David Deane Haskell Podcast

I knew this was going to be a good conversation before we even hit record. Jesse Deal and I connected immediately around parts work, inner children, trauma, addiction and recovery. Then we hit record, and the conversation pretty much went wherever it wanted to go — which, appropriately enough, is kind of how inner child work works.

We started with Wounded Angels and how I fell into this work in the first place. I’m not an IFS practitioner. I’m not a therapist. I didn’t set out to become some kind of inner child expert. I was trying to recover from addiction, trauma and codependency, and somewhere along the way these younger versions of me started showing up. And they had a lot to say.

We talk about the nine-year-old I call the Shame-Shocked Boy, and the day I learned that my mother had killed herself. We talk about what happens when a child takes something unimaginably painful and somehow decides there must be something wrong with me. Then we follow that wound forward about forty years — into addiction, into codependency, into fawning and attaching myself to charismatic people because if the cool guy liked me, maybe I could be okay too. Into the adult relationship that eventually blew apart and sent me straight back into that nine-year-old’s shame. And into the strange realization that one of the worst emotional experiences of my adult life may also have been one of the greatest gifts I ever received.

We talk about sitting with pain when every part of you wants to run from it. About the fact that I spent years unable to sit quietly with myself for even two minutes. About self-care, unhealthy coping, boundaries, abandonment, betrayal trauma, and why healing sometimes means discovering that the people you once thought you absolutely could not live without are no longer in your life — and somehow, you’re still here.

We also talk about something I’m still learning now: can my inner children trust me? Because it turns out it’s one thing to tell some frightened part of yourself, I’m here. I’ll listen. I won’t abandon you. It’s another thing to mean it.

And that leads into a story I had only lived a few weeks before this conversation. I had a plane ticket to the Philippines. I was supposed to leave Japan. I had plans. I had an identity as this traveling digital nomad. I had already decided what came next. There was just one problem: I didn’t want to go. More specifically, some very frightened part of me was begging me not to go. I told him that if we really had to stay, we would stay. Except I didn’t mean it. I was leaving. And then, the night before my flight, everything went sideways. I’ll let you hear the rest.

This conversation goes into places I didn’t expect. My divorce. A recent healing afternoon with my ex-wife and daughter. My father’s death. The strange grief of publishing one of the most vulnerable things I have ever written and then discovering that the world does not immediately stop what it is doing and buy your book. That one hit my abandonment wound harder than I expected.

We talk about Wounded Angels as what I jokingly call a vulnerability manual — basically an instruction manual to my psyche that I then decided, against the advice of several terrified parts of myself, to publish for strangers. We talk about why I wrote it even though I didn’t particularly want to write nonfiction in the first place.

And somewhere toward the end, I think we stumble into the answer. Connection. Not saving anybody. Not fixing anybody. Not having the perfect healing system. Not controlling what happens after you tell your story. Just connection.

Jesse says something beautiful about walking beside people rather than healing them for them. I talk about trying to be heard in an algorithmic world without turning myself into something I’m not. And we keep coming back to the same thing: you tell the truth, you take the next step, you let go of the outcome, you keep moving.

I loved this conversation. Jesse understood this material from the inside, which meant we didn’t have to stay safely up at the level of concepts and terminology. We could go down into the actual mess of it — the shame, the grief, the absurdity, the mistakes, the healing. All of it.

So come join us. And if you’ve ever hated yourself, abandoned yourself, attached your worth to somebody else, wondered why an old wound suddenly seems to be running your adult life — or started hearing from some younger part of yourself who has apparently been waiting decades for you to finally shut up and listen — this conversation may be for you.

Wounded Angels 2nd Edition is now available

Friends, I’ve come to the end of a mega-project journey of refreshing and revitalizing Wounded Angels since first publishing it almost a year and a half ago now. This has involved recording the audiobook in my own voice (more than a month-long effort!), and in the process, polishing up a few rough spots to make sure the 2nd edition is as solid and authentic as I could make it.

👉 Get Wounded Angels 2nd Edition

Author bio: David Deane Haskell is a writer of fiction and non-fiction who has given up on trying to pick a lane. From new age futuristic flights into high-tech worlds and their effect on the psyche, to terrifying depths of real-life trauma and despair, David’s novels resonate somewhere between fact and fantasy, but always with a core of relatable truth.

David weaves personal reflections into his stories, creating a reading experience that blends what’s relatably human with deeply personal truths. Truths that we may well share. Walk with him a while and find out.

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

I got to sit down with Greg Alan Jankowski — The Balance Professor — for IMAGiNE FiTTiNG IN, and after a bunch of emails back and forth, it was good to finally talk face to face.

We covered a lot. Growing up outside Boston, the drumming that took me to Tokyo Disneyland for what was supposed to be six months in 1998 and turned into a life in Japan. Losing my mom when I was four, and the shame that landed on me at nine when I learned how she died — the kind of thing that follows a kid into every room he walks into and makes him feel like he doesn’t belong in any of them.

We talked about the parts of recovery nobody warns you about — getting sober and thinking you’re done, then finding out codependency runs just as deep. I spent years needing people to tell me I was doing a good job before I could feel okay about myself. Untangling that took longer than the drugs and alcohol did.

Greg asked me about mentors, and I got to talk about Jordan — the guy who started me on gratitude before I could stomach the word “spirituality.” Are you starving today? No. Is it a nice day? Yeah, actually. Small questions, but they were the door back in.

And we got into the writing — Wounded Angels, the memoir I didn’t set out to write, and The Solarian Deep, which came out the other side of a five-year writer’s block I genuinely wasn’t sure I’d break. I told him the theme of that book, underneath all the sci-fi, is just: be yourself. Turns out that’s the theme of most of what I make now.

Greg built this show in memory of his nephew, and you can feel that it’s not a throwaway project for him — he asks like someone who actually wants to know.

If you’ve ever had to learn how to belong in your own life again, this one may be for you.

Thank you, Greg, for the space, the good questions, and for building something real.Hear more awesome conversations on the Imagine Fitting In podcast:IMAGiNEFiTTiNGIN

✦ David’s Bio

I guess you could call me a trauma-informed memoirist disguised as a writer, who also happens to write visionary hopeful scifi. I write for the ones who’ve been dragged through the wringer and wound up somehow changed for the better.

Not fixed. Not yet, anyway.

Just ready.

My inner child book, Wounded Angels: A Memoir That Lights the Path to Your Own Inner Child Healing, is the heart of my mission: to show what healing feels like when it’s raw, nonlinear, and hard-won. Everything I share—essays, stories, transmissions—is filtered through that same lens: the most radical honesty I can manage, as much emotional courage as I can gather up, and the deep belief that no one is too broken to give up on.

👉 Read The Solarian Deep:

https://mybook.to/solariandeep

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

In this conversation with Michel Charles on Sobertown, I talk about the second stage of my recovery—the part that came after I had already addressed substance addiction.

For me, that meant codependency, shame, childhood trauma, and eventually inner-child and shadow work. I talk about the shame I carried after learning as a child that my mother had died by suicide, the way old wounds can show up years later as oversized reactions, and the idea that “if it’s hysterical, it’s historical.”

We also get into the difference between taking responsibility for the harm I caused and taking responsibility for everything that happened to me, the danger of toxic positivity, and why recovery is not always quick or clean. I also talk about creativity—especially drumming and writing—as part of how I make sense of the past and imagine something better for the future.

Mostly, this is a conversation about what happens when the obvious crisis is over and the deeper healing begins.

I’m grateful to Michel for giving this conversation room to wander past the obvious recovery story and into the messier stuff underneath it.

Sobertown is built around exactly that kind of honest examination. Michel has created a space where people can talk about recovery without pretending it is neat, linear, or finished.

Please listen to our conversation, and spend some time checking out the other amazing conversations on Sobertown as well.

Visit Sobertown and follow the podcast

✦ Author Bio

David Deane Haskell is a trauma-informed memoirist and spiritual guide disguised as a writer. His work doesn’t just tell stories—it transmits healing. He writes for the ones who’ve been dragged through the dark and came back changed. Not better. Not fixed. Just ready.

His flagship book, Wounded Angels: A Memoir That Lights the Path to Your Own Inner Child Healing, is the heart of his mission: to show what healing feels like when it’s raw, nonlinear, and hard-won. Everything he shares—essays, stories, transmissions—is filtered through that same lens: radical honesty, emotional courage, and the deep belief that no one is too broken to come back.

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

I’m in the thick of voicing my own audiobook version of Wounded Angels for you all, and it’s a labor of love, lemme tell you. The perfectionist in me is losing his mind, all that cutting and stopping, and re-doing a paragraph that sounded just right, except for the throat clear right in the middle of it. Ugh. I am in no danger of switching careers to anime actor, let’s put it that way. Still, this book is my story, a story of healing, intended to guide others into their own version. So hearing it in my own voice makes sense. Here’s a part of one of the final chapters, focused on a defiant inner child and his voice being cut down, over and over, until he shut down entirely. When I started speaking again, it was decades later, after a lifetime of pain. I pray that your journey won’t be quite so lengthy, though for me, it had to be this way.

..from Chapter 23.

Desire

The resistance—from fear-induced slowdowns to complete blockages—feels like a cosmic joke. It’s as if I’m hesitating to unleash the full-throated potential of my writing—afraid of the reverberations it might cause.

And this hesitation infuriates my inner child.

He’s in danger, I realize. Real, grave danger.

He thinks he needs to be ‘out there’ for safety, make himself important and powerful, and rich enough to hire bodyguards. Attack dogs. Large homes with tall fences.

A best-selling successful truth-teller badass that nobody can touch.

But only perfection will get him there. Because if it’s not perfect, they’ll know. And if they say so, to him, and to the world, everyone will know.

Imposter.

I’m not allowed to speak at full-volume unless my words are pitch-perfect, or I’ll get smacked down for making too much noise.

Take your goddamned foot off that fucking echo-pedal.

Damn. There’s a deep wound right there. His dad would yell that all the time, whenever he’d start playing the piano too loudly.

So he took up the drums.

Music can be powerful and expressive, sure, but he needs more.

He needs wealth.

He also needs to run the whole thing like a one-man mega-corporation, too—just that powerful, just that well-branded—and he needs to keep all the money.

Every. Fucking. Penny.

He’s obsessed with keeping every cent, because he’s gonna need it. He’s under siege. In the crosshairs. He won’t make it to the top, to safety and security, if he’s not careful.

Did listening stir something uncomfortable in you? Maybe a part of your story you haven’t looked at in a while?

You just touched one thread of this tapestry. You felt something, didn’t you?But this isn’t a standalone novel. It’s a guidemap through the terrain of exhaustion and despair—and one man’s way out of it.

Maybe it can be yours, too.Don’t stop at one step. Take the whole journey.

👉 Get Wounded Angels and Finish What We Started Here

Author bio: David Deane Haskell is a fusion writer who’s impossible to pin down. From new age future-vision with a deep dive into the human psyche, to the depths of real-life trauma and despair, David’s novels resonate somewhere between fact and fantasy, but always with a core of relatable truth.

David weaves personal reflections into his stories, creating a reading experience that blends what’s relatably human with deeply personal truths. Truths that we may well share. Walk with me a while and find out.

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

Some podcast conversations stay politely near the surface.

This one didn’t.

Andrea Ashley took me all the way back: my mother dying when I was four, being told years later that she had died by suicide, the strange silence surrounding her life and death, the disappearance of almost an entire side of my family, the bullying, the scapegoating, leaving home at fourteen, and the shame that followed me long after childhood was supposedly over.

A lot happened to me as a child. I always knew that.

What took me much longer to understand was that the child who survived it had never stopped reacting to it.

The fear of rejection. The feeling that I was fundamentally wrong. The desperate need to fix what other people thought of me. The belief that if someone withdrew their love, it proved something terrible about who I was.

I carried all of that into adulthood without knowing what I was carrying.

Andrea understood this territory immediately. She didn’t make me translate it into polite language or explain why something that happened forty years ago could still feel completely present in the body. She listened closely, challenged me when something needed another look, and made connections during the conversation that genuinely stopped me.

At one point, she put two moments from my childhood beside each other and showed me a connection I had never consciously made.

That’s a good interviewer.

We also talked about addiction and recovery, my years in Japan, playing drums at Tokyo Disneyland, the eleven years I largely disappeared into a room, becoming a father, my relationship with my own father, and the experiences that eventually became Wounded Angels.

But underneath all of it was the same question:

What happens when a child survives—but the survival never ends?

I’m deeply grateful to Andrea for giving this story the time and space it needed. She is funny, direct, emotionally intelligent, and completely unafraid of the places where these conversations sometimes go. Adult Child doesn’t sanitize trauma or package healing into ten comfortable little steps. Andrea knows this world from the inside, and it shows.

Please listen to our conversation—and then take some time to explore and follow her excellent podcast. There is a tremendous archive there for anyone trying to understand how unresolved childhood pain continues to appear in adult relationships, identities, bodies, and lives.

This was not simply a place where I appeared to talk about my book.

Andrea helped me see parts of my own story differently.

Visit Adult Child and follow the podcast

You can also follow Andrea at @adultchildpod on Instagram and TikTok.

Andrea, thank you. I was honored to participate in this conversation.

✦ Author Bio

David Deane Haskell is a trauma-informed memoirist and spiritual guide disguised as a writer. His work doesn’t just tell stories—it transmits healing. He writes for the ones who’ve been dragged through the dark and came back changed. Not better. Not fixed. Just ready.

His flagship book, Wounded Angels: A Memoir That Lights the Path to Your Own Inner Child Healing, is the heart of his mission: to show what healing feels like when it’s raw, nonlinear, and hard-won. Everything he shares—essays, stories, transmissions—is filtered through that same lens: radical honesty, emotional courage, and the deep belief that no one is too broken to come back.

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

This was a meaningful one.

I joined Max Ariel on The Evidence Based Podcast to talk about recovery, trauma, shame, inner child work, and what healing can actually look like when you stop trying to force it into someone else’s idea of what that should be.

I’m grateful to Max for the conversation and for the room to speak honestly. These are not always easy things to talk about, but I do think they matter.

Here is the original session, with additional commentary from Max:

✦ If my work resonated today and you support this kind of healing…

👉 Consider funding these efforts directly

✦ Author Bio

David Deane Haskell is a trauma-informed memoirist and spiritual guide disguised as a writer. His work doesn’t just tell stories—it transmits healing. He writes for the ones who’ve been dragged through the dark and came back changed. Not better. Not fixed. Just ready.

His flagship book, Wounded Angels: A Memoir That Lights the Path to Your Own Inner Child Healing, is the heart of his mission: to show what healing feels like when it’s raw, nonlinear, and hard-won. Everything he shares—essays, stories, transmissions—is filtered through that same lens: radical honesty, emotional courage, and the deep belief that no one is too broken to come back.

✦ There’s more coming — the inner child work, the failures, the breakthroughs, the parts we don’t usually say out loud. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.

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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit innerchildjournal.substack.com

Sometimes grounding isn’t soft—it’s defiant.

We think of grounding as a calm, reflective act. I’m out of sorts, I need to get grounded. Not much different from I need a break. But that’s not always the case—as I learned when I stumbled on something unforgettable in a forest in Bali… one stubborn force of nature that stopped me in my tracks.

I Stepped In Again

After finally breaking through the fear of my first podcast, I found myself facing the next step—saying yes a second time. And sure enough, the nerves came back: Will this one go as well? Will I stumble? Do I even have more to say, or did I already spend it all on the first one?

The answer, I discovered, is yes. And no. And something entirely different.

Because this time I sat down with Julia Anchorhaven, host of the Mystical Wellness Podcast, and the conversation went places that weren’t on my map at all. Julia has a way of opening up quiet, luminous spaces in her questions—spaces where I found myself speaking truths I didn’t know I was ready to share.

How It Happened

I noticed that Julia had done some work on inner child on her podcast, which it turns out was a good setup for our conversation, and after a quick connection, we decided to record together. She welcomed me in so warmly that the whole experience felt less like an interview and more like stepping into a shared experience.

We touched on the mystical, the healing journey, the fears that still surface, and the strange beauty of letting your voice actually be heard, through fiction, through true stories, through music—however it happens.

As usual, I walked away grateful. Not because it was “perfect” (apologies for the tech issues, those were entirely on my end this time!), but because it was real.

Listen In

So here it is—the full conversation with Julia on the Mystical Wellness Podcast.

I encourage you not only to listen to our exchange, but also to check out more of Julia’s episodes at the link below. Her work creates a kind of grounded magic that blends healing, wonder, and everyday life in a way I deeply admire.

https://anchorhaven.substack.com/podcast

I hope you enjoy our time together here, and that it leaves you with something meaningful to carry.

Until next time,

David

The Inner Child Journal - Real-Time Guidance For Healing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

✦ Author Bio - David Deane Haskell

David Deane Haskell is a trauma-informed memoirist and spiritual guide disguised as a writer. His work doesn’t just tell stories—it transmits healing. He writes for the ones who’ve been dragged through the dark and came back changed. Not better. Not fixed. Just ready.

His flagship book, Wounded Angels: A Journey to Wholeness Through Inner Child Healing, is the heart of his mission: to show what healing feels like when it’s raw, nonlinear, and hard-won. Everything he shares—essays, stories, transmissions—is filtered through that same lens: radical honesty, emotional courage, and the deep belief that no one is too broken to come back.

✦ Why The Inner Child Journal Exists

You won’t find “10 Tips to Love Yourself” here. You’ll find the emotional truth at the end the tip list—the part no one wants to talk about.

This is a space for people doing real healing. For those whose inner children still throw tantrums, freeze up, or whisper, ‘we’re not safe yet’. If that’s you, welcome. You’re not behind. You’re not defective. You’re just healing honestly.

David doesn’t speak from theory. He speaks from the trenches. And he’s building this journal for others who need a witness, a mirror, or a moment of ‘God, someone else gets it’.

✦ Why Your Voice Matters Here

This isn’t a community for passive reading. It’s a space for shared resonance. You are not here to consume. You’re here to be present. When you comment, when you share, when you say, ‘this hit me’, you’re helping build something sacred.

Don’t recommend this because it’s trendy.Recommend it because it’s true.

And if you feel something reading this?Say something. That’s how this becomes ours.

Wounded Angels: A Journey To Wholeness Through Inner Child Healing, is the centerpiece of my healing work. I hope you will find your own healing there.

👉 Read Wounded Angels by David Deane Haskell

If my words resonated today and you’d like to help me continue this work…

👉 Help David Keep Writing

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

I Finally Did the Podcast!

I recently hit a long-postponed milestone—to be a guest speaker on a podcast. I kept going back and forth about which one to appear on, what the timing should be, what I should wear, what I should say, which jokes to use, whether I should wait until I have ten books published, whether or not I needed 3D holographic technology first.

You know, the sort of things everybody worries about.

Right? 😊

Turns out, surprise-surprise, it was high-grade resistance to being seen. Because then you'll all see what I look like and hear what I sound like. And if I say something silly, everybody will know.

So months slipped by; I half-heartedly sent a couple of inquiries.

But finally, I met up with the incomparable Suzy Rowlands after hearing that a Substack friend had done a podcast interview with her. And she has been more wonderful start to finish.

I feel so happy about the final result, not to mention the fact that I finally did it, that I asked Suzy if she would be so kind as to let me add the podcast to my own publication as well.

She graciously accepted. Watch our conversation above. Then visit her podcast, Suzy Exhales, here:

I hope you enjoy the healing conversation, and that you get something meaningful out of it.

Until next time...

✦ Author Bio - David Deane Haskell

David Deane Haskell is a trauma-informed memoirist and spiritual guide disguised as a writer. His work doesn’t just tell stories—it transmits healing. He writes for the ones who’ve been dragged through the dark and came back changed. Not better. Not fixed. Just ready.

His flagship book, Wounded Angels: A Journey to Wholeness Through Inner Child Healing, is the heart of his mission: to show what healing feels like when it’s raw, nonlinear, and hard-won. Everything he shares—essays, stories, transmissions—is filtered through that same lens: radical honesty, emotional courage, and the deep belief that no one is too broken to come back.

✦ Why The Inner Child Journal Exists

You won’t find “10 Tips to Love Yourself” here. You’ll find the emotional truth at the end the tip list—the part no one wants to talk about.

This is a space for people doing real healing. For those whose inner children still throw tantrums, freeze up, or whisper, ‘we’re not safe yet’. If that’s you, welcome. You’re not behind. You’re not defective. You’re just healing honestly.

David doesn’t speak from theory. He speaks from the trenches. And he’s building this journal for others who need a witness, a mirror, or a moment of ‘God, someone else gets it’.

✦ Why Your Voice Matters Here

This isn’t a community for passive reading. It’s a space for shared resonance. You are not here to consume. You’re here to be present. When you comment, when you share, when you say, ‘this hit me’, you’re helping build something sacred.

Don’t recommend this because it’s trendy.Recommend it because it’s true.

And if you feel something reading this?Say something. That’s how this becomes ours.

Wounded Angels: A Journey To Wholeness Through Inner Child Healing, is the centerpiece of my healing work. I hope you will find your own healing there.

👉 Read Wounded Angels by David Deane Haskell

If my words resonated today and you’d like to help me continue this work…

👉 Help David Keep Writing

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

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit innerchildjournal.substack.com

Sitting by the roadside with a hot, rich cup of salted coffee—Vietnam’s quiet masterpiece—watching the scooter madness unfold. No rush. Just breath, beeps, and beauty in motion. Come slow down with me.