Kill The Silence

Cody Taymore
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  • Mental Health

Welcome to the Kill The Silence podcast! Hosted by Cody Taymore. killthesilenceofficial.substack.com

Episodes

  1. Forty Strangers, One Room, No Plan

    Jun 21

    Forty Strangers, One Room, No Plan

    I went live on a Sunday with no script and no topic. Just an open room and whoever wanted to sit in it. 40 people showed up, and we talked for 45 minutes about the stuff most people only think about at two in the morning and never say out loud. People dialed in from San Antonio, San Diego, Miami, Louisiana, Costa Rica, West Africa, and right here in Detroit. Some of them said straight out that they don’t have a single person in their day to day who actually understands what they’ve lived through. For 45 minutes, they weren’t the only one in the room. These lives are free, and there will be a lot more of them. Bring your coffee, your questions, or nothing at all and just listen. If you’ve been reading from a distance, this is how you stop being on the outside of it. This is the recording. Here’s roughly where everything happened. In this one: [01:35] What the Survivor Circle is, and why I started doing these lives [08:57] My story, the short version. Getting sober, the therapist who turned predator, the lawsuit I’m still in [11:55] Why isolation is the whole point of abuse, and what it actually means to hold space for someone [14:10] “How bad does it have to get before I’m allowed to do something?” The wrong question, and the one to ask instead [19:30] What keeps me going, and why I’ll take inspiration over pity every time [22:40] Staying sober through the worst stretch of my life [27:00] Where everybody was calling in from [29:40] Why it feels like narcissism is everywhere now [31:00] The Rant, standup, and how I make all of this by myself The free work isn’t going anywhere. New essay every week, free, same as always. These open lives are part of that. The deeper version, Coffee with Cody, runs every Saturday inside the Survivor Circle. Come to the next one. Get in the room. — Cody Taymore Kill The Silence Thank you 💨Ashley Schmitt🫟™️, Dr Vicki Connop, Megan Against Injustice, RN, Renata Rads, Jamie Lee, Kathy Dirickson, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit killthesilenceofficial.substack.com/subscribe

    52 min
  2. Live with Cody Taymore

    Jun 19

    Live with Cody Taymore

    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit killthesilenceofficial.substack.com/subscribe

    4 min
  3. The Narcissist's Kryptonite: 7 Phrases That Make Them Lose Their Minds (Ep. 18)

    Jun 19

    The Narcissist's Kryptonite: 7 Phrases That Make Them Lose Their Minds (Ep. 18)

    Thank you for tuning in! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit killthesilenceofficial.substack.com/subscribe

    14 min

  4. Apr 1

    10 Things Children of Emotionally Unavailable Parents Do as Adults

    You Didn’t Know It Had a Name Nobody sat you down and explained what was happening. There was no moment where someone said your parent was emotionally unavailable and here is what that means and here is what it will cost you later. You just grew up in a house where something felt permanently off and spent the rest of your life trying to figure out what that something was. This is what it cost you. And more importantly, this is how you recognize it. 1. You Became an Expert at Reading Rooms Before you could name your own emotions you learned to read other people’s. You tracked moods, body language, tone shifts, and silences with a precision most people will never develop because most people never had to. You walked into rooms and immediately took the temperature. You adjusted. You disappeared or performed depending on what the room required. You thought this was just being perceptive. It was survival. And you’re still doing it in relationships that don’t require that level of surveillance. 2. You Apologize for Things That Aren’t Your Fault Not because you’re weak. Because you were trained to smooth things over before they escalated. In a house with an emotionally unavailable parent, tension was dangerous. Your job was to dissolve it. You got very good at absorbing blame that didn’t belong to you because absorbing it was faster and safer than the alternative. Now you apologize reflexively. Before anyone is upset. Before anything has gone wrong. A preemptive surrender to a threat that doesn’t exist. 3. You Confuse Intensity With Love Love was inconsistent. It came in bursts, unpredictably, and it felt enormous when it arrived because it was so rare. Your nervous system learned to associate love with that specific feeling of finally getting what you needed after going without it. So now calm, consistent, reliable love feels boring. It doesn’t register as love. You keep reaching for intensity because intensity is what you learned to recognize. Stability feels like something is wrong. 4. You Have Trouble Asking for What You Need Because asking didn’t work. You asked and nothing happened, or something happened that made you regret asking, or you were made to feel like your needs were an inconvenience. So you stopped asking. Now you hint. You wait. You hope someone notices without being told. And when they don’t you feel invisible and you don’t say that either because saying it requires asking for something again and that still doesn’t feel safe. 5. You’re Drawn to People Who Need Fixing Emotionally unavailable people are familiar. The distance feels like home. The inconsistency feels like love. The project of trying to unlock someone who won’t let you in is a game you know how to play because you played it your whole childhood and you never won and you are still playing it. You don’t choose unavailable people because you hate yourself. You choose them because they feel like something you recognize. 6. You Don’t Know What You Actually Feel You know what you’re supposed to feel. You know what is reasonable to feel. You can describe feelings analytically with impressive accuracy. But in the moment, when something happens, there is a delay. A buffer between the event and your awareness of your own response to it. You learned early to edit your emotions before they reached the surface because unedited emotions weren’t safe. Now the editing happens automatically and sometimes you genuinely can’t locate what you actually feel underneath all of it. 7. You’re Uncomfortable Being Cared For You can give care endlessly. You are excellent at it. You anticipate needs, show up without being asked, hold space, remember the details. But when someone does that for you it feels wrong. Too much. Suspicious. You minimize it. You deflect it. You make a joke. You change the subject. Receiving care requires believing you deserve it and that belief got damaged very early by someone who was supposed to install it. 8. You Achieved Your Way Through the Pain If you couldn’t get love you would earn admiration. If you couldn’t feel safe you would become so competent that danger couldn’t touch you. You built an incredible external life as a direct response to an internal wound. The achievement is real. The wound is also real. And the achievement never actually closed it no matter how many times you told yourself it would. 9. You Don’t Trust Good Things When something good happens your brain immediately starts looking for the catch. When a relationship feels healthy you wait for the moment it turns. When things are going well you feel a low hum of dread that something is about to go wrong. This isn’t pessimism. This is a nervous system that learned that good things were temporary and the crash after them was painful. So it stopped fully inhabiting the good things as a form of self protection. You are protecting yourself from joy. Think about that for a second. 10. You’re Exhausted in a Way Sleep Doesn’t Fix Because the exhaustion isn’t physical. It’s the cost of a lifetime of performing, managing, anticipating, shrinking, achieving, fixing, reading rooms, swallowing needs, and building a version of yourself that could survive an environment that required too much too soon. That is not a character trait. That is a wound that has been working overtime for decades. What You Do With This You stop treating these patterns as personality flaws and start recognizing them as adaptations that outlived their usefulness. You stop demanding that the child who learned to survive in that house somehow know instinctively how to thrive in a world that operates completely differently. You give yourself the one thing that house never consistently provided. Some patience. Not for them. For yourself. The patterns make sense. Every single one of them made sense when you developed it. The work is not to shame yourself out of them. The work is to slowly, deliberately, build new evidence that the old rules no longer apply. You are not in that house anymore. You just haven’t fully left yet. —Cody Taymore Kill The Silence I write about this stuff because I lived it. And then I built tools to help you work through it. Everything I make lives at codytaymore.store and every single one is FREE! No excuse not to grab one. codytaymore.store This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit killthesilenceofficial.substack.com/subscribe

    7 min

  5. Feb 21

    Why You Keep Apologizing When You Did Nothing Wrong

    You didn’t do anything wrong. You know that. Somewhere underneath all the second-guessing and the stomach-dropping anxiety, you know it. And yet there you are — apologizing. Again. For existing. For reacting. For taking up space. This isn’t weakness. It isn’t stupidity. It is one of the most sophisticated survival adaptations the human brain can produce. And someone taught it to you on purpose. Here’s what actually happened. You learned that conflict was dangerous. At some point in your life, probably early, you figured out that when someone got upset, bad things followed. Maybe it was a parent who raged. A partner who punished you with silence. A boss who made your life hell when you disagreed. A therapist who weaponized your own words against you. Your brain did what it was built to do. It found the fastest way to make the danger stop. Apologizing worked. Even when you did nothing wrong, saying sorry de-escalated the situation. The rage cooled. The silent treatment ended. The punishment softened. Your brain logged that as survival data. “Apologizing = safety. Standing your ground = more pain.” Do that enough times and it becomes automatic. You stop even checking whether you actually did something wrong before the apology comes out. The apology is just the reflex now. This is called the fawn response. But forget the label. What matters is the mechanics. You scanned for threat, you found it, and you submitted before the attack came. Every time you did that instead of holding your ground, the pathway got stronger. Now it fires before your conscious brain can intervene. You’re not weak. You’re efficient. You built the fastest possible route to safety and your nervous system took it every single time. The problem is you’re still running a survival program that belongs to an old situation. The people who made apologizing necessary may not even be in your life anymore. But the program is still running. How to actually stop. First, you have to create a gap. When you feel the apology coming, pause. One breath. That’s it. You’re not suppressing anything, you’re just buying one second to ask: did I actually do something wrong here? If the answer is no, do not apologize. Not even a softened version. Not “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Nothing. Silence is better than a false apology. A false apology tells your nervous system the threat was real and submission was the right call. It makes the next apology more automatic, not less. Second, stop explaining yourself to people who have already decided you’re wrong. Explanation feels like the rational alternative to apologizing. It isn’t. With certain people, explanation is just a longer apology. It still signals that you believe you need to justify your existence to them. You don’t. Third, expect the discomfort. Not apologizing when every cell in your body is screaming at you to smooth it over is genuinely uncomfortable. That discomfort is not a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s a sign you’re breaking a pattern that kept you safe for years. It’s supposed to feel wrong at first. The apology reflex was built in a place where standing your ground wasn’t an option. You’re not in that place anymore. The work is convincing your nervous system of that. One held boundary at a time. You didn’t do anything wrong. You don’t have to apologize for that. —Cody Taymore Kill The Silence If this gave you clarity, peace, or just helped you feel a little less alone — and you want to support more work like this — you can leave a small tip here. Buy Me a Coffee This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit killthesilenceofficial.substack.com/subscribe

    4 min

  6. 08/12/2025

    The 5 Most Dangerous Lies Strong People Tell Themselves

    Strong people are the best liars you’ll ever meet. Not to others — to themselves. We turn survival patterns into an identity. We perfect the mask until it feels like skin. And then we believe the very lies that keep us stuck. Here are the five that will destroy you if you don’t catch them in time. 1. “I’m Fine.” Translation: “I’m barely holding it together, but I can pass inspection.” I’ve said “I’m fine” after betrayal, after loss, after nights where my chest felt like a vice. It’s not strength. It’s camouflage. And the longer you wear it, the more it becomes who you think you are. Reframe: Ditch “I’m fine.” Try “I’m at capacity” or “I’m not okay, but I’m here.” Truth is stronger than presentation. 2. “I Don’t Need Help.” Translation: “If I let someone in, they’ll see the cracks.” We turn self-reliance into a religion. We’d rather break in silence than risk someone thinking we’re fragile. That’s not independence. It’s self-sabotage. Reframe: Help isn’t weakness. It’s leverage. Strategic support lets you survive without burning everything else to the ground. 3. “I Can Handle Anything.” Translation: “I’m about to take on more than any sane person should.” I’ve used this one to pile my plate so high it collapsed — jobs, people, problems that weren’t even mine. Carrying everything isn’t strength. It’s a refusal to choose. Reframe: You can handle less. That’s not laziness — it’s precision. Save your capacity for the things that actually matter. 4. “If I Stop, I’ll Fall Apart.” Translation: “I’m afraid of what I’ll feel if I’m not busy.” Relentless motion is the easiest drug to get addicted to. I stayed in overdrive to outrun the thoughts I didn’t want to face. But stillness isn’t the enemy. It’s the mirror you’ve been avoiding. Reframe: Schedule one hour where nothing happens. No phone, no distractions. Let the quiet in and watch what it shows you. 5. “I Should Be Over This by Now.” Translation: “I’ve decided there’s a deadline for healing, and I’m failing it.” This one turns recovery into self-hate. You’re not over it because it mattered. And rushing it doesn’t erase it — it just shoves it underground. Reframe: Forget the deadline. Notice what’s smaller now. That’s progress. The rest will take as long as it takes. The Cost of Believing Your Own Lies These lies make you unapproachable, exhausted, and disconnected. Real strength isn’t gritting your teeth through it. Real strength is calling yourself out before the mask calcifies. Ready to Stop Lying to Yourself and Start Moving? Half of the reason strong people stay stuck is because we overthink every choice — we wait for “perfect,” we drown in options, and we mistake delay for strategy. I built a simple system to break that cycle. It’s called The Decision Paralysis Cure — and it’s how you make any choice in under 5 minutes without second-guessing yourself for weeks. —Cody Taymore Kill The Silence If this gave you clarity, peace, or just helped you feel a little less alone — and you want to support more work like this — you can leave a small tip here. Buy Me a Coffee This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit killthesilenceofficial.substack.com/subscribe

    4 min
  • 6 Episodes

About

Welcome to the Kill The Silence podcast! Hosted by Cody Taymore. killthesilenceofficial.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Cody Taymore
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    6
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Cody Taymore
  • Show Website
    Kill The Silence

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