232 - Healing Together: A Couple's Journey Through Repressed Trauma w/ Tarah & EJ Kerwin
Adult Child
Andrea Ashley
4.9 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2026
⏱️ 74 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What your partner does when you fall apart is what your relationship was actually built on.
Tarah and EJ Kerwin are licensed therapists, co-founders of Relationship Renovation Counseling in Tucson, and hosts of the Relationship Renovation podcast who teach what they’ve lived inside their own marriage. They met as colleagues at a treatment center, got married, had twins on their honeymoon, and spent the early years of a blended family forced to do the work they'd spent their careers teaching. But the real test came years later, when Tarah's repressed childhood trauma surfaced and they had to figure out what healing trauma in a relationship actually looks like in real time. This is a conversation about what it means to be truly supported by your partner through your darkest moments.
✨ What this episode explores
▪️ Avoidance Disguised as Calm — Why the partner who seems unflappable is often more emotionally walled off than the one openly struggling.
▪️ What Real Support in a Relationship Actually Looks Like — Why healing trauma in a relationship depends less on what your partner says and more on whether they've done their own work.
▪️ The Body Remembers Before the Mind Does — Why repressed childhood trauma surfaces through symptoms, startle responses, and somatic flashbacks long before it surfaces as memory.
▪️ Why It Feels Safer to Hate Them Than Feel the Hurt — How judging the people who hurt you as "just bad" protects you from the shame of having needed their love.
▪️ The Specific Shame Underneath Childhood Sexual Abuse — Why survivors often feel dirty, blame themselves, and brace for rejection if anyone truly sees them.
▪️ Why Pressure to Heal Faster Keeps You Stuck — How a partner's expectation around intimacy, progress, or recovery can be the exact thing keeping the other person frozen.
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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:
▪️ Ep 203 | The Nervous System Side of Attachment w/ Heidi Priebe
▪️ Ep 202 | When Relationships Become Battlefields w/ Tian Dayton: Relational Triggers, Inner Child Fights & Emotional Sobriety
▪️Ep 161 | Abandonment Trauma Expert Susan Anderson on Rejection and Equating Love with Insecurity
▪️ 204 | The Deeper Truth About Fawning: How Survival Turns Into Self-Abandonment w/ Ingrid Clayton
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Some wounds only surface in the presence of someone who chose to stay. |
| 0:07.0 | My name is Andrea, and this is Adult Child. |
| 0:10.0 | What's you're holding on to? |
| 0:20.0 | Just let it all go |
| 0:22.0 | What's making you slow now |
| 0:24.7 | Let it all go |
| 0:26.6 | Welcome back to an old child |
| 0:29.0 | Where we take a deep dive |
| 0:30.6 | Into the impact of growing up |
| 0:32.6 | In a dysfunctional family |
| 0:33.9 | Ahoy my dear shit shows |
| 0:37.1 | For any new listeners My name is is Andrea. I am a total |
| 0:40.7 | incomplete shit show. I'm the captain of this hot mess of a ship. And I am an adult child of |
| 0:46.7 | dysfunctional family. Now, I always knew that my childhood was less than ideal. I grew up in an |
| 0:52.6 | alcoholic home. I was emotionally parentified. I became the |
| 0:55.8 | identified patient. I turned to drugs and alcohol myself at the age of 12. But I never considered |
| 1:02.8 | what I went through to be trauma. But it was at seven years sober when the guy that I was dating |
| 1:08.4 | for less than a month ghosted me. And my reaction was as if my husband |
| 1:13.2 | of 30 years had just tragically died in plane crash. Now, this wasn't the first time that I had |
| 1:20.3 | experienced this feeling. It was, however, the first time that I had these two realizations, |
| 1:27.4 | these two aha moments |
| 1:29.0 | in response to that feeling. |
... |
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