The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Unbroken: Life Outside The Lines by Adriene Caldwell

Episode Date: November 9, 2025

Unbroken: Life Outside The Lines by Adriene Caldwell https://www.amazon.com/Unbroken-Outside-Lines-Adriene-Caldwell-ebook/dp/B0FL7SY9VT Unbrokencaldwell.com Unbroken: Life Outside the Lines is a raw, unflinching memoir that exposes the devastating impact of abuse, mental illness, and systemic failure, while illuminating the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit. Adriene Caldwell bares her soul, recounting her journey through a childhood marked by relentless trauma—emotional, physical, and sexual—yet also moments of tender connection and hard-won hope. This is not just a story of survival but of transformation, as Adriene confronts her past with courage and dares to envision a future beyond the chaos. Every page is infused with brutal honesty and an undercurrent of fierce determination, pulling readers into a world where despair and hope coexist. For anyone who has ever felt broken, this memoir is a reminder: we are not defined by our pain; we are shaped by our ability to rise, Unbroken.

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Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it's not an endorsement or review of any kind. Too many amazing young lady on the show, we're talking about her story and her journey, and hopefully in learning about her story, the stories, this is what we always call stories, the owner's manual to life. We can find that sharing each other's stories can help each other.

Inspire us, know that we're not alone and give us blueprints to sometimes get out of some of the messes we get ourselves into or happen to us in the journey through life. She's the author of the latest book to come out. Unbroken, Life Outside the Lines, Adrian Caldwell, joins us on the show, and it came, I believe it's coming out February 10th, 2026, so you can pre-order it now and be the first one to get on your blog. lock and be sure to read it up there. Share it with your friends. Adrian Caldwell is the author of Unbroken, Life Outside of the Lines, a literary memoir about healing after trauma. Based in Houston, she speaks on resilience, identity and trauma informs storytelling, and she shares resources at her website. Please welcome. Adrian, welcome the show. Hi, Chris. Thank you so much for having me. It's a privilege to be here with your audience and with you.

And it's a privilege to have you, Adrian. Give us your dot-com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. So unbroken, cauldwell.com is my website. You can sign up for the reader magnet, so you can read prologue in Chapter 1 just by signing up. And I will not spam you. The only email you'll get from me is when the book is finally available for purchase, not just pre-order. So give us an overview of the book and your life there. Sure.

So I'm Adrian Caldwell, author of Unbroken, Life Outside the Lines. It's the story of my life from early childhood to early 20s. And during this time, I was either the witness to or the victim of the sexual assault of a young girl, the drowning death of another child, emotional and physical abuse, extreme poverty, mental illness, homelessness, horrifically abusive foster care, bulimia, drug and alcohol addiction, pedophilia, death, suicide, and incest. Wow. Yes.

It's quite a lot. And you put this in this book as your memoir, is that correct? That is correct. I cover each of these in detail in my book. book. Interesting life experience you've had. Give us kind of a tease out on some of this. I mean, how early this, how early this started your childhood? And what were some of the theater that surrounded this? Sure. Mental illness runs in my family. My grandfather was schizophrenic and sexually abusive with my mother, physically abusive with my grandmother and their four children.

But the trauma for me started at age five. I witnessed my five-year-old little girlfriend, Janie. She was sexually assaulted. It was very merely me. Had I not listened to my inner voice and ran away, literally ran away from the situation, it would have happened to me. So at five, that was really. my first experience where I

realized that little girls are not safe in this world. And then at seven, I saw a girl drowned. Oh, wow. So my trauma history started very young,

and the hits just came on, came on coming. Where did you, you mentioned you grew up poor. Where did you grow up? And what were the conditions that you grew up? You told us kind of about your parents, but to what are the conditions that you were growing up? Where were these parents that should have been taken care of you?

Sure. So my mother was schizophrenic, physically abusive. She had me at 19, so she wasn't able to have a vocation or a profession. She basically worked minimum wage jobs just as many hours as possible, along with her sister and her two brothers. My grandfather moved the family to Houston and then left. them for his mistress, whom he had on the side for 20 years. Wow. Yeah.

Everyone worked except for my grandmother, who stayed home to take care of me. And not many people really know about schizophrenia, the fact that it doesn't develop, like, other mental illnesses. It really doesn't start to come into play in late teens, early 20s. So my mother's schizophrenia was developing as I was developing. So I grew up and her schizophrenia just escalated. A lot of children when they experienced trauma, sometimes they're not able to identify it right away as trauma or sometimes it buries their experiences because it's overwhelming. And they don't have the capacity as children to try and navigate it or try.

and reconcile it. And so sometimes, yeah, it does come out in later life. Did you find that was going on with you? Or did you, were you experiencing it and remembering it in real time? My grandmother shielded me as much as she could. But unfortunately, she passed away when I was seven. So I lost my protector, my guardian, my shield against my mother. And you had asked about the poverty. And I wanted to touch on that. because my mother didn't have a vocation, she didn't, she worked minimum wage jobs. She wasn't able to live on her own. She could not provide for an independent household.

So we bounced between two sets of aunts and uncles. And then when my mother got tired of them telling her not to beat me, every time my mother would beat me, one of them, one of my aunts would, would try to intervene and have my uncle, the patriarch of the family after my grandfather left, have him try to intervene, intercede, and just really stress, you know, Valita, you cannot beat your daughter with the dog lees. You cannot beat her with, you know, hangers with shoes. You cannot do this to your daughter. And my mother got sick of it. So she went down to social services and asked what it would take to get a government subsidized apartment.

And they told her that because we were living with family, we were a lower priority than those people in homeless shelters. So she actually took my brother and me and we lived in a homeless shelter summer after fourth grade for me. And that was brutal. The shelter made us leave. And it was downtown Houston, literally with the skyscrapers. The shelter made us leave every day between 10 and three.

And so just brutal summer Houston heat. You could see the heat waves just emanating off the asphalt. And we just wandered downtown for hours with no place to go. But we did get a government subsidized apartment. I call it Haverstock Hell. It was Haverstock Hill apartments. We were literally the only white family in the entire complex. And when I say we were poor, I mean we were abjectly poor.

So food stamps don't cover paper goods. So we couldn't afford toilet paper. We used wash rags. We couldn't afford toothpaste. We used baking soap. We didn't have shampoo, conditioner, stuff like that. We used a dish detergent for our hair, our body, our laundry, which we did in the bathtub because we couldn't afford the laundromat.

My mother would sweep the carpet because she couldn't afford a vacuum. And we were in what is now known as a food desert. We had a convenience store, and there was like a small, many Marbleau. the street, but they didn't sell meat, not that we could have afforded it, even if they did, but we were truly, truly poor. Our furniture in our house, we had an egg crate that we put the 12-inch black-and-white TV on, no dining furniture, no living furniture. There was a mattress and my brother in my bedroom, just a mattress, and my mother actually slept on the floor until her. her brother and his wife came and brought a mattress.

So when I say poverty, I do mean true poverty. Let me ask you this when, did you have other siblings? I had one sibling. He was nine years younger than me. So you were the first in line one who kind of takes all the abuse. I kind of went through that as a child. The first child takes a lot of hell. And I would make sure that my mother did not get a hold of my brother.

I would physically shield him whenever she was trying to attack him. And that would just probably make her angrier, huh? She was already just gone, just raging. So I don't think she really cared who she hit. It was just a venting for her. just, she was angry. Was your father in the picture at any point in time? No.

No, wow. No. Okay, so classic single mom experience, that sort of thing, huh? All right, what was it, how did you survive during that time? Was there something you were able to hold on to? Was there a goal that you had in mind? What was it that gave you hope during that time? So I did very well in school, and school was my refuge.

It was my safe space. I knew how to behave. I knew the rules. I knew the social dynamics and how to interact and engage. And I was a voracious reader. The librarians knew me. For long books, it would take me two days. but most books, I would rent them one day, turn them back in the next day and just move through

as many books as I could. I would actually stay up at night and read by lamplight. There was a lamp post outside our apartment building. And on full moons, it was easier. I was lucky. I had the lamplight and the full moon to read by. But that was my escape. And that's where I, got affirmation and my mother actually told me in one of her lucid moments she said adrian education school getting a's is what's going to get you out of this life wow yes so that um that that that stuck with me that that if i could excel in school that it would take me out of the life that we were living and get away from your mom i think maybe you identified that as well my mother was you know schizophrenic physically abusive she actually found a man on a tv program in prison in

san francisco for raping and murdering women and my mother tried to force my brother and me to go to San Francisco. Wow. And my aunts and uncles, the two sets of aunts and uncles weren't very involved in our lives at that point. Yeah. But they were better than nothing. And San Francisco would have been, would have been us on our own. Oh, yeah.

So. Do they step in then or? No. How did you keep from going? My mother tried to force me the weekend before the last week of school. and I refused to get on the bus. And then that Friday, the last day of school, I was actually using the pay phone at the convenience store, trying to call one of my aunts just to beg for help, to beg for someone to come over and stop my mother. And my mother actually reached over my shoulder and disconnected the phone.

It was a pay phone. This was 92, I think. So she took me into her closet and proceeded to beat me with the wooden dial rod, the rod that you hang your clothes on in the closet. That time, after that beating, I did get on the bus. We did go to San Francisco, but I ran away. And I called my best friend's family. And her, my best friend's dad actually flew out to San Francisco and got me because I had run away from my mother. We were sleeping or she and my brother were sleeping on the benches at the bus station in San Francisco because the homeless shelter where she had planned on us staying.

They were closed for renovation. So my best friend's father flew out, got me. The next day, when I was gone, my mother spoke with police, and they realized there was something off with her. And so they actually took my brother into custody, and he got flown back to Houston by the end of that week. Wow. So we were reconciled. And, yeah. Isn't that great?

Someone came to your help that was kind of a complete stranger. and got the police involved and everything else. I mean, probably. Yes, but that was, yeah, that was how I actually came to be in children's protective services custody. That's the event that landed my brother and me there. And my mother did end up relinquishing her parental rights. The plan was for my brother and me to live.

live with my best friend's family, the Smith family. And I, coming from the background that I did, the poverty, the limited social skills, not knowing how to behave in like restaurants or just being comfortable, they, the Smith family was upper middle class, well to do. They had a guest room. And to me, that was like the craziest thing in the world because my entire life, I had shared a mattress with my mother or my grandmother and me in the middle. And then later in the apartment, it was my brother and me. I had never even slept on my own.

So the idea that there's this empty room, well, it had furniture in it, of course, but there's this empty room just in case somebody decides that they want to spend the night. Like, I, that was like going to a different world for me. And they ended up keeping my brother and Mrs. Smith got him a speech therapy. He was severely developmentally delayed at four years old. He had a vocabulary of 10 words. I am forever grateful to her for what she did. My brother now has a normal, wonderful life. Married has a daughter.

But they kicked me out after nine months. And I went to go live with my aunt and uncle. And I was just so messed up at the time. There were things that I just couldn't deal with. And I asked to be moved to a foster home. When everything was CPS first started before the Smith family took my brother and me in, you know, they had to do all the intake procedures. and background screens and all of that to be a foster family or to have my brother and me.

So I made the biggest mistake of my life and begged to be placed in a foster home, which I thought it was going to be like the first one, where it was a lovely family. They were nice. They were kind. Shared a bedroom. room and I ended up living with a woman who in my book I refer to as the witch from hell except with a B her her acronym is TBFH the witch from hell and that's her name in my book in Unbroken I refuse to give her a name she she doesn't deserve a name other than the witch

from hell. To witch from hell. And I like to compare it. So my schizophrenic, physically abusive mother, I've never had a nightmare about her, but TBFH, I've had nightmares about her where I wake up crying as recently as a year ago. So the damage that she did, and it wasn't sexual or physical, it was psychological, emotional, dehumanization. What I went through with her and I was there for three years was far worse than anything I had ever experienced with my schizophrenic abusive mother. And that's saying a lot.

TBFH was awful, absolutely awful. The foster girls were not allowed to sit on the furniture. We had to sit on the floor like animals. She had more than one. Oh, yes. This was an income thing for her. Yeah. So there were between four and six girls at a time, basically as many as she could possibly squeeze in,

as many as the state would allow her to have. Wow. And there was actually a perverse incentive. of the more damaged the foster child, the higher the pay rate, which to me is just asinine. It should be that as you help, it was a therapeutic, and I use quotes around therapeutic foster care. And they, yeah, the more damaged, the more money she got for each girl. And there was really no incentive to help girls overcome. their issues because that would mean a pay cut for her.

So she was horrible. I mean, we had separate food, separate dishes. The last foster girl to bathe, there was only one full bathroom in the house. The last foster girl to bathe had to clean the tub with bleach before the foster family would even use the shower. Wow. So it was completely de-heathe. humanizing. And there are a couple of quotes that have stuck with me. The first, it's actually

from a police report from the next door neighbor. This happened after I was gone, but I've seen the police report. I have it. And the neighbor says she treats those girls worse than prisoners. And the neighbor, Helen, knew for a fact because she had worked in the prison system for 30 years. And this wasn't, nobody talked to her. Nobody told her what was going on inside the house. That was just from what she had seen on the outside. And I had my first suicidal gesture while I was there. And when I showed TBFH, she actually looked at it and said,

you didn't even do it right. You're supposed to cut along the vein, not across. Jesus. Yeah. And another one, I was trying on swimsuits, and I came out to show her. And she looked at me and said, your thighs are fat. I'm surprised you haven't started throwing up to lose weight. Wow.

Yeah. And that started a battle with bulimia that lasts to this day. Oh, wow. I still struggle with it. Yeah, I can imagine. Now, let's, we want to leave this. much of this for people to consume in the book. Tell us how you build out of the story. How do you find your redemption and heal from your trauma? Absolutely. And that's ultimately what my book is

about. That's what Unbroken is about. I do recount everything, but it is a story of hope, of resilience, of survival. And I want to be an inspiration to anyone who is struggling. I want them to say, if she can go through all of that and come out the other side, then I can handle what I'm going through. And what got me away from TBFH, I actually received a congressional scholarship to do a one-year foreign exchange to Germany. And that was my salvation. That's where I learned how a family is meant to be. That's where I really, I blossomed. My host family was amazing.

They treated me like an adult. I was 16. They treated me like an adult because in Germany at 16, you are an adult. And they just, they were, they, now I never told them about my past. In fact, I had my unbroken translated into German, and I'm still in touch with my host family. I sent it to my host mom to read, and she wrote me back and said, it took me a few days just to digest what you wrote because she had no idea what I had been through. I just left everything in the past and focused on the opportunity of being there and here. healing and having a loving, supportive environment.

So that was my first opportunity to heal. And I've been on medication since I was 15 years old. When you go through significant traumas, repeated traumas, it does physical damage to your brain. So my brain doesn't make the chemicals that a normal brain does. So I've been on medication since I was 15. But I would say that writing unbroken has been truly cathartic for me. Now, don't get me wrong, writing it was hell, absolute hell. But because I had to face all of these issues, all of these traumas that I've been repressing for 25, 30 years.

Just shove them down. You know, don't think about it. It's in the past. It's over. Don't dwell on it. And writing about it, you know, each one forced me to really sit with the trauma and explore it and try to reframe it. Yeah, it was brutal. But I've come out the other side of it in a much better place.

And the life I have now, I am incredibly blessed. I am so grateful. In fact, if you had told the 15-year-old Adrian that this is the life that I would have now, the 15-year-old Adrian would have called you a liar. She would not have believed it was possible for me to be where I am today. Well, and this is the beauty of you sharing your stories and your journey. and all that stuff is basically, you know, you can help others that are out there

that are going, you know, what, you know, do I have a future, you know, and you're showing them that, yeah, you can survive, that it does get better. You're going to have to put in some work, but it can get better, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, you fight the good fight, you do the good thing, and you deal with your traumas.

How long is it taking you in maybe therapy to, get better? The therapeutic foster home, that was three years. I had a therapist come every other week, and I did do intensive outpatient therapy. I've been hospitalized twice, but I am actually going through TMS right now. Have you heard of it? Is it the jaw thing? No, it's they, it's transcranial magnetic stimulation. Oh. So they actually stimulate the brain to try to help the neural connections

regrow and to reconnect. So. Well, hopefully it's helpful and working for you. As we go out, give people your final thoughts and pitch out to order up your book and how they can find out more from you. I don't know if you have further books you're working on, but give us a snapshot of what your future holds. Thank you.

so unbroken life outside the lines uh it's available for pre-order i want there to be a book number two i'm not sure i'm ready to write it unfortunately the hits just kept on coming even even after my early 20s so i i do have material for a second book i don't know if i have the stamina maybe maybe i just need a break and then I'll start writing again because I definitely have the material for a second book. But Unbroken Caldwell, I actually post my psychiatric evaluations and when I was 20 years old, I asked for my Children's Protective Services case file. So I have posted documents to my website and you can read the therapist reports, you can read the monthly reports from the foster mother letters that my best friend kept from the year I was in Germany, letters that I

had written to him. They're all available. So, yeah, on Berk and Caldwell, pre-order the book, absolutely. And yeah, that's me. And anyone who wants to get in touch with me, I'm on Facebook and stun LinkedIn under Unbroken Called Well, I'm glad that you've survived, and I'm glad you're sharing your story with people. You don't, when you write books, you don't know how many people you end up helping. Sometimes you never meet them, you never hear from them. Sometimes you're lucky when you hear from them. They tell you how you impacted their lives or changed their lives or made a difference, or they, you know, they learned through your story that there was a blueprint for survivorship, and this is why we share our stories. The stories of the owner's manual to life,

as we like to say. you for coming on and being brave enough to share your story, Adriene. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Chris. It's been a privilege to be here. It's been a privilege to have you as well and to share your story and give people hope. Thanks for tuning in. Order for a book where refined books are sold. It's called Unbroken. Life Outside the Lines by Adrian Caldwell out February 10th, 2026. You can order it and pre-order it now. Thanks for monies for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com Fortress, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, 1

on the TikTokaddy, and all those crazy places in the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out. Great show.