Jody Lamb

Someone in your life has probably called you selfish. Maybe you've even called yourself that.

I made a whole video to tell you they were wrong. 💛

If you grew up being the one who held everything together — the fixer, the strong one, the person everyone calls in a crisis — nobody ever handed you a blueprint for taking care of yourself. This video is my case for why that's not selfish. It's literally your job.

🎥 New video is up now.

And tell me honestly: do you find it harder to rest or to ask for help? 👇

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 0

Jody Lamb

4,000 of you. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

I started this channel back in 2010 for one simple reason: I wanted to connect with other adult children of alcoholics. I'd sit in Al-Anon meetings hearing stories that I'd never heard anywhere else — honest, raw, real — and I wanted more of those stories to exist out in the world, where anyone searching for someone who gets it could find them.

So I started showing up here and sharing mine. And what I never expected was how much you would end up giving back to me.

Hands down, the single most impactful element of my healing from the effects of my childhood and young adult years was the inspiring words of other people. Knowing I wasn't the only one. Hearing someone describe a feeling I thought only I carried. That's what changed everything for me.

And that's exactly what so many of you do here, every single day. Through your comments, your messages, your willingness to share your own stories, you make other people feel less alone. You have no idea how far that ripples. I see it. I read it. It moves me constantly.

You inspire me. You always have.

What's coming next is something I've been working toward for a long time. This September, I'm releasing my memoir. The whole story: my mom, her alcoholism, the years I spent trying to save her, and the moment I finally realized my real job was to save myself. Everything I've shared in pieces here is in there, in full.
You were part of what made me brave enough to write it.

If you want to be the first to know when it's available, I'd love for you to join my email list at jodylamb.com/memoir. That's where I'll be sharing updates and behind-the-scenes details before anywhere else.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for your contributions. Thank you for helping people feel a little less alone.

I'm so grateful you're here.
💛 Jody

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 23

Jody Lamb

Why you can't relax (and what's actually going on):

You finally have a free afternoon. You sit down. You tell yourself you're going to rest. And then your brain starts scanning the to-do list.

You get up to take care of "just one thing." An hour passes. You never actually rested.

This isn't a personality flaw. It's old programming and once I understood where it came from, I was finally able to learn how to relax.

In my latest video, I share what hypervigilance actually is, why so many of us developed it, and the three things that genuinely helped me start to unlearn it.
(Spoiler: one of them is only 15 minutes a day and it changed everything.)

If you've ever felt broken because everyone else seems to love vegging out on the couch and you simply cannot, this one's for you.

3 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 1

Jody Lamb

If you've ever loved someone with addiction, nobody told you this.

You reorganized your life around their chaos. Canceled plans. Learned to read their voice in two seconds flat.

You called it love. But there's another phrase for it: the wrong job.

In my latest video, I walk through 5 signs you've been doing it and why that exhaustion you feel isn't a sign to try harder. It's a sign you've been working overtime in the wrong direction.

✔ Your calendar bends around their crises

✔ You know more about their drinking than they do

✔ You feel responsible every time they relapse

✔ You've stopped making plans, just in case

✔ You can't remember the last time you thought about your own life

If even one of these landed, this video is for you. 🤍
Which one hit hardest? Drop it in the comments.

1 month ago | [YT] | 2

Jody Lamb

I spent more than 20 years trying to save my alcoholic mom. 💛

One morning, driving to work around a lake I passed every day, something finally broke open. I had to pull over. I cried. My makeup ran down my face. When I got back on the road, I knew everything was about to change.

I just shared the whole story about this pivotal moment when I stopped trying to save her and started saving myself.

If you're standing outside the glass room right now, this one's for you. 💛

1 month ago | [YT] | 0

Jody Lamb

One in four kids in the U.S. is growing up with a parent who abuses alcohol. My latest video shares the shocking stats.

A quarter of the kids in any classroom. Any team. Any neighborhood. 💛 I spent my whole childhood believing my family's secret was ours alone — that I was the only one. I worked so hard to hide it. And the truth is, I was surrounded by other kids carrying the exact same weight, all of us convinced we were the only one in the room.

If that was you, too, and if it still feels like a secret you carry, I just want you to know: you were never the only one. We just couldn't see each other. Cheers to breaking the cycle.

1 month ago | [YT] | 2

Jody Lamb

Quick question for you: can you trace your family's dysfunction back through the generations? Your parents, your grandparents, maybe further?

I can. In my family, it's been alcoholism, generation after generation. My grandfather died from it when my mom was 11. She grew up in poverty with seven siblings. The hypervigilance and other dysfunctional patterns were baked into my mother when I came along. It was just normal.

That's the thing about dysfunction. It repeats because it's what we know, what feels familiar, what got hardwired into us before we had any say in the matter.

In my new video, I walk through the real reasons it keeps getting passed down and why I genuinely believe we're the generation that can stop it. We have resources nobody before us had. We have language for what we lived through. We have each other.

If you're the one in your family doing this work, from reading the books and going to therapy to asking the hard questions, keep going!

And the free guide I mention, The Blueprint You Never Got, is here: www.jodylamb.com/guide

2 months ago | [YT] | 2

Jody Lamb

Why does your family still get under your skin, even now, as a fully functioning adult with a job, a life, bills you pay on time?

Here's the part nobody told me: being triggered by your family isn't a sign that you haven't grown. It's evidence that you have.

You changed. The dynamic didn't. And that gap is where all the tension lives.

New video unpacks it. 👇

2 months ago | [YT] | 0

Jody Lamb

There's a kind of grief nobody talks about because the person you're grieving is still alive. You still talk. You still see them at holidays and other random times. They're still, technically, your parent. But the parent you needed them to be never existed. And at some point in your adult life, you realize you've been quietly mourning someone who was never actually there. If that sentence just hit you somewhere, my new video is for you. 💛

2 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 2

Jody Lamb

How many self-help books have you read that left you feeling worse about yourself?
I used to think the problem was me. I wasn't trying hard enough. I wasn't disciplined enough. I couldn't stick with the morning routine or the affirmations or the journaling prompts.

Turns out the problem was never me. Most self-help was written for people who grew up with a foundation. It assumes you already know how to rest, set boundaries, and ask for help and then asks you to optimize from there.

But what if you never had the foundation?

I made a video about the 4 reasons traditional self-help doesn't work for people who grew up in dysfunction and what actually does. Reason #4 is the one that made me throw a book across the room.

3 months ago | [YT] | 1