Episode Details

Adrienne was a small girl who ran the wrong way in a basketball game. She got home still crushed about it, and her mother told her she had been embarrassing. Adrienne says that was the first time she understood she was not going to get a shoulder.

Adrienne is a friend of Lisa's outside the show and a first-time guest on it. She is fifty, married to someone she describes as thoroughly supportive, a stepmother, and the younger sibling of a brother she credits with more of her healing than he knows. She spent twenty-five years in financial services and has recently left to start her own business, having realized her career had carried her further and further from helping anyone. She is also the adult daughter of a mother who was eventually given a formal diagnosis, late in life, when she no longer had the energy to hold the mask in place. Adrienne wanted to speak about it because she used to feel real shame about it and does not anymore.

In this episode she talks about her father, who died a few months before the recording and who was where safety lived in that house. She wishes he had left and taken the two of them, and he apologized to her for not doing it. She also thinks it might not have gone the way she imagines, because as a child she would probably have taken her mother's side. She holds both of those at once for most of the conversation, along with a genuine respect for what her mother built with no support of her own.

Adrienne and Lisa cover the golden child and scapegoat roles, and the point where they swapped. The fight over a wedding video that turned out to be the end, and the apology she asked for two decades later. What she watched her mother do to her brother, and why she thinks the need for maternal care is not a gendered thing. Marrying her mother the first time and her father the second. And the closing question every protective parent in this audience wants answered, where her answer is consistency, and her observation that children work it out eventually, though rarely on the schedule a parent would pick.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What the first signal looked like to a child too young to name it
• Why she wishes her father had left, and why she is not certain it would have gone better
• How to hold real anger and real fairness toward the same parent at once
• Golden child and scapegoat, and what happens when the roles switch
• The pattern of never getting an apology, and what asking for one twenty years later is like
• How a narcissistic mother affects a son, and why maternal care isn't a gendered need
• The lasting cost: second-guessing yourself and losing trust in your own instincts
• Her advice to a protective parent: consistency, and why children work it out eventually

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Meet Adrienne, why she's talking about it, and the shoulder she never had
6:00 Her father, and the leaving that never happened
9:00 Being fair to her mother, and the diagnosis that came late
14:00 No contact now, and a brother who carries the caretaking
17:00 Marrying your mother, then marrying your father
19:00 The wedding video, and the apology that never came
23:00 What she watched happen to her brother
30:00 What it cost her, and what she gained
35:00 Leaving a 25-year career, and who she was proving wrong
38:00 Advice for protective parents: consistency, and kids seeing it eventually

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids