The Aware Parenting Podcast · Marion Rose, PhD.

Episode 216: There's nothing wrong with you! with Katie Fusco

·1 hr 31 min·5 clips

Katie recalls screaming in an ambulance during birth while paramedics discussed Slimming World, feeling utterly insignificant.

The welcome is warm and unhurried. Marion Rose introduces herself as a Level 2 Aware Parenting Instructor and regional coordinator, then brings in Katie Fusco from the UK with real affection. Katie starts with care too, placing her story alongside her work in perinatal mental health before the conversation moves into heavier ground. What follows is not a tidy lesson. It feels more like sitting close while someone tells the truth about early parenting pain, lived trauma, and the strange, stubborn things that can grow after survival. Katie talks about moments when she did not know if her situation was survivable. Marion does not rush to fix it. She listens, reflects the weight of it, and leaves room for the listener to feel the impact. Activism becomes an important thread. Katie describes how despair shifted into a fierce want for change, and the episode treats that shift as something earned, not neat or inspirational. Rage has a place here too. Marion asks how Katie moved from rage about not being told toward Aware Parenting and a different way of seeing parenting. Books become one of the more revealing details. Katie notices how reading parenting books can turn into a control pattern, especially when she is looking for the book that will make her feel competent and nourishing. The episode does not shame that. It lets the search show how much fear, pressure, longing, and responsibility can hide inside ordinary parenting efforts. A rocking chair gives the story a physical shape: the chair back coming off, dents in the wall, pain made visible without turning it into spectacle. Marion keeps softening the room. By the end, big tears, younger uncried tears, and the listener's own feelings are met with love instead of correction.

As heard by us

A tender interview about trauma, rage, and Aware Parenting as part of a turning point.

Marion Rose and Katie Fusco have a steady, grounded conversation about traumatic experience, rage, and the role Aware Parenting played in Katie's turning point.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a tender way to think about rage, repair, trauma, and parenting.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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