As I’ve remarked before, even for my addicted patients, their greatest shame and regret is their failure to parent their own children, a sorrow that rarely fails to bring tears to their eyes. The point is that, as in the parenting my children received, our best is circumscribed by our own issues and limitations. In most cases, those issues and limitations originated in our childhoods—and so on down the generations. That parenting styles are passed on from one generation to the next is known both from human studies and animal experiments. In the latter, it has been shown that parental nurturing
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