- 1 hour 14 minutes232 - Healing Together: A Couple's Journey Through Repressed Trauma w/ Tarah & EJ Kerwin
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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Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy27 May 2026, 10:00 am - 27 minutes 46 secondsShitshow Saturday #206 - Impossible Self-Expectations
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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 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.
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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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Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy22 April 2026, 10:00 am - More Episodes? Get the App