SHITSHOW SATURDAY #221 – Getting the Support You NeedSHITSHOW SATURDAY #221 – Getting the Support You Need
Adult Child
This Shitshow Saturday conversation focuses on how to recognise real support in recovery and how to tell when therapy or help isn’t actually serving you. Andrea Ashley and community members share personal experiences of good and bad support, highlighting what safety, validation and authenticity can look like in practice.
31:18•5 Sept 2026
Getting the Support You Need: How to Tell When Help Is Really Helping
Episode Overview
- Good support makes you feel seen, not judged or analysed, and helps your story make sense in light of your past.
- Safe relationships allow you to bring intense emotions without the other person shutting down or rushing to fix you.
- If you leave sessions feeling like you performed, managed the therapist or received explanations without relief, something may be off.
- It’s valid to step away from unhelpful clinicians and keep looking for trauma-informed care that can truly hold your experience.
- Humour, authenticity and showing up imperfectly can make healing spaces feel safer and more human for everyone involved.
“You deserve support that actually supports you. And if what you're in right now isn't doing it, it's okay to trust that read.”
What makes a recovery story truly inspiring? This Shitshow Saturday episode of Adult Child centres on one huge theme: getting the support you actually need, rather than settling for whatever’s in front of you. Andrea Ashley talks frankly about how hard it is to recognise good support when you’ve grown up in dysfunction, where care came with strings, judgement or outright neglect.
She lays out simple, gut-level indicators that support is working: "They make you feel seen, not evaluated, not diagnosed, seen." The right person helps you understand why you are the way you are as an understandable response to your past, so you start to see yourself as someone who adapted, not someone who's broken.
You’ll hear how safety feels in practice: being able to bring "the ugly crying, the rage, the shame spiral" and watch the room stay steady; feeling like there’s time for you, rather than racing a clock; sensing that someone is close enough to feel the weight of what you’re carrying without being rattled by it. The conversation also looks at the flip side—what it’s like when help isn’t helping.
Andrea describes sessions where you end up doing the therapist’s job, performing instead of healing, leaving with "an explanation and no relief" and starting to dread appointments. Community members share real experiences of overprescribing clinicians, detached practitioners, and the huge difference it makes when someone finally says, "I can't help you" and points you towards trauma-informed care.
Throughout, Andrea emphasises authenticity, humour and showing up imperfectly as key ingredients of a safe healing space: "There’s no way that any of us could do this wrong... the only thing that we have to do is show up." For anyone wondering whether their current support is truly supporting them, this conversation might be the nudge to trust that inner read and ask: do the people around you make you feel seen, or like a project?
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