Most people who grow up in traumatic childhoods don’t make it.
Addiction, prison, poverty, broken relationships — the statistics are brutal.

But there’s something interesting about the people who do survive it.

There are a lot of bad outcomes for people who go through traumatic childhoods. This should come as no surprise, but children who endure abuse, suffer through neglect, and spend their formative years surrounded by drugs, poverty, and violence don’t have the best adult lives.

I’ve written several essays about my alcoholism and addiction, and walked you through the neurobiological and psychological roots of them in my childhood, which was full of pain and poverty in public housing projects.

I’m not going to rattle off all the stats to confirm the obvious—I’ll toss those in at the end of the essay if you’re curious and skeptical—but I have to talk a little about the numbers.

Adverse childhood experiences are potentially traumatic events that occur when someone is a child. These are categorized as neglect, abuse, or general home dysfunction.

When looking at the United States prison population, 97% of them have had at least one adverse childhood experience, with 78% of them having experienced 4 or more. Compare this to the general population, where only 64% have had at least one adverse childhood experience, with only 15% having experienced 4 or more.

Even if they don’t end up in prison, we know that victims of childhood trauma are more likely to have lower self-esteem, mental health issues, suffer from obesity, abuse drugs, and suffer financial difficulties in their adult lives.

There’s a reason why kids who grow up in that environment are considered “at-risk youth”. However, not all who come from this environment end up in prison or with a lower quality of life. It’s not a guarantee that having a rough childhood sets you up for a rough adulthood, but the odds are not on your side.

How you start the race determines not just how you run it and how far you’ll go in it, but if you’ll even finish at all. But one thing that doesn’t get enough attention is the strengths people gain from surviving a childhood like that.

This essay will cover a few of the strengths you gain from growing up in a broken environment. Now, this essay in no way argues that a traumatic childhood is not so bad. I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I think it’s a good idea for a young person—or anyone, for that matter—to endure the pain of a traumatic childhood because somehow, it will make them stronger and tougher, because that does not happen.

Anyone who seriously tells you anything like that is afflicted with a serious case of survivor’s bias. With that said, people who survive horrible ordeals do so because they develop traits that make them resilient, resourceful, and adaptable—and they have done so in an environment marked by constant attacks and unrelenting scarcity, where hope is rarer than a two-parent household.

And that deserves some recognition.

This essay is for everyone who grew up in an environment like that or is growing up in one now, and who needs a way to believe in themselves and find the silver lining.

• ​Read the rest on my website​
• ​Read the rest on Substack​
• ​Read the rest on X​
• ​Watch the video​

Today's Sponsor—An Alcohol Substitute

As many of you know, I've been sober now for 12 years—and I have no intention of ever drinking again. Life is good and just keeps getting better.

Over the past few years, I've become increasingly more polarized in my stance against alcohol. I've shifted from "this is something for me, you do you," to "drinking in moderation is cool, but it's not something I'll ever try again," to something closer to "alcohol is a poison with no benefit, even just a little bit."

With that said, I do recognize that it's not easy for many people to open up and feel social without a tiny amount of alcohol. I used to think this was bullshit until I studied exactly how and why alcohol loosens you up (you can read my short essay about it here).

If you are a person who wants to drink less—or not at all—but you are worried about how to socialize, today's sponsor is right up your alley.

Outty is a non-alcoholic drink mix that uses a combination of ingredients to affect the same areas of the brain that alcohol does, but without the negative side effects of intoxication.

In fact, it does such a good job on the brain that many people (myself included) use it as a nootropic to get work done or just to help them be more expressive in their communication.

I'm not going to dig into the details of the ingredients here. I do that in this article, and this one, but some of the stuff Outty uses has been shown to increase verbal fluency, lower brain waves, AND increase motivation—all things you get from drinking a little bit.

And it's delicious!

If you want to learn more and try some, check out either of the articles about or visit their website here.

Hard Lesson of The Week

The reality is that any significant accomplishment is a confluence of both individual effort and interference from factors beyond your control.

You make your own luck, but paradoxically, only when you’re acting in a way that reduces the need for luck.

In this way, creating luck comes from strategic decisions that reduce uncertainty.

The old saying “The harder I work, the luckier I get” perfectly encapsulates this reality.

-Hard Lessons From The Hurt Business: Boxing And The Art of Life​