Adult Child

Your story is only half of it. The other half is the storyteller, and that’s your body.
Jacquie Compton is a Toronto-based registered psychotherapist and art therapist, and a trainer with the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, with 20 years of experience in trauma work. As a little girl whose mother was often seriously ill, she couldn’t fall asleep at night, because she believed that if she stayed awake, her mom wouldn’t die. This is a conversation about how sensorimotor psychotherapy works with the body as the storyteller, and how trauma can heal without having to relive the whole story.
✨ What this episode explores
▪️ What Is Sensorimotor Psychotherapy - How it pairs talk therapy with what your body is communicating through sensation, movement, posture, and gesture, and why the relationship with your therapist is as central to the work as any technique.
▪️ Completing Fight or Flight - Why the actions that usually don’t get to happen during trauma are the fight and the flight, and what it looks like when a client finally completes a push they couldn’t make back then.
▪️ Healing Freeze and Collapse - Why freeze and collapse can’t be completed the way fight and flight can, and why what they were missing all along was support.
▪️ Healing Without Reliving Everything - Why processing a whole memory at once overwhelms the system, and how working with just one piece, like the bracing in your shoulders, can reach other memories too.
▪️ Telling Kids About Hard Things - Why kids sense what’s happening whether or not anyone explains it, and how being told nothing and being told too much both leave a child carrying a responsibility they can’t hold.
▪️ Meeting Your Child State - How bringing your younger self the experience they missed, like hearing that they matter, actually works, and why it’s normal when that younger you doesn’t believe it at first.

🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:
▪️ Ep 119 | Why Nothing’s F*cking Wrong With You w/ Ana Del Castillo
▪️ Ep 209 | How “The Body Keeps the Score”: Making Sense of Stored Trauma, Survival Mode & Functional Freeze
▪️ Ep 248 | When Your Body Has the Memory and You Don’t: Repressed Memories & Somatic Healing w/ Dr. Deniz Ahmadinia
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Everything that helped you survive childhood costs you something as an adult. Love is usually where you pay.
Dr. Galit Atlas is a psychoanalyst, an NYU faculty member, and author of Emotional Inheritance and her new book, Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, and the Secrets of Emotional Intimacy. As a kid, her closest friend was her diary, because it would never hurt her, disappoint her, or leave. This is a conversation about the six wounded inner children we carry into adulthood, and why love is where they show up the loudest.
✨ What this episode explores
▪️ Choosing the Safe, Empty Partner - Why the frightened child often avoids repeating chaos by choosing someone less available, and how that safety slowly turns into a relationship that feels empty.
▪️ Parenting From Your Own Wounds - Why giving your kid the parent you wished you had can be a conversation with your own fantasy instead of your actual child, and what it looks like when a kid is asking for more structure.
▪️ Leaving Volatile vs. Empty Relationships - Why both are hard to walk away from: in the volatile one you keep trying to convince them you’re good, and in the empty one you’re convinced you’re crazy for wanting more.
▪️ Chosen Child vs. Golden Child - The difference between being picked to meet a parent’s emotional needs and being picked to make them look good, and why the threat for not delivering is usually louder than any praise.
▪️ Meeting Your Needs in Secret - How guilty children learn to take care of themselves behind closed doors, like taking a nap and saying they were on a call, and why asking directly is the real work.

🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:
▪️ Ep 134 | Avoidant Attachment and Romantic Relationship Pitfalls for ACA’s with Dr. Sofya Vass
▪️ Ep 252 | Toxic Guilt: Why You Feel Like You’re in Trouble When You Didn’t Do Anything Wrong
▪️ Ep 227 | Daughters of Narcissistic Fathers: The Golden Child’s Grief w/ Taylor Pearl
-----------------------
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⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community
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Kids who expect to be rejected find a way to get rejected. It isn’t manipulation. It’s prediction.
Robyn Gobbel is a children’s mental health expert, host of The Baffling Behavior Show, and author of Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors and its new companion guided journal. Before she moved into training professionals, she spent years as a play therapist for kids with complex trauma, including one child she saw nearly every week from age six until he was eighteen. This is a conversation about why kids do things that make no sense, and why the parents raising them so often feel like every next move will be wrong.
✨ What this episode explores
▪️ Disorganized Attachment in Kids - What happens when the person a child runs to for safety is also the source of danger, and why that no-way-out experience shows up as the most baffling behavior of all.
▪️ When Parents Feel Stuck Too - How parents of dysregulated kids end up feeling like every next move will make things worse, and how that reaction can reenact the very experience their child is trying to heal from.
▪️ Overreacting to Your Kid - How to trace why a lie about homework sets off a life-or-death reaction in your body, using a “what would be bad about that?” chain to find the fear actually driving the moment.
▪️ Where Parents Get Repair Wrong - The three ways it goes sideways: processing every rupture until it feels perfectly clean, avoiding repair for fear of setting things off again, and never noticing the rupture at all.
▪️ Siblings of a Struggling Kid - Why the goal isn’t keeping siblings from being impacted, and how shared family language helps them make sense of their own resentment without blaming themselves.
▪️ Grieving Your Family’s Story - The grief of realizing this isn’t the family you pictured, and why being honest about the impact helps more than trying to fix everything.

🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:
▪️ Ep 101 | The Neuroscience of Toxic Shame w/ Robyn Gobbel
▪️ Ep 203 | The Nervous System Side of Attachment: Understanding Anxiety, Avoidance & Safety Through the Body w/ Heidi Priebe
▪️Ep 208 | When Each Parent Leaves a Different Scar: From Attachment Wounds to Parenting Triggers, Rage & Repair w/ Amber Trejo
-----------------------
⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community
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