Welcome to Is This Real Life, a Bravo podcast that relates our favorite shows to our own lives in the world around us.

I'm your host, Mandy Slutszer. Let's get to it.

Hi, everyone. I hope you had a wonderful week. Thank you all so much for the kind birthday messages. I had a really nice time with my family and celebrating another year around the sun. This is also a pretty crazy week for Bravo. We had the finale of season 10 of Vanderpump Rules, which was very gripping,

raw, honest, just incredible reality television. And it feels bad sometimes to watch people's

worst moments play out on TV for your own entertainment, but to see how

Ariana is doing so well in her life and getting so many business deals and having so many

of her friends support her, you know, that does make me feel better. Now, I don't believe I've done this before,

but I wanted to put a trigger warning on this podcast because today's podcast goes into a number

of topics that are very sensitive, including domestic violence, abuse, childhood trauma.

And so I just want listeners to be aware that if those are things that are triggering

for you that are unhelpful for you to hear about, you may want to skip this week's episode.

But for everyone else that's been spending so much time talking about Scandival

and how horrible Tom Sandoval and Raquel have been behaving and how could Tom Schwartz not say

anything and not tell Ariana, this podcast might shed some light on their behavior. Now, I have to admit, when I was watching

and hearing everything play out in March, my first inclination or thought wasn't what happened

to Raquel or what happened in these people's childhoods that made them fall into these

behavioral and like relationship patterns. But Andrea Ashley from the

adult child podcast reached out to me and said, you know what, I might be able to shed some light

on why they're behaving the way they're behaving and want to come on your podcast and talk about

what it means to be an adult child of dysfunctional families. So that is what today's podcast is.

It's about the role that unresolved childhood trauma might play out in dysfunctional adult

relationships.

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