A lot of us didn’t get what we needed as kids, so we adapted—squeezed ourselves into shapes that kept us safe. As adults, our nervous systems still remember those shapes. This episode is about our inner child: the part that wants to play and create, but also freaks out when life feels unsafe.

Carrie shares how ACA and parts work (IFS) helped her begin reparenting herself; Emily talks survival mode, productivity, and why singing felt like safety. We get into grief-in-autumn vibes, the self-soothing we never learned, and—because it’s us—a strangely perfect detour into inner ears and earwax: inner child, inner ear—chef’s kiss.

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References:

• ACA - Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families - 12-Step Support & Recovery Group - for anyone who, because of people or circumstances in their childhoods, had to adapt in painful, unhelpful, or unhealthy ways to survive—whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually

• IFS - Internal Family Systems - also known as “parts work” - a psychotherapy tool developed by Richard C. Schwartz that views that the mind as a collection of relatively separate subpersonalities or parts, each with its own unique viewpoint and qualities

• “Ball of Wax” - english idiom meaning “everything” or “all of it”
  

TIMECODES:
0:00 - Intro
0:49 - Grief
3:24 - Inner Child work
10:39 - Often, our parents didn’t have enough tools to give us what we needed
12:35 - Hiding from healing in the church
18:54 - We were trained that if we were okay, we were doing something wrong
21:59 - We weren’t taught how to self-soothe
24:32 - When the Inner Child calls bullshit/earning back our Inner Child’s trust
27:14 - Getting healing for US is the best gift we could give our kids
28:48 - Our Inner Child is the seat of our creativity
34:39 - Trauma lands hard as a child
35:28 - The Earwax Discussion

Carrie tried smoking grass at 14. It's not what you think. It didn't go well.

Today, we’re doing something a little different: Carrie is sharing a finished thing—a non-fiction short story she wrote called “The Inside Girl.” It’s about growing up in a bubble, longing to be inside of culture, and the day teenage curiosity met cattail fluff and…fire. It’s a story she needed to write to make sense of her longing to belong.

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Where to find Carrie:

Read “The Inside Girl” on Substack

Substack: carriekingpresents.substack.com

Instagram: @carriekingpresents

YouTube: @carriekingpresents

This week on the show, we talk about play and rest and how they’re kind of important parts to our creative practice. We talk about giving our minds a rest and letting our bodies take the wheel by choosing low-stakes experiments (waste the page) to loosen perfectionism. On the rest side, we talk about what it is (choice) and isn’t (doomscrolling).

We’re getting a little rebellious with this one—and perhaps even a tad wasteful *gasp*!

References:

• Utah Shakespeare Festival - annual summer/fall theatre festival in Cedar City, UT

• Into the Woods - 2014 Disney adaptation of the 1986 musical Into the Woods starring Meryl Streep and a bunch of other famous people

• • “Stay with Me” - song from the 2014 Disney adaptation of the 1986 musical Into the Woods written by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine Heartburn - novel by Nora Ephron, narrated by Meryl Streep
  • Tom Lake - novel by Ann Patchett, narrated by Meryl Streep
  • “Aqueous Transmission” - song by Incubus
  • “Get Ur Freak On” - song by Missy Elliott
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - novel by Douglas Adams
  • The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, book by Julia Cameron

  
  

  TIMECODES
  0:00 - Intro
  2:04 - Get your “frisson”
  8:15 - Dance as play
  12:16 - Resistance to play
  18:13 - When did we stop playing?
  29:49 - Rest is radical