Rainn Wilson details difficult childhood

Rainn Wilson has shared details of his challenging childhood.

During the most recent instalment of the Diary of a CEO podcast, the actor, who is best known for playing Dwight Schrute in The Office, opened up about his childhood struggles.

"I experienced a lot of pain in my life and a lot of suffering with anxiety and depression and addiction," the 57-year-old told the podcast host Steven Bartlett.

He continued, "As I dove into recovery and the therapeutic process, I can pin that squarely on a lot of gross imbalances and trauma that I suffered as a child."

Rainn revealed that his mother left him when he was around two years old and he was raised in the Baha'i faith by his father, a science fiction writer and abstract painter.

Rainn and his dad moved to Nicaragua when he was three years old. They then moved back to the U.S., where his father remarried.

The actor said that he was confused by the Baha'i faith meetings, as what he learned did not align with what he experienced at home, sharing that his father and stepmother would "rage" behind closed doors.

"There was never any kind of, acknowledging what had just happened, so for an 8-year-old, 9-year-old, 10-year-old being in that milieu, you're like, is this how people act?" the TV star remembered. "Is this how we're supposed to act, we have all these emotions, but we don't talk about them, and then we go and we pray together?"

Rainn noted that he decided to "re-examine" his ideas of faith when he was in his 20s.

"That's when I decided to kind of re-examine these ideas as a potential way out, as a potential path forward for my own transformation, for my personal healing, and I was ultimately able to come back to the religion of my youth and find great peace and solace and meaning in it after a long journey in my 20s and early 30s," he shared.