226 - Losing Yourself in Love: Why You Become Whoever They Need You to Be w/ Tammy Sollenberger
Adult Child
Andrea Ashley
4.9 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2026
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tammy Sollenberger is an IFS therapist and host of The One Inside podcast, and today she's not holding back. She shares about the sudden loss of her father and a devastating breakup — and how both pulled her back to a wound she's been carrying since before she was born: unwanted.
✨ What this episode explores
▪️Grieving a Parent You Had a Complicated Relationship With — What it's like to mourn someone who both loved you and failed you.
▪️Hiding Yourself to Keep Them — The many ways you disappear to stay in relationship, from losing your voice to hiding the parts of yourself that feel too risky to share.
▪️Healthy vs. Unhealthy Reassurance — The difference between co-regulation and handing your whole nervous system over to someone else to manage.
▪️The Wound of Being Unwanted — How feeling unwanted as a child becomes the reason you settle for crumbs as an adult
▪️Connecting With Preverbal Parts — How to reach the parts of you that formed in utero or infancy, long before you had language for what you were experiencing.
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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:
▪️Ep 190 | The Purpose of Our Pain: IFS Therapy to Heal Complex Trauma w/ Tammy Sollenberger
▪️Ep 204 | The Deeper Truth About Fawning: How Survival Turns Into Self-Abandonment w/ Ingrid Clayton
▪️Ep 140 | Healing from Emotionally Immature Parents: Grief Behind Anger w/ Morgan Pommells
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | One of the hardest things to grieve is all of the time you spent settling for less than you deserved. |
| 0:07.2 | My name is Andrea, and this is Adult Child. |
| 0:13.7 | What's holding on to? |
| 0:20.5 | Just let it all go |
| 0:21.9 | What's making you slow now |
| 0:24.7 | Let it all go |
| 0:26.6 | Welcome back to an old child |
| 0:29.4 | Where we take a deep dive |
| 0:30.9 | Into the impact of growing up |
| 0:32.9 | In a dysfunctional family |
| 0:34.4 | Ahoi my dear shit shows For any any new listeners, my name is Andrea. I am a total |
| 0:41.9 | incomplete shit show. I grew up in an alcoholic family. I became the identified patient slash |
| 0:47.3 | scapegoat of my family at the age of nine. I was sent to rehab for the first time. Four days after my |
| 0:52.7 | 14th birthday, I got sober at 19, and then at |
| 0:55.9 | nine years sober, I finally figured out that my childhood had screwed me up a whole hell of a lot more |
| 1:03.3 | than I initially thought, and that what I had lived through was actually trauma. And that the reason |
| 1:08.7 | that I got attached so fast, ignored every red flag, |
| 1:13.2 | tolerated ship from men that I wouldn't have tolerated from anyone else, and couldn't walk |
| 1:17.3 | away from situations that were clearly harming me, was all because of the childhood trauma |
| 1:23.2 | that I didn't even know was in there. And this is the podcast where we talk about, |
| 1:27.7 | what the hell to do about that? |
| 1:30.0 | We curse here, you've been warned. |
... |
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