The Terri Cole Show

Are you the one who handles everything for all the people? Are you the fixer? The one who rarely needs or asks for help? Are you the one who does all the things for all the people?

Be honest with yourself.

If so, you may have a father wound that is hiding in plain sight — because the very capability you have keeps this unhealed wound hidden.

That is exactly what this episode is about: why the father wound can be especially hard to recognize in high functioning women, how high functioning codependency can keep you stuck in patterns of self-abandonment, and why how you feel and what you want matters as much as what you accomplish.

Read the show notes for today's episode at terricole.com/864

Build an Empowered Blended Family with Cameron Normand

In this episode of The Terri Cole Show, I sit down with nationally recognized stepfamily expert Cameron Normand to explore the unique challenges stepmoms face and why traditional parenting advice often doesn't work for blended families.

Cameron shares practical guidance on building relationships with stepchildren, navigating parenting and discipline, setting clear expectations with partners, and managing the stress of stepfamily life. She also explains why it can take four to seven years for a stepfamily to feel cohesive and why moving at the children's pace is essential.

Cameron also shares details about her annual Stepmom Summit, a virtual event designed to give stepmoms expert guidance, resources, and a supportive community. The summit starts September 14th, and you can grab a free ticket at terricole.com/stepmomsummit

You can get the show notes at terricole.com/863

Having an unhealed father wound impacts your ability to create emotional safety in your relationships.

If you grew up in a house where emotional safety was not part of your relationship with your father, calm can feel weird or unfamiliar, and vulnerability can feel risky. Trusting another person to be there for you, if that wasn't your experience, may feel counterintuitive.

In this episode, we're exploring how father wounds impact our ability to feel safe in relationships, why calm can feel so unfamiliar, and what emotional safety can look like as we heal.

We may have learned to protect ourselves through high-functioning codependency, hyper-vigilance, or hyper-independence. These strategies made sense at the time, but they can keep us from the safety we actually want now. From The Episode:

• A father wound is a worthiness wound. We may have learned in childhood that we weren't good enough as we were.

• Without emotional safety from our fathers, we find other ways to protect ourselves: high-functioning codependency, hyper-vigilance, or hyper-independence.

• When your system is more familiar with hypervigilance than with safety, you may be drawn to relationships that are familiar but not necessarily good.

• We repeat what we do not repair. If you're not attracting someone who's calm and securely attached, we may need to heal the wound first.

• Emotional safety is the felt sense that you can be yourself and still belong. You can have needs, say no, and make mistakes without being punished or rejected.

I wrote a whole book on father wounds to help you understand how they show up in your relationships, your sense of safety, your self-worth, and the way you give and receive love. If you're ready to start healing those patterns at the root, preorder your copy today.

Plus, when you preorder now at https://fatherwoundbook.com, you'll get a free 3-hour virtual healing retreat.

What if the key to better sleep and less stress wasn't doing more, but moving less?

In this episode, I sit down with Liz Tenuto, aka The Workout Witch, to talk about somatic exercises, nervous system regulation, and why so many of us can't sleep or relax.

Liz teaches tiny, lazy movements that release stored tension from the body, and she demonstrates three of them during our conversation. We also talk about why standard sleep advice fails trauma survivors, and how dissociation shows up in women who take care of everyone but themselves.

If you feel wired but tired and can't remember the last time you felt truly rested, this episode is for you.

00:00 Welcome to The Terri Cole Show 02:29 Liz's Origin Story: Chronic Pain, Bad Sleep & 10 Years of Searching 05:28 Why Somatics Is Not Woo-Woo: The Science & Ancient Roots 08:23 Why Sleep Issues Are So Widespread Right Now 10:08 How to Luxuriate Your Sleep Routine (Especially If You're a Trauma Survivor) 13:39 The Hip-Rocking Exercise That Helps You Fall Asleep 17:14 Fight-Flight vs. Freeze: What Nervous System Dysregulation Actually Looks Like 20:24 What Dissociation Really Means Beyond Just Zoning Out 22:41 Two Somatic Fixes: Ear-Pulling for Dissociation & Forehead-Swiping for Fight-or-Flight 25:15 Inside "When the Body Speaks" & Where to Find Liz you can get the shownotes at terricole.com/861

If setting a boundary feels like you're risking the whole relationship, your unhealed father wound might be why.

When the person who was supposed to protect you didn't, you can grow up without the sense that you're even allowed to say no.

In this episode, I'm walking through how the father wound shapes your boundaries, the different father archetypes and the specific boundary struggles each one creates, and why so many of us never learned we were allowed to protect ourselves in the first place.

Whether your father was absent, critical, emotionally distant, abusive, unreliable, narcissistic, passive, or played favorites, those wounds can make certain boundaries especially difficult. It often comes back to the same things: learning to protect yourself, honoring your needs, and being able to disappoint other people without abandoning yourself.

The best part of healing your father wound is that you don't have to keep going along to get along anymore. Not sure if your father wound is affecting your boundaries? Get the journal prompts from this episode to uncover how your father wound may still be shaping your boundaries, relationships, and ability to say no. terricole.com/860

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• If your father didn't protect you, you may have learned you weren't worth protecting. That belief shapes your boundaries in adulthood.
• Different father archetypes create different boundary struggles: absent fathers make saying no feel like abandonment, critical fathers make you fear getting it wrong, narcissistic fathers teach you that your needs don't matter.
• Pleasing, being compliant, achieving to belong — these are the opposite of having healthy boundaries. They kept you safe as a child, but they're not serving you now.
• You'll never build the life you want if it's built on self-abandonment.
• You don't need your father's permission or participation to heal your father wound. This work is for you.

I wrote an entire book to walk you through this work. Pre-order Father Wound and get access to a free 3-hour virtual retreat with me. fatherwoundbook.com

What if surrender could help you reconnect with pleasure, heal emotionally, and feel fully alive again?

In this powerful conversation, I sit down with Regena Thomashauer to explore surrender, pleasure, self-healing, and emotional healing. We talk about why high-functioning women can become exhausted from trying to control everything, how surrender is different from submission, and what happens when we stop fighting our lives.

Regena shares her deeply personal journey from trauma and self-doubt to discovering the power of pleasure, reconnecting with her body, and learning to trust what comes next.

If you're ready to let go of control, reconnect with pleasure, and discover a new way to move through burnout and life's difficult moments, this conversation is for you.

Find the show notes at terricole.com/859

Let's say you have a rough interaction with someone, a disappointing outcome, or you get bad news–what do you do to help yourself feel better?

Do you have a couple of drinks? Maybe smoke a little weed? Or eat a tub of ice cream? No judgment here, but I want to invite you to think about it because many of us confuse self-numbing with self-soothing.

In this episode, you'll learn my favorite self-soothing tips, healthy ways to support your nervous system and emotional wellbeing, plus how to create your own self-soothing and stress relief toolkit.

Learning how to effectively self-soothe can be life-changing!

Read the show notes for today's episode at terricole.com/396

What if beauty could change the way you experience life?

In this conversation, I sit down with visionary filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg to talk about gratitude, nature, beauty, wonder, and mental health—and why paying attention to the natural world can help us become more present and connected.

Louis shares the story behind his breathtaking films Fantastic Fungi, Gratitude Revealed, and Moving Art, and explains why he believes beauty can be a powerful antidote to a world filled with fear, conflict, and constant bad news.

We talk about how nature teaches us to live, why gratitude begins with presence, and what happens when we slow down enough to actually see the beauty that's already around us.

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the world, this conversation may give you a completely different way to look at it.

Read the show notes for this episode at terricole.com/857

Do you find that you attach unusually quickly to people, whether in friendships or romantic relationships? Do you stay in relationships that you know are bad for you because the thought of being alone scares you more than staying in a bad relationship? Or do you repeatedly find yourself in relationships with unavailable people? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you might have abandonment issues. In this episode, I'm helping you recognize the signs of abandonment issues in adult relationships and reviewing the most common causes of chronic fear of abandonment.

Find the show notes for today's episode at terricole.com/374

Are you a nice person?

Do you think it's possible to be too nice? Or that wanting to be nice is an excuse some high-functioning codependents hide behind to avoid conflict?

In my personal and professional experience, it is possible to be too nice, and it's not great for your relationships.

In this episode, we'll explore what it means to be nice, what being too nice looks like, why it matters, and how to shift your behavior to authentic niceness.

Read the show notes for today's episode at terricole.com/714