Healing the invisible roots of addiction: From childhood neglect to ancestral trauma and connection

Vanessa Kredler Author

A glimpse into my experience of how addiction grew out of childhood emotional neglect and intergenerational trauma.

Addiction and complex trauma healing is highly individual and non-linear, I tell my clients. That’s what the experts say, and yes, that’s my personal experience too. For me, it took around eight years in addiction recovery before I could even recognise that I had grown up in an unsafe environment, which left my nervous system perpetually hypervigilant, anxious, frozen and chronically ashamed about myself.

When I first started looking at my past, what organically surfaced were memories of verbal and emotional abuse; a home environment of criticism and erratic moods, including rage. A life where people were doing their best, yet carried deep-rooted intergenerational burdens themselves. 

Over several years of engaging with many different therapy and personal development modalities, the wounds of abuse were mostly resolved. Much forgiveness occurred, in drips and drabs, in my family. It makes sense that those memories surfaced first. You can’t work with what you can’t see and feel. Intrusion (abuse) usually has a story and is easier to grasp. 

Only once those intrusive wounds were resolved, it seemed that the wounds of childhood emotional neglect could surface. Emotional neglect experienced in infancy is so much more elusive to heal because we are dealing with absence and nothingness where there should have presence. It has no stories because it's pre-verbal. And how can we even know that something was missing if we never knew it? Emotional neglect in the form of not being tended to, and an early life medical trauma left invisible wounds, which perpetuated themselves in compulsive behaviours and recurring survival patterns in relationships. The nervous system is shaped by it. But we don’t know this as it lives in dissociation.

Being with the legacy of neglect

The first time I was really able to get to the root of my deep neglect wounds, somatically, to really feel them, was through IFS therapy. By that time I already knew a lot about my history to understand the nature of my childhood emotional neglect intellectually. (The making sense / intellectual part of my inner work has been just as significant as the somatic work). IFS therapy helped me uncover and be with a deep, despairing loneliness—a quiet exile inside me. In many sessions, I touched the memory of being left in a “soup of nothingness” as a baby, maybe even in the womb. People were there, somewhere, but they were very distant, unreachable. To survive, I had to move, cry, do something—anything—to avoid disintegration, to remember that I was still alive. There was a desperate emptiness, nothingness, and perpetual overwhelm and terror of having to face my internal landscape alone. That’s where my restless activity and compulsive doing and seeking began: I needed to change state to remember I existed. Food, of course, given at regular intervals, was a soothing balm of comfort—no wonder I never wanted to stop feeding. External stimuli and internal restless anxiety became more of a regulation force than caregivers, leading to addiction and fierce self-sufficiency and avoidance of vulnerability in relationships.

I’ve spent many sessions with this despairing exile, being with her in ways that she needed back then, with attention, care, affection, engagement, encouragement, nurturance and presence. She is still alive in me, but it feels good to know her much better, and support her when her pain resurfaces, supporting her healing.

The ancestral tunnel

The further and deeper I venture in my shadow work, the more I uncover. More recently, I’ve discovered something profound: the compulsive patterns, especially the compulsive over-doing, over-activity, aren’t just mine. They are ancestral. Intergenerational trauma is a big part of my history. My family history on both lineages carries an enormous amount of WW1 and WW2 tragedies. This is not new to me, and many sessions have resurfaced and healed in IFS therapy. This in turn has led to tremendous healing in my family during times when I visit Germany.

But recently, new ancestral material has emerged. I saw a vision: a dark blue tunnel, gloomy and endless. My ancestors trudged through it, life unbearably tedious and terrifying. There was one tragedy after another. Loss of wealth, economic instability, early deaths, fleeing their homes, imprisonment, starvation…. To endure, they clung to rigid structures—“Do X, do Y, don’t deviate, don’t look left, don’t look right.” That energy lives in me as managerial protector parts today. I have parts that are incredibly well organised, planned, productive, and real task masters. These parts work alongside parts that suppress my emotions, that just have me get on with it. Together, these protectors organise around self-reliance, compliance, competence, and performance, and rigidity—at the cost of connection and vulnerability. Somatically, they manifest as chronic shoulder, neck and head tension, shallow breathing, rumination and restlessness; a sensitive and over-active nervous system stuck in a sense of threat.

In a recent session, I was able to release some of the ancestral “dark blue tunnel” energy. We brought golden and white light into my cells, dissolving heaviness and separating burdens from ancestral gifts—celebrating my enormous sense of perseverance, responsibility, and determination. There was a sense of more lightness entering my system and this widened my perspective beyond the tunnel. Connection to Country was part of it too. Australia has light and bright energy. Coming to Australia was about seeking light and solid ground, and this session reaffirmed me having migrated to this country.

Why I keep doing this deeper work

I often ask myself why I return to this kind of inner work—why I keep choosing therapy that brings me into contact with old, tender, sometimes painful places. The truth is that my whole system—body, mind, and nervous system—is shaped by these implicit memories. They influence how I think, act, feel, and respond in the present, which ultimately shapes the future I’m able to create. By tending to the past, I’ve grown more self-compassionate, more whole, more rooted in my own authenticity and strength than I’ve ever been. My sense of identity has shifted and continues to mature, deepen, and widen. This journey of knowing myself—truly knowing myself, others, and the world—is ongoing, expansive, and alive.

Building community: The journey continues 

In staying devoted to my inner world, I’ve also learned something easy for me to forget as an introvert with a trauma history: healing doesn’t happen only in the therapy room. I need connection. They need companionship, co-regulation, and the nourishment of safe-enough relationships. Recovering from childhood emotional neglect and intergenerational trauma isn’t linear—it’s a dance between inner processing, outer relational engagement, and a kind of spiritual trust. Practically, this means continually balancing my nervous system’s need for calm and grounding—through yoga, movement, meditation, rest, solitude, and spiritual contact—with the equally important work of building community and cultivating relational intimacy. One step at a time, celebrating every small piece of progress.

Categories: : Addiction, Internal Family Systems, Recovery, Trauma