Choosing Love After a Lifetime of Hurt | Matthew QuickChoosing Love After a Lifetime of Hurt | Matthew Quick
The One You Feed
Eric Zimmer and Matthew Quick discuss how childhood wounds, codependency and alcohol are intertwined, and how Matthew’s new memoir traces his choice to care for his father through dementia. The conversation focuses on reclaiming your story, integrating the shadow, and finding healing by consciously choosing love after long-standing hurt.
1:02:08•21 Jul 2026
Matthew Quick on Choosing Love, Sobriety and Healing After a Lifetime of Hurt
Episode Overview
- Alcohol often functions as a way to numb deep, unresolved pain rather than being the core problem itself.
- Seeing the "bad" parts of ourselves as shadow material to be understood, rather than banished, can reduce shame and reactive behaviour.
- Codependency and people-pleasing can stem from childhood patterns of appeasing volatile or emotionally abusive caregivers.
- Consciously choosing to care for a hurting parent—rather than feeling forced—can create unexpected healing and meaning.
- Reclaiming your own narrative and recognising that your story matters as much as anyone else's is a powerful step in recovery.
“The alcohol I don't even think was the problem. It was just the thing that made me forget about the problem for a while.”
Curious about how others navigate their sobriety journey? This conversation between host Eric Zimmer and author Matthew Quick centres on healing old wounds, reclaiming your own story, and choosing love after a lifetime of hurt. Matthew talks openly about growing up with a volatile, deeply religious father and how that shaped his nervous system, his relationships, and his drinking. As he bluntly puts it, "The alcohol I don't even think was the problem.
It was just the thing that made me forget about the problem for a while." Instead of staying stuck in blame, he explains how years of Jungian analysis and shadow work helped him stop splitting people into "good" and "bad" and start seeing the full spectrum of his own humanity. You’ll hear Matthew describe codependency, father hunger, and the way emotionally abusive men gravitated toward him later in life because he’d been unconsciously trained to take care of them.
He and Eric swap stories of anxious childhoods with irritable fathers, and how those patterns show up decades later around older men, confrontation, and self-worth. The heart of the episode is Matthew’s new memoir, *Dad, Love, Me*, and his decision to care for his father through dementia. He shares moments of raw difficulty—suicide threats, repeated regret-filled monologues—as well as surprisingly tender scenes where his father delights in azalea bushes and clouds like a child seeing beauty for the first time.
Matthew frames this choice as a conscious act of love, not obligation, and describes how becoming “the father to him that I always wished he was to me” has been deeply healing. If you’ve ever wondered whether you can heal without the apology you feel you deserve, or how to stay sober while facing painful family dynamics, this episode may give you plenty to reflect on.
How might choosing your own values, even in hard relationships, change the way you show up today?
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