Helping Audiences in Their Recovery from
Trauma, Addiction, and a Damaged Self-Concept
Information for Event Planners
Dr. Todd Berntson’s work focuses on the intersection of trauma, addiction, and relationships—how early emotional experiences shape the self, how unresolved wounds contribute to addiction and relationship difficulties, and what meaningful recovery requires. These subjects are not only areas of professional training and decades of clinical work. They have also been part of his own journey of recovery.
More recently, Dr. Todd developed the Effigism construct, describing a particular form of relational trauma in which one person manages a wound within themselves by organizing another person into a diminished or failed position. Effigism represents one pathway to emotional trauma, alongside experiences such as neglect, assault, attachment injury, and narcissistic injury.
Across his presentations, Dr. Todd combines psychological research, clinical experience, and lived experience to help audiences understand not only what happened to them, but why it continues to affect them—and what recovery can look like.
Featured Keynote
Effigism: Being Raised to Fail
When You Are Undermined by Those You Love
Most of us understand what it means to grow up with criticism, neglect, abuse, or an emotionally unavailable parent. But there is another kind of relational injury that can be much harder to recognize.
Sometimes a parent, partner, authority figure, or other important person seems to have a psychological investment in keeping someone else diminished. You become the incompetent one. The overly sensitive one. The foolish one. The needy one. The disappointment. The person who somehow never seems to get life right.
Dr. Todd Berntson calls this pattern Effigism.
In Effigism: Being Raised to Fail, Dr. Todd introduces a new psychological construct for understanding a form of emotional cruelty in which one person manages a wound within themselves by organizing another person into a diminished or failed position.
For the person on the receiving end, the consequences can reach far beyond hurt feelings. When this pattern begins in childhood, repeated undermining can become woven into the developing sense of self. People may enter adulthood doubting their competence, questioning their perceptions, struggling to know who they are, feeling chronically inadequate, choosing relationships in which they continue to occupy a diminished role, or carrying the persistent feeling that something about them is fundamentally wrong.
This keynote gives audiences a new framework for understanding those experiences.
Dr. Todd explores how Effigism develops, why the success or independence of the proxy can become threatening to the person who needs them to remain diminished, how a relational role can become an internalized failed state, and why simply leaving the relationship does not necessarily undo what the relationship taught us about ourselves.
Most importantly, the presentation moves beyond recognition to recovery. Once people can separate who they actually are from the role they were trained to occupy, they can begin rebuilding identity, safety, connection, value, and agency—and move toward a life that is no longer organized around someone else’s need for them to fail.
Audiences will leave understanding how Effigism differs from ordinary criticism, conflict, and other forms of emotional harm; how one person can become organized into a chronically diminished or failed position; why these relationships can profoundly shape self-concept and adult functioning; why independence, competence, boundaries, or success can disrupt an effigistic relationship; and how recognizing the pattern can become the beginning of recovery.
Breakouts, Workshops, and Other Presentations
Trauma and Addiction
There Is More to Recovery than Sobriety
Addiction is often treated as the central problem in a person’s life. But for many people, addiction began as an attempted solution. Alcohol, drugs, compulsive behaviors, and other forms of escape can provide temporary relief from emotional pain, shame, dysregulation, loneliness, traumatic activation, or a deeply wounded sense of self. When the addictive behavior stops, the emotional system that made that behavior useful does not automatically disappear. That is one reason recovery can become much more complicated than simply maintaining abstinence.
In Trauma and Addiction, Dr. Todd explores the relationship between trauma, attachment injury, emotional regulation, shame, self-concept, and addictive behavior. Drawing on trauma research, clinical experience, and his own long-term recovery, he helps audiences understand why people so often continue to struggle emotionally even after the substance or behavior has been removed. The presentation reframes addiction not as a moral failure or an isolated disorder, but as a behavior that exists within a larger emotional and relational system.
Audiences learn why sustainable recovery often requires developing the capacities that trauma may have disrupted: regulating difficult emotional states, experiencing safety, tolerating vulnerability, building a stable sense of self, developing meaningful connection, and learning healthier ways to respond when old wounds are activated. The result is a broader understanding of recovery—not simply as freedom from addiction, but as the process of building a life in which addiction is no longer necessary.
Relationships for People in Recovery
Rebuilding Strong Relationships after Addiction
Getting sober changes your life. It doesn’t automatically teach you how to have a healthy relationship. Recovery can transform a person’s life, but intimate relationships often expose challenges that sobriety alone cannot resolve. Many people enter recovery without ever having experienced a truly healthy model of intimacy. They may know how to survive conflict without knowing how to repair it. They may confuse caretaking with love, control with safety, intensity with connection, or avoidance with peace. Others discover that the very vulnerability required for intimacy activates emotional wounds they spent years trying not to feel.
Relationships can therefore become one of the most rewarding—and one of the most difficult—parts of long-term recovery.
In Relationships for People in Recovery, Dr. Todd explores what healthy intimacy actually requires after addiction. Audiences learn how emotional wounds influence attraction, conflict, boundaries, communication, trust, sexuality, vulnerability, and the roles partners adopt with one another.
Rather than offering simplistic communication formulas, the presentation helps people understand what happens underneath relationship conflict and why two people who genuinely love one another can repeatedly trigger, pursue, withdraw from, control, rescue, or defend against each other.
The goal is to help people move beyond simply staying sober together toward creating relationships characterized by emotional safety, accountability, healthy boundaries, repair, mutual support, and genuine connection.
Recovering from Emotional Trauma
Essential Tools for Healing from Your Past
Emotional trauma is a corroding thread that becomes woven into the very fabric of our existence and seems to affect everything—how we think, feel, act, and relate to others. Whether our emotional trauma came in the form of neglect, abuse, exposure to violence, or growing up in an environment where we were shamed or emotionally abandoned, the emotional impact that we carry into adulthood can lead to us struggling with emotional dysregulation, a damaged sense of self, and relationship difficulties.
In this presentation, you will learn a novel holistic recovery approach to emotional trauma that will help you calm your emotions, heal your sense of self, and improve the quality of your intimate relationships. You will learn the essential tools to help free yourself from the effects of emotional trauma so that you can live the life you were meant to live.
Information for Event Planners
Making Complex Ideas Understandable
Dr. Todd has given hundreds of presentations and lectures for universities, professional associations, treatment and recovery communities, trade organizations, conferences, and public audiences. His speaking style combines psychological depth with accessibility. Rather than overwhelming audiences with academic terminology, he uses stories, clinical observations, research, humor, and recognizable human experiences to make difficult psychological concepts understandable.
Audiences do not need a background in psychology to follow the ideas, and professionals will find enough conceptual depth to make the presentations useful in their own work. Presentations can be adapted for keynote addresses, conference sessions, workshops, professional development programs, treatment and recovery settings, retreats, and community events.
If your organization is looking for a speaker who can help people understand trauma, addiction, relationships, or the hidden relational patterns that shape the sense of self, Dr. Todd would be happy to discuss your event and audience.
Presentations can be adapted in length and emphasis to fit the needs of your organization.