I cover my life in 2001. I was mugged, lived in a warehouse, lived in a YMCA, saw Randy Johnson hit a bird with a pitch and of course 9/11. I forgot to even mention I also saw Randy Johnson strike out 20 batters in one game that year too.

I drop a lot of names in this story and I honestly want to share my most name droppy stories. I have been in the stand up world for 13 years and every now and then you get a moment with a legend and they drop some wisdom on you and I want to share it with all of you.

Not celebrating the holidays with a dysfunctional family is 100% healthy. No need to move your boundaries just because of where we are in the calender. This episode explains my relationship with Christmas and maybe, hopefully it can help you if you or maybe help someone who doesn't understand.... avoiding toxic family members or entire unhealthy families is the best gift you can give yourself for the holidays.

"It is never my responsibility" may be obvious to come people but not to a codependent. Also if you find yourself arguing with this list maybe look in to why you are arguing with a list.

The ACA (Adult Chrildren of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Famalies) Laundry List (Traits of adult children) seems touch alot of people and make them realize that they do have traumatic responses in their daily adult lives. I go through the list here. I am not ACA, I am just someone who works the program. If you'd like to learn more about ACA after hearing this episode, find a meeting or some more literature at Adultchildren.org

As someone who doesn't have a substance abuse problem it confuses people on how I got involved in 12 step programs and what I got out of it. In this series I am going to talk about the things I connected to and what I got out of them. This first episode is about "Open Letter from an Alcoholic". It is the first thing I connected to that made me curious what these programs had to offer.

This is the nice part. Where I talk about how I discovered the problems with codependency and how it hurt me. It breaking the cycle.

Aaron Michael Marsh, Adult Child. Here is my background. Here is my story and I have been terrified to tell it my whole life. I assumed if any of this ever got out that my family would kick me out of it. The reality is I needed to walk away from any family that would rather keep this a secret and protect the abusers than stay in it. That wouldn't and still isn't safe for me. So this is how I got CPTSD, how I because an Adult Child, Family Scapegoat Abuse survivor, teenage homeless kid and how I got the wounds I would just try and ignore and confuse it for healing. This is Act 1 of three. The next act is how these wounds effected my adult life. Act 3 is how I went in to hiding/healing. There is hope.