According to a former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante, successful people tend to have childhood trauma. “If you don’t have childhood trauma, you don’t have that chemical addiction,” he said. “If your parents love you, and everybody’s there for you, and life is easy, you actually feel like, ‘I don’t need to prove myself. I don’t need to make anybody happy.’”When you become comfortable like that, you remain stagnant. Leadership development consultant Soren Kaplan, PhD, shared his own relationship with childhood trauma.