Haylie walked into a family law office at seventeen, a self-described divorce court ordered and mentally disordered child of the system she would spend the next few years watching up close. Now twenty, she sits down with her boss — a family law attorney — to look back at what it actually felt like to be a kid shuttled between households, living out of a duffel bag, bounced around like a pinball before she had words for any of it.

This is not a damage narrative. It is a portrait of someone who learned early, paid forward, and is only now starting to give herself credit for it. The conversation moves from custody schedules and courtroom logic to depression diagnoses in middle school, from the two completely different households that built two completely different versions of Haylie, to what she would tell a judge making a joint custody call today.

She is funny, self-aware, and occasionally undone. Which is exactly the point.

Jenny didn't set out to become someone who testifies before legislators or writes articles that strangers message her about at midnight. She set out to survive.

Her story begins with a childhood defined by a cousin's long illness and a quiet sense of not fitting the mold — too physical, too emotional, too outside the lines of what a Southern girl was supposed to be. It moves through a high school history teacher who noticed her grief and used it, a disclosure her mother couldn't quite hear, and a decision to pack the memory down and keep going.

Decades later, in the middle of a marriage under enormous strain, Jenny found herself in a counselor's office hoping for help. What she got instead was a second round of the same thing — grooming, manipulation, and an abuse of the therapeutic relationship that left her more broken than when she arrived.

In this conversation, she talks about what it feels like to recognize a pattern you lived through twice before you had the language to name it. She talks about transference, about the way predators weaponize your own vulnerability against you, and about the specific devastation of not being believed by the person you most needed to believe you.

She also talks about what came after. The six-month recovery program. The slow return to therapy with a practitioner she could actually trust. The decision to go public — anonymously at first, then fully — after the person who hurt her told his version of events before she could tell hers.

Jenny is now in her second year of pushing for legislation in Mississippi that would criminalize sexual misconduct by licensed counselors against adult clients. The bills have not yet passed. She believes they will.

This episode is for anyone who has ever asked themselves whether what happened to them was real, whether anyone would believe them, or whether speaking would cost more than staying silent. Jenny's answer to all three questions is direct, hard-earned, and worth hearing.

Ashlea was adopted at birth into a loving family — and spent the next two decades not processing a single emotion about it. In this episode, she opens up about what happened when she finally did: the counselor who called her Pollyanna, the rock bottom in her late twenties, and the treatment center where she learned that nearly half the room was adopted.

We talk about disenfranchised grief — the grief you are not allowed to name because it is for someone you never lost, in the conventional sense — and why so many adoptees end up in crisis before anyone thinks to ask them how they are actually doing.

Ashlea is now a nurse practitioner who works to get on the front end of that crisis, helping adoptive families have the conversations before things come apart. She shares what she would tell adoptive parents today, what she wishes her family had known, and what she would go back and say to her younger self.

This is one of the most honest conversations we have had on this show. If you are an adoptee, an adoptive parent, or someone who has ever pushed something too far down for too long — this one is for you.

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Topics covered: adoption grief, adoptee identity, disenfranchised grief, adoptee mental health, adoption and substance use, adoptive parenting, closed adoption, emotional processing, adoption reunion, identity and belonging.