You are not who your hardest season says you are. But somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up a label we didn’t ask for: damaged. Maybe it came from a relationship that fell apart, a love that was taken too soon, or a family that was never going to look the way you hoped. Maybe it came from the words of someone who should have known better, a message at church, or simply from years of being the only one in the room carrying what you carry. However it arrived, this conversation is about why that label is wrong.
Robert Beeson, Founder and CEO of Solo Parent, sits down with Elizabeth Cole, single parent and co-host, and Amber Fuller, a counselor with a Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy and single parent herself, to talk honestly about why so many solo parents carry a deep, private belief that they are somehow less than – less worthy of love, less capable of healthy connection, less able to rise above the things that have happened to them. And this isn’t just a conversation about dating or remarriage. As Elizabeth makes clear early on, it’s about every relationship in your life: your friendships, your relationship with your kids, your relationship with yourself.
Most solo parents can point to at least one moment when they started to wonder if the life they were living had disqualified them from something better. The wondering quietly turns into believing. The believing quietly turns into identity.
You replay a voice that told you, in some way, that you weren’t enough. You carry shame from things that happened to you, things that were never your fault. You grieve the life you expected to have, the partnership you lost or never got, the version of yourself you expected to become. You wonder if loving someone again somehow diminishes what you had before, or if the love you wanted was ever really available to you. You’ve built walls because letting people in has cost you before, and you’re not sure the risk is worth it anymore.
The deeper question under all of it is the one that tends to stay buried: after everything I’ve been through, do I still have something worth offering – and is it too late for any of this to get better?
Key Insights from This Episode
- The “damaged goods” feeling has company – a lot of it.
- The broken mirror wasn’t you.
- Healing doesn’t happen in isolation.
The “Damaged Goods” Feeling Has Company – a Lot of It
One of the most disorienting things about the feeling of being damaged is how convinced we are that we’re the only one who has it. Everyone else seems to show up to friendships, to parenting, to dating with a kind of confidence that feels impossible from where you’re standing. You look around and wonder what is wrong with you that you can’t seem to get there.
What Robert makes clear in this episode is that this feeling is not the exception. It is the norm. “We are all carrying these backpacks of ‘I’m damaged goods’ in one shape or another,” he says, and then goes further: the truth is we have been affected. We have been damaged in some ways. That’s not a character flaw. That’s being human.
Amber traces it back to some of her earliest memories, growing up poor in rural Minnesota in a conservative household where she couldn’t participate in what other kids were doing. At eight years old, she tried to bluff her way into a conversation with classmates about something her home life had never introduced her to – and it didn’t work. The shame she felt in that moment planted a root that went deep. “We start to believe we’re damaged because we’re not like everyone else,” she reflects. Then something harder happens, and it confirms the belief. Then something else happens, and it confirms it again.
Robert adds his own version. Coming out of a difficult divorce, he spent years with a mental tape on repeat: you’re selfish, you’re manipulative, you’re not capable of a healthy relationship. Even a widowed solo parent he once heard from carried the weight of it differently. His wasn’t a story of rejection or failure – it was grief. Loving someone new felt like a betrayal of the love he had lost, and that guilt was enough to make him feel like he had nothing whole left to offer.
The point is not that everyone’s story is identical. The point is that virtually every single parent is carrying some version of this. And when you hear that clearly, when you realize the feeling isn’t a signal that something uniquely wrong happened to you but that something very human happened to you, it takes a little of the venom out. Don’t let feeling like damaged goods make you feel even more like damaged goods, Robert says. You are not alone in this.
The Broken Mirror Wasn’t You
When we look in the mirror and see something broken, it might be because the mirror itself is broken, not us. That’s the framework Amber puts forward, and it reframes everything.
The voices that shaped what we believe about ourselves came from somewhere. A parent in the middle of their own hard journey. A religious community that conflated self-worth with pride and humility with self-erasure. Words spoken over you in a hard season that became the loudest tape in your head – whether they came from a spouse, a parent, a partner who left, or a culture that told you your situation made you less than. A mother-in-law who called eight days after Amber discovered her husband’s infidelity to ask if she was still putting on lipstick in the morning, as if she were somehow responsible for the state of her own marriage.
What this does in the brain has a name. The reticular activating system, as Elizabeth explains it, is the part of your neurology that goes looking for evidence to confirm what you already believe. Once you’ve accepted the idea that you are damaged, your brain will quietly and constantly collect proof. You aren’t imagining it. It is actually happening. And that’s why willpower alone doesn’t fix it.
Growing up in a closed system – whether a closed family system or a closed spiritual community – there is often no room for a different narrative, no other mirror to reflect something truer back to you. Amber makes this point from her own experience. The antidote to shame, she says, is not perfection. She tried that and it didn’t work. The antidote is connection: connection to your humanity, connection to yourself, and connection to a greater truth about who you actually are.
That means the mirrors have to change. And that’s a slow process, but it is a real one.
Healing Doesn’t Happen in Isolation
You cannot think your way out of this alone. That’s the answer all three voices keep coming back to when the conversation turns from why we feel this way to what we actually do about it.
The temptation is to try to muscle through it internally. A life coach once told Elizabeth to treat negative thoughts like a tennis match – knock the bad ones away as fast as they come in. It didn’t work, because what she was dealing with wasn’t a thought problem. It was a shame issue, and shame is not resolved by better internal dialogue. It is resolved by showing up with other people and letting them see you.
Self-compassion, she says, looks like allowing yourself to show up with other people and accepting love from them in small ways. Not in a dramatic, all-at-once, life-altering moment. In small ways. A conversation. A group. A single person who tells you the truth about yourself and means it.
For Robert, that happened in a men’s group called Samson Society, and in Solo Parent groups where people show up not to fix themselves or fix anyone else, but simply to unload and hear other people say me too. That phrase does something. You stop being the only one. And once you stop being the only one, the story starts to soften.
The same pattern shows up in Amber’s own family history. Her father sat in truth-telling circles as part of his recovery from addiction, and that is where hope began for him, and for their whole family. One day at a time. Not arrived. Not done. Just moving.
The practical steps aren’t complicated, as Elizabeth lays them out: find environments where you are accepted as you are. For some people, that is a church community. For others, it is a nonprofit, a service opportunity, a small group. Find where you can tell the truth. And then, when people love you well in response, practice accepting it. That part is harder than it sounds. When someone says something kind and your instinct is to deflect, push back, or change the subject, try to stay. That is the work.
You Are Not Beyond the Reach of Something Better
If you’ve been carrying this for a long time, the idea that things could actually be different might feel more like a platitude than a promise. And that’s a fair place to be. Nobody gets to skip the work just because they decide they want to feel better.
The truth underneath all of it, though, is this: the voice that says you are damaged beyond repair is probably not accurate. Not because your story isn’t hard. Not because what happened to you wasn’t real. But because being human means being affected by things, and being affected by things is not the same as being disqualified from them.
You don’t have to start by believing you’re okay. You can start by deciding that maybe the voice is wrong. That’s enough. One small step toward a different environment, one group, one honest conversation, one moment where someone says me too and you let it land.
You are worth the effort of getting into the kind of company that tells you the truth about yourself. And the truth, when the right mirrors are in place, is better than the one you’ve been told.
