210: Dissociated & Disconnected - When Feeling Nothing Was How You Survived w/ Andy Carlson
Adult Child
Andrea Ashley
4.9 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2025
⏱️ 103 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When childhood trains you to make yourself invisible, your body learns to go numb. And your mind becomes the place you live — because it’s the only place you can. This episode explores how to rebuild safety from the inside out.
Andy Carlson is a trauma coach, LIFT facilitator, and co-host of Time with Tim Fletcher. In this conversation, he opens up about growing up in a home where strict control and chronic criticism made “aliveness” feel unsafe — and disconnection became his default. He shares how the collapse of his marriage became the breaking point that forced him to confront shame, codependency, and the long road back to feeling, agency, and self-trust.
✨ What this episode explores:
▪️Invisible Child → Numb Adult — Why dissociation and emotional shutdown can be the cost of learning “don’t be seen, don’t be loud, don’t be human” in a rigid or shame-based home.
▪️Dorsal Shutdown + Sympathetic Panic — How CPTSD can swing between collapse and over-control, leaving you feeling “blank” in your body while your mind stays stuck in hypervigilant chaos.
▪️State Precedes Story — Why your nervous system creates the conditions for spiraling thoughts, and how the brain builds a narrative to match dysregulation (instead of telling you the truth).
▪️Somatic Reconnection That Doesn’t Overwhelm You — How slow, structured somatic practices rebuild body awareness when stillness feels unsafe, and why “just meditate” often backfires for trauma survivors.
▪️Widening Your Window of Tolerance — How small, consistent “micro-doses” of sensation build distress capacity over time, so your system can feel more without slamming into numbness.
▪️Agency, Boundaries & Healthy Aggression — Why fawning and shutdown often require reclaiming assertive energy, and how embodying a real “no” can rebuild self-trust from the inside out.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, Chitia, so let's see if any of these apply to you, okay? |
| 0:03.0 | You've done the therapy, you've read the books, but you have yet to dip your toe into the somatic healing pond. You still find yourself having reactions that are out of proportion to the situation at hand. You live in a constant low-grade state of hypervigilance like you're waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or you're on the opposite end. you're checked out, disconnected, |
| 0:20.4 | floating through life like your head |
| 0:21.5 | is a completely separate entity |
| 0:22.8 | from the rest of your body. |
| 0:23.9 | You live in chronic tension. Your shoulders are up to your ears like mine or your jaws clenched, hips tight, lower back pain, or you deal with digestive issues or you're constantly tired in a way that sleep just doesn't seem to fix. And last but not least, you're craving a place to heal with other cool people where you can just show up as your whole messy self and be accepted for it. So if any of those applied to you and let's get real shit shows, at least one of those applied to you, it's time that you sign the hell up or breathe to heal. The seven week journey kicks off on Tuesday, January 13th. It's led by Teresa, |
| 0:55.7 | fellow shit show member and somatic and breathwork practitioner. And it combines the three modalities |
| 1:00.5 | that literally helped me thaw out of functional freeze and start moving my life in the |
| 1:05.0 | direction I actually wanted. Breath work, somatic practices, and parts work. This is a steal |
| 1:09.8 | compared to other somatic programs out there |
| 1:11.9 | with two and three month payment options to make more accessible. |
| 1:14.9 | So you, yes, you, yes you, let's do the damn thing already. |
| 1:18.4 | Head to adult childpodcast.com slash breathe to heal. |
| 1:21.2 | That is breathe with an e at the end. |
| 1:22.6 | Adultchildpodcast.com slash breathe to heal |
| 1:24.5 | to get your damn spot and thank me later. |
| 1:30.0 | You cannot heal if you keep pretending it doesn't hurt. |
| 1:34.5 | My name is Andrea and this is an old child. Welcome back to hold it on to just let it all go. |
| 1:49.6 | What's making you slow now? |
| 1:51.9 | Let's let it all go. |
| 1:53.8 | Welcome back to adult child, where we take a deep dive into the impact of growing up in a dysfunctional family. |
| 2:00.8 | Ahoy, my dear shit shows. |
... |
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