18 Sept 2026
Episode 41: Couple's Therapy/Rivers and Roads/ Days are Gone
Episode 41 of What’s Your Damage? brings a first for the show: AJ and AJ welcome their editor, KT, as their very first guest. Together, the three of them unpack abandonment — being left, leaving others, and the ways we sometimes abandon ourselves.
KT kicks things off by tracing the roots of her codependency back to high school, when a complicated relationship with a close friend and make-out buddy ended in a painful rupture. After a mental health crisis involving her friend, KT found herself suddenly ostracized not only by that person, but by their family as well. It became her first real rock-bottom moment and helped establish a pattern of trying to rescue the people she loved.
That pattern showed up again in a seven-and-a-half-year relationship. KT rushed into building a life with her partner — moving in quickly, getting pets together, and becoming deeply invested in helping him through difficult periods. As the relationship became increasingly strained and alcohol became a major problem, KT found some escape through another relationship within their polyamorous dynamic.
But after the original relationship ended, the person who had become her refuge fell in love with someone else and moved away, triggering KT’s deepest fear of abandonment. Strangely, it also became the beginning of something new. With distance, time, and an unexpected assist from the show Couples Therapy, KT began learning how to stop rescuing everyone around her and start healing herself.
J approaches abandonment from a different direction: the grief of realizing that relationships can change even when nobody has done anything wrong. After moving to a new city with her husband, she found herself listening again and again to The Head and the Heart’s “Rivers and Roads,” a song about distance from the people who once felt closest to you.
When her parents also moved away, the hometown “hub” she had always expected to return to disappeared. During one visit, she and her husband realized that none of the doors they had imagined opening for them actually did — there were no invitations to stay, no plans being made, and no easy return to the life they had left behind. After a year of trying to maintain those relationships exactly as they had been, J finally let herself grieve on the drive home and accept that they needed to build roots where they were now.
A closes things out by talking about a different kind of abandonment: abandoning herself.
During her years in New York, she allowed the culture surrounding UCB to shake her sense of who she was. She tried to become the kind of performer and person she believed the theater wanted her to be, pouring her time, talent, energy, and identity into an institution she hoped would validate her.
Then she was cut.
Instead of fighting her way back in, she made the decision never to return. Around that time, HAIM’s album Days Are Gone — and especially its title track — became part of the process of letting go. The theater she had given so much to was gone from her life, but in leaving it behind, she began finding herself again.
This week, it’s abandonment from every direction: the people who leave us, the lives we outgrow, the relationships we can’t rescue, and the moment we realize that sometimes the person we most need to stop abandoning is ourselves.
