Episodes

  • 237 - Stopping The War Within: Understanding Your Patterns Through Parts w/ Britt Frank

    237 - Stopping The War Within: Understanding Your Patterns Through Parts w/ Britt Frank
    Jul 1 2026

    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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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Shitshow Saturday #211 - Why Asking For Help is Hard

    Shitshow Saturday #211 - Why Asking For Help is Hard
    Jun 27 2026

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    38 mins
  • 236 - The ADHD Nervous System: Rewiring What Your Body Needs to Actually Function w/ Kristen Carder

    236 - The ADHD Nervous System: Rewiring What Your Body Needs to Actually Function w/ Kristen Carder
    Jun 24 2026
    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.-----------------------🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:Ep 110 | Childhood Trauma & ADHD w/ Kristen CarderEp 170 | The Intersection of Trauma, ADHD and Toxic Family Dynamics w/ Kristen Carder— — —⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection👉 theshitshow.mn.co🗞️ SIGN UP FOR SHITSHOW NATIONGet the newsletter for community updates, healing insights & early access to workshops.➡️ Join here💁‍♀️ SUPPORT THE POD☕ Buy Me a Coffee – help Andrea (and her cats) eat🛍️ Shop Shitshow Merch💬 CONNECT WITH ANDREAInstagram → @adultchildpodTikTok → @adultchildpodYouTube → @adultchildpodAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Shitshow Saturday #210 - Why We Struggle Socially

    Shitshow Saturday #210 - Why We Struggle Socially
    Jun 20 2026

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    27 mins
  • 235 - The Obligation Myth: What You Owe the Parent Who Hurt You w/ Lisa Stinson

    235 - The Obligation Myth: What You Owe the Parent Who Hurt You w/ Lisa Stinson
    Jun 17 2026

    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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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Shitshow Saturday #209 - Ana S.

    Shitshow Saturday #209 - Ana S.
    Jun 13 2026

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    24 mins
  • 234 - Wired for Abandonment: How Somatic Work Heals What Talk Therapy Can't w/ Valerie Rubin

    234 - Wired for Abandonment: How Somatic Work Heals What Talk Therapy Can't w/ Valerie Rubin
    Jun 10 2026

    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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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • Shitshow Saturday #208 - Wanting to Be Chosen

    Shitshow Saturday #208 - Wanting to Be Chosen
    Jun 6 2026

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    34 mins