Rainn Wilson talks about his traumatic childhood and its glimmer of hope

Rainn Wilson doesn’t leave his troubles at The Office.

The comedian, who played the impossibly clumsy Dwight Schrute on the NBC sitcom, opened up about his nightmarish childhood on this week’s The Diary of a CEO podcast. (Check it out below.)

Wilson said he was abandoned by his mother as an infant, taken by his father to the jungles of Nicaragua when he was three, and then suffered abuse in a loveless household with his father and stepmother.

“I have experienced a lot of pain and suffering with fears and fears in my life depression and addiction,” he told host Steven Bartlett. “As I’ve researched the recovery and therapeutic process, I can relate this directly to a lot of gross imbalances and trauma I suffered as a child.”

At the presenter’s urging to elaborate on the abuse, Wilson declined.

But he’s put a positive spin on his bleak upbringing.

“That’s the weird thing, I’m grateful for that,” Wilson said. “Because you know, if I had had a happy, balanced childhood, I don’t know where my career would have gone. But it certainly wouldn’t have been an actor. And it certainly wouldn’t have been a successful actor.”

“That coincidence of pain and difficulty and abuse and neglect caused me a lot of suffering later on, but at the same time they pushed me to try to be the best version of myself … and they made me funny.”

Wilson recently spoke on the hit sitcom about how unfulfilled he felt at the height of his fame, but his interview here took a different, revealing direction. Fast forward to 2:20 for the section on Wilson’s childhood: