233 - The Gift of Grief: When Loss Becomes the Door You Couldn't Open On Your Own w/ Joe Ryan
Adult Child
Andrea Ashley
4.9 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2026
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
✨ NEW COURSE — Safe Within: a 7-week live somatic healing journey to Self energy. Starts July 1st.
Waiting to be chosen is the slowest way to abandon yourself.
Joe Ryan is a trauma recovery coach and host of The Joe Ryan Podcast — and today, he's speaking from the other side of the most profound grief of his life. After losing his best friend to cancer and facing his own cancer scare six weeks later, he chose to sit in the pain for a year and a half instead of running from it — and what surfaced wasn't just the grief, it was every abandonment wound underneath, including the lifelong, exhausting pattern of waiting to be chosen. This conversation is about what grief actually gives you when you stop running from it, and the moment you realize the only person you ever needed to choose you was yourself.
✨ What this episode explores
▪️ Why Grief Is the Price of Love — How the walls that protected you from being hurt are the same walls keeping out the connection you most want.
▪️ The Lifelong Wait to Be Chosen — Why no amount of being picked by someone else fixes what only choosing yourself can, and what shifts when you finally stop performing for it.
▪️ The Self-Abandonment Underneath the Abandonment Wound — Why the people who feel abandoned the most are often the ones abandoning themselves first, and how to recognize it in your own patterns.
▪️ What Sitting in Grief Actually Looks Like — The body-level practice of staying with discomfort long enough for the rumination to quiet down and the real material underneath to surface.
▪️ The Performance Mask — The shiny, no-cracks version of yourself you built so no one would see the needy little kid underneath, and what it costs to keep wearing it.
▪️ Capacity Is the Whole Game — Why the work you do in the calm seasons becomes the difference between drowning and grieving when the next loss comes.
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🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:
▪️ Ep 39 — The Fear of Abandonment w/ Joe Ryan
▪️ Ep 91 — Complex Trauma, Dating & Setting Boundaries w/ Joe Ryan
▪️Ep 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 | Grief, sat in long enough, becomes the doorway into every part of yourself you've been running from. |
| 0:07.2 | My name is Andrea, and this is an old child. |
| 0:22.0 | What's your you slow now |
| 0:24.7 | Let it all go |
| 0:26.6 | Welcome back to a total child |
| 0:29.3 | Where we take a deep dive |
| 0:30.9 | Into the impact of growing up |
| 0:32.8 | In a dysfunctional family |
| 0:34.8 | Ahoy, my dear shit shows |
| 0:37.0 | For any new listeners, My name is Andrea. I am a total |
| 0:40.5 | incomplete shit show. I'm the captain of this hot mess of a ship where we talk about what the hell to do |
| 0:45.4 | when you realize that your childhood screwed you up more than you initially thought. And before we get |
| 0:51.5 | to today's guests, y'all, I have something exciting to share with you all. |
| 0:57.1 | I am announcing my very first course, and it is called Safe Within a seven-week live somatic healing |
| 1:09.3 | journey for finding self-energy. And this is kicking off on Wednesday, |
| 1:16.9 | July 1st. So that is four weeks from today. This is the first course that I've put together |
| 1:23.0 | completely on my own. I've designed it. I'm leading it. I built this whole thing very, very, very |
| 1:29.1 | intentionally. And it is the, it is the culmination of a lot, y'all. As many of y'all know, |
| 1:38.0 | and especially those who have been here since the beginning, I thought that I was so much |
| 1:41.9 | more healed when I started this podcast. And then somewhere in |
| 1:47.3 | the spring of 2023 and into 2024, I had another dark night of the soul. I hit another |
| 1:56.0 | emotional bottom. I realized that a lot of the abandonment trauma that I thought I had worked through, I had |
... |
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