The Expert Who Was Also Living It | Adam McCormick on Shame, Childhood Trauma and the Unfinished Business Helping Professionals Carry

Adam McCormick has spent twenty-five years teaching other people to recognise the unfinished business of their childhoods. The patterns formed before we have words for them. The adaptations we built to survive. The emotions we buried so deeply they became normal.

He did all of that while living his own unfinished business. For decades. Without fully seeing it.

Adam grew up as what he calls his father's mini social worker. In a home shaped by alcoholism, he learned early that his job was to read his father's emotions, tend to his needs and disconnect entirely from his own. He became a superstar athlete to earn his father's attention. He drove a potato chip truck down a freeway at thirteen, in the dark, with no headlights, because he could not set a boundary with a drunk father behind the wheel.

And then he built an entire career out of helping other people understand exactly what he had never quite applied to himself.

In this conversation Adam and Rachel talk about what it costs to be the person everyone else comes to. About the addiction to keeping everything normal. About shame as a survival strategy that simply did not know when to stop. About what twenty-five years of teaching childhood trauma looks like when you finally recognise yourself in the material. And about the five-year-old in a karate uniform doing crane kicks in the front yard who became the compass for everything Adam now knows about getting back to himself.

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Adam is a Professor of Social Work at St. Edward's University and the author of Healing the Helping Professional: The Unfinished Business of Childhood Trauma, published by NASW Press.