Adult Child

✨SAFE WITHIN:A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. 👉 adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin

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Your body will not hand you a memory until it is convinced you can survive it.

Dr. Deniz Ahmadinia is a licensed clinical psychologist and trauma survivor who believes healing happens when we listen to the wisdom of the body. In her last appearance on the podcast, she was early in a process she couldn't yet name when repressed memories were just starting to surface. Today she shares what came after: a year of memories that arrived with no images and no narrative, only her body moving through them.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️ Why Repressed Memories Surface When They Do — Why your system waits for a home, a partner, distance from the family, and then decides it's time, and why that timing isn't random.

▪️ Trusting Yourself Without Believing Everything —Why self-trust isn't believing everything that surfaces, it's staying with it long enough to find out what it is.

▪️ What Sensory Motor Therapy Actually Looks Like — How somatic work completes the fight or flight response that got frozen at the time, and why it takes weeks of building up to a movement that sounds simple.

▪️ The Cost of Staying in the Hope — Why the part of you that keeps trying to get through to someone is the part doing you the most harm, and what you have to turn toward when you stop.

▪️ Therapist Self-Disclosure and Relational Trauma — Why a clinician who shares nothing can't give you what relational trauma requires.

🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️ Ep 182 | The Fear of Being Seen: Integrative Trauma Therapy w/ Dr. Deniz Ahmadinia

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✨SAFE WITHIN:A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. Early bird pricing through 9/17 👉adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin

--

⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

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✨SAFE WITHIN:A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. Early bird pricing through 9/17 👉 adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin

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All the healing work in the world won't make someone else willing to do their own.

Dr. Angelica Shiels is a clinical psychologist a licensed clinical psychologist who works with couples and families using Emotionally Focused Therapy, the creator of the app Attuned - Relationships and the host of Attuned with Dr. Angelica & Coach Amanda. In today's conversation she walks through the dynamics she sees when two people's childhood wounds meet in a relationship, and what actually has to happen for either of them to change.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️ When Only One of You Is Doing the Work — The two kinds of harm to screen for before you keep trying, and why staying in couples therapy too long with an unwilling partner damages the person who's willing.

▪️ The Parentified & Golden Child Pairing — The most common match in relationships, why it works beautifully until the parentified partner finally asks for something, and the exact moment it comes apart.

▪️ The 4 States People Can't Tolerate — Defectiveness, powerlessness, uncertainty and wrongness, which one sits underneath the other three, and what it means when you only react to one of them.

▪️ High Conflict Couples Doesn't Need Better Communication — Why teaching skills to a dysregulated couple fails, what has to be in place before any technique works, and why titration matters more than depth.

▪️ Fawning That Looks Like Willingness— How to tell the difference between a partner who is actually in it and one who is agreeing with everything while privately still judging you.

Check out Omaha Steaks and use my code BEEF for a great deal: https://www.omahasteaks.com

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✨SAFE WITHIN:A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. Early bird pricing through 9/17 👉adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin

⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

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✨SAFE WITHIN:A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. Early bird pricing through 9/17 👉 adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin

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Trauma-informed is a phrase any practitioner can put on their website. But some of the people using it have never sat in a client chair themselves.

Amber Trejo and Megan Walsh are licensed trauma therapists from the Midwest who are both survivors of complex trauma and on their own healing journeys. They are the co-hosts of the new podcast We Should Talk, where they get into relationships, motherhood, pop culture, and mental health without the expert hats on. This is an honest conversation about how much damage a bad practitioner can do, and what to actually ask before you hand someone your history.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️ Red Flags in a Practitioner — The specific things that should give you pause, from skewed boundaries to a therapist who has never been in therapy themselves.

▪️Questions to Ask — What to ask in a consultation before you ever book a first session, and why the direct version of the question gets you the more useful answer.

▪️ When is Self-Disclosure Appropriate — Why a therapist sharing their own story can be the thing that lands, and the question they should be asking themselves before they open their mouth.

▪️ The Importance of Attunement— How a good practitioner tracks your breath, your face, and what you're not saying, and what it costs you when they only track your words.

▪️ When No One Talks About It —What it does to a kid when something is clearly off but your parents ignore it, and how that impacts your ability to community as an adult.

▪️Titration in Trauma Work — Why going into your worst material every single week isn't depth, and how the touch-in-and-return rhythm keeps you from being retraumatized.

Check out Omaha Steaks and use my code BEEF for a great deal: https://www.omahasteaks.com

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️ Ep 208 | When Each Parent Leaves a Different Scar - From Attachment Wounds to Parenting Triggers, Rage & Repair w/ Amber Trejo

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✨SAFE WITHIN:A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. Early bird pricing through 9/17 👉adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin

--

⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

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Shitshow Saturday #127

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✨SAFE WITHIN:A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. Early bird pricing through 9/17 👉adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin

--

You've spent your whole life waiting for the other shoe to drop. Nobody tells you what happens when it finally stops dropping.

Bethany Webster is an expert on healing the mother wound, coach, and the author of "Discovering the Inner Mother." She recently launched a new Substack, Living Undaunted, where she writes about self-trust and what life looks like after the deep excavation work. Bethany returns to the pod to talk about what life actually looks like on the other side of the wound. This is a conversation about what nobody prepares you for: joy that feels suspicious, and ease you have to learn to tolerate.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️ When Your Mind Becomes Your Mother — Why overthinking isn't a bad habit but a caretaking system you built, and why the hypervigilance felt like the only thing keeping you safe.

▪️ When Glimmers Become Your Baseline — How you know the work is landing, and what changes when the present moment stops carrying an archive of the past inside it.

▪️ Why Ambition Drops as You Heal — What happens to drive and output when your nervous system stops needing to produce, and why creativity can survive that without the pressure.

▪️ Traumatic Fear vs. Regular Human Fear — How to tell the difference between a trauma response and the ordinary fear that comes with being alive, and why separating them clears your perception.

▪️ Life Without a Single Family Member — What no contact actually costs, the particular loneliness of having nobody to call, and what can only open up once those attachments are gon

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️ Ep 184 - Peeling Back Layers Of The CPTSD Onion w/ Mother Wound Expert Bethany Webster

▪️ Ep 136 | Healing the Mother Wound: Why It Hurts and How We Begin to Heal with Bethany Webster

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Shitshow Saturday #127

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✨SAFE WITHIN:A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. Early bird pricing through 9/17 👉adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin

--

Whatever you refuse to look at inside yourself comes back at you disguised as your life.

Hannah Fraser Moore is a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist and writer based in the UK. She works with complex trauma, addiction, and eating disorders, and she's currently writing a book called Holy Hunger about women, instinct, and the shadow. She spent years in therapy insisting her childhood had nothing to do with the problems in her adult life. What finally got through to her was a breakup with a guy she barely knew that hit her like a death.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️ The Shadow vs. The Exile — Why the shadow holds capacities you got rid of, not just wounds you're carrying, and why that changes what retrieving them actually requires of you.

▪️ Thinking as an Attachment Figure — Why overthinking isn't a habit, it's who you got attached to when nobody else was safe, and why that makes it so terrifying to stop.

▪️ Dating Your Own Shadow — Why the person who repels you on sight and the person who pulls you in are both showing you something you disowned.

▪️ Your Dreams Know First — How the unconscious works out what you can't face yet, and why the images it keeps sending are worth taking seriously instead of interpreting to death.

▪️ The Mother You Never Had — Why chasing a version of your mother who never existed isn't delusion, and where that longing actually belongs.

-----------------------

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✨SAFE WITHIN:A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. Early bird pricing through 9/17 👉 adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin

--

You finally go no contact after decades of abuse. Then one day the phone rings, and suddenly you're legally responsible for their entire life.

Katherine St Claire is a writer, abuse survivor, and cycle breaker who grew up in a home defined by violence, silence, and gaslighting. After four years of no contact, her father was arrested at 82 for trying to kill her mother, and within six hours she and her sister were his legal guardians.

Since then Katherine has become an advocate for adult children of dysfunctional families who end up responsible for the care of the parents who harmed them. She's building caringforabusiveparents.org a site that pulls together the legal, financial, and elder care help available to someone in this position, all in one place. It goes live in September. Until then you can find her on Instagram at @katherinestclaire_writes

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Check out Omaha Steaks and use my code BEEF for a great deal:https://www.omahasteaks.com

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✨SAFE WITHIN:A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. Early bird pricing through 9/17 👉 adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin

--

You feel like a fraud bracing for the moment everyone finally figures you out. And no amount of accomplishment or evidence ever changes that feeling that you're not who you say you are.

For those of us with complex trauma, the imposter syndrome doesn't just live in your head. It lives in your body and your nervous system. Today, we're diving deep into why you feel like such a fraud so you can stop mistaking that feeling for the truth about who you are.

✨ What this episode explores

Toxic Shame Fueled Imposter Syndrome — Why this version isn't about competence at all, but a belief that something fundamentally broken about you cancels out anything good you do.

The Golden Child of a Narcissist — How a role that has nothing to do with you makes it impossible to own your accomplishments and success.

Parentification Fueled Imposter Syndrome — How carrying adult responsibilities you should never have had to carry leads to feeling like a kid trapped in an adult body who has no idea what they're doing.

Why You Never Do the Thing — How imposter syndrome shows up as avoidance, freeze, and procrastination to keep anyone from seeing you as a fraud.

Feeling Like You Conned Everyone — How surfacing trauma can make you feel like you've deceived every person in your life, retroactively rewriting years of real connection as a lie.

Imposter Syndrome About Your Own Trauma — Why the same mechanism that makes you doubt your accomplishments makes you doubt your pain ever counted.

Imposter syndrome seems to plague us all, but for those of us with complex trauma, the imposter doesn't just live in your head. It lives in your body and your nervous system. And today, we're looking at this with a depth that helps you actually confront it. So you can stop mistaking it for the truth about you.

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Check out Omaha Steaks and use my code BEEF for a great deal:https://www.omahasteaks.com

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✨SAFE WITHIN:A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. Early bird pricing through 9/17 👉 adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin

--

Somebody doesn't text you back and suddenly you feel like you're going to die. You're not being pathetic. You're in a flashback.

Welcome to the living hell of emotional flashbacks. Your reaction never matches the situation in front of you, and even when you know that in your head, it doesn't make you feel any better. This is the single most painful symptom of CPTSD.

Today I'm taking you all the way back, from the very first emotional flashback I ever had at nine years old to the most intense one of my entire life just a few years ago. I'm not holding anything back.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️Your Brain During a Flashback — Understanding the two separate mechanisms and childhood experiences that produce one, and why only one of them involves a memory at all.

▪️ When There's No Memory to Point To — How the small stuff repeated a thousand times encodes just as deep as one terrifying moment, so there's nothing to trace it back to and nothing to prove it "counts."

▪️Walking a Kid Through Trauma — The exact steps a calm adult takes to stop a scary moment from wiring in for life, and why saying it out loud is what does the healing.

▪️ Recognizing a Flashback in Real Time — How to tell you're in one and not just upset, and the first move that starts pulling you back out.

▪️ Your Triggers Are Your Treasures — What the four categories of trigger reveal, including the ones you'd never suspect like success and praise, and why whatever sets you off is pointing straight at the wound.

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️Ep 201 | Trauma-Bonded No More: My Journey Through Shame, Regression & Finding My Way Back

▪️ SHITSHOW SATURDAY #164 |The Living Hell of Emotional Flashbacks

Check out Omaha Steaks and use my code BEEF for a great deal:https://www.omahasteaks.com

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The Abandonment Trauma Queen is back on the pod, and today we're heading into uncharted territory: borderline vs. abandonment trauma. What truly separates the two, and why the BPD label gets handed out way too easily.

Susan Anderson is a psychotherapist and a pioneer in the field of abandonment trauma, and she's spent the last three decades helping people heal. She's the author of The Abandonment Recovery Workbook (a book that truly changed my life) and Taming Your Outer Child. Having worked with thousands of people over the course of her career, she joins me to share what she's learned about telling the difference between BPD and CPTSD.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️What Actually Separates BPD From CPTSD — Why the dividing line isn't emotional intensity, but whether the pain distorts reality into a false narrative.

▪️Why Untreated Abandonment Escalates — How emotional reactivity compounds from one relationship to the next when the wound underneath is never addressed.

▪️Overthinking as an Abandonment Response — Why compulsive rumination is your brain searching for a lost attachment object, not actually solving anything.

▪️Why the Outer Child Fights Change— How the self-sabotaging part is persistent by design and actively wants to stay in charge.

▪️Self-Love as Behavior, Not Affirmation— Why the relationship with yourself is built through concrete action and written dialogue, not by deciding to love yourself.

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️ Ep 47 — Abandonment Trauma w/ Susan Anderson

▪️ Ep 97 — The Outer Child & Abandonment Trauma w/ Susan Anderson

▪️ Ep 161 — Abandonment Trauma Expert Susan Anderson on Rejection and Equating Love with Insecurity

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Shitshow Saturday #127

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The voice in your head won't shut up because if it did, you'd have to feel what's in your body.

Dr. Joe Flanders is a clinical psychologist based in Montreal who specializes in IFS, mindfulness, and psychedelic-assisted therapy. He's also the founder of Refuge, a community of practice built around experiential psychotherapy, and co-host of the podcast "Not Too Tight, Not Too Loose." But despite all his training and years of meditation, it was his own shortcomings as a father and desire to have a real relationship with his kids for the rest of his life that pushed Joe to do the deeper work of healing what insight alone never touched.

AI in Psychotherapy: A Risk Reduction Approach to Human Flourishing

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Mike's first Shitshow episode 👉 SHITSHOW SATURDAY #127

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Shitshow Saturday #127

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A death doula shares what really happens between a toxic parent and their child in the parent's final moments.

Kat Courtney is a death doula and plant medicine facilitator who has sat with dozens of people in their final moments. After a childhood spent people-pleasing a father who only wanted the happy version of her, a near-death experience in her early twenties, and years of using ayahuasca to finally face the family wounds she'd normalized her whole life, she learned that the things we run from don't disappear - they wait. This is a conversation about what surfaces at the very end, when the body lets go and the truth we've avoided our entire lives finally has nowhere left to hide.

✨What this episode explores:

▪️ When Repair Becomes Possible —Why for some people, truly healing a relationship with a parent only happens after they've died, and how to do it.

▪️ The Final Conversation — The apologies and accountability that can come from a dying parent, and why healing is still possible when they don't.

▪️ The Trauma You Avoided Your Entire Life— Why someone who spent their whole life avoiding their pain can suddenly confront it on their deathbed.

▪️ The Power of Ibogaine — Why this psychedelic stands out from others for treating addiction and trauma, and what the treatment process looks like.

▪️ How to Know if a Plant Medicine Facilitator Is Safe —Warning signs and specific questions to assess whether someone is truly qualified to hold this work.

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Everything you hate about yourself starts making sense the moment you realize you're not one person - you're a whole system trying to survive.

Britt Frank is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in trauma, trained in Internal Family Systems and Somatic Experiencing. She's the author of The Science of Stuck and Align Your Mind, which translate complex trauma and parts work into language people actually understand. Britt grew up in a covertly dysfunctional family, later found herself in a cult, survived addiction and domestic violence, and came out the other side not healed, but functional. In this episode, she shares how recognizing your multiplicity -the different parts of you all trying to protect you in their own ways - becomes the key to actually changing patterns that have haunted you.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️ Your Shadow Parts — How the parts you exiled to survive become the gifts you can't access in adulthood.

▪️ When Belonging Becomes a Trap — Why the unmet need to belong draws you into high-control systems like cults or abusive partners.

▪️ Your Inner Critic as a Scared Kid — That relentless voice in your head isn’t always bully, but a frightened part just trying to keeping you small.

▪️Parts Work for Treating Addiction — Understanding what your addiction protects you from works where logic, love, and willpower have all failed.

▪️ Functional, Not Fixed — Why the goal is not to be healed or whole, but to understand your system well enough so you can exist within it peacefully.

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The thing you've been medicating is the same thing your parents shamed you for.

Kristen Carder is the host of the I Have ADHD podcast and a dually certified coach who's back on the pod today to take the ADHD and complex PTSD connection deeper — through the lens of your nervous system and what it actually needs to function. She talks openly about how medication wasn't fixing her, it was translating what her body had been trying to tell her all along, and how the shame she inherited about her own wiring became the hardest part to undo. This conversation is about what happens when you stop fighting how you're built and start designing a life that actually works with your nervous system instead of against it.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️ What Medication Actually Does (And What It Doesn't) — Why medication isn't fixing you; it's translating what your nervous system's been trying to tell you all along, and why that distinction changes everything.

▪️ Why You Regulate Differently Than They Do — How ADHD nervous systems need completely different things to reach calm than what every productivity expert and well-meaning friend has told you to try.

▪️ The Performance Cost of Living in a Neurotypical World — Why masking your brain's actual operating system to fit someone else's expectations exhausts you faster than the ADHD itself.

▪️ How ADHD and Complex PTSD Show Up Identically in Relationships— Why the way ADHD impacts intimacy, trust, and connection mirrors relational trauma responses so closely that somatic healing works for both.

▪️ Why Forcing Focus Is Just Another Form of Self-Abandonment — How the constant battle to be "normal" recreates the same disconnection from yourself that traumatized nervous systems are already surviving.

Pre-order Kristen's upcoming book, You're Not in Trouble, coming October 2026.

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

Ep 110 | Childhood Trauma & ADHD w/ Kristen Carder

Ep 170 | The Intersection of Trauma, ADHD and Toxic Family Dynamics w/ Kristen Carder

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When your inner child says don't be selfish, your inner teen says we don't owe them shit, and your true self asks what we can live with.

Lisa D. Stinson, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, former Navy psychologist, and trauma specialist with over twenty years treating survivors of narcissistic family systems. She grew up the family scapegoat to a narcissistic mother and an enabling father, left home at seventeen, and has spent her life since at a deliberate distance from the people who raised her. Her newly published book, The Obligation Myth, explores the question almost no one prepares you for: what you actually owe the parent who hurt you once they're the one who needs help — and how to answer it in a way you can live with long after they're gone.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️Why Caregiving Reactivates Your Childhood Role — The unique challenges an aging parent triggers in the scapegoat, the invisible child, and the golden child.

▪️When Every Part of You Wants Something Different — How to honor the conflicting voices an aging parent stirs up without letting any single one decide how you show up.

▪️Competent Caregiving Without the Emotional Investment — Why you can meet a difficult parent's practical needs without handing back the self you rebuilt.

▪️Why Going No Contact Isn't One Size Fits All — How estrangement can be permanent or something you move in and out of, and why neither is the wrong answer.

▪️The Deathbed Conversation That Backfires — Why the forgiveness or confrontation you keep rehearsing can leave you more wounded than silence would.

▪️Becoming the Protector You Never Had — Why the grief of what you never got eases once you fiercely protect your younger self the way no one did back then.

Lisa's Substack

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

Ep 140 |Healing from Emotionally Immature Parents: Grief Behind Anger w/ Morgan Pommels

Ep 139 |The Power of Reparenting Your Inner Family w/ Barb Nangle

Ep 90 |Family Scapegoat Abuse w/ Rebecca Mandeville

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Your childhood taught your body that love means waiting to be left. No amount of insight changes that.

Val Rubin is a trauma-informed somatic coach and host of the Anxiety Recovery Podcast who specializes in healing the fear of abandonment through the nervous system rather than the mind — and she's speaking from the inside out. For six years she lived with chronic pain that every doctor missed, until hypnotherapy resolved it in months and set her on a path that eventually ran straight through her own trauma bond. This conversation is about what it actually takes to change when you already understand yourself.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️ Why Your Gut Reads Danger Before Your Brain Does —How your nervous system builds a subconscious safety database in childhood that keeps running your adult relationships on autopilot.

▪️ Why Unavailable People Feel Like Home— How your nervous system built its definition of love around someone who couldn't give it, and why that template outlasts every therapist you've ever had.

▪️ Chronic Pain as Stored Emotion —How unprocessed emotional pain migrates into the body as physical symptoms when there's nowhere else for it to go.

▪️ The Trauma Bond Withdrawal —What your nervous system goes through when you leave a toxic relationship, and why it has nothing to do with willpower.

▪️ Building Secure Attachment From Within —How somatic healing retrains the nervous system to generate the sense of safety that relationships keep failing to provide.

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

Ep 130 |Addicted to Fear & Chaos: The Adult Child Inner Drug Store w/ Dr. Scott Lyons

Ep 161 |Abandonment Trauma Expert Susan Anderson on Rejection and Equating Love with Insecurity

Ep 173 |Secret Language of the Body: Somatic Healing w/ Karden Rabin

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Waiting to be chosen is the slowest way to abandon yourself.

Joe Ryan is a trauma recovery coach and host of The Joe Ryan Podcast — and today, he's speaking from the other side of the most profound grief of his life. After losing his best friend to cancer and facing his own cancer scare six weeks later, he chose to sit in the pain for a year and a half instead of running from it — and what surfaced wasn't just the grief, it was every abandonment wound underneath, including the lifelong, exhausting pattern of waiting to be chosen. This conversation is about what grief actually gives you when you stop running from it, and the moment you realize the only person you ever needed to choose you was yourself.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️ Why Grief Is the Price of Love — How the walls that protected you from being hurt are the same walls keeping out the connection you most want.

▪️ The Lifelong Wait to Be Chosen — Why no amount of being picked by someone else fixes what only choosing yourself can, and what shifts when you finally stop performing for it.

▪️ The Self-Abandonment Underneath the Abandonment Wound — Why the people who feel abandoned the most are often the ones abandoning themselves first, and how to recognize it in your own patterns.

▪️ What Sitting in Grief Actually Looks Like — The body-level practice of staying with discomfort long enough for the rumination to quiet down and the real material underneath to surface.

▪️ The Performance Mask — The shiny, no-cracks version of yourself you built so no one would see the needy little kid underneath, and what it costs to keep wearing it.

▪️ Capacity Is the Whole Game — Why the work you do in the calm seasons becomes the difference between drowning and grieving when the next loss comes.

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️Ep 39 —The Fear of Abandonment w/ Joe Ryan

▪️Ep 91 — Complex Trauma, Dating & Setting Boundaries w/ Joe Ryan

▪️Ep 204 — The Deeper Truth About Fawning: How Survival Turns Into Self-Abandonment w/ Ingrid Clayton

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What your partner does when you fall apart is what your relationship was actually built on.

Tarah and EJ Kerwin are licensed therapists, co-founders of Relationship Renovation Counseling in Tucson, and hosts of the Relationship Renovation podcast who teach what they’ve lived inside their own marriage. They met as colleagues at a treatment center, got married, had twins on their honeymoon, and spent the early years of a blended family forced to do the work they'd spent their careers teaching. But the real test came years later, when Tarah's repressed childhood trauma surfaced and they had to figure out what healing trauma in a relationship actually looks like in real time. This is a conversation about what it means to be truly supported by your partner through your darkest moments.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️ Avoidance Disguised as Calm — Why the partner who seems unflappable is often more emotionally walled off than the one openly struggling.

▪️ What Real Support in a Relationship Actually Looks Like — Why healing trauma in a relationship depends less on what your partner says and more on whether they've done their own work.

▪️ The Body Remembers Before the Mind Does — Why repressed childhood trauma surfaces through symptoms, startle responses, and somatic flashbacks long before it surfaces as memory.

▪️ Why It Feels Safer to Hate Them Than Feel the Hurt — How judging the people who hurt you as "just bad" protects you from the shame of having needed their love.

▪️ The Specific Shame Underneath Childhood Sexual Abuse — Why survivors often feel dirty, blame themselves, and brace for rejection if anyone truly sees them.

▪️ Why Pressure to Heal Faster Keeps You Stuck — How a partner's expectation around intimacy, progress, or recovery can be the exact thing keeping the other person frozen.

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️ Ep 203 |The Nervous System Side of Attachment w/ Heidi Priebe

▪️ Ep 202 |When Relationships Become Battlefields w/ Tian Dayton: Relational Triggers, Inner Child Fights & Emotional Sobriety

▪️Ep 161 |Abandonment Trauma Expert Susan Anderson on Rejection and Equating Love with Insecurity

▪️ 204 |The Deeper Truth About Fawning: How Survival Turns Into Self-Abandonment w/ Ingrid Clayton

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Doing the work means you start picking healthier people. It doesn't mean stuff stops coming up when you do.

Patrick Teahan is a psychotherapist, childhood trauma educator, and YouTube creator. In today's conversation, he shares about how he kept trying to save his alcoholic mother through the women he dated, the relationship in his mid-twenties that surfaced wounds he thought he'd already healed, and what's still getting revealed inside his marriage decades later.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️ More Will Always Be Revealed — Why long-term relationships keep pulling up wounds you swore were worked through, and what those triggers are actually for.

▪️ Chasing Unavailable People — The unconscious pattern that turns every adult relationship into another attempt to get a parent to wake up.

▪️ The Therapy-Resistant Partner — What's actually happening when someone close to you keeps asking "why aren't you better yet," and the projection running in both directions.

▪️ The Self-Righteousness Trigger — How childhood trauma turns every trigger into a moral failing, and the self-righteousness hiding inside legitimate pain.

▪️ Why Kids Choose Self-Blame — The protective mechanism that turns toward self-blame because the alternative is unsafe for a child to hold.

▪️ The Open Family Secret — What it does to a kid to grow up where everyone knows what's happening, but no one is allowed to name it.

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️ Ep 107 - Unfinished Business From Childhood Trauma w/ Patrick Teahan

▪️ Ep 202 | When Relationships Become Battlefields w/ Tian Dayton: Relational Triggers, Inner Child Fights & Emotional Sobriety

▪️Ep 161 |Abandonment Trauma Expert Susan Anderson on Rejection and Equating Love with Insecurity

-----------------------

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SHITSHOW SATURDAY #118 - Sam B.

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The voice beating you up, the shame absorbing it, the part that doesn't want you to feel it — that's the triangle you're trapped in.

Jessica Fern is a certified clinical trauma therapist, David Cooley is a restorative justice practitioner, and together they co-authored Polywise. In their most recent book, Transforming the Shame Triangle, they take Karpman's classic drama triangle and flip it inward to capture the inner dynamic that keeps trauma survivors stuck. Through a parts work lens, they show how to work with the inner critic, shame, and escaper to find true healing. 

✨ What this episode explores

▪️How the Shame Triangle Starts — Why the cycle almost always kicks off with the inner critic firing first, even when what you notice is the escape behavior.

▪️The Critic That's Still in the Room — Why people with parents, partners, or bosses actively criticizing them often feel pure shame instead of a strong inner voice.

▪️The Hidden Shame of Under-Functioning — Why being the "lazy" one carries a layer of self-judgment that over-functioners never have to face

▪️ The Symptoms That Aren't the Problem — Why the behaviors that get you diagnosed (perfecting, numbing, raging, zoning) are downstream of the part actually driving the cycle.

▪️ Inner Critic to Inner Coach — What it actually takes to transform the voice tearing you down into something on your side

▪️ Impact vs. Wrongdoing — Why telling a part of you "you wronged me" keeps the cycle alive, and the restorative justice reframe that breaks it.

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️ Ep 101 | The Neuroscience of Toxic Shame w/ Robyn Gobbel

▪️ Ep 137 | Healing The Inner Child Through Parts Work w/ Michelle Chalfant

▪️ Ep 215 | Repeat or Recover w/ Dr. Tian Dayton: The Cost of Relational Trauma

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The most painful rock bottoms don't come from a relationship with a substance. They come from a relationship with a person.               

David Deane Haskel is an author of several fiction books, with his most recent being the memoir Wounded Angels. After losing his mother to suicide at the age of four, he spent the rest of his childhood navigating chaos at home and at school, while never feeling like he fit in. After finally finding sobriety, it was a codependent relationship that took him to new depths of pain and allowed him to embark on a journey to heal his unresolved trauma.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️ Hitting a Codependency Bottom — Why a codependent relationship hijacks the nervous system like a substance

▪️ Why Trauma Surfaces in Sobriety — Why most addictions function as a way to regulate unresolved trauma, and why removing the substance forces that trauma to the surface.

▪️ The Narcissistic Discard — Why a sudden, unilateral cutoff by someone you trusted reactivates the original abandonment wound in ways no other rupture can.

▪️ The Unique Attachment Wound of Losing a Parent in Childhood — How losing a parent to death or childhood in childhood creates an imprint no other loss does

▪️ The Repetition Compulsion of the Scapegoat — How scapegoats keep recreating the family system they grew up in by choosing partners who avoid accountability.

▪️ The Childhood Origins of Shame Attacks — How a single moment of overwhelming shame can lock the body into the same response for decades.

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️ 201: Trauma-Bonded No More — My Journey Through Shame, Regression & Finding My Way Back

▪️Ep 56 — The Truth About Codependency: It’s Not Empathy, It’s Survival w/ Dr. Sarah Michaud

▪️Ep 158 - Stop People-Pleasing & Find Your Power w/ Hailey Magee

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Your childhood taught you good things don't last. Your body still believes it.

Jeannine Rashidi is a TEDx speaker and bestselling author of Abundance Beyond Trauma —and her work on why we can't feel joy after a hard childhood is built on a story she lived first. With an ACE score of 10 out of 10, three marriages, and decades of confusing chaos for love, she eventually realized her nervous system had been waiting for the other shoe to drop her entire life. This is a conversation about what happens in the body when good things arrive, and why it takes so long to learn how to let them stay.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️ Why Dysfunctional Childhoods Block Your Capacity to Feel Good — How growing up around chaos doesn't just hurt you, it wires a nervous system that filters joy out before you can register it.

▪️ Why You Don't Feel Worthy of Joy — The quiet belief underneath the bracing that says good things belong to other people, and where that belief actually gets installed.

▪️ Always Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop — Why a nervous system that learned good things end becomes incapable of receiving good things, even when nothing's actually wrong.

▪️ When Anger Suppresses, the Body Expresses — Why the rage you don't get to feel finds another way out, and what's actually waiting underneath it asking to be heard.

▪️ Is It Your Gut or Is It Your Trauma — How to tell the difference between real intuition and a fear response when both feel exactly like a hunch.

Abundance Beyond Trauma: The Joyful Unfolding Journey

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️ Ep 84 — Abundance Beyond Trauma w/ Jeannine Rashidi

▪️Ep 173 — Secret Language of the Body: Somatic Healing w/ Karden Rabin

▪️Ep 119 — Why Nothing's F*cking Wrong With You w/ Ana Del Castillo

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The moment you finally see a parent clearly is the moment the grief begins.

Taylor Pearl is a therapist specializing in complex trauma, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, and survivors of narcissistic abuse. She grew up as the golden child to her brother's scapegoat in a controlling, image-obsessed home with a narcissistic father. This episode is about what the good daughter has to grieve when she finally stops playing the part: the father she thought she had, the role that kept her loved, and the self she's been rebuilding ever since.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️ The Golden Child's Specific Grief — Why leaving the parent who "chose" you carries a grief the scapegoat doesn't have to carry.

▪️ The Identified Patient vs. the Narcissistic Scapegoat — The difference between being told "there's something pathologically wrong with you" and being told "you are inherently bad."

▪️The Grief of Going No Contact — What actually follows cutting off a parent: the relief, the regression, and the grief that doesn't end on any timeline.

▪️The Sibling You Lose When You Heal — Why your closest sibling bonds often crumble the moment you stop playing your role, and why siblings still stuck in the dysfunction can experience your healing as betrayal.

▪️ What Real Repair With a Parent Requires — What a parent actually has to acknowledge for the relationship to rebuild, and what it means when they can't.

Taylor's IG

Taylor TikTok

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️ Ep 125 |Healing From Toxic & Narcissistic Parents w/ Jerry Wise

▪️Ep 123 |Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents w/ Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson

▪️Ep 153 |When Shame Becomes Our Identity: Toxic Shame & Scapegoat Abuse

-----------------------

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Jenny's first appearance on the pod - Shitshow Saturday #129

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Tammy Sollenberger is an IFS therapist and host of The One Inside podcast, and today she's not holding back. She shares about the sudden loss of her father and a devastating breakup — and how both pulled her back to a wound she's been carrying since before she was born: unwanted.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️Grieving a Parent You Had a Complicated Relationship With — What it's like to mourn someone who both loved you and failed you.

▪️Hiding Yourself to Keep Them —The many ways you disappear to stay in relationship, from losing your voice to hiding the parts of yourself that feel too risky to share.

▪️Healthy vs. Unhealthy Reassurance —The difference between co-regulation and handing your whole nervous system over to someone else to manage.

▪️The Wound of Being Unwanted — How feeling unwanted as a child becomes the reason you settle for crumbs as an adult

▪️Connecting With Preverbal Parts — How to reach the parts of you that formed in utero or infancy, long before you had language for what you were experiencing.

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️Ep 190 | The Purpose of Our Pain: IFS Therapy to Heal Complex Trauma w/ Tammy Sollenberger

▪️Ep 204 | The Deeper Truth About Fawning: How Survival Turns Into Self-Abandonment w/ Ingrid Clayton

▪️Ep 140 | Healing from Emotionally Immature Parents: Grief Behind Anger w/ Morgan Pommells

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The parts of you that carry the most shame are the parts that most need to be seen.

Paul Gilmartin, host of the Mental Illness Happy Hour, is back on Adult Child for the third time, and this is the most vulnerable he's ever been. He shares the story of his recent relapse, how the covert incest he survived as a child shaped his sexuality in ways he's been ashamed of for most of his life, and what it took to finally get honest about all of it. This conversation is about what it takes to let people see the parts of you that you've been hiding the hardest.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️ Sexual Shame After Abuse — How childhood sexual abuse can rewire your arousal patterns so that what turns you on echoes the abuse itself

▪️ When Abuse Hides as Care — How to recognize covert incest when there was no single "event" to point to, just a parent whose love always felt like it was taking something from you.

▪️ The Inner Critic Is an Inner Abuser — Why your nervous system responds to your own self-talk the same way it would respond to an external threat, and what that means for how you talk to yourself in recovery.

▪️ The Corrective Relationship — How to identify whether a partner is loving you in spite of your darkest parts or actually loving all of you, and why that distinction changes everything.

▪️ Relapse as a Doorway — How to use a relapse to trace the thread back to the original wound instead of getting stuck in the shame spiral that keeps the cycle going.

▪️ Accessing Self-Compassion — What it actually looks like to be gentle with yourself while you're still in the mess, not after you've cleaned it up.

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️ Ep 124 |Intimacy Disorders & Childhood Trauma w/ Paul Gilmartin

▪️ Ep 160 |Betrayal Bonds, Enmeshment and Sex Addiction w/ Dr. Lara Dye

▪️ Ep 163 |Breaking The Shame: Adult Children of Sex Addicts w/ Dr. Kenneth Adams

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The moment you finally see yourself is the moment you no longer fear being seen.

Jesse Deal is a trauma recovery coach, parts work practitioner, and host of the podcast Trauma Unbound. After a lifetime of playing it small, he walked away from the life he'd been surviving in and started building the one he was actually meant for. This is a conversation about the fear of being seen, finding authenticity through parts work, and what happens when you stop waiting to have it all together and just go.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️ Why Being Seen Feels Dangerous — Where the fear of being visible comes from and how to start dismantling the false story it's been telling you

▪️ Your Body as a Guide — How somatic awareness shows you what needs to change and points you toward a life that actually fits.

▪️ From Learned Helplessness to Hopefulness — How to start building the belief that the world can actually be safe and supportive.

▪️ What Parts Work Looks Like in Real Time — What it actually sounds like when someone checks in with a protector mid-conversation and comes out the other side more grounded.

▪️ When Authenticity Feels Unsafe — How learning your feelings were "too much" as a kid taught you that being yourself is what gets you hurt.

Jesse's Links🔗 Website.| YouTube |IG. |Apple Podcast |Spotify

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️Ep 168 |The Fragmented Self: Parts Work & Dissociation w/ Jesse D.

▪️Ep 190 |The Purpose of Our Pain: IFS Therapy to Heal Complex Trauma w/ Tammy Sollenberger

▪️Ep 145 |The Journey to Emotional Authenticity w/ Kenny Weiss

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When the person you're trying to save feels exactly like the parent you couldn't.

Marina Triner is a somatic coach and host of the Deep Within podcast who helps people move through deep-rooted patterns of stress, emotional disconnection, and shutdown through nervous system regulation and body-based healing. In today's episode, she shares how outgrowing her marriage allowed her to access deeper truths about her parents, her childhood, and deeply rooted patterns she hadn't seen before.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️What Happens When You Heal and They Don't — Why outgrowing a relationship and the guilt of leaving can feel heavier than the pain of staying. 

▪️The Relationships That Keep You From Seeing the Truth — How a partner can block you from from facing what's actually unresolved with your parents, your childhood, and yourself.

▪️Why You Can't Stop Trying to Save Them — How the fixer pattern was never about the other person; it was about the child inside you refusing to give up on saving your parent.

▪️The Shame of "I Should Be Further Along" — Why years of healing don't make you immune to old patterns, and why falling back in isn't proof you've failed.

▪️When Asking for Help Is the Breakthrough — How letting people see you fall apart can be the most radical thing you do for your healing.

🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️Ep 201 | Trauma-Bonded No More — My Journey Through Shame, Regression & Finding My Way Back

▪️Ep 142 | Terry Real on Relational Trauma, Love Addiction and Shame

▪️ Ep 130 | Addicted to Fear & Chaos: The Adult Child Inner Drug Store w/ Dr. Scott Lyons

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Cory Scott is a therapist, somatic experiencing practitioner, EMDR specialist, and VITA sex, love, and relationship coach who's back for round two. As the scapegoat child in her family, she spent years channeling repressed anger from childhood into righteous blame, eating disorders, and a stress response she'd mistaken for her personality. She now helps people access the aliveness and freedom that trauma buried — through somatic healing, intensives on her 80-acre property in Virginia, and the kind of deep body-based work that goes where talk therapy alone can't reach.

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You don't know who you are because you were too busy being who she needed you to be.

Viviana Vozmediano is a trauma-informed coach who works with women who grew up with emotionally unavailable mothers - and she's speaking from experience. After spending her childhood as a Jehovah's Witness trying to be the perfect daughter to earn her mother's love, she was excommunicated and lost her entire community overnight. 

✨ What this episode explores

▪️Why Being the "Good One" Never Works — How becoming the easy, rule-following child was never about being good, but a strategy to earn love that was never available on those terms

▪️The Grief of Losing Someone Who's Still Alive — What it means to mourn a parent you can still call but can't actually reach, and why no one prepared you for that kind of loss

▪️When Your Whole Identity Belongs to Someone Else — How growing up performing for an emotionally unavailable parent can leave you with no idea who you are once the performance stops

▪️Why a Healthy Relationship Feels Like the Hardest Thing You've Ever Done — How finally being safe with someone can surface everything you suppressed to survive the relationships that weren't

▪️What Happens When You Lose Everyone Overnight — How being cut off from your entire world creates an abandonment wound so deep it keeps you in the next bad situation for years

🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

Ep 136 | Healing the Mother Wound: Why It Hurts and How We Begin to Heal w/ Bethany Webster Ep 103 | Religious Trauma & Abuse w/ Dr. Laura AndersonEp 161 | Abandonment Trauma Expert Susan Anderson on Rejection and Equating Love with Insecurity Connects

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What if the anxiety you feel didn’t start with you at all? This episode uncovers how inherited trauma and unconscious patterns shape our lives,

Mark Wolynn is a leading expert in inherited family trauma and director of the Family Constellation Institute. , and author of the acclaimed ‘It Didn’t Start with You.

He recently published a revised and updated edition of his international bestseller It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, along with The Official It Didn't Start with You Workbook.

The 4 Unconscious Themes — The most common ways we carry or repeat family trauma without knowing itThe Latest in Epigenetics — What new research shows about inherited traumaYour Core Trauma Language — How the key to healing often lies hidden in your own wordsWhat You Carried From the Womb: How in-utero trauma shapes your nervous systemThe Break in Early Attachment: Why not feeling seen, known, or soothed by your mother qualifies as big T trauma

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This is an epidemic no one is talking about: adult phone addiction.

Millions of people are struggling worldwide—and most don’t realize how much it’s impacting their focus, mood, relationships, and ability to be present.

In this episode, I break down 8 manifestations of compulsive phone behavior, how to tell when you’re in it, and why “just stop” doesn’t work when your phone has become your nervous system’s fastest relief.

Device checking compulsionSocial media compulsion (passive scrolling + active participation)Mobile gamingInformation/content compulsion (news, rabbit holes, constant consuming)Online shoppingDating appsWork/productivity compulsionFitness/biometric tracking compulsion

Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter

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Leah Carey is a Sex and Relationship Coach and host of the Good Girls Talk About Sex podcast. She helps thoughtful, self-aware adults who grew up in fear-based environments to stop freezing, over-explaining, and second-guessing themselves in relationships. In other words: in a world filled with confusion and fear, Leah helps sex make sense. Drawing on her own healing journey from fear and repression, she specializes in working with people from high-control childhoods like Purity Culture, narcissistic abuse, cults, and other patriarchal abuse.

✨ What this episode explores:

Freeze and Fawn in Intimacy — How these survival patterns shape your sexual relationships, and what it means to rewrite them.From Transactional Love — How receiving conditional love as a child shaped your beliefs about self-worth and connection.Releasing Sexual Shame — How letting go of past repression leads to genuine self-acceptanceBoundaries Without Fear — How learning to set healthy boundaries allows you to step out of old roles and into authentic connectionsReclaiming Your Voice — How learning to express your needs transforms your relationships

xoleahcarey.substack.com

Social media as @xoleahcarey

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Maggie Nick is a trauma therapist and author of the newly published book Good Kids: Why You Suffered in Silence and How to Break the Cycle. She grew up as the good kid in a home with a personality-disordered mother - performing, complying, and quietly falling apart while making sure nobody ever saw the real her. After years of working through what she thought was the "real" trauma, she discovered that relational shame was the deepest layer underneath everything else.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️Relational Shame as the Deepest Layer: How every surface-level struggle (the perfectionism, the people pleasing, the self-hatred) is just smoke from the same fire: being made to feel like the real you is fundamentally bad.

▪️The "Good Kid" Was a Survival Strategy, Not a Personality: Why compliance, fawning, and never misbehaving wasn't temperament. It was your nervous system's way of staying loved and staying safe.

▪️The Silent Treatment Is Emotional Violence: Why it's one of the most normalized forms of emotional abuse and what it does to a kid when love can be jerked away without warning.

▪️The Fight Response Turned Inward: What happens when you never had permission to push back. That energy doesn't disappear. It becomes the vicious inner critic, the eating disorder, the relentless self-punishment.

▪️The Check Engine Lights Everyone Misses: Why the kids (and adults) who look like they have it the most together are often the ones suffering the most, and what to actually look for underneath the performance.

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Duane Osterlind is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Certified Sex Addiction Therapist – and the host of The Addicted Mind. He specializes in helping individuals and couples impacted by sexual compulsion, porn addiction, and betrayal trauma. His Shame to Resilience group program helps men who've caused sexual betrayal learn to regulate their shame so they can finally show up with the accountability, empathy, and remorse their partners need to heal. 

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️Technology Created a New Kind of Addiction We Don't Know How to Treat Yet — Why early exposure to high-speed internet porn rewires developing brains differently than any generation before, and how phones and games use the same mechanisms to collapse the space between impulse and action.

▪️How Childhood Trauma Becomes Sexual Compulsion — The pipeline from hero/caretaker roles to dismissive attachment to using sexual arousal as the only escape from loneliness; why men especially learn to shrink their emotional lives and self-soothe through isolation.

▪️How Betrayal Is About Stolen Consent — How deception and gaslighting in relationships cause legitimate post-traumatic stress; why betrayed partners aren't "stupid for not seeing it," and what it means when someone destroys trust while still deeply loving you.

▪️Shame-Based Accountability Doesn't Work — Why the person who caused harm has to do their own shame work first before they can show up for their partner; how "compassionate accountability" is the only way through, and why shame can only heal when it's witnessed by others.

▪️The Four Phases of Healing Betrayal — The predictable 3-5 year journey from crisis to scaffolding to safety-building to repair, and why partners need to see consistent, trustworthy behavior over time before post-traumatic growth can begin

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Dr. Tian Dayton is a clinical psychologist, Senior Fellow at The Meadows, and author of 15 books, including the upcoming Growing Up With Addiction: How Adult Children of Addicts Can Heal Family Trauma, CPTSD, and Codependency. In this conversation, Tian draws on her 40+ years as a professional in trauma and addiction, alongside her own lived experience growing up with alcoholism, to paint a deeply human portrait of breaking the cycle of generational trauma.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️ Why ACA trauma is different from other childhood trauma— How growing up with alcoholic parents creates relational wounds that get passed down unless we interrupt the cycle

▪️Healing complex trauma requires nervous system work, not just talk therapy — Why intellectual understanding keeps us stuck; how stored survival energy shows up in your body

▪️Perfectionism is killing your recovery (and what to do instead) — Learning to live in the messy middle instead of crisis-to-crisis; why repair matters more than getting it right

▪️Internal Family Systems (IFS) for adult children — Understanding your many "parts" (not just one inner child) and how they show up in relationships and healing

▪️Process addictions and dissociation in ACAs — How phone addiction, food, and other behaviors help us check out; when coping crosses into something more serious

▪️The difference between being victimized and staying in victimhood — How to honor what happened without getting stuck in victim identity that blocks your path forward

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Does narcissistic personality disorder always trace back to trauma? This episode explores what truly lies beneath personality disorders.

Dr. Peter Salerno is a psychologist specializing in personality disorders and the author of “The Nature and Nurture of Narcissism” and “Cruelty by Nature.” His work challenges mainstream assumptions, arguing that personality disorders can develop independently of childhood trauma, emphasizing biological and trait-based factors.

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If you keep getting re-triggered by the people you’re trying to heal from, healing starts to feel impossible. This episode unpacks when taking space is the most loving thing you can do for yourself.

Dr. Sharon Martin is a psychotherapist and author specializing in helping adult children recover from difficult childhoods. She's passionate about helping adults overcome the effects of narcissistic and emotional abuse, learn to set boundaries, and develop self-worth. She writes extensively about codependency, perfectionism, and healthy relationships, including the popular blog Conquering Codependency for Psychology Today. Dr. Martin is the author of four self-help books, including The Better Boundaries Workbook and Cutting Ties with Your Parents.

✨ What this episode explores:

Estrangement as Nervous System Safety — Why no contact can be right choice when repeated interactions keep pulling you back into trauma responses.

Boundaries That Aren’t Just Walls — How healthy boundaries can function like a gate you control, letting you adjust access based on emotional safety, behavior, and what your body is telling you in real time.

The Guilt Trap and Family Conditioning — What makes going no contact feel “wrong” even when it’s necessary, and how scapegoating, obligation, and shame keep adult children stuck in roles they’ve outgrown.

Grief for the Parent You Didn’t Get — How estrangement often brings a specific kind of grief where you’re not just mourning the relationship, you’re mourning the hope that your parent will ever be able to show up differently.

Explaining Yourself vs Protecting Yourself — Why giving explanations to emotionally immature or unsafe parents can backfire

Self-Trust as the Real Recovery Skill — How healing often comes down to rebuilding trust in your own judgment so you can reassess contact over time

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True healing begins when we stop choosing between our nervous system and our inner narrative—and start listening to both.

Ruth Culver is a certified IFS practitioner and IFS constellations facilitator who has brought her own innovative contributions to the field, including the Survive and Thrive Spiral and her Drawing into Self approach. Her own trauma healing journey began when serious health issues led her to seek out hypnotherapy - first as a client, and eventually as a certified practitioner herself. She eventually found IFS and realized it offered her a compassionate framework to gently understand and integrate her parts, making it a natural fit for her healing journey.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️The Survive & Thrive Spiral — How Ruth mapped survival states as a spiral to de-shame your reactions and show the real path from activation to shutdown to regulation.

▪️Freeze Isn’t Collapse — Why “deer-in-headlights” freeze is different from floppy shutdown, and what that distinction reveals about fragmentation and the “reservoir” of unprocessed exile feelings.

▪️Drawing Into Self — How externalizing parts through intuitive scribbling lowers overwhelm, creates instant witnessing, and helps protectors soften without forcing them to “step back” inside your body.

▪️Story Follows State — What changes when you stabilize the body enough to hear your parts clearly, so your nervous system isn’t driving the narrative while your mind tries to explain it after the fact.

▪️Multiple Parts, One Moment — How fawning, fighting, fleeing, and numbing can all cycle in the same trigger, and why mapping the whole cast (instead of picking one) can unlock the stuck “nothing works” exile underneath.

THE SURVIVE / THRIVE SPIRAL

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If your life requires you to override your body to function… that’s not “success.” That’s survival.This episode is about creating a life that doesn’t require self-abandonment to keep up.

Nate Postlethwaitis a writer and teacher who shares trauma recovery and inner child work from a survivor’s perspective. In this conversation, he shares how burning out after 13 years in a demanding real estate career became a turning point — one that eventually led him into a new path of teaching and guiding others through healing from a survivor’s perspective. And as his work has grown, he opens up about what it’s looked like to make choices that protect his wellbeing — even when those choices go against what the world expects.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️ Burnout as a Turning Point — Why high-functioning “success” can actually be survival mode, and how burnout forces a reckoning with what your body has been trying to say for years.

▪️ Autism vs. Complex PTSD — How adult autism can be misread as CPTSD (and vice versa), and what shifts when you finally have the right framework for sensory overload, rigid thinking, and chronic dysregulation.

▪️ Overstimulation & Sensory Survival — What it means to live with constant nervous system activation, and howcreating low-stimulation environments becomes real trauma recovery

▪️ Walking Away From Social Media — Why the healing space can become performative, noisy, and emotionally demanding and how to choose depth over visibility can be an act of self-protection (and integrity).

▪️ Spirituality After Religious Trauma — Why“raise your vibration” advice can be harmful for trauma survivors, and whata grounded, non-dogmatic relationship with meaning can look like after spiritual abuse.

Unlearning Worthlessness: Spiritual Trauma, Repressed Identity & Inner Child Work w/ Nate Postlethwait

Nate's Retreat

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When childhood trains you to make yourself invisible, your body learns to go numb. And your mind becomes the place you live — because it’s the only place you can. This episode explores how to rebuild safety from the inside out.

Andy Carlson is a trauma coach, LIFT facilitator, and co-host of Time with Tim Fletcher. In this conversation, he opens up about growing up in a home where strict control and chronic criticism made “aliveness” feel unsafe — and disconnection became his default. He shares how the collapse of his marriage became the breaking point that forced him to confront shame, codependency, and the long road back to feeling, agency, and self-trust.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️Invisible Child → Numb Adult — Why dissociation and emotional shutdown can be the cost of learning “don’t be seen, don’t be loud, don’t be human” in a rigid or shame-based home.

▪️Dorsal Shutdown + Sympathetic Panic — How CPTSD can swing between collapse and over-control, leaving you feeling “blank” in your body while your mind stays stuck in hypervigilant chaos.

▪️State Precedes Story — Why your nervous system creates the conditions for spiraling thoughts, and how the brain builds a narrative to match dysregulation (instead of telling you the truth).

▪️Somatic Reconnection That Doesn’t Overwhelm You — How slow, structured somatic practices rebuild body awareness when stillness feels unsafe, and why “just meditate” often backfires for trauma survivors.

▪️Widening Your Window of Tolerance — How small, consistent “micro-doses” of sensation build distress capacity over time, so your system can feel more without slamming into numbness.

▪️Agency, Boundaries & Healthy Aggression — Why fawning and shutdown often require reclaiming assertive energy, and how embodying a real “no” can rebuild self-trust from the inside out.

-----------------------

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Your childhood isn’t just a memory — it’s still quietly running the show inside your body. This episode unpacks how “The Body Keeps the Score” shows up in ways you might never have connected.

Andrea joins us for a solo episode today, pulling back the curtain on how much of her childhood was still alive in her body long after she thought she’d “done the work.” She shares how a trauma-bonded relationship, nine months of functional freeze, and chronic neck and shoulder pain finally forced her to understand The Body Keeps the Score on a visceral level—not just as an idea. Through her story, she invites you to see your own stuckness, shame, and survival mode as evidence of unfinished trauma, not personal failure.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️ Fragmented Memories & Emotional Flashbacks — How unprocessed childhood experiences get stored in your nervous system and why they show up as emotional flashbacks that feel way out of proportion to the present moment.

▪️ Survival Energy That Never Shut Off — What it means to carry stored fight-or-flight energy in your fascia, muscles, and nervous system, and how that shows up as chronic hypervigilance, numbness, and living in low-grade survival states.

▪️ The Hidden Faces of Functional Freeze — What it looks like when you’re stuck in functional freeze, whether you’re procrastinating endlessly, over-functioning for everyone else, or feeling emotionally numb and disconnected from your own life.

▪️ The Long-Term Impact of Survival Mode — How staying in chronic survival states can lead to physical issues like muscular tension, autoimmune conditions, and chronic pain that are actually linked to stored trauma.

▪️ Limbic System Healing — What it means to actually reprocess and integrate those fragmented memories at the limbic system level, and how this helps reduce emotional flashbacks and bring your nervous system out of survival mode.

Trauma-Bonded No More: My Journey Through Shame, Regression & Finding My Way Back

The Many Faces of Functional Freeze: The Stuck & Shame-Filled Overthinker

The Many Faces of Functional Freeze: The Over-Functioning Fixer

The Many Faces of Functional Freeze: The Detached & Disconnected floater

— — —

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What happens when one parent shatters you by leaving and the other wounds you by staying? This episode unpacks how two very different kinds of unsafe love can live in your body at the same time.

Amber Trejo is an integrative trauma therapist who helps parents with C-PTSD untangle how their own attachment wounds and nervous system triggers show up in the way they love and raise their kids. She grew up with two alcoholic parents — a father who disappeared overnight and a mother who stayed but pulled her into parentification, emotional abuse, and way too much adult reality. It wasn’t until she fell in love and later became a mother herself that those early wounds surged back as paranoia, dread, and explosive reactions she barely recognized as her own.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️Growing Up With Two Kinds of Unsafe — Why having parents who hurt you in different ways makes it harder to see your trauma clearly, easier to minimize it, and more confusing to sort out which wounds came from where.

▪️Attachment Wounds in “Good” Relationships — Why safe, stable partners can still trigger paranoia, phone checking, and urges to run when your body learned that love and danger always showed up together.

▪️The “I Can’t Get What I Need” Core Wound — How this belief quietly drives functional freeze, overdoing, resentment in relationships, and the feeling that everyone else’s needs matter more than yours, including your kids’.

▪️When Parenting Feels Like a Trauma Relapse — When your child’s tantrums, needs, or clinginess send you into screaming, shutdown, or terror because they mirror the ages when no one comforted you.

▪️Raising Kids While Healing Yourself — What real repair looks like when you’ve yelled, grabbed, or minimized, and how to own the harm without dumping your story on your child or drowning in shame.

▪️Vicarious Sexual Abuse — What it actually is and what it can look like later in life

-----------------------

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Long-term recovery doesn’t mean you stop getting triggered — it means you finally see how deep the wiring goes. This episode explores how to navigate those ongoing invitations for growth without turning every setback into proof that you’re failing.

Dr. Sarah Michaud is a clinical psychologist, author of Co-Crazy: One Psychologist’s Recovery from Codependency and Addiction, with decades of personal and professional experience in addiction and codependency recovery.

She shares what it was like to be decades sober and still have her life upended by her husband’s relapse — and how that season forced her to confront layers of shame she thought she’d already outgrown. She also opens up about body-based triggers in a new relationship, the impact of covert childhood trauma, and the journey of self-forgiveness.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️Long-Term Recovery Is Not the Finish Line — Why deeper layers of childhood trauma, CPTSD and codependent patterns can surface decades into sobriety and suddenly make you feel back at square one.

▪️When Insight Doesn’t Equal Healing — How you can understand your trauma, teach this stuff to others, and still repeat old behaviors until your nervous system and body are actually part of the work.

▪️Codependency as “I Can’t Be Myself” — What it really means to chronically over-help, manage or shrink around others and how that pattern keeps adult children of dysfunctional families from feeling safe.

▪️When the Body Remembers Before the Brain — How sleep issues, anxiety spikes and body tension with safe people can be clues that covert emotional or sexual trauma is still stored in the nervous system.

▪️Navigating Triggers With Self-Compassion — How naming activations, regulating before you react and reframing setbacks as invitations for deeper healing can shift you out of “I’m failing at recovery.”

▪️Parenting After Addiction and Neglect — How guilt can turn sober parents into over-givers and why reclaiming boundaries with your kids becomes part of breaking generational trauma and codependency.

-----------------------

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You’re not antisocial — you’re someone who had to choose self-protection over belonging. This episode unpacks how complex trauma wires your nervous system to treat closeness like a threat and what it looks like to slowly become someone who can actually let people in.

Anna Runkelis a trauma educator, YouTuber, best known as the Crappy Childhood Fairy and author of the new book Connectability: Heal the Hidden Ways You Isolate, Find Your People, and Feel (At Last) Like You Belong. Once someone who couldn’t read social cues, trusted the wrong people, and assumed everyone would eventually turn on her, she’s now created a life where she trusts her instincts, chooses safe people, and actually enjoys being around others.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️Covert Avoidance in Disguise — How trauma survivors “do the things” (parties, potlucks, group chats, even relationships) while secretly withdrawing, under-giving, or staying on their phones, and why it keeps them feeling unseen and emotionally isolated.

▪️Trauma-Built Beliefs About People — Why complex trauma wires you to assume others are selfish, unsafe, or about to discard you, and how those quiet assumptions silently shape your friendships, dating choices, and sense of belonging.

▪️Attunement After Neglect — How growing up around chaos, denial, or emotional neglect scrambles your ability to read red flags, and what it takes to rebuild intuition, social cues, and nervous system safety with people.

▪️Dating With Attachment Wounds — How CPTSD and anxious or avoidant attachment can make you rush intimacy, chase the wrong partners, or parent your person — and what changes when you slow down, watch for red flags, and let reciprocity lead.

▪️Releasing Mean & Chaotic People — How to recognize when your life is packed with bullies, addicts, and chronically troubled folks, why letting them go can feel unbearably lonely at first, and what opens up when you hold that boundary.

▪️Choosing Sovereignty Over Self-Blame — What it looks like to stop outsourcing your power to therapists, sponsors, or online “cults,” and how reclaiming personal responsibility helps you become someone who can build real, safe, mutual connection.

https://www.youtube.com/@CrappyChildhoodFairy

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You didn’t choose chaos; your nervous system learned to crave it.Learn to read your body, set real boundaries, and stop mistaking calm for danger.

Amy Fiedler is a trauma specialist and coach known for practical, nervous-system-informed boundary work. She grew up around alcoholism and chronic shaming—an environment of denial, gaslighting, and volatility that wired her to over-tolerate. After years of toxic, abusive relationships, she chose herself, did the work, and now helps others do the same by rebuilding self-trust with values-based boundaries.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️The 3–3–3 Boundary Method — How stating a limit up to three times with matched follow-through reveals remorse, accountability, and change—or signals it’s time to reduce access.

▪️From Triangulation to Truth — How to end go-between roles, speak directly, and set limits so sibling and parent dynamics stop running your life.

▪️Triggers as Data, Not Danger — How asking “history or violation?” in the moment turns reactivity into principled action.

▪️Safety Before Strategy — How regulating before you speak lets you set boundaries from values instead of panic.

▪️From Being Chosen to Choosing Yourself — What changes when you map the behaviors you value, decline what you don’t, and align consequences so self-respect outranks scarcity.

▪️Healing in Healthy Love — How co-regulation and repair with safe partners build capacity, even when old triggers surface.

Amy's IG -@amythelifecoach

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Fawning isn’t people-pleasing — it’s self-erasure in the name of survival.This episode dives into the hidden trauma response behind your need to stay small and what it takes to finally come home to yourself.

Dr. Ingrid Clayton is a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in complex trauma and the author of Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves — and How to Find Our Way Back, a groundbreaking guide to the often-overlooked “fourth F” of trauma. In this conversation, she shares how fawning once defined her relationships, identity, and sense of safety — and how becoming a mother and confronting her own mother’s denial of abuse ultimately exposed what it costs to keep performing peace.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️Fawning as a Hybrid Trauma Response — How it carries both fight-flight energy and freeze-collapse shutdown and becomes the body’s default for managing power, hierarchy, and perceived danger.

▪️When Fawning Means Too Much or Too Little of You — Why some survivors over-function and take up more space while others shrink to survive, and how both patterns stem from the same survival reflex.

▪️How Fawning Shows Up in Parenting — How your child’s emotions can trigger your own suppressed ones and why breaking cycles means tolerating your kid’s feelings and your own discomfort.

▪️Sexual Fawning — How early sexualization and powerlessness can wire the body to equate safety with desirability and what it takes to reclaim agency, pleasure, and self-trust.

▪️When Healing Requires Distance — What it means to stop performing safety with a parent who refuses accountability and how to grieve someone who’s still alive.

▪️Reclaiming the Self Beneath the Survival Strategy — How somatic and parts-based healing help you reconnect with the voice, truth, and body you had to abandon to stay safe.

— — —

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You’re not needy. You’re not detached. You’re just wired for survival.This episode reveals how your nervous system learned to love — and what it takes to rewire safety.

Heidi Priebe is a YouTuber, writer, and educator with a master’s degree in attachment theory who’s built a massive following for her honest, body-based approach to healing. She grew up being labeled the “difficult child,” internalizing the belief that something was wrong with her long before anyone recognized the impact of emotional neglect. Her lifelong effort to make sense of that pain led her to study how attachment and the nervous system shape the way we connect, cope, and seek safety.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️How Attachment Lives in the Body — Why anxious and avoidant patterns aren’t personality flaws but survival strategies wired through early experiences of distress and safety.

▪️Emotional Neglect as Conditioning — How inconsistent or rejecting caregiving trains the body to either amplify emotion to be seen or shut it down to stay safe.

▪️Anxious vs. Avoidant Regulation — Why one nervous system ramps up while the other goes numb and how both are rooted in the same need for connection.

▪️Perfectionism as Avoidant Attachment in Disguise — How chronic self-criticism and the drive to “get it right” are often nervous system attempts to earn belonging.

▪️The Window of Tolerance— How to recognize when you’re inside or outside of regulation, and design your environment to stay within it more often.

▪️Healing Attachment Through the Body — Why real recovery requires nervous system work and learning to feel safe in connection, not just think differently about it.

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Every argument has an audience you can’t see — the ghosts of the past. This episode unpacks how unhealed trauma sneaks into our relationships and how to finally stop fighting the wrong person.

Dr. Tian Dayton is a clinical psychologist, Senior Fellow at The Meadows, and author of 15 books including The ACoA Trauma Syndrome and Emotional Sobriety. In this conversation, she revisits the moment that changed everything — standing in her living room, locked in a fight with her husband, and realizing they weren’t two adults arguing, but two wounded children replaying their pasts.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️The Trauma Beneath “Normal” Conflict — How seemingly small arguments can carry the emotional charge of decades-old pain the body never had permission to release.

▪️When Healing Turns Humbling — Why moments of regression often mean your system finally feels safe enough to touch what’s been frozen, not that you’re back at square one.

▪️The Myth of the “Functional” Family — Why growing up around unspoken pain or denial can be just as damaging as overt abuse - and often harder to name.

▪️Intimacy as Exposure Therapy — How relationships become the stage where our deepest attachment wounds are both triggered and given a chance to heal.

▪️The Courage to Feel, Not Fix — Why emotional sobriety isn’t about control or calm, but learning to stay present when every instinct wants to shut down.

▪️Healing as a Group Effort — How true recovery requires co-regulation, witnessing, and community - not just self-awareness or solitary work.

— — —

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Ever wonder what happens when the host of a trauma podcast finds herself right back in the trenches?

A story about what happens when healing collides with old survival patterns — and how the body can pull you back into the past, even when your mind knows better. This isn’t a “how-to.” It’s truth-telling about the gap between understanding your trauma and actually feeling safe inside your own skin.

✨ What this episode explores:

Childhood relational trauma wires us for trauma bonds— When love and pain come from the same person, the nervous system fuses attachment with fear. As adults, we mistake that familiarity for connection and call it love.

Healing from the neck up leaves the body stuck in the past —Insight can’t rewire survival responses. You can name every pattern and still have a body that flinches, freezes, or fawns like the child who first learned danger was love.

Regression isn’t failure; it’s unfinished business surfacing—When old patterns return, it doesn’t mean you’ve backslid. It means your system finally feels safe enough to process what once overwhelmed you. The “relapse” is readiness in disguise.

Trauma bonds aren’t about the other person, they’re about your body seeking familiarity —You don’t stay because you want pain; you stay because your nervous system confuses chaos and inconsistency with connection. It feels like home because it once was.

Managing someone else’s dysfunction can become a lifelong neural pathway —If you grew up regulating a parent, control equals safety. As an adult, your brain lights up when chaos appears — the same highway it’s been driving your whole life.

Grief is often the missing layer in recovery —You can understand and accept the past intellectually yet still carry what you never grieved. Healing deepens when the body finally mourns what it lost — safety, innocence, possibility.

— — —

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After an eleven-month hiatus, Adult Child is back... messier, deeper, and more honest than ever.

Host Andrea Ashley returns to revisit what it really means to heal from a dysfunctional family, through brutal honesty, emotional truth, and humor (of course).

This season kicks off with vulnerability and chaos — trauma bonds, repetition compulsion, and a story she’s never told before.

Buckle the hell up. Healing’s not linear, and it’s about to get real.

— — —

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How I learned I was an Adult Child - The Tale of 2 Brians

THE LAUNDRY LIST - Common Characteristics of an Adult Child

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What happens when the very people who were supposed to teach you love taught you pain instead?When you’ve been wired for abandonment and neglect, it’s no wonder your nervous system confuses chaos for connection.

Lisa A. Romano is a certified life coach, bestselling author, and leading voice in codependency and inner child recovery. After growing up in a home defined by addiction, denial, and emotional neglect, Lisa spent years chasing love in all the wrong places before realizing her patterns were rooted in unresolved childhood wounds.

🔑 Mother Hunger & Emotional Neglect – How unmet childhood needs for nurture and safety leave us chasing love in all the wrong places as adults.

🔑 Mistaking Pain for Love – Why chaotic relationships feel familiar and safe to adult children of dysfunctional families, even when they’re toxic.

🔑 The Cycle of Self-Abandonment – How people-pleasing, perfectionism, and ignoring our needs are survival strategies that keep us disconnected from ourselves.

🔑 Reprogramming the Subconscious – Why awareness alone isn’t enough, and how tools like meditation, journaling, and rewiring negative self-talk can change deep patterns.

🔑 Breaking the Family Denial System – How speaking the truth about your childhood creates liberation, even if it means being labeled “crazy” by your family.

🔑 The Path to Self-Reclamation – Why healing requires radical self-honesty, self-compassion, and releasing the need for others’ validation.

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