Bonus - How I Bring it All Together - AuDHD parenting, PDA, NPD, legal battles, solo parenting and Catholicism

This post explains my vision for the podcast. I intend to "cross-educate". For example, bringing trauma-informed strategies to single motherhood. Or, looking at narcissistic personality disorder through a spiritual lens. Or, showing how the autistic brain can perform in a superior manner in family court. Or, bringing the tools that the Church gives us access to, into your PTSD recovery. Or, linking regulation in mothers with trauma, to how they can handle PDA kids. Etc.

Welcome back to Light in the Battle. I'm Faustina, a single autistic mom raising a PDA autistic child, healing from narcissistic abuse and winning in court. I'm doing it all without a husband, a safety net, and I'm carrying 99% of the parenting load. It's just me, my kid, my dog, and Jesus. If you're here for perfectly-curated, AI-based influencer energy, this is the wrong podcast/blog for you. But if you're here for blunt truths, nervous system reality checks, human thoughts, Catholic weapons of warfare, and the occasional inappropriate joke, I got you. Light in the Battle is where we get clearer, calmer, and spiritually and legally harder to mess with.

This is the transcript for the Bonus Episode I dropped in the middle of Season 2, Emotional Detachment as a Tactical Strategy for Family Court.

This episode is a little different from the content I've been offering thus far. In this one, I would like to take a step back and talk about why I'm doing this podcast. In my story, I have a lot of realities that intersect:

• I'm an adult-diagnosed autistic woman,

• I'm parenting an autistic PDA child,

• I'm a single mom with ADHD, which makes me an AuDHD single mom to an autistic child,

• I'm a survivor of narcissistic abuse,

• I'm involved in high-conflict co-parenting dynamics,

• With a Catholic view on my suffering,

• I'm winning in court,

• And I'm living a trauma-informed lifestyle.

What I noticed is that back when I was in the thick of it, I could not find a single influencer that was talking about that intersection, when all of those realities are occurring at once in a family.

I found some amazing content, amazing influencers that talk about adult autism, autism in women, PDA in kids, single motherhood, ADHD women, how to navigate high-conflict co-parenting, amazing content about narcissism, legal strategies for family court, amazing trauma-informed content, people that talk about the Catholic meaning of suffering, but they were all separate podcasts or separate Insta profiles.

Nobody was talking about bringing it all together back when I needed it most. And with:

• The increase of adult autism diagnoses, especially in women,

• The increase of kids diagnoses of autism and PDA awareness,

• The increased awareness of Spiritual Warfare,

• The increase of narcissistic tendencies,

• The return of Catholics to their faith that we're observing,

• The steadiness / increase of divorce rates,

• And with the massive amount of women that I'm seeing that feel destroyed by their co-parenting experience,

that intersection is growing. So that's where I want to position myself.

I have not found anyone who talks about all of those realities together, and there's more and more of us that live with these many crosses at once.

Another reason I saw a need for this podcast is that I'm seeing two types of influencers talking about those topics, albeit separately:

• I'm seeing incredible, very high-quality content coming from women that have navigated those realities, but they're now out of it. Either because the kids have left the nest somehow, or they've remarried, or the ex has been court-ordered to stop suing and appealing, or it's been many years since they managed to win in court, or they've gone on to earn PhDs, or they've become psychologists. They have a very healed perspective on those topics. They're no longer in the thick of it, and they don't necessarily speak to the reality of the constant state of burnout, the exhaustion, the frustration, the repeated court hearings, the anger... That's very much in the past for them.

  
  

• Another type of influencer I'm seeing is women that are very much in it right now, but all I'm hearing when they're speaking is the suffering and the hurt. And so it's a lot of rambling and a lot of oversharing. And I feel for these women, I really do. I know in my body how that feels. I truly do. I just don't see how they're able to help me just yet, because they're in it. It's all hurt and suffering that they're sharing. They haven't gone maybe far enough in the journey to be able to develop their own tools and their own tips and tricks to share with the community.

So I'm in the middle between those two, and that's where I think I bring the most value to my audience.

Quick confession - I think it's my ASD speaking - I feel the need to explain myself. I did rely on ChatGPT in the beginning as a beginner podcaster. I had no idea what I was doing, so I did rely on AI a little bit in the beginning to scaffold my launch into podcasting. And I very quickly realized that we all sound the same. On Instagram, I'm seeing all these profiles that are dishing really good quality advice or stuff that looks and sounds like lived experience. But you can tell it's been written by ChatGPT. And so I quickly, before I even hit the sixth or seventh episode, I quickly stopped using AI. And this is now all based on my human thoughts and my human lived experience and my personality. And I think what makes my content even more special is that it's not a robot speaking to you through my voice. I'm not reading what a robot told me. I'm sharing lived experience and real battle-tested tips that I've used or created for my life.

So thank you for listening to this bonus episode. I hope this makes it more clear what I'm wanting to achieve here and whether that's a fit for you and can help you.

Please remember to take this life one day at a time. Your only job is to make it until this evening. And then you do that again tomorrow and the day after. We'll see you next week, and resume our Emotional Detachment journey with PTSD treatment with EMDR.

If you haven't started Season 2, and you're wanting to achieve Emotional Detachment, to perform better in family court, start here with Episode 15A about the Trauma Bond.