✨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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Sometimes the hardest part of healing isn't sitting in the pain. It's letting yourself actually feel something good.

Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald is a research professor and life coach who specializes in the psychology and philosophy of trauma, and the author of The Joy Reset: Six Ways Trauma Steals Happiness. She grew up the inconvenient truth teller in a home ruled by her mother's fear, and lost both parents within a year of each other in her mid-twenties, which sent her into years of panic she had to learn to survive from the ground up. This is a conversation about why we push good feelings away, and how to let them in without pretending the hard stuff isn't there.

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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. Get in on this sh*t 👉 adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin

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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. 👉 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

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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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⚓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

--

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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