Some bonds don’t begin in safety. They begin in survival. In shared chaos. They live in the roles we step into without choosing, in the silence we keep to protect each other, and in the ways love can feel like endurance instead of ease.

In this episode of Born Tired: Where Survival Meets Healing, I share what it was like growing up as the protector in a family shaped by addiction, mental illness, and unspoken roles — and what it cost me to finally step out of that role. This is a story about my sister and me, about scapegoating and silence, and about what happens when healing pulls two people in different directions.

This episode is about survival love. About what it means to mother someone while still being a child yourself. About carrying guilt when you leave, and resentment when you stay. I reflect on discovering the language of the narcissistic family system — the scapegoat, the golden child, the enabler — and how naming those roles changed how I understood my life. I share what it felt like when my body began breaking under the weight of keeping the peace, and how going no-contact became less about anger and more about survival.

Because healing doesn’t always lead to reconciliation. Because love built in survival can’t always grow into peace. And because sometimes choosing yourself feels like betrayal before it feels like freedom.

This episode is for anyone who has felt torn between loyalty and self-preservation. For siblings who survived the same house but carry different versions of the story. And for those learning that walking away isn’t abandonment, it’s awareness.

You are allowed to outgrow the roles that once kept you safe.

You are allowed to choose peace, even when it costs you connection.

You don’t need to fix yourself to be here.
You don’t need the right words.
You just need to arrive as you are.

Your voice matters.
Your story matters.
And you are not alone.

Gentle Reminder:
This podcast includes conversations about trauma, family dynamics, mental health, estrangement, and lived experiences. Listener discretion is advised.

🤍 Support the podcast:
Buy Me a Coffee — https://buymeacoffee.com/mzd5yc89kkk

📌 Follow me:
Instagram: @borntiredpodcast
Threads: @borntiredpodcast
Substack: https://substack.com/@borntiredpodcast

Credits:
Written & narrated by Eirene Torres
Audio production by Carlos Torres
Original music by Carlos Torres

Disclaimer:
Born Tired is a personal storytelling podcast based on lived experience. This content is not a substitute for professional mental health care and does not provide medical or clinical advice. If you are struggling or in crisis, please consider reaching out to a qualified mental health professional or local support services.

Some fears don’t begin in the moment. They’re passed down through silence, survival, and the stories our bodies learn to carry long before we have words for them. They live in the way we brace, the way we swallow anger, and the way love can feel unsafe even when we want it most.

In this episode of Born Tired: Where Survival Meets Healing, I share what it was like growing up with an alcoholic father, and the fear that followed me into adulthood. Not just fear of drinking, but fear of anger, chaos, control, and becoming the very thing that hurt me.

This episode is about how survival shapes identity. About building a life around not becoming someone, and realizing that resistance can still keep you trapped in their shadow. I reflect on the ways generational trauma lives in the nervous system, how inherited intensity can feel like a flaw, and how healing isn’t about erasing the past but changing your relationship to it.

Because awareness breaks cycles.

Because fear can protect, but it can also keep you small.

And because you can inherit fire without inheriting destruction.

This episode is for anyone who grew up walking on eggshells, for those who carry fear in their body without always knowing why, and for the cycle breakers learning that healing isn’t proving you’re different, it’s choosing who you become.

You are not doomed to repeat what hurt you.

Your awareness is already the beginning of freedom.

This podcast is rooted in lived experience. In growing up in survival mode. In breaking generational patterns that were never meant to be carried forward. I speak openly about family trauma, estrangement, identity, C-PTSD, and the slow, intentional work of building a life that finally feels like yours after trauma. Every episode is created for those who carried too much, too early. For the ones who learned to stay quiet to stay safe. For the ones who became strong before they ever felt protected.

Born Tired is a space for cycle breakers, truth tellers, and anyone learning how to rest after a lifetime of bracing. A place where your story is not minimized, your experience is not questioned, and your voice is allowed to exist without explanation.

You don’t need to fix yourself to be here.
You don’t need the right words.
You just need to arrive as you are.

Your voice matters.
Your story matters.
And you are not alone.

Gentle Reminder:
This podcast includes conversations about trauma, family dynamics, mental health, estrangement, and lived experiences. Listener discretion is advised.

🤍 Support the podcast:
Buy Me a Coffee — https://buymeacoffee.com/mzd5yc89kkk

📌 Follow me:
Instagram: @borntiredpodcast
Threads: @borntiredpodcast
Substack: https://substack.com/@borntiredpodcast

Credits:
Written & narrated by Eirene Torres
Audio production by Carlos Torres
Original music by Carlos Torres

Disclaimer:
Born Tired is a personal storytelling podcast based on lived experience. This content is not a substitute for professional mental health care and does not provide medical or clinical advice. If you are struggling or in crisis, please consider reaching out to a qualified mental health professional or local support services.

Some love doesn’t arrive loudly. It doesn’t come with speeches, grand gestures, or perfect endings. Sometimes love shows up quietly — in presence, in consistency, in the small moments that make a child feel seen and protected when the rest of the world feels unsafe. In this episode of Born Tired: Where Survival Meets Healing, I share the story of my godmother — my madrina — the woman who became my first experience of steady care in a childhood shaped by emotional neglect, dysfunction, and fear.

This episode is about the kind of love that doesn’t erase pain but stands beside you in it. The love that notices what others ignore. The love that fills the gaps left by absence. And the love that breaks silence when pretending would be easier. I reflect on how my godmother stepped in when danger became impossible to ignore, the cost of choosing truth over harmony, and how in families built on keeping the peace, honesty is often rewritten as betrayal. Because silence protects the system, but truth protects the child. And sometimes the bravest love is the one willing to risk relationships in order to keep someone safe.

This episode is for anyone who had one person who made them feel remembered, for those who grew up in emotional absence and learned to survive through hypervigilance, and for the cycle breakers who are learning that courage sometimes costs closeness, but saves lives. You can honor the people who protected you… without repeating what broke you.

This podcast is rooted in lived experience. In growing up in survival mode. In breaking generational patterns that were never meant to be carried forward. I speak openly about family trauma, estrangement, identity, C-PTSD, and the slow, intentional work of building a life that finally feels like yours after trauma. Every episode is created for those who carried too much, too early. For the ones who learned to stay quiet to stay safe. For the ones who became strong before they ever felt protected.

Born Tired is a space for cycle breakers, truth tellers, and anyone learning how to rest after a lifetime of bracing. A place where your story is not minimized, your experience is not questioned, and your voice is allowed to exist without explanation.
You don’t need to fix yourself to be here.

You don’t need the right words.
You just need to arrive as you are.

Your voice matters.
Your story matters.
And you are not alone.

Gentle Reminder:
This podcast includes conversations about trauma, family dynamics, mental health, estrangement, and lived experiences. Listener discretion is advised.

🤍 Support the podcast:
Buy Me a Coffee — https://buymeacoffee.com/mzd5yc89kkk

📌 Follow me:
Instagram: @borntiredpodcast
Threads: @borntiredpodcast
Substack: https://substack.com/@borntiredpodcast

Credits:
Written & narrated by Eirene Torres
Audio production by Carlos Torres
Original music by Carlos Torres

Disclaimer:
Born Tired is a personal storytelling podcast based on lived experience. This content is not a substitute for professional mental health care and does not provide medical or clinical advice. If you are struggling or in crisis, please consider reaching out to a qualified mental health professional or local support services.

There are women whose love is measured by how much they endure. Women who were taught that staying was strength, silence was loyalty, and keeping the peace mattered more than naming the pain. In this episode of Born Tired: Where Survival Meets Healing, I share the story of the women in my family who stayed — especially my paternal grandmother, the matriarch who held everyone together with warmth, devotion, and sacrifice. Her home was the center of our family: the laughter, the food, the gathering place that still felt like “family,” even when the truth underneath it was heavy.

This episode is about what happens when survival becomes the definition of love. When enabling is mistaken for compassion. When women are expected to endure harm quietly, and leaving — even when it means safety — is treated like betrayal. Because in families like mine, silence doesn’t only protect the men who cause harm… it also traps the women who carry it. And the truth is: love without accountability isn’t love, it’s survival. And survival, no matter how strong it looks on the outside, is not the same thing as peace.

This episode is for anyone who grew up watching women sacrifice themselves in the name of loyalty, for anyone who was taught to prove love through endurance, and for the daughters who are learning that strength doesn’t have to sound like silence. You can honor the women who stayed… without repeating what it cost them.

This podcast is rooted in lived experience. In growing up in survival mode. In breaking generational patterns that were never meant to be carried forward. I speak openly about family trauma, estrangement, identity, C-PTSD, and the slow, intentional work of building a life that finally feels like yours after trauma. Every episode is created for those who carried too much, too early. For the ones who learned to stay quiet to stay safe. For the ones who became strong before they ever felt protected.

Born Tired is a space for cycle breakers, truth tellers, and anyone learning how to rest after a lifetime of bracing. A place where your story is not minimized, your experience is not questioned, and your voice is allowed to exist without explanation.

You don’t need to fix yourself to be here.
You don’t need the right words.
You just need to arrive as you are.

Your voice matters.
Your story matters.
And you are not alone.

Gentle Reminder:
This podcast includes conversations about trauma, family dynamics, mental health, estrangement, and lived experiences. Listener discretion is advised.

🤍 Support the podcast:
Buy Me a Coffee — https://buymeacoffee.com/mzd5yc89kkk

📌 Follow me:
Instagram: @borntiredpodcast
Threads: @borntiredpodcast
Substack: https://substack.com/@borntiredpodcast

Credits:
Written & narrated by Eirene Torres
Audio production by Carlos Torres
Original music by Carlos Torres

Disclaimer:
Born Tired is a personal storytelling podcast based on lived experience. This content is not a substitute for professional mental health care and does not provide medical or clinical advice. If you are struggling or in crisis, please consider reaching out to a qualified mental health professional or local support services.

Silence doesn’t start with us, it echoes. In this episode of Born Tired: Where Survival Meets Healing, I share the story of the silence I was born into, the inherited silence that shaped the women in my family and taught generations how to endure pain without naming it. In my family, silence wasn’t a symptom. It was a tradition. A survival strategy. A belief system protected by fear, faith, shame, and reputation.

This episode is about what happens when women are taught that endurance is love, obedience is virtue, and silence is holiness, and what it looks like when one generation finally decides to break it. Because silence doesn’t just live in the words we never say. It lives in the body. In the throat. In the fear of being “too much.” In the instinct to shrink the truth before it ever leaves you.

And the truth is: the truth didn’t break us. The silence did.

This episode is for anyone who was raised to stay quiet, keep the peace, minimize harm, and carry pain that was never allowed to be named, and who is ready to live differently. You may have inherited the silence… but you don’t have to pass it on.

This podcast is rooted in lived experience. In growing up in survival mode. In breaking generational patterns that were never meant to be carried forward. I speak openly about family trauma, estrangement, identity, C-PTSD, and the slow, intentional work of building a life that finally feels like yours after trauma. Every episode is created for those who carried too much, too early. For the ones who learned to stay quiet to stay safe. For the ones who became strong before they ever felt protected.

Born Tired is a space for cycle breakers, truth tellers, and anyone learning how to rest after a lifetime of bracing. A place where your story is not minimized, your experience is not questioned, and your voice is allowed to exist without explanation.

You don’t need to fix yourself to be here.
You don’t need the right words.
You just need to arrive as you are.

Your voice matters.
Your story matters.
And you are not alone.

Gentle Reminder:
This podcast includes conversations about trauma, family dynamics, mental health, estrangement, and lived experiences. Listener discretion is advised.

🤍 Support the podcast:
Buy Me a Coffee — https://buymeacoffee.com/mzd5yc89kkk

📌 Follow me:
Instagram: @borntiredpodcast
Threads: @borntiredpodcast
Substack: https://substack.com/@borntiredpodcast

Credits:
Written & narrated by Eirene Torres
Audio production by Carlos Torres
Original music by Carlos Torres

Disclaimer:
Born Tired is a personal storytelling podcast based on lived experience. This content is not a substitute for professional mental health care and does not provide medical or clinical advice. If you are struggling or in crisis, please consider reaching out to a qualified mental health professional or local support services.

Some of the deepest wounds don’t come from strangers. They come from family, from the people who were supposed to protect you. From the ones who stayed physically present, but emotionally unavailable. The ones who saw what was happening… or sensed it… and still chose silence. Because silence can look like loyalty. It can look like keeping the peace. It can even look like survival. But when you’re the one being harmed, silence doesn’t feel neutral. It feels like abandonment. Like being sacrificed so the family can stay comfortable… so the narrative can stay intact.

In this episode of Born Tired: Where Survival Meets Healing, I share a personal story about what it feels like to grow up knowing someone saw your pain and didn’t intervene. What it does to a child when protection never comes. When the people around you expect endurance instead of safety. This episode is about quiet betrayal inside connection. The grief that comes from realizing no one was coming to save you. The way your body learns to stay alert long after the danger is gone. The way hypervigilance becomes a personality. The way silence becomes habit.

And how, over time, you start to confuse being “easy” with being safe, and being needed with being loved.

We explore what it means to carry trauma in the nervous system — how survival rewires you, how it shapes your identity, your relationships, your voice, and even the way you move through the world. And we talk about what it looks like to reclaim yourself without minimizing what happened… without excusing the harm… and without carrying the shame for choices that were never yours to make.

If you’ve ever carried secrets that weren’t yours…

If you learned to stay quiet to stay safe…

If you grew up inside a bond that required you to endure instead of being protected…

this episode is for you.

This podcast is rooted in lived experience. In growing up in survival mode. In breaking generational patterns that were never meant to be carried forward. I speak openly about family trauma, estrangement, identity, C-PTSD, and the slow, intentional work of building a life that finally feels like yours after trauma. Every episode is created for those who carried too much, too early. For the ones who learned to stay quiet to stay safe. For the ones who became strong before they ever felt protected.

Born Tired is a space for cycle breakers, truth tellers, and anyone learning how to rest after a lifetime of bracing. A place where your story is not minimized, your experience is not questioned, and your voice is allowed to exist without explanation.

You don’t need to fix yourself to be here.
You don’t need the right words.
You just need to arrive as you are.

Your voice matters.
Your story matters.
And you are not alone.

Gentle Reminder:
This podcast includes conversations about trauma, family dynamics, mental health, estrangement, and lived experiences. Listener discretion is advised.

🤍 Support the podcast:
Buy Me a Coffee — https://buymeacoffee.com/mzd5yc89kkk

📌 Follow me:
Instagram: @borntiredpodcast
Threads: @borntiredpodcast
Substack: https://substack.com/@borntiredpodcast

Credits:
Written & narrated by Eirene Torres
Audio production by Carlos Torres
Original music by Carlos Torres

Disclaimer:
Born Tired is a personal storytelling podcast based on lived experience. This content is not a substitute for professional mental health care and does not provide medical or clinical advice. If you are struggling or in crisis, please consider reaching out to a qualified mental health professional or local support services.

In toxic family systems, roles are assigned early, often without consent. The caretaker, the hero, the golden child, and then there’s the scapegoat. The one who absorbs the blame. The one who carries what no one else will hold. The one labeled “too much,” “difficult,” or “the problem” — not because they’re broken, but because they reflect what others refuse to face.

In this episode of Born Tired: Where Survival Meets Healing, I share my personal story of growing up as the family scapegoat — how that role shaped my identity, followed me into adulthood, and quietly taught me to confuse guilt with who I was. We explore what scapegoating really is, how it impacts the nervous system and sense of self, and what it looks like to begin unlearning survival roles that were never yours to carry.

This episode is about the moment something clicks, when you realize you were never who they said you were. You were responding to an environment that needed someone to blame. Healing isn’t just about setting boundaries with others. It’s about learning to stop believing the lies that shaped your survival.

This podcast is rooted in lived experience. In growing up in survival mode. In breaking generational patterns that were never meant to be carried forward. I speak openly about family trauma, estrangement, identity, C-PTSD, and the slow, intentional work of building a life that finally feels like yours after trauma. Every episode is created for those who carried too much, too early. For the ones who learned to stay quiet to stay safe. For the ones who became strong before they ever felt protected.

Born Tired is a space for cycle breakers, truth tellers, and anyone learning how to rest after a lifetime of bracing. A place where your story is not minimized, your experience is not questioned, and your voice is allowed to exist without explanation.
You don’t need to fix yourself to be here.
You don’t need the right words.
You just need to arrive as you are.

Your voice matters.
Your story matters.
And you are not alone.

Gentle Reminder:
This podcast includes conversations about trauma, family dynamics, mental health, estrangement, and lived experiences. Listener discretion is advised.

🤍 Support the podcast:
Buy Me a Coffee — https://buymeacoffee.com/mzd5yc89kkk

📌 Follow me:
Instagram: @borntiredpodcast
Threads: @borntiredpodcast
Substack: https://substack.com/@borntiredpodcast

Credits:
Written & narrated by Eirene Torres
Audio production by Carlos Torres
Original music by Carlos Torres

Disclaimer:
Born Tired is a personal storytelling podcast based on lived experience. This content is not a substitute for professional mental health care and does not provide medical or clinical advice. If you are struggling or in crisis, please consider reaching out to a qualified mental health professional or local support services.

In this episode, The Language of Protection, I explore the moment many survivors reach when the body begins telling the truth long before the mind is ready to hear it.

For those of us who grew up in survival mode, protection often looks like vigilance, silence, and control. It looks like staying calm at all costs. It looks like building a life that appears peaceful on the outside while the body continues to brace underneath.

This episode is about the difference between protection and peace, and the courage it takes to unlearn the strategies that once kept us alive.

I share my personal story of growing up in a home where silence was survival and truth was treated like rebellion. I talk about the night my father tried to strangle me, the denial that followed, and how those experiences shaped the way I learned to mother, to protect, and to build a home that felt different from the one I came from.

This is also a reflection on grief, for the childhood we didn’t get, for the choices we made out of fear, and for the parts of ourselves that believed rest had to be earned.

If you are a cycle breaker, a truth-teller, or someone learning what peace actually feels like after years of survival, this episode is for you.

This podcast is rooted in lived experience. In growing up in survival mode.
In breaking generational patterns that were never meant to be carried forward.

I speak openly about family trauma, estrangement, identity, C-PTSD, and the slow, intentional work of building a life that finally feels like yours after trauma.

Every episode is created for those who carried too much, too early.
For the ones who learned to stay quiet to stay safe.
For the ones who became strong before they ever felt protected.

Born Tired is a space for cycle breakers, truth tellers, and anyone learning how to rest after a lifetime of bracing. A place where your story is not minimized, your experience is not questioned, and your voice is allowed to exist without explanation.

You don’t need to fix yourself to be here.
You don’t need the right words.
You just need to arrive as you are.

Your voice matters.
Your story matters.
And you are not alone.

Gentle Reminder:
This podcast includes conversations about trauma, family dynamics, mental health, estrangement, and lived experiences. Listener discretion is advised.

🤍 Support the podcast:
Buy Me a Coffee — https://buymeacoffee.com/mzd5yc89kkk

📌 Follow me:
Instagram: @borntiredpodcast
Threads: @borntiredpodcast
Substack: https://substack.com/@borntiredpodcast

Credits:
Written & narrated by Eirene Torres
Audio production by Carlos Torres
Original music by Carlos Torres

Disclaimer:
Born Tired is a personal storytelling podcast based on lived experience. This content is not a substitute for professional mental health care and does not provide medical or clinical advice. If you are struggling or in crisis, please consider reaching out to a qualified mental health professional or local support services.