What if the behaviors that make you great at helping others are also the ones that keep you stuck, burned out, and disconnected from yourself?

Trauma expert and award-winning professor Dr. Adam McCormick joins host Dave Roberts for a deeply practical conversation about adverse childhood experiences, emotional survival, and why so many helping professionals are drawn to this work long before they ever realize it.

Adam shares how growing up with an alcoholic father and becoming a parentified child shaped his path into social work, and why so many adults recreate familiar pain in relationships, work, and self-sabotage without meaning to. He breaks down the difference between ACEs and trauma, why trauma is the wound rather than the event, and how shame, control, and survival adaptations like fight, flight, freeze, overfunctioning, and people-pleasing follow us into adulthood.

You’ll discover:

• Why emotional and relational trauma often shapes professionals more than overt abuse
• How childhood survival skills get rewarded in social work, teaching, and other helping roles
• Why “just do self-care” fails when someone has disconnected from their authentic self to survive
• How countertransference can reveal unresolved childhood material in the room
• Why connection, co-regulation, and being truly seen matter more than perfect advice

Adam offers a powerful framework for understanding how meaning gets made, how trauma spreads when it goes unrecognized, and how healing begins when someone finally stays present without judgment.

This conversation is essential listening for anyone who works with trauma, supports young people, or is trying to break generational cycles in their own life.

About Adam

Adam McCormick, MSSW, PhD, is an award-winning professor, social worker, keynote speaker, and author whose work explores trauma, burnout, emotional development, helping professionals, foster care, resilience, masculinity, and the emotional lives of boys and men.

Over the course of his career, Adam has delivered nearly 300 keynote presentations, workshops, conference sessions, continuing education trainings, and professional development programs for social workers, counselors, healthcare professionals, educators, universities, and helping organizations across the United States.

In 2026, Adam received the Minnie Stevens Piper Professor Award, widely regarded as the highest honor for teaching excellence in the state of Texas. He is also a candidate for the 2028 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, one of the most prestigious teaching awards in higher education in the United States, and was the recipient of St. Edward's University's Distinguished Teaching Award in 2025.

Adam is the author of Healing the Helping Professional: The Unfinished Business of Childhood (NASW Press, 2026), a book exploring childhood trauma, emotional survival adaptations, burnout, authenticity, and the journey back to the self. He is also currently completing The Cost of Becoming a Boy: Trauma, Boyhood, and a Return to Self, a forthcoming book examining the emotional, developmental, and cultural experiences that shape boys and men. Dr. McCormick is the author of LGBTQ+ Youth in Foster Care (Routledge).

Known for blending trauma science, storytelling, vulnerability, humor, and practical application, Adam's presentations help audiences better understand both the people they serve and themselves.

Connect with Adam McCormick:

Follow Adam on LinkedIn for his social links and weekly trauma-focused newsletter.

His book is available through Amazon and NASW Press.

Music licensed through Soundstripe.

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