The Fan in the Window: Interrupting What We Inherit

There is a question that changed the way I think aboutchildren.  Not, what’s wrong with you? What happened to you? Those are two very different questions. And the one you askdetermines everything—what you see, what you miss, what you do next, and what the child in front of you learns about whether they are worth understanding.  Today’s guest works with children and families every singleday inside...

Have you ever looked at a relationship and thought—how did Iend up here again? Not the same person. But the same feeling. The same dynamic. The same patterns playing out in a slightly different set of circumstances. You were not choosing wrong. Your nervous system was choosing familiar. And familiar and safe are not the same thing—but they feel that way when you grew up in a house where familiar m...

Most of what we talk about on this show is what happens after. After you recognize the pattern. After the damage has already moved through your family line.   But what happens when you see it coming?   Dr. Rondalyn Whitney has spent her career studying exactlywhat protects children from the harm trauma causes. When she was widowed in 2020—her husband Bill killed instantly in a car accident—she did...

There is a version of healing that happens alone. In therapy. In journals. In the 2 a.m. conversations you have with yourself when something finally clicks.   And then you go back to your life. Back to the people youlove. And someone does something ordinary—and everything you understood at 2 a.m. disappears. And you are back in the pattern. Again.   That gap—between what you understand and what yo...

Start here: thefaninthewindow.com/start There’s a version of love that jumps in front of everything so your child never has to feel it. And there’s a version that learns to hang back, to ask what they need instead of deciding, to trust that the feeling won’t break them. Most of us were never shown the second one. So, we defaulted to the first one—and called it love. Because it was. It was also som...

Start here: thefaninthewindow.com/start   Most of us didn’t learn how to be in a relationship. We learned how to survive inside one.   Season 2 opens with a solo episode—and it goes somewhere personal.   Tressa shares what conflict used to look like in her own relationships: the fawning, the silence, the collected resentment, the flooding, the cruelty that came out without warning, and the leaving...

This is the season finale. And I want to be honest with you from the start. I do not have a tidy ending. I do not have a before-and-after story with a clean resolution and a lesson neatly wrapped. What I have is a direction. A long way traveled. And the deep conviction that there is no finish line—and that is not a failure. That is the truth. Twelve episodes. Twelve conversations about the roles w...

There is someone in your life you love deeply who is struggling. And you know things that could help. You can see the path forward. Every instinct you have says — do something. Fix it. You know how. And you have to let them find it themselves. That tension — between knowing and releasing, between loving and controlling — is what this episode is about. Not because control makes you a bad person. Bu...

You loved your children. That has never been in question. But love and presence are not the same thing. And there are seasons of parenting where survival takes everything you have — leaving very little for the kind of presence your children needed and deserved. This episode is about that season. What it looks like from the inside. What your children are absorbing, even when you don't realize i...

You've done the work. The therapy. The reading. The healing. You've built language for what happened, found forgiveness, made peace with things you couldn't change. And you still jump when a door slams. That is not a failure of healing. That is your nervous system doing the job it was assigned a very long time ago — and nobody told it the threat was over. In this episode, I go undernea...

Tressa Bell introduces a Mother’s Day episode of The Fan inthe Window: Interrupting What We Inherit focused on the complexity of maternal relationships, including grief, estrangement, and mixed feelings, and clarifies the show is not therapy while providing crisis resources. She explores generational patterns of harm and distinguishes between an apology and a “real apology,” drawing on Harriet Ler...

Tressa Bell introduces her podcast, The Fan in the Window:Interrupting What We Inherit, explaining how surgery created the stillness that led her to build a book, podcast, business, and platform rooted in her frustration that it took until age 50 to understand what happened to her at five. In this episode, “The Grief of Losing a Role,” she explores howfamily-system roles formed in chaos become ide...

Host Tressa Bell introduces The Fan in the Window: Interrupting What We Inherit and explores what happens when someone tries to step out of inherited family or workplace roles and the surrounding system pushes back through silence, anger, manipulation, or guilt-inducing questions. Referencing Murray Bowen’s Differentiation of Self and Family Projection Process, she explains how systems seek equili...

Host Tressa Bell introduces The Fan in the Window: Interrupting What We Inherit and explores how children in chaotic, emotionally unpredictable homes adapt by organizing themselves into survival roles—responsible one, peacekeeper, protector, invisible one, performer, or mascot—often without realizing it. She connects this to family systems theory (Murray Bowen) and parentification, describing inst...

Tressa Bell introduces her podcast, The Fan in the Window:Interrupting What We Inherit and the episode “What Children Carry,” exploring how children absorb tone, tension, silence, and adult nervous-system states without needing explanations. She argues that children make meaning from patterns in their environment, learning not only how adults fight but whathappens after conflict, and that lack of...

Host Tressa Bell introduces The Fan in the Window and explores how growing up around conflict, emotional unpredictability, and unresolved intensity can become “normal,” shaping adult templates for love, attraction, and resilience as conditioning rather than health. She explains that children prioritize attachment over accuracy, adapt to survive, and often can’t name dysfunction even when they perc...

Tressa Bell explains that leaving an unhealthy situation can create external safety without bringing internal nervous system regulation, sharing how she left her marriage after escalating conflict and unpredictable self-harm threats and still stayed in survival mode, scanning for danger. She describes dysregulation as cycling between fight (irritability, reactivity) and freeze (numbing, dissociati...

Tressa Bell introduces her podcast, The Fan in the Window , about trauma, nervous systems, generational patterns, and interrupting what gets passed down. In this episode, “The Book Wasn’t the End,” she describes finishing her manuscript and realizing it didn’t resolve her patterns but exposed that they are still active, including over-functioning, bracing, and feeling responsible for stabilizing o...