Season 1 - Addison | Episode 2: The Early Years

This podcast features deep-dive, unfiltered conversations that often include adult themes and strong opinions. Listener discretion is strongly advised. If you want the full uncensored experience, including ad-free episodes, you can support the show and find us over on Supercast. Welcome back to Untamed Lives.

Before we jump into Episode 2 — The Early Years — we take a breath and look back: a girl who learned intimacy too soon, a young mother trying to hold a life together, and a voice named Olivia that surfaces when the world gets too heavy. In Episode 1 we met Addison — her work with animals, the strain and resilience of single parenthood, and the unfiltered edges of her sexuality. In Episode 2 we follow the thread back to where it all began.

Hear Addison tell it in plain, sometimes raw detail — the backyard game of 'ditch' that blurred curiosity and coercion, the first secret nights at friends’ houses, and the slow dawning that those early encounters were not the normal magic she once thought. She remembers thinking you had to care about someone to want them physically, and how that belief cracked under the weight of repeated hurt. Those fractures became the map she would travel for years to come.

We sit with the tenderness of first true love and the sting of leaving it: Brian, a safe place in a chaotic adolescence, and the difficult choices that led her to walk away. Then there is Cooper — the whirlwind that moved from college flings to marriage and a newborn, and the gutting moment when he chose a farm over a family. The day he packed and left, Carhartt the dog and a slammed door became symbols of a life split in two. Divorce dragged on, custody papers were vague, and a little girl learned to guard her heart from the man who should have protected it.

Through legal fights, summer visits that felt like visits to a stranger’s house, and the emotional abandonment that followed her father’s new family, Addison describes the quiet erosion of trust — in men, in promises, and sometimes in herself. A moment that cuts deep: when her daughter, facing medical injections, worries more about going to Dad’s than about the diagnosis itself. That painful scene crystallizes what the early years left behind.

But this episode is not only about scars. It is about reclamation. Addison opens up about exploring sex on her own terms in college, the pragmatic joy she found in release, and the complicated freedom of building identity while raising a child. She talks about open relationships, the lines she drew, and the walls she still carries — how early patterns become ruts in the road unless you fight to find a new path.

Licensed clinical social worker Erin joins the conversation with compassionate clarity, helping us understand how premature sexual experiences and repeated betrayal can shape attachment, worthiness, and future choices. Together, they trace how validation-seeking became both a survival tool and a trap — and how becoming a mother, a student, and then an independent woman reshaped those instincts.

Episode 2 is a raw, cinematic journey through adolescence, heartbreak, abandonment, and the small fierce decisions that build a life. It’s a story about what we inherit from the people who raised us, and what we choose to keep. Stay with us: in Episode 3 — Betrayal — the story darkens as new love, lies, and violence test everything Addison has fought to protect.

I am Chris, and this is Untamed Lives. Thank you to Addison for her courage, to Erin for her expertise, to Sam for helping shape each episode, and to you, the listener, for coming along. If you want the uncensored, ad-free experience, find us on Supercast.