The Power of Validation: The Cost of Self-Worth After Foster Care Ft. Ivory Bennett

After the Sand: You are not Behind, You are Rebuilding

After the Sand: You are not Behind, You are Rebuilding The feeling of being “behind” after foster care isn’t just in your head. For many of us, it’s the result of trying to build a life without ever being given a stable foundation to begin with. In this deeply reflective episode, Angie explores the persistent belief of being “behind” in adulthood after foster care. Through powerful storytelling and vivid imagery, she introduces the metaphor of the three little pigs to describe how many of us built our lives with straw, then sticks, doing the best we could with what we had, only to watch it collapse when life’s storms came. Angie shares how survival-based tools like hyper-independence, self-reliance, and intuition shaped her early attempts at stability, and why those materials, while necessary at the time, were never meant to sustain a lifelong foundation. She also names the deeper layer beneath it all: the unstable ground and unprocessed weight of grief, bitterness, and a hardened heart that made it even harder to stand. Through her personal story, including becoming a caregiver to her husband after a traumatic accident, Angie reflects on what it looks like when life forces you to stop, reassess, and rebuild from the ground up. She introduces a new way of understanding healing, not as catching up, but as rebuilding on something strong enough to finally withstand any storm. This episode is for anyone who feels like they are behind in life, tired of starting over, or questioning why things never seem to stick, and for those who want to understand what it truly takes to build a stable, grounded life after instability. 💭 What You’ll Hear in This Episode * Why the feeling of being “behind” after foster care is rooted in foundation, not failure * The three little pigs metaphor: straw, sticks, and brick as stages of survival and rebuilding * How hyper-independence and self-reliance can only take you so far * The impact of grief, bitterness, and a hardened heart on your ability to build stability * What it means to build on unstable ground vs. something that can actually stand firm * A personal story of collapse, caregiving, and being forced to rebuild * What “brick” looks like in real life: truth, structure, and spiritual alignment * Why healing isn’t about catching up, but about rebuilding differently 🪞 Reflection Question If the foundation you started with was unstable, what could your life become if you rebuilt it on something strong enough, steady enough, and true enough to finally hold you? 📚 Resources & Links Connect with Angie via email: Hello@angelaquijadabanks.com Follow on Instagram: @angelaquijadabanks Subscribe to The Cozy Glow Newsletter for behind-the-scenes reflections, healing, and faith-based encouragement Explore more : AngelaQuijadaBanks.com

The Power of Validation: The Cost of Self-Worth After Foster Care Ft. Ivory Bennett

The Power of Validation The Cost of Self-Worth After Foster Care Featuring Ivory Bennett, Lived Experience Partner   Angie is joined by her lived experience partner for this episode, Ivory Bennett, an advocate, educator, and writer who spent 17 years in foster care across multiple placements and school systems in Pennsylvania. Ivory holds a dual Bachelor of Arts in Africana Studies and English Literature with a minor in Theatre Arts (Performance) from the University of Pittsburgh, as well as a Master of Education Administration, and is an aspiring doctoral student. She is deeply committed to foster care and education equity, serving on multiple child welfare and education boards and organizations, and engaging in advocacy through writing and public speaking. She is also a newly adoptive mother, an identity that further grounds her personal and professional work. Her passion for holistic health and well-being is rooted in a trauma-informed lens, with a particular focus on epigenetic impact, informed in part by her lived experience with Type 1 (juvenile) diabetes. In this episode, Angie explores the hidden weight of being labeled “strong” and how validation rooted in survival can shape identity in ways that are both empowering and limiting. Through personal reflection and lived experience, she walks through her own journey of seeking validation through relationships, purpose, and recognition, and what it looked like when those foundations began to collapse. With insight from Ivory as a lived experience partner, this conversation also names a deeper and often unspoken grief: not just what was lost in foster care, but the experience of trying to build self-worth without stable foundations. Together, they highlight how systems often fail to nurture identity, and how spaces like Youth Voices Rising are creating room for that process to be reclaimed and redefined. This episode gently challenges the idea that strength alone is enough, and instead invites a shift toward identity that is not rooted in performance, survival, or external validation. This episode is for anyone who has ever been praised for their strength but felt unseen in their humanity, and for those seeking to understand how to support people whose identity was shaped in survival. 💭 What You’ll Hear in This Episode: • How being labeled “strong” can shape identity in both empowering and limiting ways • The hidden grief of building self-worth after foster care • Why survival behaviors cannot sustain long-term identity • The different ways validation shows up through relationships, purpose, and recognition • What happens when validation from the world becomes the foundation of identity • The difference between human validation and God’s validation • Why identity rooted in creation does not have to be earned, proven, or performed • How lived experience voices like Ivory’s are reshaping conversations around identity and belonging 🪞 Reflection Question: If the validation you receive from the world disappeared tomorrow… would you still know who you are? What labels are you still carrying that were formed in survival, and are they still serving who you are becoming? 📚 Resources & Links Connect with ivory via email: ivory@fosteringmediaconnections.org On Instagram: @ivorybennett [https://www.instagram.com/ivorybennett] Learn more about Youth Voices Rising at and explore lived experience writing and advocacy Connect with Angie via email: @angelaquijadabanks [https://www.instagram.com/angelaquijadabanks] Subscribe to The Cozy Glow Newsletter for behind-the-scenes, holistic wellness, and mamahood: https://angelas-newsletter-bc8a88.beehiiv.com/ [https://angelas-newsletter-bc8a88.beehiiv.com/]

The Fragility of Trust: Learning How to Build Healthy Relationships After Foster Care

The Fragility of Trust: Learning How to Build Healthy Relationships After Foster Care “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. 💭 What You’ll Hear in This Episode * 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 🪞 Reflection Question 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? 📚 Resources & Links 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 Ft. Kassandra Villarreal

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/ [https://angelas-newsletter-bc8a88.beehiiv.com/] Explore healing and identity resources at AngelaQuijadaBanks.com [http://www.AngelaQuijadaBanks.com]

The Unwritten Guidelines of Adulthood: What We Weren’t Taught Before Aging Out Ft. Lola Bunn

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. 💭 What You’ll Hear in This Episode: 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 🪞 Reflection Questions: 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? 🌿 Sponsor Spotlight 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. 📚 Resources & Links Connect with Angie via email: Hello@angelaquijadabanks.com [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/ [https://angelas-newsletter-bc8a88.beehiiv.com/] Explore healing and identity resources at AngelaQuijadaBanks.com