“Connectedness has the power to counterbalance adversity.” — Dr. Bruce Perry

The challenge of acquiring, maintaining, or even desiring healthy relationships after foster care is that many of us are neurobiologically inclined to accept unsafe or unhealthy connection simply because it feels familiar. And layered on top of that is the reality that relationships often feel fragile, like they are always one moment away from being lost.

In this deeply personal episode, Angie names a shared but often unspoken struggle among adults with foster care experience: the longing for connection alongside the fear of abandonment. Drawing from lived experience, trauma research, and faith, she explores how early relational ruptures shape the nervous system, distort our understanding of love, and make trust feel terrifying to extend.

Angie reflects on how inconsistent caregiving, repeated abandonment, and the absence of repair taught her body to stay alert. She traces how survival-based definitions of love, rooted in compliance and self-abandonment, followed her into adulthood and even shaped how she once perceived God.

This episode is for anyone who desires healthy relationships but feels overwhelmed by closeness, conflict, or vulnerability, and for communities seeking to understand how to create environments where trust can grow slowly and safely.

• Why trust can feel fragile after foster care
• How early relational trauma shapes the nervous system
• The difference between love and compliance, and connection and self-abandonment
• How distorted views of love impact adult relationships and faith
• What Scripture offers as a grounded definition of love
• How healing happens through safety, consistency, and healthy connection
• Why trust is not rebuilt through pressure, but through presence

Where have you learned to shrink, comply, or silence yourself in order to preserve connection, and what might change if love no longer required self-abandonment?

Connect with Angie via email: Hello@angelaquijadabanks.com Follow on Instagram: @angelaquijadabanks Subscribe to The Cozy Glow Newsletter for behind-the-scenes reflections and spiritual nourishment Explore healing and identity resources at AngelaQuijadaBanks.com

You Are Not Broken, You Were Just Unprotected Featuring Kassandra Villarreal, M.S., LPC Associate

Angie is joined by her sister in Christ, Kassandra Villarreal, a Counselor and LPC Associate with a Master of Science in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. With professional experience as a Youth Specialist at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services and a deep commitment to supporting children, parents, and families, Kassandra brings both clinical insight and lived understanding to this conversation. Beyond her work, she is a devoted wife, mother of two boys, and community builder who hosts weekly coffee gatherings and intentional spaces for women to connect and heal.

In this episode, Angie and Kassandra gently shift the lens from the belief that people with foster care experience are “broken” to a more truthful and compassionate understanding: many of the wounds carried into adulthood were formed in the absence of protection, consistency, and care. Angie also reflects on how internalizing the “broken” narrative impacts self-worth, relationships, and the future we believe we deserve, and how healing begins when blame is removed from the self and placed where it belongs.

This episode is for anyone who has ever questioned their worth, struggled with shame around survival behaviors, or wondered if healing means fixing themselves rather than understanding what they were never given.

💭 What You’ll Hear in This Episode: • How the “broken” narrative forms in foster care and other systems of harm • The difference between being broken and being unprotected • Why survival behaviors were adaptive, not defective • How internalized shame shapes adult relationships and self-expectations • What healing looks like when we center safety, protection, and truth

🪞 Reflection Question: What parts of yourself did you label as broken that were actually doing their best to protect you? And were you instead just unprotected?

📚 Resources & Links Connect with Angie via email: https://angelas-newsletter-bc8a88.beehiiv.com/ Explore healing and identity resources at AngelaQuijadaBanks.com

The Unwritten Guidelines of Adulthood: What We Weren’t Taught Before Aging Out Featuring Lola Bunn's poem: "I'm an adult"

Expectations are often what we’re met with after foster care, with very little guidance and sometimes even less grace. Because we should already know.

But turning eighteen doesn’t mean we were taught how to be successful, healthy adults. It simply means the responsibility shifted.

In this episode of Fostering AfterCare, Angie explores what it means to enter adulthood without a written roadmap and how the quiet expectations of the world, around relationships, finances, work, and self care, can feel overwhelming when the instruction was never given.

Through layered commentary, Angie names how what often gets labeled as personal failure is actually the collision of multiple realities. The personal, the relational, the communal, and the systemic. All happening at once. All placing expectations on individuals who were often trying to heal while also trying to survive.

This episode is also held in poetry. Angie is joined by her little sister, Lola Bunn, a lived experience expert, videographer, creative, and poet. Lola’s words give voice to the emotions many adults with foster care experience carry quietly. The overwhelm. The confusion. The grief. The longing. Her poetry offers a body level reflection on becoming, survival, and healing in adulthood.

Angie also shares a faith flashback from early adulthood, navigating housing instability, financial pressure, spiritual questioning, and the search for truth and belonging. Together, these stories invite listeners to reconsider what it means to learn late and to release the shame of being expected to know what was never taught.

This episode is for anyone who has ever felt unprepared for the expectations placed on them, and for those who walk alongside people with foster care experience, offering consistency, grace, and support.

Angie’s personal reflections on entering adulthood after foster care with expectations but no instruction

A layered exploration of the unwritten rules of adulthood, from finances and relationships to work, self-care, and managing a household

How missing guidance is often misread as personal failure instead of a collision of personal, relational, communal, and systemic realities

A faith flashback from early adulthood navigating housing instability, financial pressure, spiritual questioning, and searching for belonging

Lola Bunn’s poetry giving voice to the overwhelm, grief, longing, and becoming many adults with foster care experience carry quietly

A prayer and reflection for those learning late, releasing shame, and rebuilding adulthood with compassion and support

What expectations were placed on you without guidance or explanation?

Where do you still feel pressure to already know what you’re still learning?

How might compassion, for yourself or others, change the way you approach adulthood now?

This episode is sponsored by A Home Within, a nonprofit dedicated to the mental health of youth in foster care and adults formerly in care. A Home Within connects individuals to free, long-term, relationship-based therapy, recognizing that healing is a lifelong process.

Learn more at ahomewithin.org.

Connect with Angie via email: Hello@angelaquijadabanks.com

On Instagram: @angelaquijadabanks

Subscribe to The Cozy Glow Newsletter for behind-the-scenes, reflections and mamahood: https://angelas-newsletter-bc8a88.beehiiv.com/

Explore healing and identity resources at AngelaQuijadaBanks.com