Why Success Can’t Heal Emotional Wounds (& What Actually Does) | (#063) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

When Michael was just seven years old, his father was killed in a car accident, the kind of accident that makes the evening news for a night and then disappears, except for the people who can never forget it. In the will, his dad had thought of everything, college tuition, living expenses, even a trust fund that would make sure that Michael never had to worry about money for the rest of his life.

Everyone said what a thoughtful man his father had been, that he’d done right by his son, and in a way, he had. The family never struggled. Michael grew up in beautiful homes, went to the best schools, had every door open for him, but every night, before bed, he’d stare at a photo of his father on the dresser, smiling, alive, and he’d whisper, “Good night, Dad.” No matter how much time passed, the silence that followed always hurt the same way. He didn’t want the cars or the schools or the vacations. He wanted his dad. [01:11.5]

Years later, as a grown man, accomplished, successful, wealthy, he said to me through tears, “I’d pay it all back, every cent with interest, just to have one more day with my dad.” It’s a simple story, really the kind that reminds us how easily we forget what matters most, because for a child, there is no currency more valuable than a loving parent’s presence. No amount of money can buy the feeling of being truly seen, held or cherished, and for a loving parent, there’s no price you’d ever accept in exchange for your own child.

This episode is about that truth. That presence is more essential than presence, because a child’s deepest needs aren’t met by money or luxury, or even safety, but by love, significance, connection. That’s what builds the kind of success that no inheritance can buy. [02:05.7]

I’m David Tian, a leadership coach and therapist. I’m a Brown University–certified leadership and performance coach, a certified IFS therapy practitioner, and an ICF-certified coach. For almost the past two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find fulfillment, meaning and success in their personal and professional lives.

Look, a lot of high-achieving parents don’t realize this, but somewhere along the way, being responsible quietly got redefined. It stopped meaning being present and started meaning providing things, food, housing, tuition, enrichment classes, a down payment and inheritance, and, look, those things help, of course, no question. They make life easier. They show care in their own way. But the problem is when achievement-addicted parents unconsciously start believing that provision is the proof of love, that meeting material needs is the same thing as meeting emotional ones. [02:59.6]

Children don’t see it that way. A child doesn’t measure love by the size of a trust fund. A child measures love by the look on your face when they walk into a room, by the warmth of a hug, the softness of your voice, the way you stop what you’re doing and actually fully listen to them, by the laughter that you share, the safety you give, the feeling that they matter beyond what they can do or achieve, those tiny moments of eye contact, affection, presence. Those are the bricks that build a child’s inner world.

When they’re missing, something else gets built instead. You get children who grow into adults who are always trying to perform, always trying to please, always trying to fix, always trying to fawn, people who hustle for validation the way some people chase oxygen, because somewhere inside, a part of them still believes, If I achieve enough, maybe then I’ll finally be worthy of love. That belief doesn’t come from laziness or entitlement. It comes from a wound from the absence of loving presence. [04:04.1]

This isn’t just poetic sentiment. This isn’t just theory. For almost a century now, scientific research has shown again and again that deprivation of affection doesn’t just create sad childhood memories. It reshapes the brain, the body and the spirit, and the wild part is, once you see what this really does to a child in the long term, you can’t unsee it. In fact, it explains something later in this episode that most parents never even realize they’re passing on.

If you think that sounds dramatic, wait until you hear what the science reveals when we zoom in closer, because for almost a century now, researchers have been trying to understand why some children thrive even in hardship, while others collapse even in comfort, and again and again, the answer comes back to one thing: the presence of a secure, responsive caregiver. Not wealth, not comfort, not opportunity. Presence. [05:00.0]

When John Bowlby first began studying children separated from their parents after World War II, he noticed something unsettling. These were not starving children. They had shelter. They had food. They had adults supervising them. By all the material check boxes, their needs were met, but something inside them had collapsed. Their bodies were fine, but their minds and spirits were not.

Bowlby saw that humans are wired from the very beginning to look for a secure base, someone whose presence says, “You matter. You’re safe. You’re being watched over and protected. Now go explore the world.” Without that secure base, even survival feels like danger, but with the secure base, even danger feels surmountable.

Then Mary Ainsworth brought this insight into the lab with her Strange Situation experiments, very famous. She watched what infants did when their mother left the room and then returned. Babies with secure attachment, crawled out, explored, played, tested the world, but always glanced back to make sure Mom was still there as an anchor, and when she returned, the babies lit up. They ran to her not because she fed them, but because she was their emotional home. [06:12.2]

What Ainsworth showed is that secure attachment isn’t about spoiling a child or coddling them. It’s about giving them the inner courage to move through the world without panic. Children who feel securely attached grow into adults with a stable sense of Self. They can take risks without falling apart. They recover from failure without losing their identity. In other words, they can actually pursue success without being owned by it.

This isn’t just about human babies. Harry Harlow’s work in the 1950s, as disturbing as the methods turned out to be, revealed something profound. He separated infant monkeys from their mothers and gave them to artificial mothers. One mother was made of wire, but provided milk. The other was covered in soft cloth, but provided nothing else, and every single baby clung to the cloth mother. They would lean over, grab the milk, and then immediately scurry back to the warm, soft, comforting body. [07:09.3]

Let’s pause and think about that. Even in monkeys, contact comfort outweighed sustenance. Even animals knew nourishment keeps you alive, but affection gives you the will to live, and now neuroscience fills in the rest of the picture. In early childhood, the brain is exploding with growth. Millions of new neural connections form every second, but just as quickly, the brain begins to prune away the connections it doesn’t need. This process, synaptic pruning, is guided almost entirely by experience. Which circuits get strengthened? They’re the ones activated by the environment, and the most powerful environment a child ever encounters is the caregiver’s emotional presence. [07:53.3]

Neuroscientists like Charles Nelson, Megan Gunnar, Bruce Perry and the team at Harvard University Center on the Developing Child have shown that “serve and return” interactions, those tiny moments when a child reaches out and the parent responds, literally build the brain architecture for everything that follows—emotional regulation, stress tolerance, empathy, self-worth, even IQ and language development.

When those interactions are missing or inconsistent, something else gets built instead. The amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, then becomes hyperactive. Cortisol stays elevated for hours. Neural pathways for anxiety and distrust get strengthened, and children internalize a worldview that says, “I’m not safe. I can’t rely on anyone. I have to do everything myself.” This is how neglect gets under the skin. It wires insecurity directly into the nervous system, and here’s the part that still catches people off guard. You don’t need physical abuse or starvation for this to happen. Emotional absence is sufficient. [08:59.5]

A parent who is physically present but emotionally distracted can create the same physiological signatures as outright neglect or survival-level danger. When we talk about presence, we’re not talking about being just in the same room. We’re talking about attunement, responsiveness, warmth, consistency, the things that tell a child, “You matter. I’m here. You are cared for.” The loving presence of the parent doesn’t just make a child feel loved. It builds the literal neural pathways that make happiness, self-worth, confidence and love possible later in life. It creates the inner foundation that achievements alone can never supply.

What’s most surprising is what this science helps us understand about certain families, especially the ones that did everything right on paper, but still ended up with kids who felt empty or lost. There’s a reason for that, which I’ll review later, and once you understand how the brain is built through connection, these darker studies, which I’m about to share with you, stop looking like historical curiosities and start looking like warning signs. They show in painful detail, what happens when love is absent, and what happens even when every material need is met except the one that matters most. [10:18.4]

Nowhere is this clearer than in the Romanian orphanages of the 1980s and 1990s. These were state-run institutions where infants were fed on schedule, clothed in uniforms, placed in clean cribs, lined up in perfect rows. There was structure. There was order. There was food, and there was almost no human touch. Many infants spent 20, sometimes 22 hours a day, lying on their backs, staring at ceilings, rarely picked up, rarely spoken to, rarely held.

When Western doctors and researchers first entered these facilities after the fall of the regime, they were shocked. Children who should have been walking were lying motionless. Two-year-olds looked like six month olds. Many made no sounds at all, no crying, no babbling, no laughter, because crying had never brought anyone to their side. It never worked. [11:08.8]

In some of the institutions, more than half the children were underweight despite having enough food. Their bodies had slowed their own growth as a survival response to chronic emotional starvation. Later, when IQ tests were administered, the averages hovered around the 70s, borderline intellectual disability, not because these children were born with low intelligence, but because their brains had never been activated properly, never been scaffolded with that serve and return type of interaction that sparks cognitive development.

This is where the Bucharest Early Intervention Project becomes so crucial. It took the radical step, ethically controversial but scientifically invaluable, of randomly assigning some institutionalized children into high-quality foster families, and the results were clear. If a child was moved into a loving, consistent, responsive home before the age of two, their brain activity, their attachment patterns, their cognitive scores improved dramatically in some cases. Some approached typical development by school age. [12:17.0]

But if the removal happened after age two, the recovery was partial at best. Even with years of loving foster care, even with stability, even with opportunity, some of the early damage remained visible in EEG scans, stress responses and emotional regulation. Let’s pause on this. These children had food. They had shelter. They had medical care. What they didn’t have was love. What they didn’t have was presence, and the absence of a loving presence didn’t just hurt their feelings. It reshaped their brains and their bodies. [12:49.1]

If you think this is limited to extreme neglect, consider Wayne Dennis’ study from the ’30s. Dennis studied fraternal twins, Del and Rey, who were raised in a barren Iranian orphanage. These boys had food, clothes, clean, beds, all the basics, but they were given almost no stimulation, no toys, no stories, almost no touch.

When Dennis found them at age two, they couldn’t walk. They couldn’t speak. They barely interacted with the world around them. Dennis then provided months of structured play practice and attention. The boys did make progress, but even many years later, they lagged far behind their peers. Their later training could not catch up to what their brains had already missed. That window had closed, and this pattern repeats across many studies.

Myrtle McGraw’s famous twin study in the ’30s with Johnny and Jimmy showed that the twin who received early, playful, emotionally present stimulation developed smoother motor skills, more confidence and more grace, as she put it, than his brother. Even when she later trained the less stimulated twin with intense practice, he never fully matched the natural ease of the brother who had simply been given more interaction earlier on. Love, play, and presence are not luxuries. They are neurological nutrition. [14:09.1]

René Spitz’s work in the ’40s brought this to even sharper relief. Spitz studied infants in sterile orphanages where the hygiene was excellent, the feeding schedules were exact, and the material environment was immaculate, but the caregivers rotated constantly. No one bonded with any one child. No one became that child’s person, and the result was what the researcher Spitz called hospitalism.

Infants stopped smiling. They stopped reaching out. Some lost the ability to sit or crawl. Many became sick with no medical explanation, and in some institutions, up to a third of the infants died—again, not from lack of food, not from lack of shelter, but from lack of love and a loving presence.

We don’t usually think of affection as life support, but for a developing child, it is. Deprivation isn’t just hunger for food. It’s hunger for presence, hunger for the warmth of a face that lights up when you enter the room, hunger for the simple truth you matter enough for someone to come when you call. [15:12.2]

Sometimes success comes with a hidden cost. You might have built a career, a business, or life you thought you wanted, but inside, maybe you feel burned out or unfulfilled. Or maybe it shows up in your relationships with your partner, your family or your team, where no matter how hard you try, the same painful patterns keep repeating.

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When that truth is missing, the damage is not only emotional, it’s biological. It’s cognitive. It’s existential. When a loving presence is absent, the body shrinks, the mind stalls, and the sense of Self fractures.

When love is absent, even the best material environment becomes a kind of desert, and when love is present, even in poverty, even in war, even in chaos, children grow roots. They grow courage. They grow the emotional spine that they need for the rest of their lives. This brings us back to the core truth that we’ve been building toward. The deepest wounds don’t come from poverty. They come from emotional absence. The missing ingredient is not money. It’s presence. [16:53.0]

Once you understand how absence shapes a child, Michael’s story, the one I started this episode with, that starts to make a painful kind of sense, because Michael’s father didn’t fail him. He didn’t abandon him. He was killed, suddenly and tragically, and he left behind everything he could think of to make sure his little boy would be taken care of. But a child’s brain doesn’t interpret events with adult logic. It interprets them through the narrow window of survival.

A seven-year-old can’t grasp mortality or chance, or the randomness of tragedy, and no one in his family tried to explain it to him. What he did grasp was this—Dad was here and then Dad was gone, and when something that big and that frightening happens, the child’s mind reaches for the one explanation that gives him even a tiny illusion of control. “Dad left, and I must have done something wrong,” because the alternative that the world can just rip away the person you love most without any warning, unpredictable chaos, is too terrifying for a child to hold himself. [17:55.7]

Blaming himself hurts, but it hurts less than believing the world is just unpredictable, destructive chaos. Self-blame at least offers the illusion that if he’s good enough or impressive enough or successful enough, maybe next time the people he loves will stay, so the wound hardens into an unconscious rule: “To deserve love, I must achieve.”

But that’s only half of what happened. The child also tells himself another story in an attempt to understand the loss. He tells himself, “Dad left me,” as if his father made a choice, as if his father walked out, shrugged and moved on, because when you’re just seven, it feels like a choice. It feels like abandonment, and so resentment sneaks in, bitterness, anger, the beginnings of a quiet belief that “If he really loved me, he wouldn’t have gone,” so this little boy grows up carrying both sides of that wound, resentment toward the father who left and guilt that he deserved it. [18:54.1]

Then there’s the trust fund, the very thing meant to protect him, it becomes a symbol of both sides of the wound, a blessing and a curse, material comfort tied to emotional confusion, love tied to loss, support tied to shame. By the time Michael came to me, he was successful on the outside, but split on the inside, and that inheritance, this incredible, generous legacy, felt like evidence of a transaction, as if his father had paid his way out of being there.

But through our work together, something finally shifted for him. For the first time in his life, Michael saw the gift through his father’s eyes, not through the eyes of the hurting child he once was. Michael said, “This wasn’t a transaction and he didn’t abandon me on purpose. It was my father’s last act of love, unconditional and unearned,” and when that truth finally landed for him, not just in his head, but in his body, the guilt dissolved. The resentment loosened. [19:55.6]

He could feel his father’s presence in the gift, instead of being haunted by his absence, and from that place, he could do something even more profound. He could turn toward the younger parts inside him, the scared boy who thought it was his fault, the angry boy who felt abandoned, and he could give them what they never received back then, his own loving presence, his own steady reassurance, his own unconditional acceptance.

He no longer needed to achieve in order to be worthy. He no longer needed success to feel safe. He no longer needed to perform to be loved. He had become the presence his younger Self needed, and that, more than any inheritance, is what finally set him free—and this is where the contrast becomes almost blinding, because if the absence of love can break a child even in comfort, the presence of love can raise a child even into greatness, even in chaos. [20:55.2]

You see this in places that we don’t usually look for inspiration, war-torn regions, refugee camps, cities flattened by conflict, places where parents don’t have trust funds, for sure, or private schools or even safe streets. What they do have is their arms around their children when the bombs fall, their bodies shielding them, their whispers saying, “I’m here. I’ve got you.” In Gaza, in the Congo, in Sudan, right now, parents living under the constant threat of violence, find ways to give their children what even the wealthiest families sometimes forget to give, a loving presence.

A mother rocking her baby to sleep in a tent while explosions echo in the distance, a father distracting his child from hunger with stories or jokes or songs, doing anything to keep fear from becoming the child’s worldview, these parents have nothing by material standards, but when you talk to the grown children who survive and thrive in places like that, what they remember isn’t the hunger or the danger. What they remember most is the way their parents held them, the way their parents looked at them, the way their parents made them feel when life felt like it was falling apart around them. [22:04.0]

You see this in stories far closer to home, too. Take Christopher Gardner in The Pursuit of Happiness, starring Will Smith. For almost a year, Gardner and his son were homeless, sleeping in shelters, sleeping in subway stations, sleeping in a locked public restroom, because it was the safest place they could find that night.

Gardner had no money to give his son, no security, no comfort, nothing that most achievement-addicted parents would consider responsible providing. But what he did have, he gave fully, his attention, his steadiness, his laughter, his belief, his presence, and that was enough. His son didn’t need a trust fund. He needed trust itself. He needed the look in his father’s eyes that said, “You matter. I’m here. We’ll make it,” and this is why I say, and I hope you let these words settle in, a child can grow strong with love and no money, but never with money and no love. This is not some metaphor. This is biology. [23:05.2]

Emotional attunement literally rewires the brain. When a child feels seen and loved, the brain releases oxytocin, the bonding hormone. It dampens cortisol, the stress chemical. It strengthens the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for judgment, emotional regulation, and resilience. In neuroscience labs from Harvard to Minnesota to UCLA, this pattern shows up again and again. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking at children in poverty or children in wealth. When emotional connection is there, the neural networks for resilience grow stronger. When love is consistent, the child carries that stability into adulthood, but when emotional connection is missing, the effects follow the same script, whether you grew up in a mansion or in a shelter. [23:52.2]

Material poverty paired with emotional abundance often produces adults who are grounded, gritty, compassionate, even visionary. They grow into leaders who don’t crumble at the first sign of failure, because they learned early that security did not come from circumstances. It came from relationship.

Material wealth paired with emotional neglect often produces something very different, adults who are successful on paper, but hollow on the inside, high-achievers who are addicted to validation, perfectionists who can’t rest, narcissists who never feel enough, people who chase status, power or approval, like drowning men trying to gasp for air, because they’re still trying to fill an emotional void created decades earlier.

This is one of the great moral ironies of human life. The things parents kill themselves to provide, the school, the house, the tutors, the legacy, those things can be helpful, but they are not the foundation, and when they become substitutes for presence, they become obstacles to fulfillment. [25:01.5]

Every study, every survivor’s story, every piece of neuroscience, keeps pointing back to the same truth—the greatest predictor of a child’s long term success, emotional, psychological, relational, is not wealth. It’s not opportunity. It’s not privilege. It’s the felt sense of love, the certainty of belonging, the quiet, steady presence of someone who says, “I’m here and you matter.”

Once you see this truth, once you really feel it in your bones, the question becomes, what do we do with it? What do we do with this knowledge that presence outweighs presents, that love does what money never can, that so many of us, without realizing it, have been living out the consequences of emotional scarcity since childhood? This is where the healing is for parents and for the grown children walking around in adult bodies, but still carrying the fears and strategies of a much younger Self. [26:01.6]

If you’re a parent listening to this, here’s the part that matters most. Your presence is the ultimate inheritance. Your children will not remember the brand of their clothes or the size of their bedroom, or the model year of their family car. They will remember the look in your eyes when they came to show you something. They will remember your tone of voice when you spoke to them, your laughter when you played with them, your steadiness when they were scared. These moments are not small. They are architecture. They are literally sculpting your child’s brain.

The neural pathways that define confidence, empathy and resilience, antifragility, are built in the tiny interactions that most adults don’t even notice. That’s why giving fewer gifts and giving more attention is not a downgrade. It’s the upgrade. Children spell love as T-I-M-E, not tuition, not travel, not trust funds. Time, attention, your presence. [27:00.7]

If you’re an adult child, meaning, if you’re a grown human who has spent your life performing, pleasing, fixing, impressing or chasing, this part is for you. Stop trying to earn what should have been freely given, your perfectionism, your people pleasing, your compulsive drive to succeed, your fear of disappointing others. These didn’t come out of nowhere. They were survival strategies. They were the ways that you learned to get just a little bit of safety or attention in an environment that didn’t give it freely.

But now those strategies are running and ruining your life. They’re driving you toward exhaustion, burnout, and emptiness, and the only way out is to reparent the parts of you that still believe that love must be earned. This does not require a time machine. It requires the presence of your Higher Self, your presence, the same presence you needed from your caregivers but didn’t consistently receive. [27:56.0]

Sit with those parts of you, the anxious inner child, the overachiever, the perfectionist, the one who is terrified of failing, and offer them what they’ve always actually wanted and needed, warmth, patience, acceptance. You can’t outachieve an unmet need. You can only outlove it, and when you begin to do that, achievement can stop being a desperate attempt to prove your worth. It becomes an expression of who you are, whole, integrated, secure, and that is the beginning of real success.

When you start healing in this way, a bigger question naturally begins to surface, a question about legacy, not the financial kind, not the résumé kind, the human kind. What presence do you want to leave behind, not what titles, not what balance sheet, not what trophies or degrees, or generational wealth? When the people you love look back on their lives, what do you want them to remember about you? Because it won’t be the things you bought them. It will be how you made them feel when you were with them. [28:59.4]

So, I want to invite you into a moment of reflection. If you’re a parent, where in your life have you been substituting presents for presence? Where have you been reassuring yourself that you’re doing enough because you’re providing while quietly avoiding the emotional connection that your child actually needs? And if you’re an adult child, what part of you is still performing to earn a love that you never received? What part of you is still convinced that you have to prove your worth even now?

Choose one relational action for this week, just one, an uninterrupted hour with someone you love or a real conversation where you’re actually truly listening, a moment where you let yourself be fully present, without distraction, without agenda, without looking at your phone, because the science is clear. Decades of research show that warm, responsive relationships don’t just make life nicer. They shape the brain. They build resilience. They create the stable foundation from which people grow into strong, grounded, centered adults—and morally, this is our highest responsibility, investing in emotional connection, not later, not someday, but now. [30:13.1]

This is the shift from achievement addiction to integration, from “I must achieve to prove I matter” to “I matter,” and from that place, “I create. I engage. I contribute.” For parents, you’re not just raising someone who achieves, you’re raising someone who feels secure and deeply loved. For adult children, you’re not just someone who performs. You’re someone who rests in self-worth and then creates from that self-worth.Let me leave you with a simple mantra and let it land wherever it needs to land. “I was loved before I performed. I am loved even when I fail. I will love others, not only with what I provide, but with how I am.” [30:58.4]