243. The Codependent Love Bubble and Divorce as Real Freedom with Sae Mickelson

You think getting divorced at 23 is too young to learn anything valuable? Think again.

Sade Mickelson, life coach and Chinese medicine expert, shares her story of marrying an Iranian restaurant owner who was arrested for federal drug charges while she was still in college. Instead of walking away, she doubled down—visiting him in prison, planning to move to Iran, and proving her capability at every turn.

The wake-up call came on a broken Ferris wheel in Isfahan. Sae realized she was wishing her entire life away, rushing to reach the end just to prove she picked the right person. She discovered her best friend was having an affair with her husband. But the real revelation came when she told him: "I made you up."

This episode explores how women use their professional strengths—resilience, capability, problem-solving—to stay trapped in relationships that drain them. Sade's story reveals the difference between proving your worth and protecting your peace. She learned that truth feels like freedom, even when it hurts.

Her journey from codependence to self-befriending offers wisdom for any woman rebuilding after divorce. The answer is not figuring everything out tonight.

Ready to stop proving yourself and start protecting your peace? Schedule a consultation call with Sade Curry at https://sadecurry.com/info.

Transcript

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Dating After Divorce podcast. I'm your host, Sade Curry, and I am excited to bring you a guest again. It has been a minute since we've had a guest. I'm very careful about who I bring on because I want them to be people who have walked in your shoes so that the story is super relevant. I don't do a lot of just experts, but today we have someone who is both an expert and someone who has walked in the divorced woman's shoes.

My friend and colleague, Sade Mickelson, is here, and she is a life coach. She's a licensed acupuncturist and a classical Chinese herbalist, and I follow her on Facebook. We have been Facebook friends for a while. We've been in a lot of the same groups. I think what really always strikes me is just how nourishing, I guess, what you teach is. I'm constantly screenshotting the things you put out because I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to make that" or "I really need to think about that" or "That brings everything in my life together in one spot."

So I find your work really inspiring, really valuable, especially for women in midlife, just because there's so much wisdom. You know, wisdom isn't this linear 1-2-3 steps. Especially the way you do it, it's this whole thing. And every time you write something, it's always the whole picture. So I have always appreciated that, but I would love for you to introduce yourself to the listeners, tell them a little bit about yourself, who you are, what you do, and really just a little bit about that work.

Sade Mickelson: Thank you. I love being here. This is such good conversation, right? Talk about the depths of different relationships that have made us who we are. I am a longtime Chinese medical practitioner. I worked specifically with women and children for many, many, many years, and what makes that helpful to my entire life is not only learning deep details about how to care for myself and for my family and all the connections, but really the ability to help others feels really good to my system.

I started so long ago that it was really a rare thing to be going into Chinese medical school, percentage-wise in the US. So it was a wonky and confusing thing for most people. Being able to describe who I am and what I do took a long time. It was a long growth process, let's put it that way, and it really helped me come deeper and deeper into my own self-understanding. Because you want to be understood by other people in what you do, who you are, and if you find it difficult to describe because so few people really understand what it is that you're doing, the culture at the time doesn't get it, it really helps you reconsider and, possibly it did for me, deeply befriend yourself.

And I think that came about because my first early marriage in my life was so complex and strange and lonely that it created in me a determination that the next steps that I make, I'm going to choose things that really just are my own, regardless of what they look like, regardless of how they're perceived or understood or not. And that has definitely been my whole trajectory, frankly helping other women learn how to do that for themselves, however that looks for themselves.

Most of my clients now, now that I'm not in clinic any longer, I still utilize all the herbs and very deep nutritional consideration for each specific client because it is so different for every single human being at every stage of their life. But really, each and every single human being, I utilize all that good information from before and all those years of experience, but I really now do so much more of the emotional care of the human because I understand what it is to be caring for the physical body, hoping for a specific outcome, and not understanding just how much the emotional system of the body—we talk about the nervous system in the West now. You know, that came about a few years ago and I was kind of stunned. I'm like, "Well, there you go. Western science finally coming around to some kind of full look at the system."

Instead of separating it so much, it's still quite separated, and I think of that as a very clinical term, your nervous system, but it's extraordinarily helpful to our Western minds that like to have things very reduced down. It clarifies a lot and gives people a lot of opportunities to understand themselves. And so I spend a lot of time with my clients caring for their nervous systems and helping them to learn how to do that as well. And then, of course, very much the physical body nourishment.

And really looking at who are you? A lot of my clients are like myself—they outran, I always say, very complex childhoods. They built really powerful lives, but they might struggle to sit down in those lives to really be. And I think that's one of the most important things we can ever look at, is all of this work and care to create what you wanted. So much of that is external, and so bringing it into the internal is the most important work by a certain stage of our life.

If we don't do it, we tend to have a lot of physical struggles. I think that's why we see so many perimenopausal and menopausal nightmare stories right now. A lot of it is because we are so worn thin from modern life that is quick, quick, quick, quick. There's a whole lot of other factors, of course—chemicals and not enough correct dense nutrition—but it is so much of the rush forward and the do and the fix that we haven't really cared for ourselves on an emotional, cellular level. Then we hit big change and it's like, "Whoa, how's this going to be?" Because it really asks and then it demands a very different way of life.

Sade Curry: Yeah. And it demands listening to messages that a lot of people don't know how to listen to if you've never—one of the things, you know, my clients, when I'm doing general life coaching for them, sometimes their health or their wellness or their physical activity will come into play. And one of the things I'll ask them is, "After you eat a particular meal, do you know the difference between when you eat plantains and spinach and when you have a slice of pizza? Can you tell the difference in your body without waiting for the message to be super loud and painful?"

That level of knowing what your body is telling you about what's happening is where you kind of want to get to, to be able to say—kind of like what you said earlier, you said there are no—you didn't say there were no formulas, that's my word for it—but every human body is completely unique and different, and what it needs is completely unique and different. And so if you're not listening to those messages when your body is whispering and you're going years or decades and you only listen when it's screaming, midlife, perimenopause, menopause is going to be a huge thing.

Sade Mickelson: Yeah.

Sade Curry: Okay, so we're here to hear what the children call the tea today, kind of your journey in relationships. You know, in your bio you talk about how you've lived in so many places, including Iran, and I know that's a part of your story, so I'm just going to let you run with it. You got divorced at 23, I believe. Was it 23?

Sade Mickelson: Yes.

Sade Curry: That was—I think I've only had a couple of guests who were younger than 30. So that's different by itself. Can you just start off by telling us how and where you met this person?

Sade Mickelson: Yes. I went to college at a few weeks before the age of 18, which I think now, "Whoof, I needed a little more time in my life before going off to downtown Chicago." I started at University of Illinois at Chicago right before 18, and then I met him within, I don't even know, maybe two months of being at school. And he was much older than I, owned a restaurant on the north side of the city, and I met him through a really good pal of mine who had moved downtown about a year before I did. He was the boyfriend of my best friend who went off to school in a totally different state.

And we were out one night and we met this whole group of people who worked at the restaurant next door at this kind of juice club, as they would have been called way back in the day. And because I wasn't there to do anything but dance, it was actually a gay club where it was so much about the dance and the joy. Well, my ex came in with his group because they were just really good friends with the owners. So it was a bunch of straight guys that came in, probably thinking, "Yay, here's some unsuspecting gals who are here with their gay besties and wide open," you know?

So we met there, and it was the thing that I now understand, that whirlwind, really too much too fast sort of relationship, that codependent immediate enmeshment thing. You know, I avoid a lot of those terms because I don't want to ever reduce things down when I'm talking to patients or clients. My clients now, it's not that we don't talk about them, but I'm always careful with that because I think so many terms—it's great to have words that help you understand something, but we are not diagnoses.

Sade Curry: Correct. And even if there is a word for something, and I mean, you're not one of my dating clients, thank God, because it is very exciting in quotes out there. There's a frame of reference problem that comes when we use these words. So "avoidant" to one person—what does that person really mean by avoidant? And what does this other person mean by avoidant? It's not always the same thing. And frame of reference challenge is something I'm constantly having to remind my clients of. Okay, so when you say you want a relationship and both of you—you and this person you're dating—both say you do want a committed relationship, just saying those words doesn't mean you're on the same page.

Sade Mickelson: For sure. And everything is the lens of your own childhood, your own things that have not been enough. So there's a lot of deficiencies in your life. There's a lot of too much. There's a lot of excesses that have occurred. You know, I think in terms of elements like that, just because that's the Chinese medical way that has been trained into me, and it's very helpful to me because it really is more like the fluidity of the body of the human. We are fluid creatures. We're always changing. It's very dynamic.

And so I look back and I can say, okay, yeah, at this point it's been whatever, 35 years or something, I can say that was a definite narcissistic game that I stepped into. But I'm grateful that I have all this understanding that that doesn't matter. Actually, it is a stage—one, being able to name something is very relieving. There's nothing wrong with it at all. But staying, trying to stay static with that, doesn't honor your own growth. It doesn't honor actually all that is really possible to learn from, because ultimately it didn't matter just how narcissistic he was.

Sade Curry: It really does 100%. And not every good guy is good for a particular person. There's that—even if he wasn't narcissistic, he wasn't good for you.

Sade Mickelson: He wasn't good for me. Exactly. And that just gives a—it does. I understand why that doesn't necessarily feel relieving in the beginnings, and I understand why some people are going to stay where that doesn't feel good, right, to just name this open possibility of, "Hey, whatever he was or wasn't, he wasn't good for me." I understand why people struggle with that very much.

Of course, because I'm an empathetic human being, I also spend all these hours talking with people in their deep emotional—here's me, I don't want to use the word traumas only because it's more than that, but it is traumas. I mean, there are deep traumas that occur, and I'm not here to deny any of that. And at some point it really behooves you to be able to look and open and open and open to what all the layers of learning there are in whatever it was. Here's how it landed for me because of my thinking and my deficiencies and excesses.

Sade Curry: Yeah. I have a quick question. Do you think the ambience of the meeting place had anything to do with how you felt that day?

Sade Mickelson: Very possibly, because I was, you know, really young, but a really mature 18-year-old in this way. I had had to grow up very quickly to do a lot of parenting of my parents, caring for younger sibling, making my own way in the world because there wasn't a lot of capacity to help me on my early journey. So I think I wanted this very adult feeling. And being in a club, you know, felt exciting too, but very mature.

Sade Curry: Yeah. Pat Mellody talks about that in her book Facing Codependence, one of my favorite books—saved my life during my divorce—about the overly empowered child. She talks about how codependence or narcissistic tendencies come from two areas. One is the overly empowered child, so given adult responsibility, so of course you take on that feeling of, "Well, yeah, I mean, I basically am raising my sibling and taking care of my parents. I am an adult." But without the nourishment for that tree to actually grow and have the sturdiness that it needs to weather everything that comes with being an adult. And then, of course, on the other side is the child who is smothered and kept infantilized, so to speak.

Sade Mickelson: Yes. Yes. I did get to prove my capability. That's all I did in this relationship. It was a constant proving of just how much I could manage, handle, do. So for sure, the start—that's a great question. The start was probably pretty igniting from the beginning and curious to my particular body and mind from where I was coming from.

Sade Curry: Amazing. All right, so you met at the club, hit it off right away. What happened next?

Sade Mickelson: Well, he was 10 years older than I and from Iran, which was super fascinating to me on many levels. I was curious about learning about different cultures. That was just something that's always been interesting to me, so that definitely helped. And he had such a different view of so many things. Of course, I'm young, right? So he can teach me a whole bunch of stuff about politics of the world, living in many different countries. So that was all extraordinarily interesting.

But within, I think, about two months, I realized that he had an addiction to cocaine, and my whole body reacted to this like, "I'm going to save this person from this thing that's keeping them from who they could really be," you know? My goodness. I want to go back and just hug that young woman endlessly.

Sade Curry: Well, of course it makes sense. You'd had to do that for others already. You were a pro at it.

Sade Mickelson: Yep, I was. And you know what? If anyone could do it for him, it was going to be me and all of that. So yes, and it does give you such a sense, or it did me, of like, "Well, all of the things I've had to do"—I don't know that I was thinking this specifically, but this is how it felt now I look back—clearly all of that is what is going to lead me to be able to do really powerful things in people's lives, like this wonderful, incredible human that I'll never meet again. I mean, he seemed so exotic, right, and so complex. He had been through the Iran-Iraq War. Like I said, he had lived in multiple countries. He owned a restaurant. I mean, come on, this is fascinating stuff, right?

So I took that challenge on. About a year into our relationship, which was extraordinarily volatile—no surprise, I'm sure, it's like I'm sure your audience is like, "You're kidding?"—oh, gracious, I can't imagine. So he was arrested in a federal, unfortunately, case which included many people throughout the United States and into Canada through, I think, multiple restaurants, I believe, is how it was working. Was this ring that was doing heroin sales.

Now I had no idea about this, right? So I was that last-to-know gal. And of course, in the time that we had been together, I had understood that he was now here illegally. He had come over as a student, so he didn't jump at me to marry him to keep him in this country. But by the time he's in the federal system—which, I can't even, that's its own podcast, going through that experience. You know, I was suddenly working with federal lawyers. I mean, the federal prison system in Chicago, how outrageous it was to have to try to even go and be able to visit. I mean, it was really epic.

Sade Curry: And so the arrest wasn't for you like, "Oh, you know what? I'm out."

Sade Mickelson: Oh, no. I doubled down. I hear you. Because now you really need me. You know what I mean? It's ridiculous.

Sade Curry: And what was his—did he agree with that? Was he demanding of that support, or was he going into the needy, "Oh, now I have no one else"? Which one was it here?

Sade Mickelson: It was, and it was like a drug. I look back now, I learned something so common-sensical, probably to many people, but so fundamentally important for myself over the next few years, which was when someone tells you you are the best thing that ever happened and the only thing they've got, that's not a compliment. Really? Okay, well, it's been nice being around you. Bye. I mean, right?

Because this was exactly the drug that he offered. He said, you know, "Stick to me. You know, this way of saying it, I don't have anything else but you, and I will basically elevate you forevermore because we have this bond." Oh, gracious. So I did everything that was possible. It's unbelievable what I look back and see now.

He was tried, convicted. Because I was such a—I have paperwork around this. It's so funny. I saw it a few years ago. I was like, "Oh geez, why don't I get rid of this?" And I thought, "Well, because I might want to write about this someday." And this is an interesting little component because I had forgotten this, but the judge actually stated that my dedication to him showed some level of maybe goodness. I don't remember how the judge said it. They said very technical speak, but that they were going to, instead of putting him in a couple different places that were possible, that he was going to go to what they call, jokingly, of course, in federal speak, a prison camp, which is low security and was very close by. It was in Indiana.

And so I spent the next couple years of my life doing multiple things. One, caring for him in this system. It's really complex because you have to set up funds for the commissary, you know, where they can actually buy enough things for themselves. You have to get yourself on the visitation list and then, you know, pass all the levels to do that, on and on and on. I had to go multiple—I didn't have to go. I chose, and that's what it felt like—was to keep our relationship going. I went, you know, every other weekend, driving hours both ways, getting a hotel. I'm supposed to be in college, right? I had dropped out of college, obviously, because, you know, he became my college, really.

And so then at the same time, my birth mother was declining quite rapidly, and it was so painful. So I was spending a lot of time trying to support that as well. She was in a state facility while he was in a federal facility, and her multiple sclerosis had become so debilitating that nobody could take care of her in the family any longer because she literally just could not be moved. She was so stiff and it was a really difficult time.

So he was also still more of that escapism, probably in a lot of ways, and purpose that I could actually do something about. I'm going to imagine, you know, I don't really dwell too much on that because it's really—it has been such a painful thing to think about that I spent a lot of time, of course, with my mom and her facility and also just trying to take care of the family around it. But I really felt for years awful not spending even more time with her while I'm with this bozo going through that level of silliness, which only got sillier, it only got more ridiculous.

And you know, I don't use those terms to be funny, but I mean, seriously, it was simple when you think about it. In either case, even if he hadn't been in the picture, you were a baby, essentially.

Sade Curry: I was. I was. I was a little kiddo, and I didn't understand that at all. I didn't think it was possible, right? I mean, it was like, "No, I have to rise up to whatever is needed here." And it got more and more complex.

So I even was going through the large process of trying to get the chance to marry him in prison because that would possibly help him not be deported at the end, because he was actually quite concerned about going back to Iran, as a lot of people are, for political reasons, for, you know, being dropped off from US prison systems back into Iran could lead to prison in Iran, right?

So I felt really desperate, and I did all of this unbelievable paperwork and care at this age, you know, and I'd already done this federal prison system stuff. Now I was doing federal prison system stuff for getting permission to marry him in prison. Oh, my goodness. Oh yeah. And simultaneously, as we were receiving that permission, my mom was declining. And when she passed away, I had received permission to marry him on a very specific date, which fell on the day after her funeral.

Sade Curry: Oh, my goodness.

Sade Mickelson: Oh yeah. So here I am, oh my gracious, with the biggest sorrow, and then going into a prison system and marrying this person, thinking, "Okay, at least we've checked this off."

While this is all happening, I also am involved with my best friend from childhood. We had been really close when I lived in Indiana, and then she had moved to Chicago. We had kind of reconnected about a year before my husband's imprisonment, and I really wanted them to be dear friends. I wanted them to know one another. So she was the only other person I shared everything with. Most of my family did not understand what was going on at all. It was so humiliating and embarrassing. But also, I think I really convinced myself like, "They can't possibly understand this love," you know, that calm thinking.

And I had really isolated myself from other friends. At work, I never talked about, you know, anything to do with him. I just was so much in this alone state of just surviving. And then we were going to get together again, of course, and then we were going to be fine, that sort of—the fairy tale.

Sade Curry: The fairy tale, yeah.

Sade Mickelson: So this friend had moved to Chicago with me, and she was the only other person that visited him in prison. It worked out really well because she lived not far from—her family lived not far from there, so she could go home and visit her family. She could go and visit him when I wasn't there, and it was like this way of keeping his spirits up. So she was the person also, because I needed to have someone come and witness the marriage. So she was there. She, of course, was at my mother's funeral. We were very close. We were completely intertwined as well in a deeply unhealthy way, putting it mildly, because she also came into this very isolated in a way. Even though she came from a very large and well-known family in her town, she was at school doing, you know, good, big things, but she had a lot of depression issues.

I look back now and I was also in savior mode with her out of anxiety, a lot of depression, which I didn't understand at the time. I just thought, "Oh, she just needs correct friendship," you know, correct opportunities.

So what happened after the marriage? He only had a little bit more time in that particular camp. They actually decided to deport him, and he was moved to another prison that was more set up for deportation. This all happened over about another, I don't even know, 12 to 14 months. And in that time, my best friend started seeing this man in Washington, DC, I believe, and she would go and visit him. And now my husband is further away from both of us, so I only went there twice, I think, in those many months. We just, you know, spent a lot of money on the phone. Back in those days, you know, collect calls. You had to accept the call and pay a lot of money. My goodness, I worked for phone calls.

But at any rate, I was getting myself prepared to go to Iran. I mean, really, literally, gathering the things that I was going to need and, you know, the gifts I was going to take to his family. I mean, I look back, I'm like, "Oh my gracious." I worked, and then I spent my life planning how I was going to be and get, by the way, into Iran, which is very complicated. It was very—it's complicated now, but it was completely a no unless you were married to an Iranian. And so I had to send my passport off to the consulate, which was inside, I believe, the Turkish Embassy at that point, because we don't have political ties, of course, to Iran. And so I did all of this complex stuff. I'm doing this with my head down constantly, just planning and planning.

And about three weeks before he was going to be deported and I was going to be flying in, then maybe a month past that at the most, maybe even just a few weeks, I can't remember, past when he was going to arrive. I find, quite by accident, a whole host of letters that he and she had been exchanging for about nine months.

Sade Curry: Wow.

Sade Mickelson: And it turns out that they had a plan that once I got to Iran—maybe, I mean, there was a lot of it that was very fantastical, right? None of it really made a lot of sense to my shocked brain anyway, but it was very fantastical. They were going to finally meet in Turkey, and, you know, it was really unfortunate. They both were sad that they were going to have to do this, but I was going to be put to the side. Maybe I could stay a friend. I mean, it was really—I am fast-forwarding through this. It was the slowest motion thing that has ever happened to me.

You know, up to that point for sure, and actually I can say since, even though there's been a lifetime of many, many things that have been very hard, that I mean literal stun, that I couldn't even hear noise, or I would completely shut down. I could not think, consider anything.

And so confronting her about this, realizing yes, they kind of had slowly fallen into this. And here it is, and they're really sorry about that. But at the same time, when I do get to talk to him, he's denying chunks of this. He still wants me to come to Iran. And it was such an interesting thing. I look back now what can happen in really manipulative relationships where there's that push-pull, yes, where he really came across half the time as, "I feel so terribly about this and I know we can fix this." And then it was, "Oh, I don't know what to do with myself. I'm such a terrible person," you know?

It was excellent acting. And also, I believe, probably still to this day, a huge portion of what story he had made up in his own mind, right?

Sade Curry: Yes. Yeah. It's fascinating how when people are lying or making up stories—I think having walked through some similar things, definitely not as high-stakes as yours at all—how much manipulative people really do believe their stories. I think that's what makes the story so effective, is that on some level—and it is so strange, and something I'm always trying to talk to my clients about—I'm like, "Listen, you're not going to be able to—a lot of women will pride themselves on being able to tell when a person is lying or being able to see through the games." And I'm like, "That's not a useful skill. You can't play that game as well as the people who are playing it."

Sade Mickelson: No. What else, he was confirming everything that I believed about myself, frankly. Yeah, right? So he was confirming, "Look at all you've done for me. Look at all we've been through." Well, that makes perfect sense to the mind of someone who has gone as far as I have, right? Of course, of course. "You mean to reroute this back to us? Of course we're going to figure out a way to make this make us stronger." I mean, you know, that's the way my mind works. So it was—and I'm sure you, like you said, there are parts of him that were thinking, "Yeah, that'd be great." I mean, what the—but the truth is, he had very low capacity for a lot of the things that I had the highest capacity for, obviously.

Sade Curry: It is the best word. I love that word. I use that word so much with my friends. I'm always like, "Listen, a couple of things." One is women, people socialized as women, we're conditioned to listen for words somehow. And I don't know how that originated. I haven't gone down that rabbit hole, but I think it's something that just happens. I've seen it in myself. I've seen it in young women. I've seen it in older women. And I don't know—someone said, "Well, maybe it's because we were conditioned to hang on the promise of a relationship."

So if someone promised to marry you in certain societies, that was like law, and it elevated a woman's status to have a promise of marriage. But a promise of marriage is just words, but when you—so it's sort of like how you have a contract. A contract is just a piece of paper, but as a society we have all agreed that this piece of paper signed by people means something. And I think in many cultures—I know certainly in my culture—the promise of marriage means something. But when you sort of test the reality of it, nothing is happening except words being exchanged.

But we're in a culture where—and so if you think about your journey and all these words—when I look at it, I'm looking at it through the lens of when my clients are dating, and I will tell them, "So what's actually happening? Like, what is the substance?" And I see so much substance from your end going his way—so much time and energy and attention and money and effort and paperwork. But if you don't know to look for it, you don't realize that almost zero is coming your way, or zero or minus 10.

Sade Mickelson: I don't even mind this 10. And that, I think, really, actually, at that stage in my life, fulfilled me. I think it literally filled up holes in my own self-understanding, right? "Look at my capacity." I think we as women were, overall, in some way or another, conditioned to notice potential so we can find safety in our own strength. What we make out of that potentiality shows how strong and capable we are. It keeps proving something to ourselves.

Sade Curry: Yes. And I think society loves that. Society loves to tell women to prove themselves, to take this little thing and make something out of it. "Make the house a home," you know?

Sade Mickelson: Yeah. I think the patriarchy just loves that. I know it's like everything is built on the back of the efforts of women. And if you don't have some form of, you know, "I have to go towards something," you're not going to pour out a level of effort that is going to keep a lot of structures in place. And we, you know, really do hope also that, "Oh, will I have enough inside of me to survive regardless?" Because all you got to do is watch a costume drama. Every single woman is scanning the room, trying to see herself through other people's eyes to see if she is doing whatever it is right enough to get the safety that is required by being connected one way or another.

I mean, you had to, in so much of human history, at least have an uncle or a cousin male that liked you enough to keep you somewhat safe, yeah, much less husband, father. But really somebody. Which paints a picture of the graspy sensation that we are often experiencing inside of our bodies every moment if we're not careful. Also, you know, women have had to make do with very little.

Sade Curry: Yes.

Sade Mickelson: And so this person who had opened a restaurant and done all this different travel and spoke multiple languages, you know, to me it was like, "Oh, okay, so I'll wrangle this." And, you know, "Oh, with me as the not only precursor"—I'm thinking about how I'm making a nutrient thought processes because that's what I do. I mean, "If I'm foundational, nutritive for this person, then, you know, with all that they already have, right, just imagine them planted in my soil."

Sade Curry: Yes. Yes. Oh my God, I recognize that impulse. I think an impulse is a good word for it because, like you said, when we're in it—when I was in, because I got married at 21, so give or take, so there's a little bit of a journey to that—but yes, at that stage, it wasn't these words weren't there for that. But there is that impulse of like, "Oh, this is going to be amazing. I can make this amazing. He has the things that I don't have, and I have the things that he doesn't have, and we can craft this whole thing out of it."

Sade Mickelson: Yes. It's such an excellent survival mechanism. I mean, it really is about survival. You're not going to thrive in that state, more than likely, unless you're being met somehow or another with another human being who is also in that thought process somewhat. That, you know, is the important part. Are they actually there? Are you pulling them along fully?

But at any rate, yeah, so I ended up going to Iran, which is a lifetime experience, of course. I thought I was going to be saving my marriage. I wish I had spent a hell of a lot less time worrying about my marriage and just enjoying Isfahan, just hanging out.

Sade Curry: Yeah. How old were you at this point?

Sade Mickelson: Twenty-two. I guess almost no time had passed, just a couple of years, just a couple of years.

And so, yeah, the experience there was incredible. I learned so much about male-female relationship because I watched some things that, I'm sure, you know, could sound really strange, even to your listeners, but the women and men—the women ran the home, and it was very evident and elevated there. We make that into—in the West, in the United States especially—it's like that's some sort of subjugation of the woman. And believe me, there's plenty of subjugation in Iran. Don't get me wrong, please. I mean, I was wearing the manto and the chador as well. So it's like I definitely experienced the whole of that.

Not that that is inherently subjugating, but it definitely was forced on a lot of women who did not want to do that. But I learned so much about the pride that you can have actually in just knowing what your main nature is. And a lot of the women that I met—not all, and that was definitely painful—but a lot of them really did deeply enjoy a life of, "My husband does his thing. I love raising my kids and doing this cooking and being with my girls." And I was really stunned by that.

I was fortunate enough to get to go to a funeral, a wedding, many birthday parties. So I got to see the depth of different experiences inside of culture. And it was, you know, it was a total privilege in so many ways. Ridiculously painful, completely disjointing, unbelievably hard on my whole health and my life. But I learned so much stuff about what's possible in human culture. I also saw plenty of women who did not want to be, you know, the foundations of their home and how squelching that was, and I really understood new layers of that as well. Had a lot of gratitude for my own opportunities.

But not just that. I think that's a very shallow view that we can have in the West, and it's very ethnocentric, like, "Oh well, you know, you're a bunch of—these women are imprisoned in their homes," and that's not true.

Sade Curry: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, in the West—when I think back to my culture, I think back to Yoruba culture and what I know of it. I'm not as close to my culture as I could be, working on that. But I think about things like—a client of mine and I, she's Nigerian as well—we're discussing this last week about peer groups. So my tribal culture is very peer-group-based historically, where it wasn't this very isolating experience that we now have, like in places like the United States, where now you are married to this man and now you have kids and you are running the home, but it's basically you home all day with your children. Every once in a while you get a girls' night if your husband doesn't kick up a fuss or let the kids tear the house down while you're gone on this girls' night.

And that's, you know, that's the freedom, so to speak, whereas historically in my culture, it was more like, okay, yeah, you had the city and things, but people moved in their peer groups. So the teenage girls had, like, sort of their communal duties, and they went and did all those communal duties together. And then the young men went and did all that together. And then the older men, and then, you know, the mothers—like you were describing, they enjoyed just being with their girls and not having, yeah, you know. And then, of course, the whole community comes back together. And then, you know, you have—

Sade Mickelson: The agreed-upon social structure was just maybe a lot more—

Sade Curry: —sense—

Sade Mickelson: —but it really seemed to be way more sensible for a lot of humans. And it also seemed to me, because I stayed in homes—this was, you know, many months that I was there in people's homes. I only stayed in a hotel once for a few days. So months and months of all different homes, I really got to see a structure that does seem set up for deeper community and a lot of good help and care for whoever needs it, as well as for the children to have a lot of different connections.

So I did see a whole lot of things to learn from and just understand some of these stressors that we don't necessarily—we don't look at in the West. We, at least back then, it was always the dialogue was, "Aren't we so lucky? We don't—we're not going through that," and we point a finger, right?

Sade Curry: Yeah. "Oh, look at those women. You know, they're so downtrodden."

Sade Mickelson: And of course, that regime—come on. I mean, of course, of course, of course, there's a lot of very serious human rights issues going on, and I'm not in any way trying to lighten that because that's real. And I also saw that we lack so many social structures that—and that had never occurred to me because this is like '92, you know what I mean? And that wasn't really a big conversation. I think it's more so now. We're starting to realize, "Oh, wait a minute, this is not working out very well."

Sade Curry: Yeah. I think the key is, does the individual have a choice? That's the big thing. And when you look at both sets of societies, so if you're looking at a society that's more overtly patriarchal, you know, even if it's more nourishing and has more community, does the individual who might be different or want a different choice—does that individual have a choice? So it's easy to see in other cultures, but in the West there's the label of choice. We do a lot of good marketing.

Sade Mickelson: That's literally what my brain was widened and opened into. Oh yeah. It's like, yeah, you say you have a choice, but there's not going to be childcare. There's not going to be free education. There's not going to be maternal care. There's going to be all these things. So now, yeah, you have the choice to go and hang out with your girls. But do you have the choice when the systemic structure makes it really hard for you to exercise the choice?

Sade Curry: Yes. And the social structure and messaging tells you too, you're never doing enough. Like you are absolutely never doing enough. And in Iran, you know, this was my first exposure to something like this, and it was so completely different than anything I had ever experienced, or most people will if they're from the West. I was fully cracked open realizing how problematic high individualism and an individualistic way of doing everything while thinking you're supposed to literally be three or four people, right? You're supposed to be this incredible business person. You're supposed to be this or whatever employee. You're supposed to be this foundational energy for your family and home. You're supposed to be, you know, this incredibly connected and caring and nourishing mom. I mean, on and on it goes.

It was just the beginnings of that sort of understanding, and I'm super grateful for it, but it was otherwise really, really hard and shocking. And of course, we should get back to the story. I just realized that.

Sade Curry: Yeah.

Sade Mickelson: So essentially there it was a roller coaster of, "Are we together or are we not?" And some of the most unbelievable things happened for me, truly. I mean, you don't get to learn this kind of stuff in life unless you really are ready to and have the perfect circumstances, which I think that's what happened.

One day we were at a family friend—had a small, I'm not joking, amusement park that they had open in the summers. This was early spring, so it wasn't open yet. And it was so bizarre. It was like a bad Hollywood set. Everything looked very decrepit because, you know, most things in Iran—they're older. They were older materials. At that point, the government doesn't allow in new things, and this would have been made in the US equipment, but at any rate, so we're there, and this guy's going to show off like everybody always does whenever I'm taken anywhere because I'm an American. I never saw another Westerner. You know, I never heard English being spoken in any of that time, except for once with this Canadian chick that I ran into in Tehran, and we both screamed, which was not appropriate, by the way, because I heard her speaking and I turned around and said, "My gosh, are you North American?" And she's like, "What?" I mean, we pointed at each other. She said yes, and oh my goodness.

So here I was on this haunted-looking old amusement park-ish set, and I'm walking along with this man who's very pridefully showing me this broken-down equipment. And he convinces me—which, good Lord—to, along with my husband, he wanted us to do the Ferris wheel. So here we are on this Ferris wheel which looks like it's going to fall apart. I have no idea what in the world I was doing getting on that thing, but you know, what the heck? I'm in Iran and I'm 22 and married to somebody who's having an affair with my best friend. So, well, let's get on the Ferris wheel.

And so here we are going around, and I'm not enjoying myself at all. And I'm round and round and round, and he's not going to let us off because he's speeding it up because it's something he's going to show off, right? He's going to let us know how exciting he can make my trip that day because that's really what it was always about. Like, "This American is here. Oh my gosh," you know, rekindling, as they would say.

So when I got off of that thing, I had this flash. I realized—I don't know how to explain this except it was probably just a moment of beautiful grace. I felt this thing wash over me. I realized I was living my life wishing my life away because I wanted to know how it was going to work out. Was I going to be with him my whole life? Was I going to be able to get to the end of my life and know I didn't make a mistake? I didn't waste my time, you know? I'm 21 or whatever. But I felt everything had been poured into this person.

And I had this sudden, shocking sensation like, "I'm wishing my life away." My mom had just died an early death, and I'm wishing my life away over this person. Whoa. Because it had been so unconscious for so long what I was doing, that moment of "What I'm actually doing if you boil it down is trying to speed through my life so that I'm not, quote, wrong for being with this person."

Who in the world is that going to be proving anything to? And what does that mean for the whole of my precious life? What am I doing?

Sade Curry: Yeah. When you say wishing your life away, did you mean being in a state of wishing while your life passed? Or—could you—

Sade Mickelson: Yes, I'll explain that. It was a sensation of, "I just want to be at the end of my life so I know that we were always together."

Sade Curry: Wow.

Sade Mickelson: And for the first time I could hear how problematic that was. Because how do you—for whatever reason, there was some understanding in my system that for whatever reason I would be doing that, I would literally not be present at all in my life. And I had watched my mother suffer so horrifically, it felt like a waste of her teachings to me. It felt like a dishonoring to her. Yeah. To think that I would be wanting to rush through so that I could have some kind of relief—I don't even know what other word to use—that I had been with the right person, as if getting to the end of your life, by the way, has any way of making that so. "Oh, okay, I'm at the end of my life. This all worked out."

I mean, very possibly not, because it's like the ultimate purpose of being alive was this relationship.

Sade Curry: Yes. And I see that so much in—not necessarily my dating clients, although there's an element of it sometimes—but my divorce clients, so the women that I am walking through the breakup or the decision to break up. And I remember the moment that I also sort of turned that corner, you know. So my ex, he filed for the divorce without me knowing. So I was already blindsided by the divorce. But there's that period of grief and just trying to make sense of it all and the pain of it.

And what really helped me turn the corner was I went back—and I think you might like this—I went back to the moment I was born. Because I grew up in a Christian tradition and I was a deep, deep Christian for a very huge part of my adulthood. There was all of that, the woman and your purpose and being a helpmeet. And then, of course, I came from a conservative culture, and there's all that stuff in there. There was this belief embedded, not consciously, that my purpose was the relationship.

And so ending the relationship or agreeing to end the relationship or the relationship having ended caused this really deep fracture in my sense of identity. And I didn't, you know, because I had not heard the word codependency until I turned 39 when I was divorcing. So I didn't know any of this. I just knew what I was feeling. And so as I started coaching myself and walking myself out of all of that, what really broke it was I was like, "The moment I came into this world"—so I'm 40 at this point—"So I came into this world on my own. I don't have a twin, don't have—not a part of a triplet-hood or whatever. So I came in alone. At some point between heaven and earth and creation, my little spirit came in here alone."

It's impossible for my existence to be about this person. He wasn't even there. He wasn't there. He wasn't anywhere there. I didn't meet him until I was almost 20. So why is this such a big deal? It isn't. It's such an epiphany for me that the relationship was not a big deal.

Sade Mickelson: I could not agree more. And so many human beings really balk at something like that because it feels, you know, shocking to come into that level of really self-befriending and clarity. But that's what that had begun that day. So I'll be forever grateful for that rickety-ass, my God, Ferris wheel, because I think it did do something. It shook something loose in me or, you know, uncovered something.

And the rest of the time, I won't say that I was now in such a resolution that I was like, "Okay, I just got to get out of here." But it was an opening of, "All right, I probably need to get my passport back." It had been taken from me. You can imagine. This whole thing—probably need to come up with a plan.

So here I am at a pay phone a couple days later calling the United States, calling my best friend from high school whose boyfriend had introduced me to this fool. And I called him and I said, "Can I come and stay with you for a little while?" And he said, "Absolutely." And I'll never forget that, that clarity of friendship. It was just very simple. "Absolutely." "Okay, yeah."

So I got myself home, which was quite the thing. That was a whole epic story too. And here I am home—I'm not home. I don't have a home—but I'm in New York City staying with him. And, you know, we left it where we were going to work on ourselves and maybe our relationship with space and time. And I decided when I got back that something felt even worse than usual because, believe me, I was in a state of constant shock and anxiety all the time and just unbelievable. I couldn't eat, you know, I couldn't really sleep well. I mean, you can imagine.

And so I did a couple of very important things. One is I decided—this is back in the day where there were, you know, answering machines—and I called the answering machine and put in the code of my old apartment where my, you know, best friend that was having an affair with my soon-to-be ex-husband—although I didn't know this, any of this at the time—I wanted to see if he had been leaving her any messages. And I was—I am the least, obviously, suspicious person. So it was a very beautiful blessing that my mind said, "Why don't you just see what is going on? You don't know what these people are doing at this point."

And sure enough, he had left a couple of messages that I got to hear. And I had the most unbelievable doneness you've ever experienced. So clean, extraordinarily devastating, but clean. I was like, "Oh, I didn't even have to worry. I get it now," as if—

Sade Curry: As if—

Sade Mickelson: Yes. Oh my gracious. "Now I have it. Okay."

So by the next time I talked to him, actually one of the best things that happened right after that, as I walked out of the bedroom that I was in, and I was wearing these gold bangles that are very much a part of the Iranian culture that show marriage, etc., and they're very difficult to get off. And I had my friend help me literally scrape them off my wrist and hand. And it felt—there, you know, he's like, "Wait a minute, it's cutting you." "I don't care. Get this off." And it was such a relief to feel that.

So then a few days later, talking with my husband, I just said, "I, you know, I know all this stuff, and I'm completely done." And he went into some of the most manipulative, fascinating talk that I could now see from a completely different angle. And I listened to a little bit, but actually it was so emotionally insulting and assaulting to me. As opposed to me saying, "What can I take on? What can I do with this?" it was more like, "Oh, I don't want any of this, and it feels as painful as it actually is," yeah, instead of it being somehow or another filling up holes that I thought proved something about something. It actually felt the pain that it was, which was such another moment of grace.

And the biggest clarity came over me. The call was super dramatic because in Iran they'll shut the phone off if they think you're speaking about things that are illegal. So I kept calling him back, which he used as, "See, you really just want to be with me." And I'll never forget what came over me. It was such a beautiful shift, and it was the beginning of incredible healing for me.

I was calling him back because I did want to say a few things, just a few, but I wanted them to be said for myself. I really wanted to hear my—I knew this even at the time. So when he said—it was super insulting. He was just like, "See, you just keep calling me back. You want to be"—I'm like, and it felt icky.

So I decided I was going to say my final thing and if I got cut off—and what I said was what created the next level for me. And it was, "I realized I made you up." Fully made you. Yes. Yeah. A figment of my imagination from the beginning. Yes. And I take full responsibility for that.

I said this at that age. I know I said this because I wrote it down in the journal that was so detailed. I remember it. But seeing that journal only about probably seven or eight years ago, I was like, "Yeah, that was relieving," because it was the beginning of me truly understanding things that still took me years and years to put into full practice and to really fully grow from. But it was such a relief because it was super painful, but it was the truth. And, you know, the truth, although painful, is such a relief and freedom.

Sade Curry: Yes. Yes. Yeah. When you say the truth, you know, the modality that several of our colleagues and I use is, you know, the model, and we talk about truth versus story or fact versus story. Where do you put those? So in this particular context, so we have the story, we know the story, and then there's some facts, right, that happened, and then there's the truth. How do you see those playing out for you? Like, I know the truth. How do you define that?

Sade Mickelson: Yeah. The truth for me has a sense of freedom. It doesn't feel convenient or comfortable, but there is a little bit of—I can explain it for myself somatically. The way my body feels is there's a little bit of an opening in my chest that feels like a little breath, and it happens when I'm realizing something that is extraordinarily painful and inconvenient, but getting to the center of it feels like a release and a relief for just being with it. Like, "Yeah, this is it."

It wasn't all of the "What am I going to do with myself now that this person is not going to be my everything?" You know, all of those tight, wound thoughts. It wasn't any of that any longer. It was, "Wait a minute, who am I?" And I'm not afraid to really look at that because I just began to understand that I don't have to understand anything about why this happened or what to do with it at this point. All I need to understand is that I can begin from here, and this will all kind of—I didn't know the words back then—but it will, I will digest it. I will integrate this over time, and I can feel that.

So the truth for me is understanding that there is going to be a whole process. Doesn't have to be hyper-figured. There's so much possibility in every experience that I can trust myself that I will figure it out over time. New understandings will unfold. I will be able to gather and gather and gather all of that for myself.

My mom, who had passed away, taught me some of this thinking for sure, but my aunt who adopted me legally at 11 years old because my birth mother was so ill, was the one person that I called and told the entire story to at some point within a week of being back in New York City. And we had a very fascinating relationship. Sometimes it was pretty contentious, but she was also definitely often deeply on my side. And I poured everything out over a four-hour, you know, detailed description of the horror show. Yeah.

And by the end of talking to her, this is before I actually came to all these different realizations, and I'm sure that's why I came to a lot of them—she helped me. I said to her, "What am I going to do now?" It just was so devastating to actually say it all out loud. "What am I going to do with my life?"

And she said—and it's the cleanest, clearest thing, and it's what can happen when you're able to connect with somebody who can really see you and really care about all of the levels of it, but isn't going to sit there and advice at you, just help you open to what there is to learn—she said, "Oh, honey, you don't have to figure any of that out tonight."

Sade Curry: Yeah.

Sade Mickelson: And I remember being like, "Oh."

Sade Curry: You were ready to jump on the next treadmill.

Sade Mickelson: "I have to make all the meaning and be done with it." It's like, "No, honey, no." So I think that that also was a great learning from all of this. Big things can happen, and they are going to unfold for years, and there's not one problem inside of all that. That is the problem. The problem would be not allowing for the unfolding, right?

Sade Curry: Yeah. It sounds to me like the truth is—it is a story as well, but it's a story of owning your experience, your own tangible experience, not, you know, some people like, "Oh yeah, my experience." But it's like, no, not the experience that someone else tells you you're having, which is manipulative, right? The experience you are actually having in your own heart, in your own mind, your own emotions, in your body, in your brain, in your own reality is the truth, right?

Sade Mickelson: The truth for me, I think, when—now that you say that, yes—it was the realization that it's not fixed, like a fixed thing. It's not static. Like we are not—I mean, once again, like I've said so many times in my life and said even here, it's like the fluidity of the self is something we have to honor because otherwise everything feels out of control when that's like saying the ocean shouldn't have, you know, waves and weather. And so here we are. We are oceans. And so we are these flowing things.

If I continued down the path of everywhere I was when that relationship with him—I wanted it to be a fixed state. "I know how this worked out. I know what we're going to do. I'm going to help you get to X, whatever it is." It was very much fixed and, very, of course, you know, we think of that as controlling, but it's, I think it's beyond that. It's probably wordless, this idea of, "I can make this just so," and it has a sense of fluidity too because it's like, "Well, I'll just keep, you know, hearing—"

Sade Curry: Every—yeah, right. And it will feel—so you feel like you're in control.

Sade Mickelson: Yes. Yes. In control. And it's like, well, I think the realization when I told him very clearly that my sudden understanding of "I just made you up," it opened me up to not having to define any of this right now. And that was such—that's the relief of the truth.

Sade Curry: Wow. That's such a great story. Like, there's just—I wanted you to get to the end of it. Otherwise I would have asked you a million questions. I was like, if I keep asking questions, we're not going to get to the end of it. We probably have to pause here, though, for this episode for sure, because we still need to get to your current love story. We did a Part Two from there, from that moment where everything broke wide open, and then your journey to the life you have now. Because I know there's just so much, you know, for women to get and showing what that journey can look like.

Because I think sometimes after divorce we're in a hurry for all the things to happen, for everything to get fixed. We want to date right away, and we want to find the man of our dreams so that we can prove to the world that, you know, all those other things didn't really happen. We have so much to prove. And I think what your story has showed is that wanting to prove something to people—that's not the purpose, that's not the goal.

Sade Mickelson: It is not.

Sade Curry: Yeah. Amazing. All right, well, we're going to wrap up this episode for now. Please tell the listeners where they can find you. If this is the only episode they listen to, where they can find you, what kind of work, you know, to come to you for, and you know, what kind of questions they can ask and things like that.

Sade Mickelson: Yes. I now work with people from all over the world, and that's the most incredible thing. After years of being in clinic, I can be found on Facebook, Sade Mickelson, on Instagram. I do some—I'm not as much—I'm a Gen Xer that is really trying to keep my social media distraction down, but I do put a lot of thoughtful things out there on Facebook. Hopefully just trying to connect with people around, you know, not only the body health but the emotional wellness that creates or chips away at or destroys body health.

And so my work is one-on-one, six months usually, where we go really deep about what's going right, what's not going as right, and we just look at all of the levels. Physiologically, you can't think your way out of a magnesium deficiency. So we really like to look at that. You know, if you don't have enough copper in your body, it's going to continually thwart you. But also, if we don't really look at the emotional thought processes that are not working for you, that you're not even able to consider on your own without having some form of safety and connection with somebody who spent their whole life building towards mentoring women who do everything for everybody else.

Sade Curry: Yeah. Amazing. All right. Thank you so much.

Sade Mickelson: Thank you. Thank you for sharing your story. You know, that sometimes, I know one of the things that comes with having this kind of story in whatever form it shows up for women who have gone through divorce or gone through, you know, toxic relationships, challenging relationships, is there's that moment where it's like, "I'm that woman." You know?

Sade Curry: Oh yeah. "I'm the cliché." And I'm like, "Well, if all of us are clichés, then, well, maybe that's just the way things are."

Sade Mickelson: Oh yeah. Are you kidding? That starter marriage taught me every freaking thing there ever was to learn. No, she learned any of it. I was like, "This is just a regular"—every time when clients first come to me, I'm like, "There's nothing special about your story, honey. No, nope. This is everyone's story."

Sade Curry: So thank you for sharing so vulnerably here today. Listeners, thank you so much for your time and attention. Make sure you connect with Sade, check out her work. And if you love this story, please rate the podcast. Give us a review on Apple, on whatever platform you're listening to it, and we will work really hard to bring Sade back for Part Two of her story. Thank you for your time and attention, and we'll see you next time.