A trait of an addiction-prone personality is a poor hold over sudden feelings, urges, and desires. Many trans identified youth have addiction and codependency issues. The absence of differentiation is codependency. The poorly differentiated person is immature and easily overwhelmed by his or her emotions, absorbing the anxiety of others. Children cannot intellectually drop a boundary to protect themselves from the definition of others; part of the development package does not belong to them but is projected onto them by parental figures. When a husband rages at his spouse, shame, anger, fear, and pain are induced into his listening children. Children cannot discriminate between someone else’s irresponsible behaviour and their own behaviour. When a baby is not held, shame and fear are induced. An abused child learns to believe in nothing and hence goes to live out and experience the hopelessness of believing in nothing - a spiritual cynicism brought on by sarcasm, rage, shame, and fear-based parental figures.[102] Early childhood experiences are often the driving force in addictive personalities. The ideal culture for healthy, drug-free, mentally strong children is cemented in the parent-child bond. Furthermore, regarding prenatal stress, numerous studies in both animals and humans have found that maternal stress and anxiety during pregnancy can lead to a broad range of problems, from colic to learning difficulties.[103]

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Berne based much of his research on a study done on early psychiatric childhood conditions in 1945 by Spitz. Spitz had found that infants deprived of handing over a long period will tend at length to sink into irreversible decline and are prone to succumb eventually to Intercurrent disease, a disease that happens in tandem with other ailments. In effect, this means that what Spitz calls emotional deprivation can have a fatal outcome.[104]

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As far as the theory of games is concerned, Berne said that the principle that emerges from this research is that any interpersonal contact, whatever, has a biological advantage over none at all. This has also been experimentally demonstrated in the case of the rats by S. Levine, in which not only physical, mental, and emotional development, but also the biochemistry of the brain, and even resistance to leukemia were favorably affected by handling, including electric shock. The significant feature of these experiments is that gentle handling and painful electric shock were equally effective in promoting the health of the animals.”[105] It was concluded by Berne that children will learn to play psychological games that provide negative strokes and any emotional contact over none at all.