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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