture — where they both are now — and concludes she’s behind. She never accounts for the weight she’s been carrying.

In my work with clients, I see this most vividly in the gap between outer presentation and inner experience. A client I’ll call Maya had graduated top of her class, built a successful consulting practice, and was described by everyone who knew her as formidably competent. She came to therapy because she couldn’t stop measuring herself against a former colleague who’d made partner at a major firm. “She’s just always been ahead of me,” Maya said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” When we began mapping Maya’s early history, what emerged was a childhood shaped by a mother with unmanaged anxiety and a father who was often absent. Maya had learned very early to be the reliable one — to anticipate everyone’s needs, to manage her own emotional state quietly, to achieve in the ways that made the family feel better about itself. She’d spent her developmental years doing emotional labor that her peer likely hadn’t been required to do. That labor had cost her — in energy, in bandwidth, in the developmental experiences of simply being a child who was free to explore and fail and be uncertain without consequence. The comparison was never equal. It never could have been. Understanding this through the lens of the relational trauma guide can help name what Maya was up against.

The comparison game is also particularly sharp for driven women because their professional environments often reward the very defenses that trauma built. Hypervigilance reads as attention to detail. Difficulty delegating reads as high standards. The compulsive need to achieve reads as ambition. The workaholism that protects against intimacy reads as dedication. These women are often rewarded for their adaptations — which makes it harder to recognize those adaptations as adaptations, and harder still to begin the work of healing. Because healing requires slowing down, tolerating uncertainty, allowing imperfection. And those things can feel, to a nervous system organized around performance as safety, genuinely dangerous.

The Both/And of the Comparison Game

I want to offer a both/and here that I think is important — because the alternative framings available tend to feel incomplete, and sometimes actively unhelpful. The first alternative is toxic positivity: “Stop comparing yourself to others! Focus on your blessings! You’ve come so far!” This is true, and it misses something. The second alternative is pure grievance: “You’ve been wronged, the world is unfair, and your success has been harder won.” This is also true, and it can become its own kind of trap — a framework that explains the wound without pointing toward healing.

The both/and that I find most useful is this: the comparison was never fair, and you’re the only one who can decide what to do with that truth. Your childhood trauma cost you things that are real and worth grieving. The weight you’ve carried has been real. The starting conditions were genuinely different, and pretending otherwise is a form of gaslighting yourself. Hold that. Let it be true. And — at the same time — the work of healing is yours to do. Not because it’s your fault, but because you’re the one who has to live your life, and the comparison game — however understandable — is keeping you from actually inhabiting it.

I think of a client named Priya who spent years furious at a sister who seemed to glide through life. Same parents, completely different experience — Priya was older, had absorbed more of the family’s early chaos, had been the one to help her mother through a significant crisis during Priya’s early adolescence. Her sister, younger by five years, had entered a family that had stabilized. “She doesn’t even know what it was like,” Priya told me once. She was right. And the anger, valid as it was, was consuming energy Priya needed for her own life. Holding both truths — that the difference was real, and that the anger was keeping her tethered to a story that was ending — was what eventually created room to move. You can read more about the complex family dynamics that produce these disparities in my piece on the golden child versus the scapegoat.

The Systemic Lens: Why the Playing Field Was Never Level

When I say the playing field was never level, I mean it in more than one direction. There’s the individual family level — the specific ways your early environment made the work of becoming an adult harder and more costly than it should have been. And there’s a broader systemic level that’s worth naming too, because it shapes which families have the resources to provide safety and attunement, and which ones are surviving on less than they need.

Poverty is a form of chronic stress that dysregulates the nervous system. Systemic racism produces environments of chronic threat that shape bodies and nervous systems across generations. Immigration, displacement, and cultural dislocation change what parents can offer their children. Gender-based violence, sexual trauma, and the ambient low-grade threat that many women carry simply by moving through the world — these are not individual pathologies. They are structural realities that produce nervous system responses entirely appropriate to the actual conditions. When we compare ourselves to people who have lived with less structural stress, we are — without realizing it — comparing ourselves to people who started with fundamentally different nervous system baselines. That’s not a deficit in us. It’s a difference in conditions.

I also want to say something about privilege, because it complicates this in important ways. Some of the women I work with grew up in material comfort but emotional poverty. They have internalized a message — from culture, from family, sometimes from therapists who didn’t know better — that they shouldn’t need healing, because they had advantages. The question of whether it counts as trauma if you were privileged is one I hear often, and it’s a painful one. My clinical answer: material advantage does not preclude relational trauma. You can grow up with every material resource and still have a nervous system organized around chronic threat if the emotional environment was unsafe. These are different dimensions, and conflating them does everyone a disservice.

The comparison game ignores all of this. It flattens complex, multidimensional differences in starting conditions into a single metric — where you are now — and draws conclusions from an incomplete picture. The corrective isn’t to stop tracking where you are. It’s to track where you started, what you’ve carried, and what it’s cost you to get here. That’s the honest ledger. And it tends to look very different from the one the scorekeeper keeps.

A Path Forward: Comparing Yourself to You

The alternative to the comparison game isn’t the absence of measurement. We’re wired to track our progress, to situate ourselves in relation to others, to assess where we are against some standard. The question is which standard — and whose.

What I invite instead is a different kind of comparison: yourself to yourself. Not yourself at your best day compared to your worst day, which is its own form of cruelty. Yourself-as-you-are now compared to yourself five years ago. Yourself-as-you-are now compared to who you were before you started this work. That ledger looks different. It accounts for what you’ve carried. It recognizes how far you’ve come not despite the weight you’ve been carrying, but while carrying it. And that is, I’d argue, a genuinely extraordinary thing.

A client named Leila came to therapy dismissing her progress because someone she knew had “done it faster.” She’d left an emotionally abusive relationship, rebuilt her financial stability, begun a new career — all in three years. But she was comparing herself to a friend who’d gone through a cleaner divorce from a shorter marriage with a supportive family and financial resources Leila didn’t have. “She moved on so much faster,” Leila told me. When I reflected back to her what she’d actually navigated, she went quiet for a long moment. “I guess I never actually put it all in one place like that,” she said. The comparing-to-others had made her invisible to herself. Turning the lens toward her own arc — her own starting conditions, her own obstacles, her own trajectory — is what finally let her see what she’d actually done. The work of going through hard times deserves that kind of witnessing — first from yourself.

Practically: this work benefits enormously from having a consistent witness. A good therapist, a trusted group, sometimes a journal practice — any relational container where your actual story can be told and witnessed in its full complexity, without collapsing it into a comparison or minimizing what it’s cost. The witness doesn’t remove the hardship. But the hardship, once witnessed, has less power to define you. You begin to see yourself as the protagonist of your own story — not as a character perpetually measured against someone else’s. And from that place, the question “why am I not where they are?” starts to yield to a more interesting one: What do I actually want, given who I actually am and where I actually started? That’s the question that moves your life forward.

Related Reading

• van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
• Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992.
• Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote, 2013.
• Felitti, Vincent J., and Robert F. Anda. “The Relationship of Adverse Childhood Experiences to Adult Health, Well-Being, Social Function, and Healthcare.” In The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease: The Hidden Epidemic, edited by Ruth A. Lanius, Eric Vermetten, and Clare Pain. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Perry, Bruce D., and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook. Basic Books, 2006.
• Mate, Gabor. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. North Atlantic Books, 2010.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer