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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Shitshow Saturday #127

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The voice in your head won't shut up because if it did, you'd have to feel what's in your body.

Dr. Joe Flanders is a clinical psychologist based in Montreal who specializes in IFS, mindfulness, and psychedelic-assisted therapy. He's also the founder of Refuge, a community of practice built around experiential psychotherapy, and co-host of the podcast "Not Too Tight, Not Too Loose." But despite all his training and years of meditation, it was his own shortcomings as a father and desire to have a real relationship with his kids for the rest of his life that pushed Joe to do the deeper work of healing what insight alone never touched.

AI in Psychotherapy: A Risk Reduction Approach to Human Flourishing

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Mike's first Shitshow episode 👉 SHITSHOW SATURDAY #127

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Shitshow Saturday #127

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A death doula shares what really happens between a toxic parent and their child in the parent's final moments.

Kat Courtney is a death doula and plant medicine facilitator who has sat with dozens of people in their final moments. After a childhood spent people-pleasing a father who only wanted the happy version of her, a near-death experience in her early twenties, and years of using ayahuasca to finally face the family wounds she'd normalized her whole life, she learned that the things we run from don't disappear - they wait. This is a conversation about what surfaces at the very end, when the body lets go and the truth we've avoided our entire lives finally has nowhere left to hide.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️ When Repair Becomes Possible — Why for some people, truly healing a relationship with a parent only happens after they've died, and how to do it.

▪️ The Final Conversation — The apologies and accountability that can come from a dying parent, and why healing is still possible when they don't.

▪️ The Trauma You Avoided Your Entire Life— Why someone who spent their whole life avoiding their pain can suddenly confront it on their deathbed.

▪️ The Power of Ibogaine — Why this psychedelic stands out from others for treating addiction and trauma, and what the treatment process looks like.

▪️ How to Know if a Plant Medicine Facilitator Is Safe — Warning signs and specific questions to assess whether someone is truly qualified to hold this work.

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Everything you hate about yourself starts making sense the moment you realize you're not one person - you're a whole system trying to survive.

Britt Frank is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in trauma, trained in Internal Family Systems and Somatic Experiencing. She's the author of The Science of Stuck and Align Your Mind, which translate complex trauma and parts work into language people actually understand. Britt grew up in a covertly dysfunctional family, later found herself in a cult, survived addiction and domestic violence, and came out the other side not healed, but functional. In this episode, she shares how recognizing your multiplicity -the different parts of you all trying to protect you in their own ways - becomes the key to actually changing patterns that have haunted you.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️ Your Shadow Parts — How the parts you exiled to survive become the gifts you can't access in adulthood.

▪️ When Belonging Becomes a Trap — Why the unmet need to belong draws you into high-control systems like cults or abusive partners.

▪️ Your Inner Critic as a Scared Kid — That relentless voice in your head isn’t always bully, but a frightened part just trying to keeping you small.

▪️ Parts Work for Treating Addiction — Understanding what your addiction protects you from works where logic, love, and willpower have all failed.

▪️ Functional, Not Fixed — Why the goal is not to be healed or whole, but to understand your system well enough so you can exist within it peacefully.

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The thing you've been medicating is the same thing your parents shamed you for.

Kristen Carder is the host of the I Have ADHD podcast and a dually certified coach who's back on the pod today to take the ADHD and complex PTSD connection deeper — through the lens of your nervous system and what it actually needs to function. She talks openly about how medication wasn't fixing her, it was translating what her body had been trying to tell her all along, and how the shame she inherited about her own wiring became the hardest part to undo. This conversation is about what happens when you stop fighting how you're built and start designing a life that actually works with your nervous system instead of against it.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️ What Medication Actually Does (And What It Doesn't) — Why medication isn't fixing you; it's translating what your nervous system's been trying to tell you all along, and why that distinction changes everything.

▪️ Why You Regulate Differently Than They Do — How ADHD nervous systems need completely different things to reach calm than what every productivity expert and well-meaning friend has told you to try.

▪️ The Performance Cost of Living in a Neurotypical World — Why masking your brain's actual operating system to fit someone else's expectations exhausts you faster than the ADHD itself.

▪️ How ADHD and Complex PTSD Show Up Identically in Relationships — Why the way ADHD impacts intimacy, trust, and connection mirrors relational trauma responses so closely that somatic healing works for both.

▪️ Why Forcing Focus Is Just Another Form of Self-Abandonment — How the constant battle to be "normal" recreates the same disconnection from yourself that traumatized nervous systems are already surviving.

Pre-order Kristen's upcoming book, You're Not in Trouble, coming October 2026.

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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

Ep 110 | Childhood Trauma & ADHD w/ Kristen Carder

Ep 170 | The Intersection of Trauma, ADHD and Toxic Family Dynamics w/ Kristen Carder

— — —

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