Adult Child

Latest Episodes:

244 - What Lives in Your Shadow: A Jungian Approach to Complex Trauma w/ Hannah Fraser Moore Aug 19, 2026

Show notes

✨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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SHITSHOW SATURDAY #218 – Turning Toward Self: Inside Safe Within Aug 15, 2026

Show notes

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Shitshow Saturday #127

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243 - The Caregiving Trap: When the Parent You're Estranged From Becomes Your Responsibility w/ Katherine St. Claire Aug 12, 2026

Show notes

✨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

You finally go no contact after decades of abuse. Then one day the phone rings, and suddenly you're legally responsible for their entire life.

Katherine St Claire is a writer, abuse survivor, and cycle breaker who grew up in a home defined by violence, silence, and gaslighting. After four years of no contact, her father was arrested at 82 for trying to kill her mother, and within six hours she and her sister were his legal guardians.

Since then Katherine has become an advocate for adult children of dysfunctional families who end up responsible for the care of the parents who harmed them. She's building caringforabusiveparents.org a site that pulls together the legal, financial, and elder care help available to someone in this position, all in one place. It goes live in September. Until then you can find her on Instagram at @katherinestclaire_writes

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SHITSHOW SATURDAY #217 – Imposter Syndrome Aug 08, 2026

Show notes

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Shitshow Saturday #127

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242 - Imposter Syndrome Through the Lens of CPTSD: Confronting the Fraud Inside Aug 05, 2026

Show notes

✨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

You feel like a fraud bracing for the moment everyone finally figures you out. And no amount of accomplishment or evidence ever changes that feeling that you're not who you say you are.

For those of us with complex trauma, the imposter syndrome doesn't just live in your head. It lives in your body and your nervous system. Today, we're diving deep into why you feel like such a fraud so you can stop mistaking that feeling for the truth about who you are.

✨ What this episode explores

Toxic Shame Fueled Imposter Syndrome — Why this version isn't about competence at all, but a belief that something fundamentally broken about you cancels out anything good you do.

The Golden Child of a Narcissist — How a role that has nothing to do with you makes it impossible to own your accomplishments and success.

Parentification Fueled Imposter Syndrome — How carrying adult responsibilities you should never have had to carry leads to feeling like a kid trapped in an adult body who has no idea what they're doing.

Why You Never Do the Thing — How imposter syndrome shows up as avoidance, freeze, and procrastination to keep anyone from seeing you as a fraud.

Feeling Like You Conned Everyone — How surfacing trauma can make you feel like you've deceived every person in your life, retroactively rewriting years of real connection as a lie.

Imposter Syndrome About Your Own Trauma — Why the same mechanism that makes you doubt your accomplishments makes you doubt your pain ever counted.

Imposter syndrome seems to plague us all, but for those of us with complex trauma, the imposter doesn't just live in your head. It lives in your body and your nervous system. And today, we're looking at this with a depth that helps you actually confront it. So you can stop mistaking it for the truth about you.

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-----------------------

⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

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SHITSHOW SATURDAY #216 – The Return of Haley Aug 01, 2026

Show notes

⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

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Shitshow Saturday #127

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💁‍♀️ SUPPORT THE POD

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241 - Inside an Emotional Flashback: Recognizing One, Surviving One & What's Underneath Jul 30, 2026

Show notes

✨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

Somebody doesn't text you back and suddenly you feel like you're going to die. You're not being pathetic. You're in a flashback.

Welcome to the living hell of emotional flashbacks. Your reaction never matches the situation in front of you, and even when you know that in your head, it doesn't make you feel any better. This is the single most painful symptom of CPTSD.

Today I'm taking you all the way back, from the very first emotional flashback I ever had at nine years old to the most intense one of my entire life just a few years ago. I'm not holding anything back.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️ Your Brain During a Flashback — Understanding the two separate mechanisms and childhood experiences that produce one, and why only one of them involves a memory at all.

▪️ When There's No Memory to Point To — How the small stuff repeated a thousand times encodes just as deep as one terrifying moment, so there's nothing to trace it back to and nothing to prove it "counts."

▪️ Walking a Kid Through Trauma — The exact steps a calm adult takes to stop a scary moment from wiring in for life, and why saying it out loud is what does the healing.

▪️ Recognizing a Flashback in Real Time — How to tell you're in one and not just upset, and the first move that starts pulling you back out.

▪️ Your Triggers Are Your Treasures — What the four categories of trigger reveal, including the ones you'd never suspect like success and praise, and why whatever sets you off is pointing straight at the wound.

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️Ep 201 | Trauma-Bonded No More: My Journey Through Shame, Regression & Finding My Way Back

▪️ SHITSHOW SATURDAY #164 | The Living Hell of Emotional Flashbacks

Check out Omaha Steaks and use my code BEEF for a great deal: https://www.omahasteaks.com

-----------------------

⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection

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SHITSHOW SATURDAY #215 – Things You Learned Were Normal That Never Were Jul 25, 2026

Show notes

⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

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Shitshow Saturday #127

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240 - Borderline or Abandoned? What Separates a Personality Disorder From Untreated Relational Trauma w/ Susan Anderson Jul 22, 2026

Show notes

The Abandonment Trauma Queen is back on the pod, and today we're heading into uncharted territory: borderline vs. abandonment trauma. What truly separates the two, and why the BPD label gets handed out way too easily.

Susan Anderson is a psychotherapist and a pioneer in the field of abandonment trauma, and she's spent the last three decades helping people heal. She's the author of The Abandonment Recovery Workbook (a book that truly changed my life) and Taming Your Outer Child. Having worked with thousands of people over the course of her career, she joins me to share what she's learned about telling the difference between BPD and CPTSD.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️What Actually Separates BPD From CPTSD — Why the dividing line isn't emotional intensity, but whether the pain distorts reality into a false narrative.

▪️Why Untreated Abandonment Escalates — How emotional reactivity compounds from one relationship to the next when the wound underneath is never addressed.

▪️Overthinking as an Abandonment Response — Why compulsive rumination is your brain searching for a lost attachment object, not actually solving anything.

▪️Why the Outer Child Fights Change — How the self-sabotaging part is persistent by design and actively wants to stay in charge.

▪️Self-Love as Behavior, Not Affirmation — Why the relationship with yourself is built through concrete action and written dialogue, not by deciding to love yourself.

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️ Ep 47 — Abandonment Trauma w/ Susan Anderson

▪️ Ep 97 — The Outer Child & Abandonment Trauma w/ Susan Anderson

▪️ Ep 161 — Abandonment Trauma Expert Susan Anderson on Rejection and Equating Love with Insecurity

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