Understanding Addiction and Emotional Child Abuse

"When a child operates from a base of self-acceptance, self-confidence, and self-love, they're going to go out into the world and be much less inclined to ingest a foreign substance to make them feel better," says filmmaker and psychological worker Oliver Tuthill. Drawing on interviews with recovering addicts of various ages, as well as behavioral and psychological professionals and social workers, Tuthill argues that abusive experiences in childhood are directly linked to an increased likelihood of drug and alcohol addiction. Unfortunately, while common sense suggests this may be true, all we're shown here are testimonials--with no statistics, no experiments, no research cited--and even the interview subjects themselves (excepting Tuthill) never specifically say the two are correlated. Since the focus of this video is to connect emotional child abuse and substance addiction (which it does not succeed in doing in any measurable way), rather than provide suggestions or strategies for coping with the results, the program is of little practical value. Not a necessary purchase. Aud: C, P. (E. Gieschen)