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This is an epidemic no one is talking about: adult phone addiction.

Millions of people are struggling worldwide—and most don’t realize how much it’s impacting their focus, mood, relationships, and ability to be present.

In this episode, I break down 8 manifestations of compulsive phone behavior, how to tell when you’re in it, and why “just stop” doesn’t work when your phone has become your nervous system’s fastest relief.

1. Device checking compulsion
2. Social media compulsion (passive scrolling + active participation)
3. Mobile gaming
4. Information/content compulsion (news, rabbit holes, constant consuming)
5. Online shopping
6. Dating apps
7. Work/productivity compulsion
8. Fitness/biometric tracking compulsion

Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter

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⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

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⚓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

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💬 CONNECT WITH ANDREA

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SPONSORS

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Leah Carey is a Sex and Relationship Coach and host of the Good Girls Talk About Sex podcast. She helps thoughtful, self-aware adults who grew up in fear-based environments to stop freezing, over-explaining, and second-guessing themselves in relationships. In other words: in a world filled with confusion and fear, Leah helps sex make sense. Drawing on her own healing journey from fear and repression, she specializes in working with people from high-control childhoods like Purity Culture, narcissistic abuse, cults, and other patriarchal abuse.

✨ What this episode explores:

• Freeze and Fawn in Intimacy — How these survival patterns shape your sexual relationships, and what it means to rewrite them.
• From Transactional Love — How receiving conditional love as a child shaped your beliefs about self-worth and connection.
• Releasing Sexual Shame — How letting go of past repression leads to genuine self-acceptance
• Boundaries Without Fear — How learning to set healthy boundaries allows you to step out of old roles and into authentic connections
• Reclaiming Your Voice — How learning to express your needs transforms your relationships

xoleahcarey.substack.com

Social media as @xoleahcarey

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⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection

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🗞️ SIGN UP FOR SHITSHOW NATION

Get the newsletter for community updates, healing insights & early access to workshops.

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💁‍♀️ SUPPORT THE POD

☕ Buy Me a Coffee – help Andrea (and her cats) eat

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💬 CONNECT WITH ANDREA

Instagram → @adultchildpod

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SPONSORS

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Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

⚓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

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💬 CONNECT WITH ANDREA

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Maggie Nick is a trauma therapist and author of the newly published book Good Kids: Why You Suffered in Silence and How to Break the Cycle. She grew up as the good kid in a home with a personality-disordered mother - performing, complying, and quietly falling apart while making sure nobody ever saw the real her. After years of working through what she thought was the "real" trauma, she discovered that relational shame was the deepest layer underneath everything else.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️Relational Shame as the Deepest Layer: How every surface-level struggle (the perfectionism, the people pleasing, the self-hatred) is just smoke from the same fire: being made to feel like the real you is fundamentally bad.

▪️The "Good Kid" Was a Survival Strategy, Not a Personality: Why compliance, fawning, and never misbehaving wasn't temperament. It was your nervous system's way of staying loved and staying safe.

▪️The Silent Treatment Is Emotional Violence: Why it's one of the most normalized forms of emotional abuse and what it does to a kid when love can be jerked away without warning.

▪️The Fight Response Turned Inward: What happens when you never had permission to push back. That energy doesn't disappear. It becomes the vicious inner critic, the eating disorder, the relentless self-punishment.

▪️The Check Engine Lights Everyone Misses: Why the kids (and adults) who look like they have it the most together are often the ones suffering the most, and what to actually look for underneath the performance.

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⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection

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🗞️ 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

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💬 CONNECT WITH ANDREA

Instagram → @adultchildpod

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Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection

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🗞️ SIGN UP FOR SHITSHOW NATION

Get the newsletter for community updates, healing insights & early access to workshops.

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💁‍♀️ SUPPORT THE POD

☕ Buy Me a Coffee – help Andrea (and her cats) eat

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💬 CONNECT WITH ANDREA

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Duane Osterlind is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Certified Sex Addiction Therapist – and the host of The Addicted Mind. He specializes in helping individuals and couples impacted by sexual compulsion, porn addiction, and betrayal trauma. His Shame to Resilience group program helps men who've caused sexual betrayal learn to regulate their shame so they can finally show up with the accountability, empathy, and remorse their partners need to heal. 

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️Technology Created a New Kind of Addiction We Don't Know How to Treat Yet — Why early exposure to high-speed internet porn rewires developing brains differently than any generation before, and how phones and games use the same mechanisms to collapse the space between impulse and action.

▪️How Childhood Trauma Becomes Sexual Compulsion — The pipeline from hero/caretaker roles to dismissive attachment to using sexual arousal as the only escape from loneliness; why men especially learn to shrink their emotional lives and self-soothe through isolation.

▪️How Betrayal Is About Stolen Consent — How deception and gaslighting in relationships cause legitimate post-traumatic stress; why betrayed partners aren't "stupid for not seeing it," and what it means when someone destroys trust while still deeply loving you.

▪️Shame-Based Accountability Doesn't Work — Why the person who caused harm has to do their own shame work first before they can show up for their partner; how "compassionate accountability" is the only way through, and why shame can only heal when it's witnessed by others.

▪️The Four Phases of Healing Betrayal — The predictable 3-5 year journey from crisis to scaffolding to safety-building to repair, and why partners need to see consistent, trustworthy behavior over time before post-traumatic growth can begin

— — —

⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection

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🗞️ SIGN UP FOR SHITSHOW NATION

Get the newsletter for community updates, healing insights & early access to workshops.

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💁‍♀️ SUPPORT THE POD

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💬 CONNECT WITH ANDREA

Instagram → @adultchildpod

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Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

⚓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.

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💁‍♀️ SUPPORT THE POD

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💬 CONNECT WITH ANDREA

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Dr. Tian Dayton is a clinical psychologist, Senior Fellow at The Meadows, and author of 15 books, including the upcoming Growing Up With Addiction: How Adult Children of Addicts Can Heal Family Trauma, CPTSD, and Codependency. In this conversation, Tian draws on her 40+ years as a professional in trauma and addiction, alongside her own lived experience growing up with alcoholism, to paint a deeply human portrait of breaking the cycle of generational trauma.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️ Why ACA trauma is different from other childhood trauma — How growing up with alcoholic parents creates relational wounds that get passed down unless we interrupt the cycle

▪️ Healing complex trauma requires nervous system work, not just talk therapy — Why intellectual understanding keeps us stuck; how stored survival energy shows up in your body

▪️ Perfectionism is killing your recovery (and what to do instead) — Learning to live in the messy middle instead of crisis-to-crisis; why repair matters more than getting it right

▪️ Internal Family Systems (IFS) for adult children — Understanding your many "parts" (not just one inner child) and how they show up in relationships and healing

▪️ Process addictions and dissociation in ACAs — How phone addiction, food, and other behaviors help us check out; when coping crosses into something more serious

▪️ The difference between being victimized and staying in victimhood — How to honor what happened without getting stuck in victim identity that blocks your path forward

— — —

⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection

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💁‍♀️ SUPPORT THE POD

☕ Buy Me a Coffee – help Andrea (and her cats) eat

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💬 CONNECT WITH ANDREA

Instagram → @adultchildpod

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Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy