It’s Not You, It’s Your Trauma - Trauma, PTSD, Abuse, Anxiety & Recovery - Joe Ryan

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your AngerAnger is often seen as a negative emotion, but what if it’s actually a powerful tool for self-discovery and healing? Understanding the roots of our anger can unlock the door to emotional freedom and personal growth, allowing us to reclaim our power and reshape our lives.The Power of AngerAnger is often misunderstood and mismanaged, leading many to feel like helpless victims in their emotional lives. The episode emphasizes that anger is a protective mechanism, a signal that something deeper is at play. When we react with anger or resentment, it’s crucial to explore what vulnerabilities we are trying to shield. Recognizing this can help us reclaim our power instead of giving it away to others.Understanding Our TriggersTriggers can serve as valuable insights into our unresolved issues. The discussion highlights the importance of examining our reactions and understanding the underlying hurt that fuels our anger. By doing so, we can break the cycle of blame and resentment, allowing for healthier emotional responses and relationships. This self-exploration is essential for emotional freedom and personal growth.Healing Through Self-ReflectionTo truly heal, one must confront past wounds and the anger associated with them. The episode encourages listeners to take responsibility for their emotions and to seek healing from within rather than relying on others for validation. By addressing unresolved anger and learning to self-soothe, individuals can foster a healthier relationship with themselves and others, ultimately leading to a more fulfilling life.Three Important TakeawaysAnger is a protective emotion that signals unresolved vulnerabilities and should be explored rather than suppressed.Understanding our triggers can lead to healthier emotional responses and break the cycle of resentment.True healing comes from within; self-reflection and self-soothing are essential for emotional freedom.ConclusionTo achieve emotional freedom, it is essential to confront and understand our anger rather than allowing it to control us. By recognizing the deeper hurt behind our anger and taking responsibility for our emotions, we can break free from the patterns that keep us stuck and reclaim our power in relationships.

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your PainHealing from trauma requires confronting the very pain we often try to avoid. It’s a journey of legitimate suffering, where we must meet ourselves at our lowest points to truly understand and overcome our emotional struggles.The Necessity of SufferingTo heal from trauma, one must learn to embrace suffering rather than avoid it. This episode emphasizes that true recovery involves meeting oneself at the pain level, allowing emotions to surface without judgment. By doing so, individuals can begin to process their feelings and ultimately find healing.Breaking the Cycle of AvoidanceMany people live unconsciously, making decisions based on fear and avoidance rather than what is truly beneficial for them. The discussion highlights how this avoidance leads to unhealthy patterns, such as codependency and addiction, which only serve to prolong suffering. Recognizing and confronting these patterns is essential for growth.Finding Freedom Through GriefGrieving is portrayed as a vital process for understanding oneself and overcoming the fear of loss. The episode shares a personal story of loss that led to profound insights about self-worth and the importance of confronting painful emotions. This journey through grief ultimately leads to a clearer understanding of one’s needs and desires.Three Important TakeawaysLegitimate suffering is essential for healing; avoiding pain only prolongs emotional struggles.Confronting and processing emotions leads to greater self-awareness and healthier decision-making.Grieving loss can provide valuable insights into personal patterns and fears, fostering growth and understanding.ConclusionEmbracing the pain of loss and suffering is a crucial step toward healing and self-discovery. By allowing oneself to grieve and confront difficult emotions, individuals can break free from unhealthy patterns and create a life filled with conscious choices and emotional well-being. The journey may be challenging, but the rewards of understanding and self-acceptance are invaluable.

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your Buried Emotional ChildYou've spent decades running from the knot in your gut, the tightness in your chest, the wave of dread that hits when life gets quiet. You numb it, distract it, intellectualize it, but the truth is brutal: healing doesn't happen by staying ahead of the pain. It begins the moment you stop escaping and start letting yourself feel exactly how bad it really is.The Brutal Truth About Avoidance You keep yourself seven steps ahead of the feelings living in your body. Phones, booze, work, sex, endless planning—anything to avoid the terror of actually being present with what’s inside. Connection is what you crave most, yet it’s what you fear most because trauma taught you closeness equals danger. Without a safe bond to your own body, you flee into thought, ruminating to pacify the discomfort. The more you avoid, the smaller your life becomes. You watch yourself from the outside, hyper-vigilant, scanning for threats, never truly inhabiting your skin.Why the Feelings Got Buried—and Why They’re Screaming Now When you were small, there was no one to hold your fear, loneliness, or rage. Feelings got dismissed, punished, or ignored, so you learned to disconnect, dissociate, and survive by abandoning your body. Those emotions didn’t disappear—they froze in place. Decades later, as distractions fade and space opens up, they rise like trapped energy demanding release. Your nervous system still believes feeling them will destroy you. That’s why the mind races to distract, why addictions promise relief but eventually collapse, leaving you more terrified of the very sensations you’ve spent a lifetime fleeing.How Sitting With It Changes Everything Start lying down in a quiet room, lights off, phone gone. Notice where the discomfort lives—usually the belly. Breathe into it. When your mind drifts to rumination, gently return to sensation. This is exposure work: short bursts at first, building tolerance like lifting weights after years away. You don’t dive into the worst memories yet. You simply meet what’s already here. Over time, the energy moves, cathartic tears and anger release what’s been poisoning you. You begin functioning even when grief or fear hits. The paralyzed child inside starts to feel seen, slowly bridging back to the adult who can now hold space.Three Important TakeawaysAvoiding uncomfortable feelings shrinks your world, fuels addiction, and keeps you trapped in hyper-vigilance and self-hate; facing them is the only path to freedom.Healing means going back in emotional time as an adult to meet the terrified child who was never taught to self-soothe—start small, build tolerance, and let the energy move through tears, anger, and grief.No external fix—partner, success, substance—will heal what lives in your body; real transformation comes from sitting with the pain long enough to understand its roots and reclaim your ability to live fully, even when it hurts.Conclusion Stop waiting for the feelings to go away on their own. They won’t. Schedule the time to feel bad. Lie down, get quiet, and let yourself hurt as much as you need to. It’s agonizing, there are no shortcuts, and nobody else can do it for you. But every minute you stay present instead of running builds strength, clears space, and returns sovereignty to the child who’s been screaming inside. The freedom on the other side isn’t fake positivity—it’s the ability to live in your body without fear owning you. You’ve survived avoidance long enough. Now start feeling your way home.

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your Surrogate Parent AddictionYou keep chasing people who will never show up for you the way you show up for them, hoping one day they’ll finally see your worth. Every disappointment just tightens the grip on the same old lie: if you hold on long enough, someone else will fix the emptiness left by childhood. The brutal truth is they won’t—and the longer you wait for them to change, the longer you stay stuck, alone even in a crowd.The Endless Search for Someone to Finally Get It You’ve been looking for surrogate parents your whole life. New friends, new groups, new partners—each time hoping this time they’ll show up, validate you, see you. Every betrayal, every letdown, every time they disappear or disappoint just repeats the original wound. You thank them later because those empty wells force you to stop drinking from them. The moment you realize no one out there can give you what was missing in childhood is the moment autonomy begins. Until then you’re still auditioning for love you were never taught you already deserve.Why You Cling to Shitty Connections Staying in toxic family systems or pseudo-friendships isn’t about connection—it’s about avoiding the terror of being alone with yourself. You grew up surrounded by people yet felt completely unseen. That loneliness lives inside you still. Leaving means facing it head-on. Most people never do. They complain, gossip, stay enmeshed, and pretend the backstabbing and manipulation equal belonging. Anything to not feel the truth: you’ve always been emotionally abandoned, and no amount of clinging will change that. The system was designed to keep you needing them so they never have to face their own emptiness.Getting Good Alone Is the Only Way Out You have to prove to yourself you can stand on your own two feet—emotionally, not just physically. Move to a new city, drop into isolation, feel broke, tired, scared, and still keep going. That’s how you build the muscle of self-trust. When you stop needing anyone to tell you you’re okay, their opinions lose power. The critical voice in your head quiets because it’s no longer projected onto everyone around you. You want people, not because you’re helpless without them, but because you choose them from a place of wholeness.Three Important TakeawaysEvery disappointment is a lesson pushing you toward the realization that no one else can fill the childhood void—you have to stop looking outside and start building inside.Staying in toxic relationships or family systems is a distraction from the loneliness and abandonment you’ve carried since childhood; real freedom comes when you get comfortable being alone with yourself.You don’t overcome codependency by finding better people—you overcome it by proving to yourself you can function, thrive, and belong to yourself first, so others become a want, not a need.Conclusion Stop waiting for the apology, the validation, the moment they finally see you. It’s not coming. What’s coming is another round of the same pain unless you turn your energy inward right now. Make the list. Ask the hard questions. Sit in the loneliness long enough to feel where it lives in your body. No one is going to rescue you from this work, and that’s actually the best news you’ll ever hear—because when you finally get good alone, you get free. Not comfortable. Not perfect. Free. Start today. You’ve waited long enough.

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your Empty Well of ApprovalYou keep returning to the same people who raised you, hoping this time they will finally see your worth, validate your existence, treat you with basic respect. They never do. The gaslighting continues because you still show up thirsty at a well that has been dry for decades. The real problem isn’t their behavior—it’s your refusal to walk away and fill your own cup first.Gaslighting Stops When You Stop Needing Their Version of Reality Gaslighting only lands when you are still seeking approval, love, or worth from the very people who could never give it to themselves. You hand them power every time you react, defend, explain, or spiral into shame after their words or actions. The moment you stop personalizing their dysfunction and start seeing them as damaged humans repeating what was done to them, their manipulation loses its grip. Healing this has nothing to do with changing them and everything to do with changing how you respond—or refuse to respond.Why You Keep Going Back to the Same Toxic Script You return because the little boy or girl inside still believes that if you can just get it right this time—be calm enough, perfect enough, lovable enough—they will finally love you back. That hope is wired into childhood survival. You learned early that connection equaled safety, even when it came wrapped in cruelty. So you tolerate the humiliation, the denial of your reality, the blame-shifting, because some connection still feels better than none. The delay in your anger, the people-pleasing, the scanning for danger—these are all echoes of a nervous system that never felt permitted to say no or walk away.The Cost of Staying Hooked on Their Opinion Every time you show up at that empty well, you lose another piece of yourself. You stay small, angry, resentful, stuck in victim identity. You waste energy begging for respect instead of building it inside. Relationships remain one-sided supply grabs. You attract more people who treat you the way you treat yourself—disrespectfully. And when they die, or time runs out, you will still be standing there, decades older, still waiting for a drink that was never coming. The pattern only ends when you end your participation in it.Three Important TakeawaysGaslighting only works when you still need their approval; stop reacting and their script falls apart.You keep returning to toxic family because the wounded child inside still hopes for love that never existed—real change starts when you stop waiting for them to give what they never had.Self-respect is built by knowing yourself deeply, owning your worth, and refusing to let anyone treat you worse than you are finally willing to treat yourself.Conclusion Stop waiting for the narcissist, the parent, the sibling to suddenly wake up and treat you right. They won’t. The prison door has always been open—you’re the one still sitting inside because leaving means facing the terror of being enough without their validation. Start small: notice when you defend, explain, or shrink; feel the anger in your body instead of swallowing it; practice showing up calm and detached next time you see them. Build tolerance for the discomfort of not being liked, not being needed, not being right. Do this messy, painful, unglamorous work and one day you’ll realize their words bounce off because your opinion of yourself finally matters more than theirs. Freedom isn’t painless, but it’s worth every second of the struggle. Get to work.

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your Masked NeedinessYou've spent decades hiding the scared, needy kid inside because showing that part felt like handing someone a loaded gun. The moment vulnerability creeps in, panic hits hard. This episode rips the lid off why authentic connection still feels dangerous and how one raw realization can finally shift the pattern that's kept you performing instead of living.The Terror of Being Truly Seen Deep down you fear people seeing the needy, empty parts you've buried since childhood. When your caregivers couldn't handle your needs without exploding or withdrawing, you learned to kill them off inside. Vulnerability feels like betrayal waiting to happen. Letting anyone close risks re-experiencing that old abandonment, so you wear the mask of self-sufficiency. The problem is the mask keeps you isolated, lonely, and disconnected from real belonging.Replaying Childhood Survival in Adult Relationships That little boy who had to anticipate mom's every mood to avoid punishment or isolation still runs the show. In every romantic relationship you unconsciously hand over your worth to your partner, terrified that disapproval means banishment. You abandon yourself to keep them happy, replaying the same desperate bid for love and safety you learned at home. The lightbulb moment comes when you see it's not them—it's the old script screaming you're only okay if they're okay with you.From Projection to Self-Belonging Expecting others to fill the ancient emptiness sets you up for repeated disappointment and shame spirals. The real work is turning inward to fill that reservoir yourself so you're not starving for scraps of validation. Capacity for joy expands only as you build tolerance for disappointment, rejection, and loss. When you stop outsourcing your worth, connection stops feeling like a survival gamble and starts feeling possible—even necessary.Three Important TakeawaysYour terror of neediness stems from childhood where expressing needs triggered rage, withdrawal, or punishment—reclaiming that part requires feeling the original terror without running.Adult relationships keep repeating the childhood pattern of self-abandonment because you're still trying to secure love by making the other person happy instead of belonging to yourself first.Healing happens through deliberate, repeated contact with the buried feelings—reliving key memories as an adult, grieving what was missing, and releasing the stored pain so you stop projecting the unmet needs onto others.Conclusion Stop waiting for someone else to make you safe enough to drop the mask. That person isn't coming. The freedom you're craving lives on the other side of feeling the panic, the shame, and the old grief you've spent a lifetime dodging. Schedule the time to sit with that kitchen memory, let the sobs and rage come, and keep returning until the charge drains out. No one is going to save that little boy but you. Do the uncomfortable work now and watch your capacity for real intimacy, joy, and self-respect finally open up. You've survived worse. You can feel this too—and come out lighter on the other side.

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your Unfinished AbandonmentYou keep hoping one more conversation, one more perfect boundary, one more explanation will finally make them see you, respect you, love you the way you deserved as a child. It won't. The only person who can give that to you now is staring back in the mirror, and until you stop running from that truth, the wound stays open and bleeding.The Core Wound Keeps Getting Reopened Joe lays bare how childhood abandonment doesn't vanish when you grow up—it just finds new hosts. Whether it's parents, partners, or bosses, you recreate the original betrayal by self-abandoning to keep others comfortable. The fear of setting boundaries isn't really about conflict; it's terror of reliving the moment love was withdrawn because you dared have your own needs. Healing begins when you stop outsourcing your worth and start feeling the rage, grief, and terror that protective people-pleasing has buried for decades.Boundaries Are the Only Door Out of the Prison Setting limits with the people who raised you is non-negotiable if you want freedom. Every time you visualize saying no, your nervous system screams abandonment all over again—that's the exact feeling you must learn to hold without collapsing into caretaking, rage, withdrawal, or dissociation. The work is brutal: sit in the body sensations, write the unsent angry letters, practice disappointing them in your mind until the shame loses its grip. No shortcut, no bypass, no amount of insight replaces actually doing it. The payoff is massive: you stop needing their approval to breathe, relationships become mutual instead of survival transactions, and the inner war quiets enough for real choice to appear.Three Important TakeawaysBoundaries with parents trigger the original abandonment terror—you must feel and tolerate that bodily panic instead of soothing them to escape itSelf-abandonment is an addiction learned in childhood; breaking it requires weaning off external validation through repeated, uncomfortable practiceTrue healing is never intellectual or performative—it lives in grieving the unmet needs, accepting what cannot be changed, and taking full responsibility for your own nervous system regulationContinue Reading at joeryan.com

Joe Ryan will host a sixty-minute Q&A session via Zoom once a month with limited spots to ensure full participation. If you'd like to join the discussion, please fill out the form below to receive an email notification when registration opens one week before the next scheduled session.Topics: Trauma, False Self, Family Systems, Addiction,Anxiety, Shame, Emotional Incest, Setting Boundaries Sign Up Here: https://joeryan.com/qanda

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your Emotional CaptivityYou've spent decades performing the perfect role in a family script that was never yours to write. The real recovery begins the moment you burn that script and start disappointing the very people whose approval once defined your worth. No shortcut, no gentle pat on the back—just the brutal necessity of leaving home emotionally before you can ever truly arrive in your own life.The Brutal Truths of Real Recovery Recovery demands you learn to disappoint people without collapsing into shame. You must emotionally leave your family system, cut the invisible cord of enmeshment, and stop letting their opinions regulate your nervous system. Anger has to be reclaimed as the boundary-setter it always was meant to be. The process is lonely, slow, painful, and non-negotiable—no one else can do it for you, and no external win will ever substitute for the internal separation required.Three Important TakeawaysYou have to emotionally leave home—reduce availability, tolerate the guilt and shame waves, and let their disappointment become their problem instead of yours.Reclaiming suppressed anger is essential; without it you stay boundary-less, people-pleasing, and powerless in the face of disapproval.Invest ruthlessly in yourself through small, private acts of competence and discipline—build internal validation so family approval loses its grip and you stop using others to fill what only self-responsibility can heal.Continue Reading at joeryan.com

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your Unfinished ChildhoodYou keep choosing people who can't love you because deep down you still believe the first ones who were supposed to couldn't either. Staying isn't loyalty—it's terror dressed up as hope, and every day you remain you're paying interest on a debt your parents created decades ago.The Repetition Compulsion Trap You enter toxic relationships because your nervous system is desperately trying to rewrite the original story. The emotionally unavailable partner, the raging controller, the chronic abandoner—they all feel eerily familiar. Your childhood taught you love equals self-abandonment, walking on eggshells, earning crumbs of affection through hyper-vigilance and people-pleasing. Staying becomes automatic because leaving triggers the same primal panic you felt as a kid when connection meant survival. The brain mistakes intensity for intimacy and familiarity for safety.Breaking Free Requires Facing the Void The real terror isn't the toxic person—it's the empty space that opens when you stop trying to fix them. That space forces you to feel the original abandonment, the worthlessness, the aloneness you were never allowed to process. Most people would rather endure known cruelty than risk unknown freedom. But freedom only arrives when you stop outsourcing your self-worth to someone incapable of reflecting it back. You must tolerate the discomfort of choosing yourself long enough to rewire what safe actually feels like.Three Important TakeawaysToxic relationships are unconscious attempts to heal childhood wounds by finally getting the unavailable parent to show up differently—except the partner is just a stand-in and the script never changes.Staying feels like survival because leaving once meant literal death to your child self; the panic in your body when you imagine walking away is the same terror wired in decades ago.Real change starts when you redirect all the energy spent managing and fixing them into building your own self-esteem, emotional regulation, and capacity to choose people who don't demand you shrink.Continue Reading at joeryan.com

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your Unmet RageYou keep turning the anger inward because it feels safer than facing the truth: the people who were supposed to protect you failed you completely. Self-hate is just misplaced fury at them, dressed up as punishment for a child who had no power. Passive healing tricks won’t touch this—you have to feel the full weight of what was stolen from you before anything changes.Redirecting the Fire Anger is always signaling a want. Hate points to a deep, unmet need. When the rage stays locked on yourself it keeps you small, helpless, and loyal to the old role of the victim who never gets to fight back. The brutal shift is turning that anger outward toward the abusers—not forever, but long enough to stop punishing the wrong person. You were never allowed to be mad at them as a kid. Directing the hate at them for a season creates breathing room so you can finally stop abandoning yourself and start meeting your own needs.Three Important TakeawaysAnger always reveals a want and hate reveals an unmet core need—figure out exactly what you’re demanding from yourself or them instead of letting the emotion run on autopilot.Shifting self-hate onto your abusers temporarily is a necessary step to free up internal space; staying stuck in either direction keeps you enslaved to the past.True freedom arrives only after you stop needing their love or approval, fill your own holes, and build self-worth so strong that their words and actions lose power over you.Continue Reading at joeryan.com

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your Inherited Shame PrisonYou grew up in a family that weaponized criticism and judgment until shame became your native language. No amount of achievement, approval, or perfect performance will ever silence that internal prosecutor because the verdict was written long before you had a voice. The only way out is to stop running from the feeling and start walking straight into it.The Relentless Inner Critic Born From Family Shame Shame is the dull, ever-present ache you carry when you were raised in a system that tore people apart for not conforming. You internalized that harsh, critical parent voice and now turn it on yourself without mercy. Perfectionism, social anxiety after every interaction, the compulsive replay of conversations—these are shame’s fingerprints. You fear exposure because being seen feels like inviting the same shredding you witnessed growing up. The family needed everyone to fit their narrow, shame-fueled picture of acceptable so they could feel momentarily superior. You were molded, controlled, and guilted into trying to become that picture. But it was never yours.Breaking Free Requires Facing the Void You Were Never Allowed to Feel The high cost is a life spent chasing an illusion of worth through external wins that never arrive. You exhaust yourself people-pleasing, performing, acquiring the right things, relationships, status—anything to fill the hole shame left. Yet when you reach the goalpost, the emptiness remains because authenticity was sacrificed. The rewards of facing it are profound: space inside your own body, freedom from constant self-prosecution, the ability to choose rather than react, and a quieting of the self-hate that once screamed loudest. You stop living someone else’s script and start building your own truth. Joy becomes possible when you no longer need to prove you’re enough.Three Important TakeawaysShame is not yours to carry—it was dumped on you by a family system too afraid to feel their own pain.No external achievement, person, or possession will ever heal the inner void; only direct inner work with the shame itself can begin to patch the soul.The work never ends, but it gets manageable when you stop chasing the family’s picture and start courageously becoming yourself, one honest feeling at a time.Continue Reading at joeryan.com

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your Unmet Maternal HungerYou were never too much or not enough. The ache you carry isn't proof of your defectiveness—it's the echo of a child who needed a present, regulated mother and got a performer trapped in generational shame instead. Society sold the perfect-mother myth, and everyone paid the price in disconnection and silent resentment.The Mother Wound Runs Deeper Than Blame The mother wound is the primal injury born when the person you biologically and emotionally depended on most was too consumed by her own unhealed shame, societal pressure to appear perfect, and inherited survival strategies to truly see, hold, or meet you. You internalized her absence as your worthlessness. She internalized her mother's absence the same way. This isn't about fault—it's a chain of unmet needs passed down through immigrants, blue-collar exhaustion, three-room apartments, and masks that never came off. The result is a terrified inner child still waiting for safety while the adult self stays stuck in resentment, neediness, or rebellion.Three Important TakeawaysThe mother wound blocks authentic connection because you view her through the lens of your hurt, scared child instead of seeing her as another wounded human doing her inadequate best under impossible pressure.Healing happens only when you stop waiting for her to change or apologize and instead rescue, re-parent, and fill your own emotional holes—no external person, achievement, or substance can do it for you.True freedom arrives when you shift from desperate need to compassionate want, allowing you to give love without demanding it back, which transforms your relationship with her and every other relationship in your life.Continue Reading at joeryan.com

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your Starved Inner ChildYou’ve spent decades running from the one truth your body screams every day: you’re still that terrified, neglected kid who learned needing anyone equals danger. Pretending you’re fine, independent, untouchable—none of it healed the wound. It only buried the ache deeper until the weight became unbearable. The moment you finally name it, everything changes.The Light Bulb That Shattered Decades of Armor This episode is raw vulnerability in real time. Joe walks through a massive personal breakthrough: realizing his entire life—relationships, choices, addictions, walls—was shaped by deep, shameful neediness born in childhood neglect. He describes the familiar cycle of lightness after insight, followed by crushing shame, then slow integration. The core revelation hits hard: denying neediness didn’t make him strong; it starved him of real connection, joy, and self-trust while keeping him emotionally stuck at the age the original wound occurred.Freedom on the Other Side of Facing the Needy Kid By grieving with that little boy, sobbing for days, Joe purges rage and blame. He sees his mother’s control as fear, not malice. The heaviness lifts—joints loosen, energy returns, motivation shifts from external chasing to internal presence. He’s no longer performing independence to avoid feeling weak. Now he can choose how to show up with family, not from obligation or rebellion, but from a place of actual wholeness. The work never ends, but the baseline rises: more joy, less fear, genuine choice.Three Important TakeawaysNeediness isn’t weakness—it’s the unhealed child’s cry that you armored against, and denying it blocks love, joy, and authentic intimacy just as much as it blocks pain.Every layer of shame you face and integrate raises your emotional baseline, trading chronic heaviness for lightness, better sleep, real energy, and freedom from external fixes.True healing means returning to the age you got stuck, grieving with that kid, and emerging able to choose connection instead of reacting from survival—eventually allowing you to show up for others without losing yourself.Continue Reading at joeryan.com

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your Unfinished SeparationYou were never truly allowed to say no at two years old. That first healthy rebellion got crushed, and now decades later you still freeze when it's time to claim your own life, terrified that independence equals abandonment. Most people never leave home emotionally—they just change addresses.The Developmental Wound Most Parents Inflict At around 24 months every child begins psychological birth, discovering they are separate from mom and dad. Saying mine, no, and refusing to share is not defiance—it's the healthy emergence of self. But most parents, threatened by the loss of control and mirrored in their own unmet needs, shame, guilt, or punish that separation. The message lands hard: you are never allowed to be more than me. That early suppression wires a lifetime fear of disappointing others, self-sabotage at every threshold of growth, and an unconscious loyalty to whoever demands the most emotional caretaking.Breaking Free Requires You to Finish What Was Interrupted You carry the two-year-old who learned that autonomy equals rejection. Leaving home emotionally means tolerating the terror of others' disappointment, building a private life that belongs only to you, and protecting what matters even when it costs connection. It hurts like hell because it reopens the original wound. Yet every boundary you hold, every pursuit you refuse to abandon, reclaims the self that was denied. Freedom arrives not through approval, but through the repeated, painful practice of choosing you anyway.Three Important TakeawaysThe terrible twos are sacred psychological birth; crushing them teaches a child they must never separate, creating lifelong codependency and fear of being more than the family system allows.Parents who cannot tolerate their child's independence unconsciously keep them emotionally hostage; as adults we repeat this pattern until we consciously finish the separation that was interrupted in childhood.Real boundaries emerge only after you find something worth protecting that is yours alone—start small, tolerate the discomfort of disappointing others, and build an identity that no longer collapses under the weight of needing to please.Continue Reading at joeryan.com

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your Unfamiliar PeaceYou finally stop waking up hating yourself, the desperate drive to prove your worth vanishes, and suddenly the old fire is gone. What remains is an unfamiliar quiet inside—a space where you can just breathe. The real terror hits: who the hell are you without the constant fight, and can you trust this fragile new normal before life demands you prove it again?Coming Home to a New Normal You've done the brutal work—connected the dots on your original pain, peeled off the protective layers, faced the shame hangover. Relief floods in, but so does raw vulnerability. No more default armor means you feel exposed, untrusting of this centered feeling because it's brand new. The old polar extremes—frantic proving or self-destructive escapes—fade, leaving an empty middle ground of peace. You pull back, not from depression, but exhaustion. Decades of survival mode leave you needing time to settle into skin that doesn't require constant performance. Self-compassion replaces the usual self-hate; you allow the lack of motivation without piling on shame. Recovery isn't a finish line—it's arriving at enoughness and learning to inhabit it without rushing to fill the void.Three Important TakeawaysBig emotional growth spurts leave you vulnerable and distrusting of your new peace—protect it fiercely by pulling back without self-shame until you can trust the shift is real.The drive to prove your worth fueled both hyper-achievement and addiction; its absence creates space for authentic being, but demands you tolerate the unfamiliar emptiness and redefine success on your own terms.After escaping survival mode, the next frontier is quiet confidence—stepping out gradually, accepting fear of humiliation, and showing up imperfectly because hiding in safety kills growth just as surely as old trauma did.Continue Reading at joeryan.com

- Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://joeryan.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://instagram.com/joeryan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Coaching: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://joeryan.com/coaching/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Submit A Question ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://joeryan.com/ask/⁠⁠⁠⁠ - Subscribe To All Episodes ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://joeryan.com/subscribe/⁠⁠ Family System Revisited builds off the Family Shame Episode (Episode 69), in which Joe elaborates on the pressures of family expectations and the toll it takes on a person in trying to fit into a family “system.” When we're born, we're born into a system. We are thrown into an existing system and put into a slot. Family systems dictate how you are expected to act, appear in public and how you are supposed to handle actions and emotions from everyone within your inner circle. The pressure to act accordingly and do only what will get you positive attention becomes a burden you can only carry for so long. Eventually, the byproduct of all this shame, whether from someone else or your own self, as you feel you can’t live up to the standard set for you in this unhealthy system. What do you do to lose the feeling of worrying about what everyone wants, thinks, or expects from you? Learn what Joe had to do to teach himself to be ok with being able to survive and being seen in ways that weren't acceptable by his family system and move past all the guilt and shame he felt as a child for wanting things outside his place in the system. In this Episode: Learn to live a life outside of the role your family has set for you to live the life you want…one free of shame. Getting in touch with our anger and emotions Live within your own body…your own self.. without anxiety and fear. Learn that you weren’t put on this earth to fill the holes of parents who can’t fill them in their own lives. Integrate the parts of yourself in your new life that your family won't let you have Build a relationship with yourself…Love is an Inside Job! Learn to dismantle your family system's role to live and deal with the uncomfortable feelings of judgment and shame from your family system! Feel the relief and freedom that comes from releasing the bonds that have been placed on you by your family!

Schedule a Complimentary Coaching Sessionhttps://joeryan.com/Empowering Individuals To Break Free From Childhood Programming, Emotional Paralysis, and Family System Roles. This is not traditional talk therapy. Inner Work Coaching is a raw, honest, personalized experience.It’s Not You – It’s Your Refusal to Be SeenYou already know something is seriously wrong inside. You’ve read the books, saved the posts, journaled the insights, yet you still wake up in the same emotional prison. The brutal truth is that healing doesn’t happen in your head or through more information—it only begins when you finally let another human being witness your deepest shame and pain.The Myth of Solo Healing You cannot think, read, meditate, or affirm your way out of developmental trauma. Your nervous system was never taught how to feel safe while feeling. That capacity was supposed to come from consistent, attuned caregivers who mirrored your emotions with warmth and acceptance. When that didn’t happen, you froze emotionally while your body kept growing. Decades later you’re physically an adult but emotionally still a terrified, abandoned child trying to manage overwhelming feelings alone. That strategy has never worked and it never will. Real change requires being seen—really seen—by someone who can hold space without flinching, without fixing, without abandoning you when it gets ugly.Why You Keep Avoiding the One Thing That Works Reaching out feels like walking naked into a room full of people who might hurt you again. Your system remembers betrayal, rejection, and humiliation. Asking for help triggers the same terror you felt as a child when vulnerability led to pain or neglect. So you stay in the familiar hell of isolation, convincing yourself that more podcasts, more books, more self-help will finally be enough this time. It’s a lie you tell yourself to avoid the risk of being seen and potentially hurt again. But staying hidden keeps you stuck exactly where the trauma wants you—alone, ashamed, and small.Three Important TakeawaysYou cannot heal developmental trauma in isolation—no amount of insight, journaling, or solo practices will rewire the nervous system that never learned safety in connection.Avoiding being seen preserves the illusion of control while guaranteeing you stay emotionally frozen, self-hating, and dependent on external fixes that always fail.Freedom begins the moment you courageously allow a safe other to witness your pain, shame, and unmet childhood needs—there is no shortcut and no way around that terrifying first step.Continue Reading at joeryan.com

Can I Recover On My Own? Joe Ryan is a Certified Peer Support Specialist who knows trauma because he’s lived it and learned to live beyond it.  Joe has been on a lifelong journey to overcome trauma, shame, and the demons that plagued him from early in life. Joe is turning his mission outward, helping others conquer their traumatic experiences through his podcast (“It’s Not You, It’s Your Trauma“) and one-on-one coaching. - Website: https://joeryan.com - Instagram: https://instagram.com/joeryan - Subscribe: https://joeryan.com/subscribe/ - Coaching: https://joeryan.com/coaching/ Drew Linsalata, creator and host of The Anxious Truth. I am a full time graduate student in clinical mental health counseling on the way to being a licensed therapist. I’m an author, a speaker, and proud to be both an educator and advocate in the anxiety, anxiety disorder, and anxiety recovery community. I am also a former sufferer, having struggled with anxiety disorders and clinical depression for more than 25 years of my life before finally fully recovering around 2008.  - https://theanxioustruth.com/

Joe Ryan is a Certified Peer Support Specialist who knows trauma because he’s lived it and learned to live beyond it.  Joe has been on a lifelong journey to overcome trauma, shame, and the demons that plagued him from early in life. Joe is turning his mission outward, helping others conquer their traumatic experiences through his podcast (“It’s Not You, It’s Your Trauma“) and one-on-one coaching. - Website: https://joeryan.com - Instagram: https://instagram.com/joeryan - Subscribe: https://joeryan.com/subscribe/ - Coaching: https://joeryan.com/coaching/ Drew Linsalata, creator and host of The Anxious Truth. I am a full time graduate student in clinical mental health counseling on the way to being a licensed therapist. I’m an author, a speaker, and proud to be both an educator and advocate in the anxiety, anxiety disorder, and anxiety recovery community. I am also a former sufferer, having struggled with anxiety disorders and clinical depression for more than 25 years of my life before finally fully recovering around 2008.  - https://theanxioustruth.com/