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

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Does narcissistic personality disorder always trace back to trauma? This episode explores what truly lies beneath personality disorders.

Dr. Peter Salerno is a psychologist specializing in personality disorders and the author of “The Nature and Nurture of Narcissism” and “Cruelty by Nature.” His work challenges mainstream assumptions, arguing that personality disorders can develop independently of childhood trauma, emphasizing biological and trait-based factors.

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If you keep getting re-triggered by the people you’re trying to heal from, healing starts to feel impossible. This episode unpacks when taking space is the most loving thing you can do for yourself.

Dr. Sharon Martin is a psychotherapist and author specializing in helping adult children recover from difficult childhoods. She's passionate about helping adults overcome the effects of narcissistic and emotional abuse, learn to set boundaries, and develop self-worth. She writes extensively about codependency, perfectionism, and healthy relationships, including the popular blog Conquering Codependency for Psychology Today. Dr. Martin is the author of four self-help books, including The Better Boundaries Workbook and Cutting Ties with Your Parents.

✨ What this episode explores:

Estrangement as Nervous System Safety — Why no contact can be right choice when repeated interactions keep pulling you back into trauma responses.

Boundaries That Aren’t Just Walls — How healthy boundaries can function like a gate you control, letting you adjust access based on emotional safety, behavior, and what your body is telling you in real time.

The Guilt Trap and Family Conditioning — What makes going no contact feel “wrong” even when it’s necessary, and how scapegoating, obligation, and shame keep adult children stuck in roles they’ve outgrown.

Grief for the Parent You Didn’t Get — How estrangement often brings a specific kind of grief where you’re not just mourning the relationship, you’re mourning the hope that your parent will ever be able to show up differently.

Explaining Yourself vs Protecting Yourself — Why giving explanations to emotionally immature or unsafe parents can backfire

Self-Trust as the Real Recovery Skill — How healing often comes down to rebuilding trust in your own judgment so you can reassess contact over time

— — —

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True healing begins when we stop choosing between our nervous system and our inner narrative—and start listening to both.

Ruth Culver is a certified IFS practitioner and IFS constellations facilitator who has brought her own innovative contributions to the field, including the Survive and Thrive Spiral and her Drawing into Self approach. Her own trauma healing journey began when serious health issues led her to seek out hypnotherapy - first as a client, and eventually as a certified practitioner herself. She eventually found IFS and realized it offered her a compassionate framework to gently understand and integrate her parts, making it a natural fit for her healing journey.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️The Survive & Thrive Spiral — How Ruth mapped survival states as a spiral to de-shame your reactions and show the real path from activation to shutdown to regulation.

▪️Freeze Isn’t Collapse — Why “deer-in-headlights” freeze is different from floppy shutdown, and what that distinction reveals about fragmentation and the “reservoir” of unprocessed exile feelings.

▪️Drawing Into Self — How externalizing parts through intuitive scribbling lowers overwhelm, creates instant witnessing, and helps protectors soften without forcing them to “step back” inside your body.

▪️Story Follows State — What changes when you stabilize the body enough to hear your parts clearly, so your nervous system isn’t driving the narrative while your mind tries to explain it after the fact.

▪️Multiple Parts, One Moment — How fawning, fighting, fleeing, and numbing can all cycle in the same trigger, and why mapping the whole cast (instead of picking one) can unlock the stuck “nothing works” exile underneath.

THE SURVIVE / THRIVE SPIRAL

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If your life requires you to override your body to function… that’s not “success.” That’s survival. This episode is about creating a life that doesn’t require self-abandonment to keep up.

Nate Postlethwait is a writer and teacher who shares trauma recovery and inner child work from a survivor’s perspective. In this conversation, he shares how burning out after 13 years in a demanding real estate career became a turning point — one that eventually led him into a new path of teaching and guiding others through healing from a survivor’s perspective. And as his work has grown, he opens up about what it’s looked like to make choices that protect his wellbeing — even when those choices go against what the world expects.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️ Burnout as a Turning Point — Why high-functioning “success” can actually be survival mode, and how burnout forces a reckoning with what your body has been trying to say for years.

▪️ Autism vs. Complex PTSD — How adult autism can be misread as CPTSD (and vice versa), and what shifts when you finally have the right framework for sensory overload, rigid thinking, and chronic dysregulation.

▪️ Overstimulation & Sensory Survival — What it means to live with constant nervous system activation, and how creating low-stimulation environments becomes real trauma recovery

▪️ Walking Away From Social Media — Why the healing space can become performative, noisy, and emotionally demanding and how to choose depth over visibility can be an act of self-protection (and integrity).

▪️ Spirituality After Religious Trauma — Why “raise your vibration” advice can be harmful for trauma survivors, and what a grounded, non-dogmatic relationship with meaning can look like after spiritual abuse.

Unlearning Worthlessness: Spiritual Trauma, Repressed Identity & Inner Child Work w/ Nate Postlethwait

Nate's Retreat

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