Ep.4 The Happy Human

Taryn Thompson learned to make a sandwich when she was three years old, in case her mom passed out and wasn't there to feed her. That's where her story starts.What follows is thirty-something years of figuring out how to love yourself when the people who were supposed to show you how... couldn't. Taryn grew up with a mother deep in addiction and a father who was emotionally absent, and she spent most of her adult life not knowing how to be okay. Panic attacks in high school. A baby at 19. Weeks without electricity. A broken engagement that became her first real rock bottom. And a diagnosis of OCD and CPTSD that finally gave language to what she'd been living with all along.But this episode isn't about surviving. It's about what Taryn built on the other side of all of it. She runs a healing practice called The Happy Human. She's building a local community space called the Regulation Room, where anyone who's overwhelmed can walk in and just breathe.She got engaged in February 2026 to someone who waited six years for her. And she'll tell you herself - she still pulls over on the side of the road sometimes because a panic attack took the feeling out of her legs. She's still healing. She just knows now that healing doesn't mean it stops. It means you know how to stay.Taryn's anchor moment isn't one thing. It's a slow accumulation of choosing herself, over and over, until one day she named her business "The Happy Human" and realized: that's actually true.Trigger warnings: childhood neglect, parental substance abuse, abandonment, poverty, grief and loss, OCD, CPTSD, panic disorder, alcohol use, and family estrangement.