211: Nate Postlethwait - Building a Life Your Nervous System Can Handle
Adult Child
Andrea Ashley
4.9 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2025
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
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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 |
| 1:11.4 | out there with two and three month payment options to make more accessible. So you, yes, you, |
| 1:16.1 | yes you, let's do the damn thing already. Head to adult childpodcast.com slash breathe to heal. |
| 1:21.2 | That is breathe with an e at the end, adult childpodcast.com slash breathe to heal to get your |
| 1:25.0 | damn spot and thank me later. |
| 1:28.3 | When you let go of what no longer serves you, you create space for what's meant to be. |
| 1:33.9 | My name is Andrea and this is an old child. Welcome Welcome back to deep dive into Just let it all go |
| 1:48.0 | What's making you slow now |
| 1:51.0 | Let it all go |
| 1:53.0 | Welcome back to adult child, where we take a deep dive into the impact of growing up in a dysfunctional family. |
| 2:00.6 | Ahoi, my dear shit shows shows and a Merry Christmas Eve to you and yours. |
| 2:06.1 | For any listeners, my name is Andrea. |
| 2:08.2 | I am your resident recovering shit show. |
... |
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