217: Good Kid, Quiet Wreckage: Relational Shame, the Silent Treatment & The War You Waged on Yourself w/ Maggie Nick

2026-02-11

Download

Maggie Nick is a trauma therapist and author of the newly published book Good Kids: Why You Suffered in Silence and How to Break the Cycle. She grew up as the good kid in a home with a personality-disordered mother - performing, complying, and quietly falling apart while making sure nobody ever saw the real her. After years of working through what she thought was the "real" trauma, she discovered that relational shame was the deepest layer underneath everything else.✨ What this episode ex...

Maggie Nick is a trauma therapist and author of the newly published book Good Kids: Why You Suffered in Silence and How to Break the Cycle. She grew up as the good kid in a home with a personality-disordered mother - performing, complying, and quietly falling apart while making sure nobody ever saw the real her. After years of working through what she thought was the "real" trauma, she discovered that relational shame was the deepest layer underneath everything else.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️Relational Shame as the Deepest Layer: How every surface-level struggle (the perfectionism, the people pleasing, the self-hatred) is just smoke from the same fire: being made to feel like the real you is fundamentally bad.

▪️The "Good Kid" Was a Survival Strategy, Not a Personality: Why compliance, fawning, and never misbehaving wasn't temperament. It was your nervous system's way of staying loved and staying safe.

▪️The Silent Treatment Is Emotional Violence: Why it's one of the most normalized forms of emotional abuse and what it does to a kid when love can be jerked away without warning.

▪️The Fight Response Turned Inward: What happens when you never had permission to push back. That energy doesn't disappear. It becomes the vicious inner critic, the eating disorder, the relentless self-punishment.

▪️The Check Engine Lights Everyone Misses: Why the kids (and adults) who look like they have it the most together are often the ones suffering the most, and what to actually look for underneath the performance.

-----------------------

⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection

👉 theshitshow.mn.co

🗞️ SIGN UP FOR SHITSHOW NATION

Get the newsletter for community updates, healing insights & early access to workshops.

➡️ Join here

💁‍♀️ SUPPORT THE POD

☕ Buy Me a Coffee – help Andrea (and her cats) eat

🛍️ Shop Shitshow Merch

💬 CONNECT WITH ANDREA

Instagram → @adultchildpod