Did she reopen old wounds to heal them properly?
On August 14, the Filipino-American actor Liza Soberano appeared on the “Can I Come In?” podcast.
Hosted and directed by Sarah Bahbah, a Palestinian and Jordanian from Australia, the podcast is a “cinematic, emotionally immersive art form; a radical hybrid of podcast intimacy, French cinema aesthetics, and raw documentary vulnerability…” A long way of saying the guests are put in situations and locations they’re comfortable with, which are also gorgeously styled and curated.
The series has featured Nemah Hasan (known as Nemahsis,) a Palestinian-Canadian singer-songwriter;) Yesly Dimate, the TikTok star behind the viral “rubber band” dance, and ex-adult film star Mia Khalifa. The first video was in 2022, and the guests on the podcast generally talk about their most traumatic moments in an effort to articulate their suffering. Bahbah also sells the prints they shot from the series.
Soberano, whose real name is Hope Elizabeth, was the guest on their latest episode “Mind Your F**king Business!” where she detailed a horrific history of abuse growing up in the USA, both from her own family and when she and her brother were in foster homes.
These included her chaotic early caregiving, growing up in a separated household, her mother’s meth addiction, her father’s legal troubles and eventual incarceration, how she and her brother were kidnapped by her mother’s boyfriend, and repeated child abuse in foster care; plus needing to grow up fast and carrying adult responsibilities as a child.
These were facts in her history that were little known, if not wholly unvocalized, in her previous interviews or a part of her public image, especially since she’s a big advocate of women’s rights. In 2020, she even faced red-tagging from law enforcement when she partnered with human rights organization Gabriela and spoke at the International Day of the Girl Child.
Soberano’s father was a Pangasinan native, while her mother was from San Jose, California. Filipino audiences will remember her as a fresh-faced tween when she began appearing in local television commercials and print ads around 2011.
Then, she got roles in several TV series like the fantasy epic “Bagani” and romance entertainment like “Got to Believe.” After years of laboring in the local entertainment grind, Soberano returned to the USA in 2022 to pursue acting in Hollywood and landed a supporting role in the Diablo Cody-penned teen horror romance “Lisa Frankenstein” (2024) as Taffy, Lisa’s step-sister.
After the podcast episode, online bile ranged from the mildly curious to the accusatory. Why was Soberano speaking about her childhood abuse just now? Was any of this true or even verifiable? Was she exaggerating her experiences for the mileage? The timing made it look like a PR stunt, an attempt to regain lapsed attention, especially after she left her previous management to pursue a Hollywood dream.
According to studies by the American Psychological Association (APA,) Soberano’s behavior tracks closely with what’s called delayed trauma patterns and is linked to the phenomenon of repetition compulsion.
When you’re a child who undergoes traumatic events, avoidance and functional suppression (meaning keeping busy and the motto of “don’t think or even talk about it”) are core post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) processes.
PTSD postpones overt symptoms you don’t want to face or that make you feel uncomfortable. Some triggers later in life can “unlock” these stored memories that you’ve buried deep to cope in the moment. Her early adversity (mother’s meth addiction at home and later being uprooted from America to the Philippines to live with a father she only heard on the phone) all fit the profile of prolonged childhood trauma.
Delayed expression is real. Studies indicate that PTSD can meet full criteria only more than six months after the trauma, though some symptoms can present themselves way earlier. They also show that most “delayed PTSD” cases have only partial symptoms in the first year that later intensified. But, new stressors or a build-up like breakups, sickness, or professional upheavals can push these latent signs over the diagnostic line, leading to their retrieval.
Moments of clarity under duress can make these intrusive memories surface, even years later. Of course, there’s always social stigma, fear, and power dynamics that come into play. Fear of being blamed, losing work by being honest, and retaliation from powerful parties will obviously delay any disclosure. By bringing her memories into the open on the podcast, especially in such a public way, Soberano is engaging in an active re-enactment. She’ll move from silence and fragmentation to a semblance of acknowledgment and, hopefully, integration.
This is where Repetition Compulsion comes in. It’s a psychological phenomenon defined by the APA as “unconscious need to reenact early traumas in the attempt to overcome them.”
“I honestly keep things to myself a lot in order to either protect other people or not get misunderstood,” said Soberano on the podcast.
Psychologists and therapists point to it when people unconsciously repeat traumatic events or make decisions that sabotage their own interests. They can’t explain why later. By repeating them either literally or symbolically, they will definitely cause distress, but are diagnosed as attempts, usually unconscious, to master the trauma.
These repeats will override conscious self-interest until you get a handle on where they’re coming from and how to heal them.
In her book “Be Water, My Friend,” Shannon Lee (daughter of Bruce Lee) recounted her battle with her love for sweets and weight gain, eventually tracing it to a moment at her father’s funeral cortege when a well-meaning, unidentified relative took her aside and gave her a bunch of chocolates and candy to stop her from crying. She was four years old when Bruce died. She only discovered this repressed memory after a long course of therapy. Eating sweets had become her default coping mechanism well into her adult life. Comfort food that obviously harmed her health, manifesting as high blood sugar and pre-diabetic symptoms.
In Soberano’s case, her abuse in foster care and growing up in a high-stress environment where her mother was a meth addict who had a criminal boyfriend, tracks a high-severity childhood. It taught her to be someone who needed to grow up fast or suffer trouble, someone who must “cope now and survive.”
Later on, as a Philippine actor and celebrity, public scrutiny and industry pressures heightened her barriers to disclosure and therapy. Career demands and risk delayed her further speaking out. For survivors of trauma, only when the context feels safe can they offer disclosure more fully. And often only with prodding, at that. Psychologists call it a “delayed help-seeking trajectory.”
Repetition compulsion is a meaningful lens through which we can view Soberano’s recalling and sharing. Telling her story to reclaim it will resonate with anyone who chooses voluntarily to open a wound or re-enter the door of a scathing moment, but on their own terms.
Writer William Butler Yeats wrote: “Why should we honor those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.”
Her willingness now to publicly engage with her narrative reflects a form of repetition compulsion. She’s trying to hurdle something that could once reduce her into a sputtering, wailing mess. The abyss of one’s self is vast and unforgiving. You can easily be lost rather than overcome it. Let’s not humiliate those who attempt the free dive under their own power.
Excerpts from Liza Soberano’s “Mind Your F**king Business?” Interview
THE FAMILY DOG
We stayed with this lady named Melissa. And she was supposedly my mom’s like high school friend, best friend, but like that was really far from the truth apparently. I ended up staying with her for like eight months and I remember in the beginning it was like it was all right. I mean, I didn’t feel super happy or excited about the situation, but it was okay. And then eventually, she started treating me differently, as like a few weeks went on. She had three kids.
They would do like family movie nights once a week or something, and I was the only one that wasn’t allowed to participate in family movie nights because I was the family dog. So, they would literally call me the family dog, and I would have to sit in like a big cardboard box behind the sofa and I actually would just sit there like a dog.
The next instance was their actual family dog took a shit on the carpet, and she had called me to come clean it up. So I went over, and then I was about to go get like a brush or a toothbrush or something, and when I came back she was like, “What are you doing?” And I was like, “I’m cleaning it like you asked me to.” Obviously, like in my little girl voice. And she was like, “No, I want you to use your tongue.” And I thought she was kidding until she like grabbed the back of my head and forced me on the carpet.
I WAS CHOKING
Then after that like she started really abusing me not just psychologically. The first instance was I was eating spaghetti at the table and this is why I have a phobia of meatballs now. She forced me to eat a meatball and I choked. She didn’t do anything. She just watched me. And I think she did it on purpose to like make it look like it was an accident. But for some reason, her husband would always step in when it got really bad, but he wouldn’t do anything when it wasn’t that bad. So, he had saved me from choking.
SHE WOULD STUFF MY BROTHER IN THE FREEZER
Then it got really bad because at one point [Melissa] just stopped being like a human to me.
So, there was this one night that we were on our way to this fast food restaurant, and everyone was ordering food from like the drive-thru, and she didn’t ask me what I wanted. And so, I was like, “Can I please have chicken nuggets?” And she was like, “No, you can’t eat.” So, I started crying in the car, but I would I would always like silently cry. like I wouldn’t I wouldn’t try to make a scene because I was so scared of what would happen. And then when we got home, as we parked in the garage, everybody went inside. And then she stopped me at the door, the entrance to the house, and she was like, “You can’t come in.” And I was like, “Why not?” She was like, “You’ve been a bad girl, so you need to be punished.” And so she asked me to sleep in the garage that night. And obviously I was like really scared. It was cold. It was dark. There was no bed. So, I kept on banging on the garage door over and over, crying and screaming. And I was like, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please let me in.” And then she opened the door and she told me that if I didn’t shut up that she would stuff Justin, my little brother, in the freezer. And so I stayed quiet and I slept there that night. And then after that was a series of her not feeding me and then feeding me. So she would not feed me for days, and then all of a sudden feed me a lot of food.
MOM’S BOYFRIEND STOLE A MINI-VAN
After my mom and dad broke up, my mom started dating this guy named Michael. And this guy was really bad news. I don’t even know how long they dated for, but there was a moment where,
and I only know this because family told me, but I remember specific moments during that experience, he had stolen a minivan from off the street. Then he took me, my mom, and my little brother. And I was probably, yeah, I was two at the time. My brother was one.
So, I remember one morning I woke up and I just somehow knew how to unbuckle my car seat. And I remember I was making a run for it because at this point we were missing for a few days. I don’t know how long, but my family, my mom’s family had already filed for a missing person’s report. And so we were actually on the news and everything for kidnapping. Then there was this big fight… um… between my mom, me, and Michael.
Michael was getting really mad because, obviously, he was about to get caught. My mom had made an excuse because he was just screaming at me and screaming at me, and so she was like, “There’s some things we need to buy.” And we were parked at like a Walmart or something. And she left me and my brother in the van to go buy those things. And when she left me, the next thing I remember, he was screaming at me, telling to telling me to hit my brother in the head with my car seat to use it to bash his head. And he was telling me that over and over. And I was like, “Why? No, no, I’m not going to do that.” And he kept on telling me to do that over and over again. And I just remember being so confused coz I was like, “Why do you want me to hit my brother’s head? Like, I’m a I’m a child. I can’t even comprehend what’s going on. And my brother’s a baby. So, I was just I was so lost. I didn’t even know what to do. Like, right now, I don’t even know what a 2-year-old would even think of when you’re telling them this.
HE HIT ME WITH A GUN
Then the next thing I know it, Michael hits me in the head with the bottom of a gun that he was holding. He hits me in the head. And then next thing I know it, my mom’s running back to the car and she had bought batteries for a flashlight. And then a few minutes pass and we hear sirens and that’s when I realized my mom had called the cops. So, Michael had pushed my mom out of the car and I didn’t I don’t remember any of this, but apparently like he had grabbed on to her hair from the window and my mom’s like hair and scalp tore a bit because he started driving the car while holding on to her hair. Then he got arrested. My mom got arrested. And the next memory I have is just being in the back of a cop car with my little brother.
MEETING DAD IN MANILA
It was so uncomfortable because he demanded so much from me as a daughter that I feel was like unmerited because he wasn’t around. I remember the first meeting we had it was at the airport in the Philippines and you know it’s I’m in culture shock like it’s my first time out of America like flying ever and I’m in the Philippines and at the time Manila wasn’t what it is now it was not as developed and so a lot was going on a lot of fear a lot of uncertainty and then out of know where this guy comes up to me and kisses me on the cheek and it’s my father and I’m just I pushed him off of me and I’m disgusted and he was like, “Hi, Hopey.” Cuz my real name is Hope. I’m like, “Who are you?” He’s like, “It’s Daddy.” And I was like, “John, nice to meet you.” because he it’s like he expected that we would act like we knew each other all this time when we’ve only had like conversations on the phone that would last like three minutes. So yeah, he just he didn’t know how to take it step by step and it just made me very uncomfortable.
