When Breaking Your Silence Means Losing Your Family: Narcissistic Abuse, Gaslighting & Fawning w/ Dr. Ingrid Clayton
Adult Child
Andrea Ashley
4.9 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2025
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What happens when speaking your truth means losing the very people you’ve spent your whole life trying to please? For so many adult children, breaking the silence around abuse and dysfunction doesn’t bring closeness—it brings exile, denial, and the gut-punch of realizing love was always conditional.
Dr. Ingrid Clayton is a clinical psychologist, trauma therapist, and the author of Believing Me: Healing from Narcissistic Abuse and Complex Trauma and Fawning Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves–and How to Find Our Way Back. Beyond her professional expertise, Ingrid shares her deeply personal story of surviving childhood narcissistic abuse, decades of gaslighting, and ultimately being estranged from her family after telling the truth. In this conversation, she opens up about how breaking silence became both the greatest heartbreak of her life—and the most powerful step toward reclaiming herself.
🔑 The Betrayal of Silence – Why speaking out about abuse often leads to family backlash, denial, and estrangement.
🔑 Gaslighting’s Lasting Impact – How years of being told “you’re the problem” erodes trust in your own memories—and what it takes to rebuild it.
🔑 The Fawn Response Uncovered – Why people-pleasing and self-sacrifice feel like safety when they’re really survival strategies from childhood.
🔑 Estrangement as Self-Protection – How setting boundaries—even with a parent—can be the only path to break cycles of harm.
🔑 Owning the Story to Heal the Wounds – Why minimizing or dismissing trauma keeps us stuck, and how naming it opens the door to real recovery.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The weather. Tomorrow, expect a biting cold front. Hmm, how naughty. I wonder what I'll be |
| 0:06.8 | wearing or taking off. The night will be wild and untamed. Expect heavy, lashing rain |
| 0:13.0 | that'll soak you to the skin. By Monday, temperatures will rise slowly but surely reaching |
| 0:18.7 | their peak in the afternoon. |
| 0:23.0 | Not in the mood for miserable weather? |
| 0:25.8 | Fly cheaply to Turkey with Sun Express. |
| 0:28.7 | Sun Express, non-stop sunshine. |
| 0:35.1 | Flags don't look like red flags when they feel like home. |
| 0:38.2 | My name is Andrea and this is Adult Child. Welcome back to adult child, |
| 0:58.2 | where we take a deep dive into the impact of growing up in a dysfunctional family. |
| 1:03.6 | Ahoy, my dear shit shows, shit show nation. |
| 1:07.6 | It's been a while since I've done that. |
| 1:09.2 | I thought I'd bless you with that all today. |
| 1:13.3 | For any new listeners that haven't turned this off yet, |
| 1:16.2 | my name is Andrea. |
| 1:17.5 | I am a total incomplete shit show. |
| 1:19.5 | I'm an adult child of an alcoholic family. |
| 1:21.8 | And this is the podcast where we talk about |
| 1:23.6 | what the hell to do when you realize |
| 1:25.4 | that your childhood screwed you up a whole hell of a lot more than you initially thought that it did when you realize that you have complex trauma |
| 1:31.6 | that you're suffering from complex PTSD, which came as quite a shock to me. I'd always know my |
| 1:37.1 | childhood was less than ideal, but I had no damn clue that what I experienced qualified as trauma. |
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