This is Part 2 of 2. Start with Part 1 if you haven't yet.

When we left off, Tara had just made a decision. She picked up her phone, got on TikTok, and posted a video about her husband cheating on her. Millions of people watched what came next.

In this episode: going viral without a plan, building a career from scratch with $500 and an in-home daycare, filing for divorce, dating after divorce, the shark-infested waters of healing in public, and what Tara means when she says she's learning to choose herself. She doesn't have a tidy ending. She is still in it. And that is exactly what makes this worth listening to.

Find Tara: Instagram: @tara.divorce.healing.unhinged | TikTok: @tara.r0se

Resources:

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 | Text START to 88788 | thehotline.org

Financial abuse resources: thehotline.org/resources/financial-abuse

Al-Anon (addiction, partners + families): al-anon.org

SAMHSA Helpline (substance use): 1-800-662-4357, free + confidential, 24/7 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 International: findahelpline.com (200+ countries) | befrienders.org

Have a story for Anchor Moments? hello@anchormomentspod.com | anchormomentspod.com

This is Part 1 of 2.

Tara's story didn't start last year. It started with a dad who chose alcohol over her, and a pattern she repeated in every relationship that followed - choosing people she could change, staying longer than she should have, and telling herself it wasn't that bad.

In this episode, Tara walks through two marriages, infidelity, a partner's addiction she had no idea existed, the moment a therapist named what was actually happening in her home, and the financial trap that made leaving feel impossible.

Find Tara: Instagram: @tara.divorce.healing.unhinged | TikTok: @tara.r0se

Resources:

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 | Text START to 88788 | thehotline.org

Financial abuse resources: thehotline.org/resources/financial-abuse

Al-Anon (addiction, partners + families): al-anon.org

SAMHSA Helpline (substance use): 1-800-662-4357, free + confidential, 24/7

988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 International: findahelpline.com (200+ countries) | befrienders.org

Have a story for Anchor Moments? hello@anchormomentspod.com | anchormomentspod.com

Every one of us have moments we can't stop being shaped by whether we want to be or not.

Anchor Moments is a storytelling podcast about those experiences. Real people. Real stories. The moments that made us who we are, and who we're still becoming because of them.

I believe it's impossible not to love someone once you know their story.

New episodes drop April 25, 2026. Follow now so you don't miss them.

This is Part 2 of my conversation with Grace from Grace Filled Mama. If you haven't listened to Part 1 yet, start there - you need that foundation before you come here.

When we left off, Grace had just hit the lowest point of her Cinderella story. The dresses were gone. Her mom's words were still hanging in the air. In Part 2, we pick up right there - and we talk about what happened next. A suicide attempt at nine years old. What God said to her in that moment. The vision that kept her here. And then years later, the slow and honest work of actually healing.

Grace also shares four of the most practical, grounded things I've heard anyone say about rebuilding yourself after a childhood like hers. I took notes. I think you will too.

In this episode:

• The hidden dress and what it meant to her in the darkest moments
• A suicide attempt at age nine and the experience that changed everything
• The vision of her future family that kept her here
• Meeting her husband at sixteen and knowing immediately
• The sexual abuse she experienced the night before her wedding
• Early marriage - the hard years and what it took to stay
• Holding her first daughter and realizing for the first time she didn't deserve what happened to her
• Going no contact with her entire family
• How the suicidal ideation finally stopped - and what actually made the difference
• Four things Grace wishes someone had told her sooner:
  • Thinking through hard things instead of toxic positivity
  • What it really means to love your neighbor as yourself
  • A daily practice for healing from body shame and sexual abuse
  • The new door - why healing doesn't feel good yet, and why that's okay

Trigger warnings:

This episode contains a suicide attempt, sexual abuse by a parent, religious trauma, descriptions of early marriage difficulty, and detailed discussion of suicidal ideation. Please take care of yourself as you listen.

Resources:

United States:

• Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 | 988lifeline.org
• RAINN (sexual assault support): 1-800-656-4673 | rainn.org
• National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 | thehotline.org
• Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741

International:

• Crisis Text Line (UK, Canada, Ireland): Text HOME to 741741
• Samaritans (UK and Ireland): 116 123 | samaritans.org
• Befrienders Worldwide (international suicide prevention directory): befrienders.org
• International Association for Suicide Prevention (crisis center directory): iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres

Connect with Grace: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/grace_filled.mama/

Keep an eye out for Grace's personal development journal for husbands - she mentioned it's dropping soon and I'm excited about it.

If this episode meant something to you, share it, leave a review, or tell one person. That is how people who need this find it. Thank you for being here.

Grace from Grace Filled Mama grew up as the seventh child in a family carrying more pain than they knew what to do with. When her mom began losing the ability to walk around the time of Grace's birth, the family's grief landed squarely on the one person least able to carry it - a little girl who spent years believing she was the reason for everything hard in her family's life.

In Part 1, Grace takes us all the way back. We talk about what it felt like to grow up invisible in a crowded house, to be pulled out of her own education at age six, and to find ways to survive from the shadows. And then the packages started arriving - beautiful, mysterious dresses that kept showing up on her porch - and everything got more complicated from there.

This is one of the most honest conversations I've had on this podcast. I think you'll feel that.

In this episode:

• Growing up as the seventh child and the weight that came with that
• Her mom losing the ability to walk and how that shaped the family's dynamic
• Being pulled from her education at age six and learning to read on her own
• Moving herself into the basement to take up less space
• The first mystery package - and the pure joy that came with it
• How her parents responded to the dresses, and what that taught her about herself
• Childhood sexual abuse
• Suicidal ideation beginning around age seven

Trigger warnings:

This episode contains childhood emotional abuse and neglect, childhood sexual abuse, suicidal ideation in a child, religious trauma, and descriptions of parental manipulation. Please take care of yourself as you listen.

Resources:

If anything in this episode brought something up for you, please reach out. You don't have to sit with it alone.

United States:

• Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 | 988lifeline.org
• RAINN (sexual assault support): 1-800-656-4673 | rainn.org
• Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline: 1-800-422-4453 | childhelp.org
• Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741

International:

• Crisis Text Line (UK, Canada, Ireland): Text HOME to 741741
• Samaritans (UK and Ireland): 116 123 | samaritans.org
• Befrienders Worldwide (international suicide prevention directory): befrienders.org
• International Association for Suicide Prevention (crisis center directory): iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres

Connect with Grace: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/grace_filled.mama/

Don't miss Part 2 - subscribe wherever you listen so it lands right in your feed.

If this episode meant something to you, share it. That is how people who need it find it.

Taryn Thompson learned to make a sandwich when she was three years old, in case her mom passed out and wasn't there to feed her. That's where her story starts.

What follows is thirty-something years of figuring out how to love yourself when the people who were supposed to show you how... couldn't.

Taryn grew up with a mother deep in addiction and a father who was emotionally absent, and she spent most of her adult life not knowing how to be okay.

Panic attacks in high school. A baby at 19. Weeks without electricity. A broken engagement that became her first real rock bottom. And a diagnosis of OCD and CPTSD that finally gave language to what she'd been living with all along.

But this episode isn't about surviving. It's about what Taryn built on the other side of all of it. She runs a healing practice called The Happy Human. She's building a local community space called the Regulation Room, where anyone who's overwhelmed can walk in and just breathe.

She got engaged in February 2026 to someone who waited six years for her. And she'll tell you herself - she still pulls over on the side of the road sometimes because a panic attack took the feeling out of her legs. She's still healing. She just knows now that healing doesn't mean it stops. It means you know how to stay.

Taryn's anchor moment isn't one thing. It's a slow accumulation of choosing herself, over and over, until one day she named her business "The Happy Human" and realized: that's actually true.

Trigger warnings: childhood neglect, parental substance abuse, abandonment, poverty, grief and loss, OCD, CPTSD, panic disorder, alcohol use, and family estrangement.

Episode 2 - Rohmel: Money is Just Paper

The stories of what happened to us, and who we became because of it.

When Rohmel was fourteen, his mother died of cancer three months after her diagnosis. A week after that, the family friends who'd taken them in said it was time to go. He and his father - a once-celebrated chef who had simply shut down - ended up on a street with the highest murder rate in the country. Eight months. No car, no shelter, no plan. The only white kid on a block where Crips, Bloods, and the Mexican Mafia all wanted him gone. He had a knife fight his first full day.

He's sixty-something now, starting a company named after his autistic stepson, training young entrepreneurs in honor of a friend's little boy who died running a lemonade stand. He says he doesn't feel fear. He also can't fully forgive himself for the divorce that cost him three years of his daughter's childhood. Both of those things are true at the same time.

A gentle heads-up: This episode includes discussion of parental loss, childhood homelessness, gang violence and near-death experiences, and a parent's grief over time missed with their child. Faith is also woven throughout - as it was for Rohmel, then and now. Resources are below. Please take care of yourself as you listen.

On faith in this episode

Rohmel's faith isn't peripheral to his story - it's the lens he uses to look at everything in it. He names God directly and often. If that's not your language, his story still belongs to you. This show holds every guest's experience as their own, not as a prescription for anyone else. What I keep coming back to isn't the theology - it's the fact that a boy who should have died every day for eight months came home carrying both a fearlessness most of us will never know and a regret he still won't release. Both shaped who he is. And - not but - he's still becoming.

Resources

If anything in this episode touched something real for you, please reach out for support.

• 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline - call or text 988
• Crisis Text Line - text HOME to 741741
• Psychology Today therapist finder - psychologytoday.com
• National Homeless Shelter Directory - homelessshelterdirectory.org
• SAMHSA National Helpline (grief, mental health, substance use) - 1-800-662-4357

If you don't feel ready to call anyone, even telling one safe person you're struggling counts.

If this episode stayed with you

Please follow, rate, and share. One text to one person is the single biggest thing you can do for a show this size, and it might be exactly what someone in your life needs today. Tag us on socials @anchormomentspod.

If you have a story you think belongs here, reach out at hello@anchormomentspod.com.

I'm Krista Patrick. This is Anchor Moments.

You are already part of someone's story. Carry that with kindness.

The step work she put down a hundred times. The words she finally let herself mean.

When you first meet Teresa, you get warmth. You get someone who will talk to absolutely anyone, who FaceTimes her sister every single morning, who moves her body every day because she knows what happens when she doesn't. What you don't see is the years she spent just surviving - going to work, keeping the lights on, showing up in all the ways that looked right from the outside while quietly disappearing on the inside. She was a functioning addict for years while raising her girls. Nobody knew. She barely knew. The version of herself she was becoming in private was starting to show up in places she did not want it to, and the fear of rejection she had carried her entire life made it almost impossible to say that to anyone out loud.

Near the end of our conversation, she told me she is a damn good mom. She said it like she had finally earned the right to believe it. She has.

A gentle heads-up: This episode includes discussion of addiction and recovery, childhood family dynamics, parenting through an identity you are still figuring out, and the kind of guilt that does not leave just because you have changed. Resources are below. Please take care of yourself as you listen.

Resources If anything in this episode touched something real for you, please reach out for support.

• 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline - call or text 988 (US)
• Crisis Text Line - text HOME to 741741 (US)
• SAMHSA National Helpline (substance use, mental health) - 1-800-662-4357 (US)
• Narcotics Anonymous meeting finder - na.org (international)
• SMART Recovery (science-based alternative to 12-step, online meetings worldwide) - smartrecovery.org
• Psychology Today therapist finder - psychologytoday.com (US and international listings)

If you're outside the US - findahelpline.com connects you to crisis support in more than 200 countries. Befrienders Worldwide offers free emotional support at befrienders.org.

If you don't feel ready to call anyone, even telling one safe person you're struggling counts.

If this episode stayed with you Please follow, rate, and share. One text to one person is the single biggest thing you can do for a show this size, and it might be exactly what someone in your life needs today. Tag us on socials @anchormomentspod. If you have a story you think belongs here, reach out at hello@anchormomentspod.com.

I'm Krista Patrick. This is Anchor Moments.

You are already part of someone's story. Carry that with kindness.