231 - Why Your Relationships Keep Triggering You Even After You've Done the Work w/ Patrick Teahan
Adult Child
Andrea Ashley
4.9 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2026
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Doing the work means you start picking healthier people. It doesn't mean stuff stops coming up when you do.
Patrick Teahan is a psychotherapist, childhood trauma educator, and YouTube creator. In today's conversation, he shares about how he kept trying to save his alcoholic mother through the women he dated, the relationship in his mid-twenties that surfaced wounds he thought he'd already healed, and what's still getting revealed inside his marriage decades later.
✨ What this episode explores
▪️ More Will Always Be Revealed — Why long-term relationships keep pulling up wounds you swore were worked through, and what those triggers are actually for.
▪️ Chasing Unavailable People — The unconscious pattern that turns every adult relationship into another attempt to get a parent to wake up.
▪️ The Therapy-Resistant Partner — What's actually happening when someone close to you keeps asking "why aren't you better yet," and the projection running in both directions.
▪️ The Self-Righteousness Trigger — How childhood trauma turns every trigger into a moral failing, and the self-righteousness hiding inside legitimate pain.
▪️ Why Kids Choose Self-Blame — The protective mechanism that turns toward self-blame because the alternative is unsafe for a child to hold.
▪️ The Open Family Secret — What it does to a kid to grow up where everyone knows what's happening, but no one is allowed to name it.
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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:
▪️ Ep 107 - Unfinished Business From Childhood Trauma w/ Patrick Teahan
▪️Ep 161 | Abandonment Trauma Expert Susan Anderson on Rejection and Equating Love with Insecurity
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | A wounded inner child will never give up on a bad relationship's potential. |
| 0:07.4 | My name is Andrea, and this is an adult child. |
| 0:13.8 | What's you holding on to? |
| 0:20.5 | Just let it all go |
| 0:21.6 | What's making you slow now? |
| 0:24.6 | Let it all go |
| 0:26.6 | Welcome back to a adult child, where we take a deep dive into the impact of growing up in a dysfunctional family. |
| 0:34.6 | Ahoy, my dear shit shows for any new listeners, my name is Andrea. I am a total |
| 0:40.8 | incomplete shit show and I am an adult child. And if this is the first time you're hearing this |
| 0:46.1 | term and you're wondering like what the hell does that mean? No, it does not mean that you are a |
| 0:53.6 | child trapped in an adult's body. This is a term that is |
| 0:58.5 | used for somebody who grew up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional family whose wounds have a way |
| 1:05.0 | of falling them into adulthood and quietly running the show, or loudly or loudly running the show, whether that's |
| 1:13.8 | in your relationships, in your reactions, in your careers, the thoughts in your head, in your body, |
| 1:22.1 | pretty much anywhere and everywhere this can show up. And this is the podcast where we talk about what the |
| 1:29.6 | hell to do about that. We curse here. You've been born. We curse here. You've been born. |
| 1:40.8 | Welcome aboard this hot mess of a healing ship. |
| 1:47.8 | So apologies for the delay in getting this episode out to you. |
| 1:53.4 | And when I'm about to share, I'm sharing just because I know that there's somebody listening who needs to hear this, somebody who needs to give themselves some kind of permission |
| 1:58.5 | today, who needs to give themselves a damn break. |
| 2:01.5 | So I had three days in a row where I was just like really, really low energy. |
| 2:07.2 | And it was kind of weird. |
... |
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