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b"\\u201cI think it's really important for, you know, people to realize that you can totally be an absolutely excellent parent of a traumatized child and the trauma had nothing to do with you and you couldn't possibly have prevented it. So I think, you know, assuming that there is trauma in somebody's addiction history, which is not always the case, but if there is, you should not immediately assume that it was bad parenting because sure, that could be the case sometimes, but\\xa0again, there's so many different ways that people can be traumatized by so many different people. And it's also the case that so much of addiction has to do with people's temperament that will\\xa0set them up for things. So, if you are incredibly sensitive to stimuli, something that wouldn't traumatize someone else might traumatize you. And again, that's not your parents fault. That's just how you were born.\\u201d\\nSo says Maia Szalavitz, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times and author of two fantastic books about addiction. Her New York Times bestseller, Unbroken Brain, tells the story of her own heroin and cocaine addiction as a student at Columbia University in the \\u201880s\\u2014she was expelled for dealing and barely escaped prison time\\u2014woven together with the decades of work she\\u2019s done as a journalist in the addiction space after entering recovery in her early \\u201820s. In it, Maia offers a compelling case for why addiction should be thought of as a learning disability, in part because so many people \\u201cgrow out of it.\\u201d\\xa0\\nMaia\\u2019s latest book\\u2014Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction\\u2014taught me so much and challenged so many of the stories about addiction I was holding onto. Ultimately, it\\u2019s an optimistic book in the face of what feels like an overwhelming cultural challenge, a challenge that only seems to get worse every month\\u2014Maia explains why we\\u2019re trending in this direction, and more importantly, what we can do to shift our collective fate toward recovery. And what an expanded idea of recovery might mean.\\xa0\\n\\nMORE FROM MAIA SZALAVITZ:\\nUndoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction\\nUnbroken Brain: A Revolutionary Way of Understanding Addiction\\nThe Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog\\nRead Maia on The New York Times\\nMaia\\u2019s Website\\nFollow Maia on X\\n\\nFurther Listening on Pulling the Thread:\\nPART 1: Holly Whitaker, \\u201cReimagining Recovery\\u201d\\nPART 2: Carl Erik Fisher, M.D., \\u201cBreaking the Addiction Binary\\u201d\\nADDICTION: Anna Lembke, M.D., \\u201cNavigating an Addictive Culture\\u201d\\nTRAUMA: Gabor Mat\\xe9, M.D., \\u201cWhen Stress Becomes Illness\\u201d\\nBINGE EATING DISORDER: Susan Burton, \\u201cWhose Pain Counts?\\u201d\\n \\nTo learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy\\n \\n Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices"