Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.

My name is Andrea and this is Adult Child.

Welcome back to Adult Child where we take a deep dive into the impact of growing up in a dysfunctional family.

And today we are diving deep with Kendra Allen.

She is the face behind the popular Instagram account your breakup bestie.

Now breakups, as we know, are not necessarily a time when an adult child thrives or is at the top of our game.

In fact, we will do essentially anything to avoid a breakup.

We will do whatever it takes to keep a shitty, unfulfilling, miserable relationship in order not to feel the intense feelings of abandonment that arise when a relationship ends.

So Kendra is a relationship coach, helping women survive, heal, and thrive from breakups and helps them to do the work needed in order to not keep repeating the same dysfunctional relationship patterns.

She is also a woman in recovery, so she is going to be sharing with us about her journey to sobriety, but more importantly about her romantic relationship history, which started off with a bang in an abusive and toxic relationship with a narcissist, which is followed by a series of unhealthy and painful relationships, and then her journey in success in fixing her broken picker.

And as Kendra so eloquently says during my conversation with her that we are our picker, so fixing our picker means fixing us.

Now, y'all have heard about my illustrious career of healthy romantic relationships.

Let's see, we had Mr. Your Old Enough To Be My Dad, Ballboy, Mr. Looks Great On Paper, Mr. This Has To Be The One, and of course, right number one and right number two, but there is, however, one relationship I have yet to tell you about, and that is my very first relationship.

So we've talked about how the relationship with our parents as children, forms the template for all future relationships, and the same can be said about our first romantic relationship.

Our first relationship can have a huge impact on all subsequent romantic relationships, whether that's good or it's bad, it has an impact.

And my first relationship, so this was the longest relationship I've ever been in.

In some ways, it was probably the healthiest relationship that I've been in, which is not saying much, especially considering there really was nothing healthy about this relationship.

It was probably the most traumatic relationship that I've been in, and it probably had the biggest impact on me out of any of my relationships.

So if I'm you right now, I am saying, what the fuck Andrea, we are on episode 29, and we are just now hearing about this, what the hell I feel betrayed.

I know, I know, you have every right to feel that way, I would be pissed off too, but let me explain why this is just coming up now.

So as far as where this relationship is in my timeline, it started off like in middle school and then through high school.

So this was my toxic shame episode and then my addiction episode, and there was just so much material in there that I need to cover, and there's quite a lot of material to cover in this relationship.

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