Adult Child 208: When Each Parent Leaves a Different Scar - From Attachment Wounds to Parenting Triggers, Rage & Repair w/ Amber Trejo
✨ Join Breathe to Heal: A 7-week Somatic Journey to Release & Receive
What happens when one parent shatters you by leaving and the other wounds you by staying? This episode unpacks how two very different kinds of unsafe love can live in your body at the same time.
Amber Trejo is an integrative trauma therapist who helps parents with C-PTSD untangle how their own attachment wounds and nervous system triggers show up in the way they love and raise their kids. She grew up with two alcoholic parents — a father who disappeared overnight and a mother who stayed but pulled her into parentification, emotional abuse, and way too much adult reality. It wasn’t until she fell in love and later became a mother herself that those early wounds surged back as paranoia, dread, and explosive reactions she barely recognized as her own.
✨ What this episode explores:
▪️Growing Up With Two Kinds of Unsafe — Why having parents who hurt you in different ways makes it harder to see your trauma clearly, easier to minimize it, and more confusing to sort out which wounds came from where.
▪️Attachment Wounds in “Good” Relationships — Why safe, stable partners can still trigger paranoia, phone checking, and urges to run when your body learned that love and danger always showed up together.
▪️The “I Can’t Get What I Need” Core Wound — How this belief quietly drives functional freeze, overdoing, resentment in relationships, and the feeling that everyone else’s needs matter more than yours, including your kids’.
▪️When Parenting Feels Like a Trauma Relapse — When your child’s tantrums, needs, or clinginess send you into screaming, shutdown, or terror because they mirror the ages when no one comforted you.
▪️Raising Kids While Healing Yourself — What real repair looks like when you’ve yelled, grabbed, or minimized, and how to own the harm without dumping your story on your child or drowning in shame.
▪️Vicarious Sexual Abuse — What it actually is and what it can look like later in life
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