
Insights from recent episode analysis
Audience Interest
Podcast Focus
Publishing Consistency
Platform Reach
Insights are generated by CastFox AI using publicly available data, episode content, and proprietary models.
Most discussed topics
Brands & references
Total monthly reach
Estimated from 9 chart positions in 9 markets.
By chart position
- 🇦🇺AU · Mental Health#34100K to 300K
- 🇨🇦CA · Mental Health#6430K to 100K
- 🇺🇸US · Mental Health#1195K to 30K
- 🇦🇪AE · Mental Health#2030K to 100K
- 🇨🇿CZ · Mental Health#543K to 10K
- Per-Episode Audience
Est. listeners per new episode within ~30 days
52K to 168K🎙 Daily cadence·16 episodes·Last published 6d ago - Monthly Reach
Unique listeners across all episodes (30 days)
173K to 559K🇦🇺54%🇨🇦18%🇦🇪18%+6 more - Active Followers
Loyal subscribers who consistently listen
95K to 307K
Market Insights
Platform Distribution
Reach across major podcast platforms, updated hourly
Total Followers
—
Total Plays
—
Total Reviews
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* Data sourced directly from platform APIs and aggregated hourly across all major podcast directories.
On the show
From 12 epsHost
Recent guests
Recent episodes
Sold At 4 For Drug Money by her Mother
May 7, 2026
1h 13m 33s
Sentenced to Life at Just 13 Years Old
Apr 30, 2026
1h 24m 46s
Human Trafficking Survivor Speaks Out
Apr 23, 2026
1h 11m 52s
“I Was A Jihadi Spy”
Apr 16, 2026
1h 21m 54s
"I Jumped From A Burning Plane…"
Apr 9, 2026
1h 26m 22s
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| Date | Episode | Topics | Guests | Brands | Places | Keywords | Sponsor | Length | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5/7/26 | ![]() Sold At 4 For Drug Money by her Mother✨ | abuseattachment trauma+4 | Jazmine | — | — | childhood abuseattachment trauma+5 | — | 1h 13m 33s | |
| 4/30/26 | ![]() Sentenced to Life at Just 13 Years Old✨ | juvenile justicelife sentences+4 | Ian | justice system | societyBlack and Brown youth | life sentencejuvenile+7 | — | 1h 24m 46s | |
| 4/23/26 | ![]() Human Trafficking Survivor Speaks Out✨ | human traffickingwar+4 | Lurata | — | — | human traffickingwar+5 | — | 1h 11m 52s | |
| 4/16/26 | ![]() “I Was A Jihadi Spy”✨ | extremismradicalization+4 | Mubin Sheikh | — | — | terrorismextremist ideology+4 | — | 1h 21m 54s | |
| 4/9/26 | ![]() "I Jumped From A Burning Plane…"✨ | survivaltrauma+3 | Jamie | — | — | plane crashsurvival story+5 | — | 1h 26m 22s | |
| 4/1/26 | ![]() What Started On Tinder Ended In Terror✨ | intimate partner violencecoercive relationships+4 | Annesa | — | — | Tinderlove bombing+8 | — | 1h 20m 21s | |
| 3/26/26 | ![]() Epstein’s Survivor: Jena-Lisa Jones Reveals All✨ | abusesurvivorship+4 | Jena-Lisa Jones | — | — | abusesurvivor+5 | — | 1h 26m 17s | |
| 3/19/26 | ![]() She Was 15: A Woman’s Reality of Forced Child Marriage✨ | forced marriagechild marriage+4 | Rubie | — | — | forced marriagechild marriage+5 | — | 1h 15m 47s | |
| 3/12/26 | ![]() Joe DiMeo on Living After 80% Burns and the World’s First Face & Double Hand Transplant✨ | identityphysical recovery+4 | Joe DiMeo | — | — | burn survivorface transplant+5 | — | 1h 08m 26s | |
| 3/5/26 | ![]() Boys Can Be Victims Too: The Silence Around Male Sexual Abuse✨ | male sexual abusevictimhood+4 | Seth | — | — | male victimssexual abuse+4 | — | 1h 17m 51s | |
Want analysis for the episodes below?Free for Pro Submit a request, we'll have your selected episodes analyzed within an hour. Free, at no cost to you, for Pro users. | |||||||||
| 2/26/26 | ![]() When Anger Explodes: The Hidden Psychology Behind Losing Control✨ | angeremotional regulation+4 | Jonathan Mendez | — | — | angeremotional regulation+5 | — | 1h 10m 11s | |
| 2/19/26 | ![]() From Prison to MMA Legend: The Making of Frank Shamrock✨ | identityconditioning+5 | Frank Shamrock | — | — | Frank ShamrockMMA+6 | — | 1h 26m 44s | |
| 2/12/26 | ![]() The Sin Of Being a Girl: Surviving Honor-Based Violence | What if your biggest sin is being born a girl? What happens when violence is justified as tradition and silence is enforced as honor? In this episode of The Shadow Sessions, Hiba Balfaqih speaks with Nina Aouilk, a survivor of honor‑based violence who grew up in a system where abuse was normalized, and truth was punished. This conversation examines cultural gaslighting, generational silence, and how gender‑based control shapes trauma and identity. Rather than sensationalizing harm, this episode focuses on the psychological and systemic realities that allow violence to hide behind words like culture and family. Today, Nina is a global speaker, coach, and advocate working to expose these structures and support survivor healing. This episode is about truth, resistance, and what becomes possible when silence is broken. | 1h 12m 13s | ||||||
| 2/5/26 | ![]() After the Collapse: Bankruptcy, Identity Loss and Building Again | Not all shadows look like darkness. Some look like ambition. Some look like discipline, perseverance, and the pressure to hold everything together while quietly falling apart. In this episode of The Shadow Sessions, Hiba Balfaqih speaks with Amber Duncan, who went from success as it’s culturally defined to total collapse. She filed for bankruptcy. She lost the money, the image, and the version of achievement the world told her to chase. What followed wasn’t just a business rebuild. It was an identity reckoning. This conversation explores what collapse strips away—and what it reveals. How ambition can become armor. How success can disconnect us from ourselves. And how rebuilding after loss requires more than strategy; it requires confronting the patterns that led there in the first place. Amber shares what bankruptcy taught her about worth, control, and resilience—and how rebuilding a multimillion‑dollar company became secondary to reclaiming trust in herself. Today, she helps others navigate financial collapse, career reinvention, and recovery through mentorship, financial education, and honest conversations about failure and survival. This episode isn’t loud or performative. It’s about the quiet shadow of perseverance—and how sometimes, the deepest healing happens after everything you worked for falls apart. | 1h 07m 47s | ||||||
| 1/29/26 | ![]() Hacker & Identity James Linton | We’re taught to imagine hackers as men in hoodies—isolated, brilliant, dangerous. But what if the real story isn’t about code or breaches at all? What if it’s about psychology? In this episode of The Shadow Sessions, Hiba Balfaqih speaks with a man who infiltrated some of the most powerful systems in the world—impersonating CEOs, deceiving institutions, and accessing spaces he was never meant to enter. He had power, and he walked away before anyone could stop him. But this conversation isn’t about technical exploits or data breaches. It’s about identity. It’s about the psychology of control, the shadow of the trickster, and what happens when someone becomes whoever the world needs them to be in order to feel safe, admired, or untouchable. Advertised as a threat, treated as a weapon, shaped by fear and projection—until the performance cracks and the truth emerges. This episode explores how hacking can become a mirror for deeper human patterns: the need for mastery, the seduction of invisibility, and the cost of living behind masks. It asks uncomfortable questions about power, protection, deception, and the moment when control stops being safety and starts becoming self‑erasure. This is an episode for anyone interested in psychology, identity formation, shadow integration, cybercrime as a behavioral phenomenon, and what happens when the role you play becomes the only place you know how to exist. | 1h 12m 49s | ||||||
| 1/22/26 | ![]() Mikey, The Death Doula | Not all shadows are dark. Some are quiet. Some are tender. Some ask us to slow down and sit with the one certainty we spend our lives trying to outrun. In this episode of The Shadow Sessions, host Hiba Balfaqih speaks with Mikey, a death doula who supports people at the end of life—helping them die on their own terms, with dignity, presence, and meaning. After experiencing her own near-death moment, Mikey didn’t turn away from mortality. She moved closer to it. This conversation explores how our culture avoids death by treating it as a distant event, when in reality it’s happening all the time. Friendships end. Identities fall away. Chapters close. And eventually, the people we love leave their bodies. Mikey’s work invites a different relationship with dying—one rooted in softness rather than fear, choice rather than denial. She challenges the idea that death is a failure and reframes it as a rite of passage we were never taught how to prepare for. This episode is about death, yes—but even more, it’s about how we live when we stop pretending we’re exempt from it. It’s for anyone curious about death doula work, end‑of‑life care, near‑death experiences, grief, meaning, and what becomes possible when we meet mortality with honesty instead of avoidance. | 1h 08m 57s | ||||||
| 1/15/26 | ![]() A Childhood Without Safety: Growing Up Inside the Prison System | What happens when a child grows up without safety—and the system responds with punishment instead of protection? In this episode of The Shadow Sessions, host Hiba Balfaqih sits down with Sonny Van Cleaveland, whose life was shaped by incarceration before it was shaped by care. By the age of seven, Sonny was already inside the justice system. By sixteen, he was placed in an adult prison that became one of the most violent facilities in Michigan within its first month. This conversation exposes how early trauma, chronic threat, and institutional violence shape identity. Violence wasn’t defiance. It was adaptation. Survival became instinct. Harm became normalized. When a nervous system is raised in danger, morality doesn’t disappear—it gets overridden. But this episode is not just about prison. It’s about childhood trauma, moral injury, and how systems that claim to rehabilitate often reinforce the very behaviors they punish. It’s about how patterns form under pressure—and what it actually takes to interrupt them. Sonny’s story challenges the idea that people are “born dangerous.” It asks harder questions about responsibility, conditioning, and what healing looks like when no one ever modeled safety to begin with. This is an episode for anyone interested in trauma psychology, incarceration, nervous system survival responses, and the long-term impact of growing up without protection. | 1h 06m 53s | ||||||
| 1/8/26 | ![]() The Secret She Carried for Decades: Her Father Was the Father of Her Children | We teach kids to avoid strangers. To trust their gut. To believe home means safety. But what if home was the danger? In this first episode of The Shadow Sessions, host Hiba Balfaqih sits down with Aziza Kibibi — a survivor whose story of incest, betrayal, and survival shatters the illusion of safety. Aziza was abused by her father, forced to carry and raise his children, and silenced by those meant to protect her. Today, she is a whistleblower, author, and advocate fighting to expose the systems that failed her and to change the laws that still protect abusers. This conversation is not just about what happened — it’s about the courage it takes to speak, to heal, and to turn survival into advocacy. | 1h 24m 03s | ||||||
| 12/18/25 | ![]() We All Have Something We Are Hiding | The Shadow Sessions is a podcast for the stories we hide, the ones too painful, too early, or too private to ever make it to therapy. Hosted by psychologist and trauma alchemist Hiba Balfaqih, each episode sits with the truths people were never given permission to speak. From survivors of abuse to those confronting their deepest shadows, these are raw, unfiltered conversations about what we carry and what it costs us. Launching January 8 on all platforms, The Shadow Sessions is a space for anyone who’s ever felt unseen, unheard, or unsafe to tell their story. Because there is light in the shadow, if someone is willing to sit there with you. | 1m 48s | ||||||
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Chart Positions
13 placements across 9 markets.
Chart Positions
13 placements across 9 markets.


















