SHOW / EPISODE

250 - What a Real Amends From a Parent Requires: Naming the Impact & What Happens If You Never Get It w/ Dr. Ken Adams & Leilani Sinclair

1h 15m | Oct 1, 2026

✨SAFE WITHIN: A 7-week live somatic journey to get out of your head and into your body. Starts Wed. Oct 7th. 👉 adultchildpodcast.com/safewithin

An apology is the parent telling you they feel bad. An amends is the parent telling you exactly what they did and what it cost you.

Dr. Ken Adams and Leilani Sinclair are certified sex addiction therapists and the co-authors of the upcoming book Unburdening Adult Children of Sex Addicts, out January 7th. Ken is also the author of Silently Seduced, the book that put covert incest and parent-child enmeshment on the map.

Their new workbook walks a family healing from sex addiction through the process of both parents taking accountability for the impact they had on their child. This is a conversation about what a parent would actually have to do to unburden you, and why an apology is not the same thing as an amends.

✨ What this episode explores

▪️ Apology vs. Amends — Why saying sorry and taking accountability are two different acts, and what the second one requires that the first one doesn't.

▪️ Impact Statements — Why putting the specifics of how you were affected on paper does something for you that talking about it doesn't, even if nobody ever hears

▪️ When Accountability Never Comes — Why the healing looks different when the accountability isn't coming, and what it means to give yourself the thing your parent won't.

▪️ The Emotional Caretaker of the Betrayed Parent — What it does to a kid to be recruited as the confidant for the parent who was hurt, and why that role is the hardest one to put down.

▪️ Why Siblings Don't Come Out of It the Same — How the roles you each played and what you each knew leave you with different versions of the same childhood.

▪️ Finding Out in Adulthood — What it does to somebody when the truth about a parent surfaces at forty, and why that's its own trauma rather than a delayed version of everyone else's.

A Light in the Dark Workshop for Adult Children of Sexually Addicted Parents (ACSAs)

Contact Leilani - leilani@leilanisinclair.com

-----------------------

🎧 If this episode resonated, you might also love:

▪️ Ep 163 | Breaking The Shame: Adult Children of Sex Addicts w/ Dr. Kenneth Adams

▪️Ep 243 | The Caregiving Trap: When the Parent You're Estranged From Becomes Your Responsibility w/ Katherine St. Claire

-----------------------

⚓JOIN THE SHITSHOW — The Adult Child Healing Community

6 weekly Zoom support groups · Discussion boards · Peer connection

👉 theshitshow.mn.co

🗞️ SIGN UP FOR SHITSHOW NATION

Get the newsletter for community updates, healing insights & early access to workshops.