You know the moment. Something lands, a tone, a silence, a left-on-read, and suddenly you're underwater. The flood comes fast and it takes the whole system with it. In this episode I want to name that moment with real precision, because most of us don't even have language for what's happening to us when abandonment hijacks the body. It isn't weakness and it isn't you being "too much." It's a response that makes complete sense once you understand it.

I also want to be careful here, because "self-soothing" is a phrase that gets thrown around in ways that don't actually serve survivors like us. So much of what passes for soothing is really just management, getting yourself quiet enough to keep functioning while the wound stays untouched. That's not what I'm talking about. There's a distinction underneath this work that makes authentic, CPTSD Resolution-based self-soothing possible, and once you learn how to lead it, your relational life will change. I walk you through what that distinction is and then into the actual practice, the thing you can do when the flood hits.

And I'm honest about what real self-soothing is not. It's not abandoning yourself to feel better for a minute. It's not white-knuckling. It's not coping dressed up in nicer language. The wider why is this: the way you meet yourself in the flood is the whole work. When you stop abandoning yourself in the exact moment you most need secure attachment, something at the root begins to change. That's what I want for you, and that's what this episode is for.

When You're Ready

CPTSD Resolution 101 Weekend Workshop Three days, seven people, live on Zoom. You'll leave with a clear, personalized map for your CPTSD Resolution. Offered twice a year in February and September. https://cptsdmedicine.com/weekendworkshop

Happily Ever After — The All-Inclusive CPTSD Resolution Experience Six months of close-proximity training with me. Application required. https://cptsdmedicine.com/services About Dr. Tanner Wallace

Tanner Wallace, PhD and Level 3 IFS Practitioner, is the founder of CPTSD Medicine and the author of the CPTSD Medicine Healing Protocol, a proprietary applied mental health training curriculum that teaches HouseHolder CycleBreakers to resolve complex relational trauma at the root. A former tenured professor of health and human development, she left academia to build the services she could not find as a childhood trauma survivor diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder: a structured six-month container that trains humans to become their own best intervention scientists. Inside her signature container, Happily Ever After, she works with a small number of students to resolve, not manage, their CPTSD.

About the Podcast

Heal First, Then Pick Your Life Partner is for high-functioning adults with complex trauma who are tired of repeating painful relationship patterns. If you perform well professionally but struggle intensely in your closest relationships, this podcast helps you see why.

Each episode takes an ordinary moment of adult life — attending a family wedding, going through old photographs, ending a relationship, writing a holiday card, having a hard conversation with someone you love — and shows you what's actually happening underneath it through the lens of complex trauma. You'll hear my take on the lived experience of CPTSD, drawn from five years of building a proprietary trauma resolution curriculum and from my own work as a survivor who no longer qualifies for the diagnoses I once did.

This is diagnostic, declarative, and unlike anything else in the CPTSD space. Hosted by Dr. Tanner Wallace, PhD, founder of CPTSD Medicine.

I know that loop intimately: hurt by the relationship almost constantly, yet too terrified to actually leave. I've lived in it, I've watched people I love live in it, and I've sat with so many students who've been circling it for years. So this one is survivor to survivor. In this diagnostic episode I name the trap out loud and tell you why it can hold us for so long.

Here's what I want you to hear: it was never really about whether your partner can change enough, or whether you can bend enough to make it tolerable. I used to believe that too. The real question is whether you know, all the way down, that you're okay on your own no matter what. As long as there's a part of you programmed to hold on at any cost, you'll stay—and you'll reach for the false exits instead. The egregious betrayal that finally "lets" you go. The new person. Enough numbing to mute the fear. Or sabotaging things so badly that they leave first. I've reached for some of those myself. None of them resolve the core wound, which means we just carry it into the next relationship and run the whole thing again. There's no relief without resolution.

I also get honest about why understanding this won't free you. You can see the survival code running and still feel it run. Insight is not the same as updating the belief at the root—that only happens when you discover a truth so valid your body actually feels it. I close the episode with a mini-facilitation you can do on your own: find a quiet, private place, bring to mind the human you feel you should leave but can't, and take inventory of the beliefs, fears, and messages that come online. Because the question was never stay or go. It's whether you're okay either way. When that lands as yes, you're never staying just because you can't leave. That's the sovereignty I want for every one of us.

When You're Ready

Happily Ever After — The All-Inclusive CPTSD Resolution Experience Six months of close-proximity training with me. Application required. https://cptsdmedicine.com/services

About Dr. Tanner Wallace

Tanner Wallace, PhD and Level 3 IFS Practitioner, is the founder of CPTSD Medicine and the author of the CPTSD Medicine Healing Protocol, a proprietary applied mental health training curriculum that teaches HouseHolder CycleBreakers to resolve complex relational trauma at the root. A former tenured professor of health and human development, she left academia to build the services she could not find as a childhood trauma survivor diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder: a structured six-month container that trains humans to become their own best intervention scientists. Inside her signature container, Happily Ever After, she works with a small number of students to resolve, not manage, their CPTSD.

About the Podcast

Heal First, Then Pick Your Life Partner is for high-functioning adults with complex trauma who are tired of repeating painful relationship patterns. If you perform well professionally but struggle intensely in your closest relationships, this podcast helps you see why.

Each episode takes an ordinary moment of adult life — attending a family wedding, going through old photographs, ending a relationship, writing a holiday card, having a hard conversation with someone you love — and shows you what's actually happening underneath it through the lens of complex trauma. You'll hear my take on the lived experience of CPTSD, drawn from five years of building a proprietary trauma resolution curriculum and from my own work as a survivor who no longer qualifies for the diagnoses I once did.

This is diagnostic, declarative, and unlike anything else in the CPTSD space. Hosted by Dr. Tanner Wallace, PhD, founder of CPTSD Medicine.

Abandonment wounds are among the most discussed injuries in the trauma field, and for good reason: they produce intense suffering and a chronic, low-grade conviction that one is perpetually being left behind. In this episode, I walk through a Case Analysis from Happily Ever After featuring a student working an assignment on abandonment wounds. I use it to show why specificity is not a refinement but a precondition for successful CPTSD Resolution, with concrete examples of what genuinely matters when working this terrain.

When You're Ready

CPTSD Resolution 101 Weekend Workshop Three days, seven people, live on Zoom. You'll leave with a clear, personalized map for your CPTSD Resolution. Offered twice a year in February and September. https://cptsdmedicine.com/weekendworkshop

Happily Ever After — The All-Inclusive CPTSD Resolution Experience Six months of close-proximity training with me. Application required. https://cptsdmedicine.com/services

About Dr. Tanner Wallace

Tanner Wallace, PhD and Level 3 IFS Practitioner, is the founder of CPTSD Medicine and the author of the CPTSD Medicine Healing Protocol, a proprietary applied mental health training curriculum that teaches HouseHolder CycleBreakers to resolve complex relational trauma at the root. A former tenured professor of health and human development, she left academia to build the services she could not find as a childhood trauma survivor diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder: a structured six-month container that trains humans to become their own best intervention scientists. Inside her signature container, Happily Ever After, she works with a small number of students to resolve, not manage, their CPTSD.

About the Podcast

Heal First, Then Pick Your Life Partner is for high-functioning adults with complex trauma who are tired of repeating painful relationship patterns. If you perform well professionally but struggle intensely in your closest relationships, this podcast helps you see why.

Each episode takes an ordinary moment of adult life — attending a family wedding, going through old photographs, ending a relationship, writing a holiday card, having a hard conversation with someone you love — and shows you what's actually happening underneath it through the lens of complex trauma. You'll hear my take on the lived experience of CPTSD, drawn from five years of building a proprietary trauma resolution curriculum and from my own work as a survivor who no longer qualifies for the diagnoses I once did.

This is diagnostic, declarative, and unlike anything else in the CPTSD space. Hosted by Dr. Tanner Wallace, PhD, founder of CPTSD Medicine.

You are alone with a kind of emotional pain that feels like a kind of despair you cannot put into words. The partner left the room, or stopped texting back, or came back with coffee and an apology that closed the conversation before the work could begin, or did everything "right" and somehow you still feel like you are a freak and alone in the middle of the afternoon, with no plan about what to do next. In this episode I name why the loop of waiting for another human to do what only you can do is not a failure of partnership but a misattribution of the source of the distress, why the cultural binary of your fault or theirs keeps the work from beginning, and what becomes available the moment you understand that being responsible for your distress is not the same as being to blame for it. We walk through three moments where this pattern shows up — the unanswered text, the kiss-and-make-up morning, the partner who is doing everything right — and what the lens does to each one. This episode is for you if you have ever said to yourself, "if they loved me right, this wouldn't hurt this much."

When You're Ready

CPTSD Resolution 101 Weekend Workshop Three days, seven people, live on Zoom. You'll leave with a clear, personalized map for your CPTSD Resolution. Offered twice a year in February and September. https://cptsdmedicine.com/weekendworkshop

Happily Ever After — The All-Inclusive CPTSD Resolution Experience Six months of close-proximity training with me. Application required. https://cptsdmedicine.com/services

About Dr. Tanner Wallace

Tanner Wallace, PhD and Level 3 IFS Practitioner, is the founder of CPTSD Medicine and the author of the CPTSD Medicine Healing Protocol, a proprietary applied mental health training curriculum that teaches HouseHolder CycleBreakers to resolve complex relational trauma at the root. A former tenured professor of health and human development, she left academia to build the services she could not find as a childhood trauma survivor diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder: a structured six-month container that trains humans to become their own best intervention scientists. Inside her signature container, Happily Ever After, she works with a small number of students to resolve, not manage, their CPTSD.

About the Podcast

Heal First, Then Pick Your Life Partner is for high-functioning adults with complex trauma who are tired of repeating painful relationship patterns. If you perform well professionally but struggle intensely in your closest relationships, this podcast helps you see why.

Each episode takes an ordinary moment of adult life — attending a family wedding, going through old photographs, ending a relationship, writing a holiday card, having a hard conversation with someone you love — and shows you what's actually happening underneath it through the lens of complex trauma. You'll hear my take on the lived experience of CPTSD, drawn from five years of building a proprietary trauma resolution curriculum and from my own work as a survivor who no longer qualifies for the diagnoses I once did.

This is diagnostic, declarative, and unlike anything else in the CPTSD space. Hosted by Dr. Tanner Wallace, PhD, founder of CPTSD Medicine.

You are ending something, and the ending is not going the way endings are supposed to go. The other person has disappeared, or reframed you to mutual friends before you could speak, or treated avoidance as a boundary and called it growth, and you are trying to logistic your way through what is actually a threshold. In this episode I name why Starting Over inside a trauma ecosystem cannot produce grace, why the cruelty and the distortion are structural rather than personal, and what the HouseHolder CycleBreaker's actual job is at the threshold, which is not correcting the narrative externally and not hero-parenting through guilt, but reinstating reality as it is, not as others have needed you to believe it was. This episode is for you if you have said to yourself, "I don't understand how this became the story."

When You're Ready

CPTSD Resolution 101 Weekend Workshop Three days, seven people, live on Zoom. You'll leave with a clear, personalized map for your CPTSD Resolution. Offered twice a year in February and September. https://cptsdmedicine.com/weekendworkshop

Happily Ever After — The All-Inclusive CPTSD Resolution Experience Six months of close-proximity training with me. Application required. https://cptsdmedicine.com/services

About Dr. Tanner Wallace

Tanner Wallace, PhD and Level 3 IFS Practitioner, is the founder of CPTSD Medicine and the author of the CPTSD Medicine Healing Protocol, a proprietary applied mental health training curriculum that teaches HouseHolder CycleBreakers to resolve complex relational trauma at the root. A former tenured professor of health and human development, she left academia to build the services she could not find as a childhood trauma survivor diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder: a structured six-month container that trains humans to become their own best intervention scientists. Inside her signature container, Happily Ever After, she works with a small number of students to resolve, not manage, their CPTSD.

About the Podcast

Heal First, Then Pick Your Life Partner is for high-functioning adults with complex trauma who are tired of repeating painful relationship patterns. If you perform well professionally but struggle intensely in your closest relationships, this podcast helps you see why.

Each episode takes an ordinary moment of adult life — attending a family wedding, going through old photographs, ending a relationship, writing a holiday card, having a hard conversation with someone you love — and shows you what's actually happening underneath it through the lens of complex trauma. You'll hear my take on the lived experience of CPTSD, drawn from five years of building a proprietary trauma resolution curriculum and from my own work as a survivor who no longer qualifies for the diagnoses I once did.

This is diagnostic, declarative, and unlike anything else in the CPTSD space. Hosted by Dr. Tanner Wallace, PhD, founder of CPTSD Medicine.

You can know a relationship is over and still feel like the ground underneath you has nowhere to land. For survivors of childhood trauma, the ending of an adult relationship is not just a loss — it is one of the most consequential windows for CPTSD Resolution you will ever be inside, and most women rush past it without realizing what was available to them. In this episode, I introduce The Reset Period: three obligations a HouseHolder CycleBreaker owes herself after an ending — Stabilize, Distill, Discern. I draw on the science of memory reconsolidation to name why the weeks after a rupture are structurally different from any other time, and I walk through what it looks like to honor the diversity of your Parts when one is devastated, one is relieved, and one is already drafting the reconciliation text. This episode is for you if you have ever caught yourself saying I just want to move on and felt, somewhere underneath, that something important was about to be skipped.

When You're Ready

CPTSD Resolution 101 Weekend Workshop Three days, seven people, live on Zoom. You'll leave with a clear, personalized map for your CPTSD Resolution. Offered twice a year in February and September. https://cptsdmedicine.com/weekendworkshop

Happily Ever After — The All-Inclusive CPTSD Resolution Experience Six months of close-proximity training with me. Application required. https://cptsdmedicine.com/services

About Dr. Tanner Wallace

Tanner Wallace, PhD and Level 3 IFS Practitioner, is the founder of CPTSD Medicine and the author of the CPTSD Medicine Healing Protocol, a proprietary applied mental health training curriculum that teaches HouseHolder CycleBreakers to resolve complex relational trauma at the root. A former tenured professor of health and human development, she left academia to build the services she could not find as a childhood trauma survivor diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder: a structured six-month container that trains humans to become their own best intervention scientists. Inside her signature container, Happily Ever After, she works with a small number of students to resolve, not manage, their CPTSD.

About the Podcast

Heal First, Then Pick Your Life Partner is for high-functioning adults with complex trauma who are tired of repeating painful relationship patterns. If you perform well professionally but struggle intensely in your closest relationships, this podcast helps you see why.

Each episode takes an ordinary moment of adult life — attending a family wedding, going through old photographs, ending a relationship, writing a holiday card, having a hard conversation with someone you love — and shows you what's actually happening underneath it through the lens of complex trauma. You'll hear my take on the lived experience of CPTSD, drawn from five years of building a proprietary trauma resolution curriculum and from my own work as a survivor who no longer qualifies for the diagnoses I once did.

This is diagnostic, declarative, and unlike anything else in the CPTSD space. Hosted by Dr. Tanner Wallace, PhD, founder of CPTSD Medicine.

You can run a life that looks competent from the outside while the private functional domain — taxes, invoicing, paperwork, the relationship with yourself — quietly falls apart behind closed doors. That split is not a discipline problem. It is an audience problem. In this episode, I introduce a single discerning question I want you carrying with you — Is there an audience for this task? — and walk through what it reveals about the Part of you that has learned to perform competence outwardly while leaving the unwitnessed loops open. We work through the backstage of the Broadway show your life has become, why mainstream priority advice has it backwards, and the difference between priorities and the systems that hold them. If you have ever said I can keep up with everyone else's expectations but I cannot keep up with my own life, this episode was made for you.

When You're Ready

CPTSD Resolution 101 Weekend Workshop Three days, seven people, live on Zoom. You'll leave with a clear, personalized map for your CPTSD Resolution. Offered twice a year in February and September. https://cptsdmedicine.com/weekendworkshop

Happily Ever After — The All-Inclusive CPTSD Resolution Experience Six months of close-proximity training with me. Application required. https://cptsdmedicine.com/services

About Dr. Tanner Wallace

Tanner Wallace, PhD and Level 3 IFS Practitioner, is the founder of CPTSD Medicine and the author of the CPTSD Medicine Healing Protocol, a proprietary applied mental health training curriculum that teaches HouseHolder CycleBreakers to resolve complex relational trauma at the root. A former tenured professor of health and human development, she left academia to build the services she could not find as a childhood trauma survivor diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder: a structured six-month container that trains humans to become their own best intervention scientists. Inside her signature container, Happily Ever After, she works with a small number of students to resolve, not manage, their CPTSD.

About the Podcast

Heal First, Then Pick Your Life Partner is for high-functioning adults with complex trauma who are tired of repeating painful relationship patterns. If you perform well professionally but struggle intensely in your closest relationships, this podcast helps you see why.

Each episode takes an ordinary moment of adult life — attending a family wedding, going through old photographs, ending a relationship, writing a holiday card, having a hard conversation with someone you love — and shows you what's actually happening underneath it through the lens of complex trauma. You'll hear my take on the lived experience of CPTSD, drawn from five years of building a proprietary trauma resolution curriculum and from my own work as a survivor who no longer qualifies for the diagnoses I once did.

This is diagnostic, declarative, and unlike anything else in the CPTSD space. Hosted by Dr. Tanner Wallace, PhD, founder of CPTSD Medicine.

You've had the experience — someone tells you what's being said about you in the group chat you're not part of, or you overhear it, or it lands in a comment section, and suddenly you're defending a version of yourself you don't recognize. The spiral is immediate, the shame is disproportionate, and you can't tell whether to retaliate or apologize. In this episode, I teach the Embodiment Equation: why leaving the body in childhood sets up an implicit contract that invites relational manipulation, why women under patriarchy reach for character attacks as a counterfeit source of power, and what being a Girls' Girl actually means when you define it structurally instead of reflexively. Drawing on a detailed business-team scenario, I walk through the honesty audit that lets you hold accountability and self-protection at the same time. If you've ever thought "why is this always happening to me" or "why did I just stoop to that," this episode was made for you

When You're Ready

CPTSD Resolution 101 Weekend Workshop Three days, seven people, live on Zoom. You'll leave with a clear, personalized map for your CPTSD Resolution. Offered twice a year in February and September. https://cptsdmedicine.com/weekendworkshop

Happily Ever After — The All-Inclusive CPTSD Resolution Experience Six months of close-proximity training with me. Application required. https://cptsdmedicine.com/services

About Dr. Tanner Wallace

Tanner Wallace, PhD and Level 3 IFS Practitioner, is the founder of CPTSD Medicine and the author of the CPTSD Medicine Healing Protocol, a proprietary applied mental health training curriculum that teaches HouseHolder CycleBreakers to resolve complex relational trauma at the root. A former tenured professor of health and human development, she left academia to build the services she could not find as a childhood trauma survivor diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder: a structured six-month container that trains humans to become their own best intervention scientists. Inside her signature container, Happily Ever After, she works with a small number of students to resolve, not manage, their CPTSD.

About the Podcast

Heal First, Then Pick Your Life Partner is for high-functioning adults with complex trauma who are tired of repeating painful relationship patterns. If you perform well professionally but struggle intensely in your closest relationships, this podcast helps you see why.

Each episode takes an ordinary moment of adult life — attending a family wedding, going through old photographs, ending a relationship, writing a holiday card, having a hard conversation with someone you love — and shows you what's actually happening underneath it through the lens of complex trauma. You'll hear my take on the lived experience of CPTSD, drawn from five years of building a proprietary trauma resolution curriculum and from my own work as a survivor who no longer qualifies for the diagnoses I once did.

This is diagnostic, declarative, and unlike anything else in the CPTSD space. Hosted by Dr. Tanner Wallace, PhD, founder of CPTSD Medicine.

You've done excellent work. You know it. And yet you find yourself scanning the room for confirmation that someone else knows it too. That quiet ache of feeling unseen at your job isn't a professional development problem. It's one of the most common places a CPTSD wound shows up uninvited. In this episode, I introduce The Appreciation Audit, a four-question self-inquiry practice designed to help you trace what you're actually asking for when you say you feel "underappreciated," and who you're really asking. We look at how childhood emotional neglect wires the nervous system to experience a missing "good job" as something closer to a survival threat, and why the workplace becomes a stand-in stage for recognition that was never delivered in the original production. Drawing on research in rejection sensitivity, attachment disruption, and real-life examples from professional and family life, we explore the difference between wanting appreciation and needing it to feel real. If you've ever thought "Why does this bother me so much? It's just work," this episode is for yo

When You're Ready

CPTSD Resolution 101 Weekend Workshop Three days, seven people, live on Zoom. You'll leave with a clear, personalized map for your CPTSD Resolution. Offered twice a year in February and September. https://cptsdmedicine.com/weekendworkshop

Happily Ever After — The All-Inclusive CPTSD Resolution Experience Six months of close-proximity training with me. Application required. https://cptsdmedicine.com/services

About Dr. Tanner Wallace

Tanner Wallace, PhD and Level 3 IFS Practitioner, is the founder of CPTSD Medicine and the author of the CPTSD Medicine Healing Protocol, a proprietary applied mental health training curriculum that teaches HouseHolder CycleBreakers to resolve complex relational trauma at the root. A former tenured professor of health and human development, she left academia to build the services she could not find as a childhood trauma survivor diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder: a structured six-month container that trains humans to become their own best intervention scientists. Inside her signature container, Happily Ever After, she works with a small number of students to resolve, not manage, their CPTSD.

About the Podcast

Heal First, Then Pick Your Life Partner is for high-functioning adults with complex trauma who are tired of repeating painful relationship patterns. If you perform well professionally but struggle intensely in your closest relationships, this podcast helps you see why.

Each episode takes an ordinary moment of adult life — attending a family wedding, going through old photographs, ending a relationship, writing a holiday card, having a hard conversation with someone you love — and shows you what's actually happening underneath it through the lens of complex trauma. You'll hear my take on the lived experience of CPTSD, drawn from five years of building a proprietary trauma resolution curriculum and from my own work as a survivor who no longer qualifies for the diagnoses I once did.

This is diagnostic, declarative, and unlike anything else in the CPTSD space. Hosted by Dr. Tanner Wallace, PhD, founder of CPTSD Medicine.

You've probably noticed that your relationship with your parents lives in one of two places: protection or blame. You either minimize what happened to keep the peace, or you've swung into a narrative that finally names the harm but hasn't actually moved anything in your body. In this episode, I unpack the three-phase arc that most CPTSD survivors move through when reckoning with their parents' role in their wounding, and I introduce the concept of Merciful Validation as the earned posture that lives beyond both protection and vilification. Using real-life scenarios like honoring a parent's birthday, we explore what it looks like to hold honest reckoning and genuine mercy at the same time without collapsing into either. If you've ever caught yourself saying "bless their heart" about the people who hurt you and felt something dishonest in it, this episode was made for you. When You're Ready

CPTSD Resolution 101 Weekend Workshop Three days, seven people, live on Zoom. You'll leave with a clear, personalized map for your CPTSD Resolution. Offered twice a year in February and September. https://cptsdmedicine.com/weekendworkshop

Happily Ever After — The All-Inclusive CPTSD Resolution Experience Six months of close-proximity training with me. Application required. https://cptsdmedicine.com/services

About Dr. Tanner Wallace

Tanner Wallace, PhD and Level 3 IFS Practitioner, is the founder of CPTSD Medicine and the author of the CPTSD Medicine Healing Protocol, a proprietary applied mental health training curriculum that teaches HouseHolder CycleBreakers to resolve complex relational trauma at the root. A former tenured professor of health and human development, she left academia to build the services she could not find as a childhood trauma survivor diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder: a structured six-month container that trains humans to become their own best intervention scientists. Inside her signature container, Happily Ever After, she works with a small number of students to resolve, not manage, their CPTSD.

About the Podcast

Heal First, Then Pick Your Life Partner is for high-functioning adults with complex trauma who are tired of repeating painful relationship patterns. If you perform well professionally but struggle intensely in your closest relationships, this podcast helps you see why.

Each episode takes an ordinary moment of adult life — attending a family wedding, going through old photographs, ending a relationship, writing a holiday card, having a hard conversation with someone you love — and shows you what's actually happening underneath it through the lens of complex trauma. You'll hear my take on the lived experience of CPTSD, drawn from five years of building a proprietary trauma resolution curriculum and from my own work as a survivor who no longer qualifies for the diagnoses I once did.

This is diagnostic, declarative, and unlike anything else in the CPTSD space. Hosted by Dr. Tanner Wallace, PhD, founder of CPTSD Medicine.