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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