Adult Child

Andrea Ashley
  • 4.9 (1.9K)
  • Self-Improvement
  • Updated Biweekly

Adult Child dives deep into the lasting effects of growing up in dysfunctional families—unpacking complex and relational trauma, codependency, toxic shame, and addiction patterns with raw vulnerability and unapologetic authenticity. Hosted by Andrea Ashley, a recovering shitshow with 17 years sober, each episode shares unfiltered insights, expert conversations, and practical tools to heal your nervous system and break free from the cycles that hold you back. Whether you’re an adult child of alcoholics or from a dysfunctional family, navigating toxic relationships, or healing your inner child, this is your no-BS space for healing. New episodes every Wednesday & Saturday. And damn the join The Shitshow Healing Community for live support groups and connection with fellow cycle breakers.

  1. 2d ago

    SHITSHOW SATURDAY #225 – Attachment Blindness

    ⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community 6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection 👉 theshitshow.mn.co 🥩 Check out Omaha Steaks and use my code BEEF for a $35 off: https://www.omahasteaks.com 🗞️ SIGN UP FOR SHITSHOW NATION Get 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 ANDREA Instagram → @adultchildpod TikTok → @adultchildpod YouTube → @adultchildpod Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    SHITSHOW SATURDAY #225 – Attachment Blindness

  2. 5d ago

    251 - Attachment Blindness: Why You Miss Real Betrayal & See Harm That Isn't There

    Your childhood decided who people are before they ever opened their mouths. Sometimes that means missing the person who is hurting you. Sometimes it means creating the harm you were braced for. There are two different ways your trauma keeps you from seeing a relationship for what it actually is. Betrayal blindness is not seeing the ways people are treating you like shit. Attachment blindness is not being able to see the people you're in relationships with accurately in the first place. Today we're diving into both. ✨ What this episode explores ▪️ Betrayal Blindness — Why your mind, body and nervous system will keep you from seeing that someone you depend on is hurting you, and what they are protecting you from. ▪️ What Actually Counts as a Parent Betraying You — Why it isn't just the obvious abuse, and the one thing that makes all of it betrayal no matter what it looked like. ▪️ Seeing the Incident But Not the Pattern — The more common version for adult children, where you clock every individual hurt but never let them add up to a conclusion about the relationship. ▪️ The Shame That Holds the Blindness in Place — Why being treated badly doesn't register as wrong when part of you believes you deserve it, and what has to come first. ▪️ Attachment Blindness — How the attachment system you built to survive your family becomes the lens you see every relationship through, and why it looks for what it expects instead of what is actually there. ▪️ 3 Ways You See Harm That Isn't There — How transference, black and white thinking and emotional reasoning each turn a feeling into a conclusion about somebody. ▪️ The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy — How the way you see someone shapes how you treat them, how that shapes the way they respond, and why you take their response as proof you were right all along. ----------------------- ⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community 6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection 👉 theshitshow.mn.co 🗞️ SIGN UP FOR SHITSHOW NATION Get 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 ANDREA Instagram → @adultchildpod TikTok → @adultchildpod YouTube → @adultchildpod Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

  3. Oct 3

    SHITSHOW SATURDAY #224 – When You Just Want a Parent

    ⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community 6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection 👉 theshitshow.mn.co 🥩 Check out Omaha Steaks and use my code BEEF for a $35 off: https://www.omahasteaks.com 🗞️ SIGN UP FOR SHITSHOW NATION Get 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 ANDREA Instagram → @adultchildpod TikTok → @adultchildpod YouTube → @adultchildpod Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    SHITSHOW SATURDAY #224 – When You Just Want a Parent

  4. Oct 1

    250 - What a Real Amends From a Parent Requires: Naming the Impact & What Happens If You Never Get It w/ Dr. Ken Adams & Leilani Sinclair

    ✨SAFE WITHIN: A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. 👉 adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin -- An apology is the parent telling you they feel bad. An amends is the parent telling you exactly what they did and what it cost you. Dr. Ken Adams and Leilani Sinclair are certified sex addiction therapists and the co-authors of the upcoming book Unburdening Adult Children of Sex Addicts, out January 7th. Ken is also the author of Silently Seduced, the book that put covert incest and parent-child enmeshment on the map. Their new workbook walks a family healing from sex addiction through the process of both parents taking accountability for the impact they had on their child. This is a conversation about what a parent would actually have to do to unburden you, and why an apology is not the same thing as an amends. ✨ What this episode explores ▪️ Apology vs. Amends — Why saying sorry and taking accountability are two different acts, and what the second one requires that the first one doesn't. ▪️ Impact Statements — Why putting the specifics of how you were affected on paper does something for you that talking about it doesn't, even if nobody ever hears ▪️ When Accountability Never Comes — Why the healing looks different when the accountability isn't coming, and what it means to give yourself the thing your parent won't. ▪️ The Emotional Caretaker of the Betrayed Parent — What it does to a kid to be recruited as the confidant for the parent who was hurt, and why that role is the hardest one to put down. ▪️ Why Siblings Don't Come Out of It the Same — How the roles you each played and what you each knew leave you with different versions of the same childhood. ▪️ Finding Out in Adulthood — What it does to somebody when the truth about a parent surfaces at forty, and why that's its own trauma rather than a delayed version of everyone else's. A Light in the Dark Workshop for Adult Children of Sexually Addicted Parents (ACSAs) Contact Leilani - leilani@leilanisinclair.com ----------------------- 🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love: ▪️ Ep 163 | Breaking The Shame: Adult Children of Sex Addicts w/ Dr. Kenneth Adams ▪️Ep 243 | The Caregiving Trap: When the Parent You're Estranged From Becomes Your Responsibility w/ Katherine St. Claire ----------------------- ⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community 6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection 👉 theshitshow.mn.co 🗞️ SIGN UP FOR SHITSHOW NATION Get 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 ANDREA Instagram → @adultchildpod TikTok → @adultchildpod YouTube → @adultchildpod Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    250 - What a Real Amends From a Parent Requires: Naming the Impact & What Happens If You Never Get It w/ Dr. Ken Adams & Leilani Sinclair

  5. Sep 23

    249 - Why You Don't Let Yourself Feel Good: Guilt, Grief & Finding Joy When You're Struggling w/ Dr. MC McDonald

    ✨SAFE WITHIN: A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. 👉 adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin -- Sometimes the hardest part of healing isn't sitting in the pain. It's letting yourself actually feel something good. Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald is a research professor and life coach who specializes in the psychology and philosophy of trauma, and the author of The Joy Reset: Six Ways Trauma Steals Happiness. She grew up the inconvenient truth teller in a home ruled by her mother's fear, and lost both parents within a year of each other in her mid-twenties, which sent her into years of panic she had to learn to survive from the ground up. This is a conversation about why we push good feelings away, and how to let them in without pretending the hard stuff isn't there. ----------------------- 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 👉 theshitshow.mn.co 🗞️ SIGN UP FOR SHITSHOW NATION Get 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 Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    249 - Why You Don't Let Yourself Feel Good: Guilt, Grief & Finding Joy When You're Struggling w/ Dr. MC McDonald

  6. Sep 19

    SHITSHOW SATURDAY #223 – Jeremy

    ✨SAFE WITHIN: A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. Get in on this sh*t 👉 adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin -- ⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community 6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection 👉 theshitshow.mn.co 🥩 Check out Omaha Steaks and use my code BEEF for a $35 off: https://www.omahasteaks.com 🗞️ SIGN UP FOR SHITSHOW NATION Get 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 ANDREA Instagram → @adultchildpod TikTok → @adultchildpod YouTube → @adultchildpod Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    SHITSHOW SATURDAY #223 – Jeremy

  7. Sep 16

    248 - When Your Body Has the Memory and You Don't: Repressed Memories & Somatic Healing w/ Dr. Deniz Ahmadinia

    ✨SAFE WITHIN: A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. 👉 adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin - Your body will not hand you a memory until it is convinced you can survive it. Dr. Deniz Ahmadinia is a licensed clinical psychologist and trauma survivor who believes healing happens when we listen to the wisdom of the body. In her last appearance on the podcast, she was early in a process she couldn't yet name when repressed memories were just starting to surface. Today she shares what came after: a year of memories that arrived with no images and no narrative, only her body moving through them. ✨ What this episode explores ▪️ Why Repressed Memories Surface When They Do — Why your system waits for a home, a partner, distance from the family, and then decides it's time, and why that timing isn't random. ▪️ Trusting Yourself Without Believing Everything —Why self-trust isn't believing everything that surfaces, it's staying with it long enough to find out what it is. ▪️ What Sensory Motor Therapy Actually Looks Like — How somatic work completes the fight or flight response that got frozen at the time, and why it takes weeks of building up to a movement that sounds simple. ▪️ The Cost of Staying in the Hope — Why the part of you that keeps trying to get through to someone is the part doing you the most harm, and what you have to turn toward when you stop. ▪️ Therapist Self-Disclosure and Relational Trauma — Why a clinician who shares nothing can't give you what relational trauma requires. 🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love: ▪️ Ep 182 | The Fear of Being Seen: Integrative Trauma Therapy w/ Dr. Deniz Ahmadinia ----------------------- 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 👉 theshitshow.mn.co 🗞️ SIGN UP FOR SHITSHOW NATION Get 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 Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    248 - When Your Body Has the Memory and You Don't: Repressed Memories & Somatic Healing w/ Dr. Deniz Ahmadinia

  8. Sep 12

    SHITSHOW SATURDAY #222 – What You Hide Hardest

    ⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community 6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection 👉 theshitshow.mn.co 🥩 Check out Omaha Steaks and use my code BEEF for a $35 off: https://www.omahasteaks.com 🗞️ SIGN UP FOR SHITSHOW NATION Get 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 ANDREA Instagram → @adultchildpod TikTok → @adultchildpod YouTube → @adultchildpod Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

    SHITSHOW SATURDAY #222 – What You Hide Hardest
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4.9
out of 5
1,870 Ratings

About

Adult Child dives deep into the lasting effects of growing up in dysfunctional families—unpacking complex and relational trauma, codependency, toxic shame, and addiction patterns with raw vulnerability and unapologetic authenticity. Hosted by Andrea Ashley, a recovering shitshow with 17 years sober, each episode shares unfiltered insights, expert conversations, and practical tools to heal your nervous system and break free from the cycles that hold you back. Whether you’re an adult child of alcoholics or from a dysfunctional family, navigating toxic relationships, or healing your inner child, this is your no-BS space for healing. New episodes every Wednesday & Saturday. And damn the join The Shitshow Healing Community for live support groups and connection with fellow cycle breakers.

Information

  • Creator
    Andrea Ashley
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    507
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2021 Adult Child
  • Show Website
    Adult Child

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