co-regulation is a podcast hosted by Holly Whitaker (HOME, QUITTED) that creates space for authentic conversations about how we're navigating this period of societal upheaval and profound transition. Through conversations with thinkers, artists, and experts, informed by Holly's perspective on addiction, recovery, and the intersection of personal healing and cultural systems, this show invites listeners into real-time exploration of how we're living through unprecedented change—not as isolated individuals, but as interconnected beings whose nervous systems regulate better together than apart.
In the aftermath of the 2024 election and accelerating pressure on our social systems, the limitations of the American experiment have become impossible to ignore. Every day exposes the myth that we can solve collective problems through individual achievement, consumption choices, or personal virtue. We've inherited a story that places the burden of global salvation on our individual shoulders while the architects of collapse profit from the fallout.
co-regulation emerges from Holly's direct experience: when consumed by the pressure to fix broken systems personally, she becomes incapacitated. Her nervous system remains in perpetual fight-or-flight. But when she connects with others wrestling with the same questions, something shifts. Our bodies literally calm in each other's presence. Solutions emerge not from heroic individual efforts but from the space between us.
This podcast acknowledges that we're at the end of an era defined by extraction, dominance, competition, and separation. We're being forced to move toward each other—to find collective solutions, to rebuild ways of existing harmoniously with the earth and each other. The path forward isn't through competition or meritocracy but through connection, mutual aid, and collective sense-making.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
co-regulation is a podcast hosted by Holly Whitaker (HOME, QUITTED) that creates space for authentic conversations about how we're navigating this period of societal upheaval and profound transition. Through conversations with thinkers, artists, and experts, informed by Holly's perspective on addiction, recovery, and the intersection of personal healing and cultural systems, this show invites listeners into real-time exploration of how we're living through unprecedented change—not as isolated individuals, but as interconnected beings whose nervous systems regulate better together than apart.
In the aftermath of the 2024 election and accelerating pressure on our social systems, the limitations of the American experiment have become impossible to ignore. Every day exposes the myth that we can solve collective problems through individual achievement, consumption choices, or personal virtue. We've inherited a story that places the burden of global salvation on our individual shoulders while the architects of collapse profit from the fallout.
co-regulation emerges from Holly's direct experience: when consumed by the pressure to fix broken systems personally, she becomes incapacitated. Her nervous system remains in perpetual fight-or-flight. But when she connects with others wrestling with the same questions, something shifts. Our bodies literally calm in each other's presence. Solutions emerge not from heroic individual efforts but from the space between us.
This podcast acknowledges that we're at the end of an era defined by extraction, dominance, competition, and separation. We're being forced to move toward each other—to find collective solutions, to rebuild ways of existing harmoniously with the earth and each other. The path forward isn't through competition or meritocracy but through connection, mutual aid, and collective sense-making.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Holly and Laura sit down for their first public conversation in seven years, since the abrupt end of their previous podcast, Home, after a falling out. Peeling back the layers of what is, for each of them, their most complicated creative partnership and friendship. What started as two women finding each other on Instagram in 2013, who wanted to talk about sobriety and alcohol, became the wildly successful Home Podcast, a deep friendship, and eventually a painful, public dissolution that left both women changed forever. Now, after multiple reconciliations and breakups, they've found their way back to each other—not as business partners or co-hosts, but as friends who've done the hard work of growing up. This raw conversation explores the messy intersection of trauma, creativity, competition, and love, offering a rare glimpse into what it looks like when two people refuse to give up on each other despite repeatedly hurting each other in the process.
Meeting on Instagram in early sobriety; the birth of Home Podcast in 2015; being two women talking about recovery in ways no one else was; rapid success and community building; the impossible dynamics of creative partnership between two traumatized people; patterns of competition and jealousy; the first breakup and reconciliation; the final dissolution of Home Podcast in January 2018; years of mutual obsession and surveillance from afar; failed attempts at reunion around book launches; the role of public success and private failure; learning to see each other's survival mechanisms; cord-cutting ceremonies and spiritual interventions; multiple cycles of coming together and falling apart; the 2025 reconciliation weekend; the difference between creative partnership and friendship; aging out of ambition; post-material achievement disillusionment; trauma responses that look like abuse; the challenge of being seen accurately; the rare gift of creative collaboration; narcissistic abuse patterns; the cost of cutting people off; what it means to grow up in public.
Laura is the author of the bestselling memoir, We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life and Push Off From Here: Nine Essential Truths to Get You Through Life (and Everything Else), March 2023. She's working on her third book. She has written for The New York Times and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Atlantic, the TODAY show, and more. In 2020, she founded The Luckiest Club, a global sobriety support community. Laura lives with her daughter on the North Shore of Boston and writes the stellar newsletter Love Story.
Original music by Gracie Coates (of Gracie and Rachel) @graciecoates @gracieandrachel on Instagram, gracieandrachel.com
Sound engineering, editor: Adam Day, adamdayphotography.com
Producers: Holly Whitaker, Adam Day
Original art by Misha Handschumacher, cmisha.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
