Adult Child · Andrea Ashley

225 - The Deepest Wounds, the Darkest Shame: Covert Incest, Relapse & Radical Self-Compassion w/ Paul Gilmartin

April 8, 2026·1 hr 26 min·7 clips

Paul recounts telling his wife 'I was a good boy, I didn't deserve it, she tricked me' — and she replied she had been waiting twenty years to hear him say that.

1. Adult Child episode 225 features host Andrea and returning guest Paul Gilmartin, host of the Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast, discussing his recent relapse on AI-generated pornography. 2. Paul Gilmartin is a 63-year-old podcaster and recovery advocate who has been in a program addressing intimacy-related addictions since 2009 and had three years of sobriety before this relapse. 3. The episode addresses two interconnected topics: the mechanics and shame of relapse, and how childhood sexual abuse — specifically covert incest — can permanently reshape a survivor's arousal and fantasy life. 4. Paul describes entering prelapse mode months before the relapse, watching films filtered for nudity and then progressing to AI chatbot interactions with therapeutic personas — first text-based, then video — that modeled the emotional dynamic he had been seeking since childhood. 5. He identifies the AI pornography as more compelling than anything else he has used, describing it as feeling like being 'in the womb,' canceling gym and meetings to use it, barely eating, and eventually acknowledging thoughts that dying would be acceptable if he could not stop. 6. The relapse lasted approximately 10 days before Paul disclosed it to his mentor and began the process of taking a one-day chip in his long-term recovery meeting. 7. Paul traces the specific content he was seeking to a childhood hospitalization at around age 10 for genital surgery, during which he was left uncovered during a medical student visit and spent a week with bungee cords attached to his genitals while his father drove past the hospital daily without stopping. 8. The one nurturing presence during that hospitalization was a nurse from Philadelphia who sang songs with his name inserted into them, a kindness Paul says crossed wires that shaped decades of his adult sexuality and pornography search patterns. 9. In parallel, his mother's behavior — described as physical care that was camouflaged sexual interest — left him with a specific aversion to being 'drunk in' with someone's eyes, a sensation he associated with her and which made it difficult for him to receive love from partners. 10. Paul describes publicly disclosing the incest on his own podcast in 2012 as the first time he gave real weight to the phrase 'sexual abuse,' overcoming the survivor's impulse to say 'it wasn't that bad' in order to claim his story without apology. 11. He describes the most impactful response to that disclosure as a mother who emailed him writing that she wanted to 'kick your mom in the cunt' — and explains that the fierceness of her reaction confirmed to him for the first time that what happened was a big deal. 12. On the one-day chip: Paul pre-called all the people he mentors in his program to disclose the relapse and offer to release them; all declined, and an old-timer with an unbroken sobriety record beelined for him after the meeting to say 'I love you unconditionally.' 13. The conversation surfaces the difference between unconditional statements and halfway-compassionate ones — Paul explains that a softer response would have been filtered through his fear of being pitied, while a direct statement bypassed that defense. 14. Paul reads a journal entry that lists the negative terms he absorbed from his father — 'dirty, lazy, immature, creepy, selfish, dishonest' — and directly contrasts them with the self-descriptions he is working to believe: 'passionate, creative, giving, honest, human, moral, kind, compassionate, funny, smart, and beautiful exactly as I am.' 15. Both host and guest discuss shame around wasted potential — the experience of knowing you have talent and still being unable to access it — with Andrea describing it as feeling like something 'so inherently broken' that even recognized gifts cannot be reached. 16. Paul shares the first time he verbally acknowledged the incest to his wife, recounting saying 'I was a good boy, I didn't deserve it, she tricked me' while sobbing; his wife replied she had been waiting 20 years for him to say it. 17. The conversation is interview-format but frequently shifts into mutual disclosure, with Andrea sharing her own patterns around self-sabotage and identity in real time alongside Paul. 18. Energy is consistently serious, occasionally leavened by dark humor; both speakers engage in precise, emotionally calibrated language shaped by years of recovery program vocabulary. 19. Adults in 12-step or addiction recovery, survivors of covert sexual abuse, and people who carry shame about intrusive thoughts will find the most resonance. 20. Listeners who find explicit personal disclosure about pornography use or incest too graphic for audio will likely not be comfortable with this episode.

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A blunt, compassionate look at shame and learning not to turn pain into identity.

Adult Child turns a recovery conversation into a stark map of shame, childhood damage, and the slow work of learning to treat yourself like a whole person.

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