The Femme Cast
Welcome to The Femme Cast—the podcast for women who are truly ready to break free from toxic relationship cycles, choose themselves, and become a magnet for the love they deserve.
I’m Maria — Master Energy Healer, Radical Self-Love Leader, and Relationship Mentor.
I work with the women who are cycle breakers, grid shakers, and truth layers — the brave souls who came here to dismantle the inherited beliefs that told them they had to chase love, prove their worth, and beg to be chosen.
I help them break free from the karmic cycles and generational patterns that keep them stuck in toxic relationships and self-abandonment — so they can unapologetically choose themselves, reclaim their inherent worth, and become magnetic to soul-aligned love, expansive opportunities, and the liberated life they were born to lead.
Without ever shrinking, settling, or self-abandoning again.
I’ve been where you are, stuck in cycles of chasing love, begging to be chosen, and abandoning myself again and again in the name of love. But I turned my pain into purpose, and now I’m here to help you do the same.
Each week, I share personal stories, actionable insights, and a blend of spiritual and practical tools to help you heal from past wounds, reclaim your self-worth, and rewrite your love story. You’ll hear everything from vulnerable truths about my own journey to breaking toxic patterns to empowering lessons that will guide you toward creating the healthy, loving relationships you crave.
Join me as we say goodbye to self-abandonment, people-pleasing, and unhealthy dynamics, and hello to radical self-love, emotional freedom, and true empowerment.
It’s time to reclaim the version of you who never had to beg to be chosen.
You ready?
Let’s do this.
The Femme Cast
Hurt People, Hurt People — And Why Compassion Doesn’t Mean Tolerating Bad Behavior
We’ve all heard the phrase “hurt people hurt people.” It’s meant to encourage understanding — and yes, there’s truth in it. But for empathic, codependent, or anxiously attached women, this well-meaning advice can quietly become a trap that keeps you tolerating what you should be walking away from.
Yes, you can see the wounded child inside someone and understand where their pain comes from. Yes, you can choose compassion over bitterness. But compassion is not the same as permission. Understanding someone’s trauma doesn’t mean you have to let their brokenness break you.
In this episode of The Femme Cast, I’m breaking down:
🎤 How “don’t take it personally” can actually feed self-abandonment patterns
🎤 Why over-compassion can keep you stuck in toxic dynamics
🎤 The truth about emotional intelligence (it’s not about never getting triggered)
🎤 How to protect your peace while still holding empathy
🎤 My personal story of confusing compassion with self-sacrifice
🎤 The magnetic power of taking a strong stand for what you don’t want
If you’ve been asking yourself, “Why do I keep abandoning myself in relationships?” or “How do I choose myself, break the cycle, and become magnetic to aligned love, purpose, and expansion?” — this conversation will shift how you see compassion forever.
Because the most loving thing you can sometimes say is “I want you to eat… but you don’t get a seat at my table.”
Are you healing from cheating? Betrayal? A heartbreak that not only broke your heart but broke your life?
If so, join me for She Rises: A FREE & LIVE 90-minute healing and activation experience for the woman ready to alchemize the pain of lies, betrayal, and being cheated on into unapologetic power, radiant confidence, and the woman she was always meant to be.
Betrayal doesn’t get the final word — you do.
https://thefemmecast.kit.com/masterclass
Hey you guys, what is up and welcome back to the show. I am so excited and grateful to have you here. Welcome, if you guys are new. Today we're going to have a little bit of a more serious conversation, also sparked by comments on Instagram on someone else's post, who I have a lot of respect for again, but said something that I did not agree with and I shared my well, I did agree with to a degree and then I also kind of gave my two cents on it and it sparked so much conversation in the comments.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So I know it's something that people need to hear and that is this whole idea of how hurt people hurt people and why compassion does not mean tolerating bad behavior, and I want to make that explicitly clear. Like and this is why I became a trauma coach, because I do a trauma informed coach, because I do hear a lot of these different ideas and expectations kind of thrown around a lot in the spiritual community and I don't always think that they're healthy this, all this whole idea of her people, her people, and peace, love and light and unconditional love, and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, all great, but you have to be, you know, you have to be. What's it called? Everything with a grain of salt, you know. That doesn't mean because you're unconditionally loving or hurt people hurt people or peace, love and light and all that BS that you have to tolerate mistreatment or bad behavior or abuse. We still get to draw the line and we still get to not like it. Like it's okay to not like it, it's okay to be angry, it's okay to react and respond and have an emotional reaction to something that someone else is doing or saying that is hurtful or bad. I don't want to take permission away from people to feel what they're meant to feel. There's no bad emotion. It's only in what we choose to do with it that it becomes bad. So I really just want to, you know, make that clear, like I think so in this particular post, and I have it written down and this is what was said. So when you're an emotionally intelligent person, you can't really hate someone because you know why they are the way they are. Most people see an adult, but you realize that what you're looking at is a wounded child that never really healed, that's stuck in an adult's body. So when you see this, you stop taking everything so personally. You understand that the person is just projecting their pain, their trauma and their fears onto others. Hurt people, hurt people. It doesn't excuse their behavior, but it does explain it and you can take a step back and let people have their experiences at that point and not get all wrapped up in it, and then don't let their brokenness break you. Okay, so that was that was the. That was the point that was being made in this reel, which I mean.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:For the most part, I do agree with a lot of what's being said. The part that I don't agree with and I want to, I want to emphasize that, to use the word, you don't hate somebody, and hate is a strong word, and I don't know if any of us ever really hate people. I mean, I can think of a couple of people that I hate in mainstream media right now because their unhealed trauma and their projections of their unprocessed pain is creating havoc. So I choose to hate them. I'm sorry If that makes me an uninvolved person, then so be it, but that is how I am processing it and I'm not. I'm not, like you know, going out on social and spreading this hate or you know, like I'm. You know I'm doing what I can to be the kind of person I wish they would be. So I'm still using this hate in an empowered way, like do you see the difference? It's not what you feel, it's what you do with what you feel that makes the difference, and that's that's what I always want to bring home, okay, so, um, so let's talk about this truth.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Okay, hurtful behavior often comes from unhealed pain or trauma. And other people right? Yes, when people are acting in hurtful ways, in ways that create pain and trauma in others, they're usually acting out of their own unhealed trauma. Okay, yes, that is 100% true, and for that I always do bring a level of sympathy and compassion for that person, or empathy and compassion for that person. Okay, but here's where the buck stops, okay, here's where I draw the line Number one we all have a choice. Okay, and this is how I'll paint it. We all have trauma. We all have a lot of unhealed trauma. Whether or not we hurt other people is a choice. So, for whatever reason, they're making the conscious choice to hurt other people, and that, for me, is not okay. So, although I can have compassion for why you're hurting people and why you're projecting all this unhealed trauma onto the people around you, although I can have compassion for it and I can empathize with it. I don't need you to be part of my reality. Do you see the difference? I can still say I see you, I hear you, I feel you, but that is, that is not for me.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Um, and somebody, I think, wrote in the comments and it was such an amazing quote I'm like, oh my God, so well said, it wasn't theirs, they had gotten it from somebody else and the quote um, and it was apparently. It was a famous quote and I was going to Google it before we hopped on to record but I forgot. So that's what it is, um, so if you guys know, let me know in the comments, if you know who quoted this. But the quote was something along the lines of I want you to eat, but I don't want to give you a seat at my table. You know what I mean. Like I want you, I don't wish you, but I don't wish harm come to you. Like I wish you well, but you don't need a place in my life. Like I can set a boundary and putting up with.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Sometimes all this conversation of bad people hurt people, just gives people this permission, especially women, especially women who are caught in toxic relationship cycles who are constantly like self-abandoning and getting wrapped up in these toxic relationships with toxic, emotionally unavailable, maybe even borderline, abusive or narcissistic men. Because I've said this, oh, but hurt people, hurt people, he's just acting. No, you walk away. No one, no one's pain, unprocessed trauma or anything is reason enough to accept being treated badly by that person and it does not make it okay. So I want to make that perfectly clear. Like I mean again, although the post said they won't, you won't hate, you can.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Nobody emotionally um, mature or intelligent I can't remember the word that they use would hate somebody who was acting out of their unhealed trauma. Okay, fine, maybe don't hate them, but you don't need to share a life with them either. You don't need to be in relationship either. They don't get to have a seat at your table. You know Both can be true. You can have compassion, you can have empathy and not allow them to abuse you or mistreat. You Both get to be true. So, even though you know it's so easy to get caught in that trap of you know well, hurt people hurt people. So he's hurt. It's not your job to mend them. It's not your job to self-sacrifice for them.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Please don't use that as an excuse to stay in a situation that is unhealthy or hurtful or painful for you, or where somebody is mistreating you or lying to you or cheating on you or whatever. The situation is. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Nothing can justify you staying in a situation that is painful for you because of their unhealed trauma.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:If they have unhealed trauma, that is theirs to deal with, and some people unfortunately don't want to deal with their unhealed trauma. They don't want to get the support or the help that they need. They don't want and we cannot force them to do that. We cannot make them do that, but we also can't be the band-aid solution for them and the crutch that makes it easy for them not to address it. Do you know what I mean? Because by staying, if that person were to ever decide, okay, yeah, I've got some unhealed trauma and I'm treating people badly and I've really hurt so-and-so and I should really take a look at this. Right, they're not going to do it while you're sticking around, they'll do it when you leave.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Because as long as you're sticking around, it's like, yeah, on a subconscious level, they probably know they've got some unhealed shit they need to address, but it's like, yeah, but things are fine, why rock the boat? You know she's here, she's putting up with it, so I'll just leave it as is. You know and I say this lightheartedly, but it's not lighthearted like there's nothing lighthearted about it. You know, when you're tolerating, it's really easy and I've been there before when you're tolerating abuse from someone and mistreatment from someone, it's so easy to use everything in their past as an excuse for why they're treating you badly. The bad relationship they had with their father, or maybe the completely unavailable father, right, the overbearing mother that made them feel helpless and that constant needed to, you know needed to be mothered and doubted on. And you know taken care of. You know constantly it on and doted on and and. And you know taken care of.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:You know constantly, um, the feeling insecure as a child and never really feeling like they fit in. Or you know, being abused or bullied at school. Or you know, whatever their story was, whatever they experienced, it's so easy to take that and say, okay, well, you know that's why he's the way he is. You know he had an absent father, he had an emotionally overbearing mother. He's so insecure, there's so much rage in him. You know he suffered the loss of a friend at a very young age or whatever it was. And you know that's why he acts the way he does and that's why he gets so angry sometimes and that's why sometimes he's so emotionally unavailable and, you know, says mean things or does mean things or does things that he knows will hurt me. And you know, I know it comes from that little boy in him that was hurt so badly and has never processed what he experienced.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:I've been there. I've been there where you constantly make excuses for them and why they treat you badly. You know you can justify all of it right From all the pain and suffering that they've experienced, from all the hurt, from all the letdowns, from all the things that they were unable to express because they were never given the safe place to do it. I get it. I get it and I know how easy it is to, you know, fall for, not fall for, but give in to ideologies like, well, hurt people, hurt people. Like it's almost like a sigh of relief, it's like, okay, I don't have to leave, I can just stay with them and it's okay.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:See, this makes sense because I'm empathizing with their traumatic, you know their unprocessed trauma, and I get it and I'm being sympathetic to that. I'm being empathetic to that, I'm being a good and loving person. You're not. You're actually self-abandoning and the only thing that you're doing is teaching this person that it is okay to treat people badly and that there is no consequence for it. When there is a consequence for people treating people badly, you know it doesn't have to be a harsh consequence, like I'm not saying these people should be thrown in prison, but well, it depends, um. But you know, like there is consequences for treating people badly, even if it does come from unprocessed trauma, because your unprocessed trauma cannot be is not the excuse for treating people badly and possibly traumatizing somebody else.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:This is where we get generational trauma is because we keep traumatizing one another from one generation to the next, passing on the same painful experiences. Right, it has to stop. And it comes with making the uncomfortable decision to say I see you, I recognize that you have a lot of unhealed pain and trauma, and, as much as I would love to be able to be here for you and hold space for you to move through, whatever it is you're moving through, I am not going to let you hurt me anymore. I am drawing the line. I am setting a boundary, I am walking away. You no longer get access to hurting me, and that is a decision that we all get to make and not feel bad about.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Okay, yes, sometimes you know we talk about, you know, being unconditionally loving. You have to accept the person for all. Okay, sometimes you know we talk about, you know, being unconditionally loving. You have to accept the person for all. Okay, yeah, that's fine. But sometimes accepting a person for all of who they are, in their light and their dark, means I accept you, I see you, I see all of you. I'm not trying to change you. This is who you are. I accept it, I love it. I wish you well. Change you this is who you are. I accept it, I love it. I wish you well. But you don't have a seat at my table. You don't have access to me.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:If you're going to be hurtful towards me, because I also have unconditional love for me, and because I have unconditional love for me, I can say without guilt and without shame that you don't get to project your unhealed trauma onto me. If you want to deal with your trauma, if you want to hold on to your trauma and keep it with you, that's fine, that's that's yours. Keep it by all means. You do what you see, what you think is best, but for me, I know what's good for me, and what's good for me is making sure that I set a boundary so that your trauma does not impact me. And that's where I think he said, you know, in the end, when he said don't let their brokenness break you. Right, and I think that's what he was trying to get at and at the end of the day, is you know, don't let their brokenness break you, and be able to set the boundaries and be able to take a step back and say that, you know, recognize that their behavior has more to do with them than it has to do with you. And that part I totally agree with right. When people are behaving badly, it has everything to do with them and very little to do with you.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:The part that I just I think I really struggled with is this whole idea that you know we can't and again he used hate, but you know it can easily be misinterpreted to we have to always be loving and accepting of people who treat us that way, and that's just not true. We can get angry, we can get hurt. We can even experience hate in these situations, especially when that person's unhealed trauma and making bad decisions and taking bad actions impacts my life. And, let's face it, sometimes that does happen and it does create mess for us that we need to clean up right or think about or address, and we can absolutely hate that. And again, it always comes down to what not what you feel that's bad, but what you choose to do with those emotions.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So I choose to remember, even though I may feel hate or anger or resentment or whatever it is that comes up for me when I'm in these situations, with these types of people. I may feel all these things, but I choose to set a boundary and say you no longer get access to me if this is how you're going to treat me. I choose to. If I can't change their behavior, how can I show up in a way that is aligned with how I would want? Like, how can I, you know, lead by example, right? How can I process my pain, my anger, my resentment, my anger in a healthy way, rather than, you know, just taking that pain and reprojecting it onto somebody else and, you know, letting that cycle of trauma continue, right? These are all choices that we get to make, and I think you know when we talk about you know, like you said, being an emotionally intelligent person.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:I don't think there's anything about emotionally intelligence that says you deny yourself certain feelings. That's the part I think I disagreed with the most. I think, as an emotionally intelligent person, you get to feel all your feelings and process them in a healthy way and understand what's behind them, right? So I can feel all these icky emotions. I can feel hate, I can feel anger, I can feel rage. I can feel all these things, but I can channel them in healthy ways to figure out where do I need to set a boundary, what truth do I need to share, how do I want to show up in the world in a way that aligns with what I believe in and what I deem to be healthy, and how can I break the cycle of trauma and come to that empowered like, make that empowered decision, without having to resort to denying myself certain emotions or shaming myself for having certain emotions? I don't think that that's healthy. I think that's actually very unhealthy, um, I think that's that's actually very unhealthy, um.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:And so I just wanted to kind of, you know, give everyone permission to say you don't have to like it when somebody treats you badly, you don't have to make excuses for it or or spend like copious amounts of energy trying to analyze why they're treating you badly and where it's coming from and where is the trauma and why are they behaving in this way? And is it because their father didn't love them or wasn't available to them, or is it because their mother smothered and was overbearing with them? Let all that go and just take people at face value and how they treat you, and if they don't know how to treat you well, it does not matter what they've been through. You still get to choose whether or not those people get a seat at your table and you have every right to say you do not get a seat at my table if you treat me badly and not feel an ounce of guilt or shame over it. Even if they have unhealed trauma, that is theirs, not yours. Okay, now I get it.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:It's different, with different types of relationships and different dynamics. Obviously, I get it. Everything is everything I say. Take with a grain of salt. Everything has, you know, is a million shades of gray and each situation is different, but I'm just trying to tell you. You have that choice, it is available to you and nobody's going to fault you on it. And if anybody were to fault you on it, tell me I'll kick their ass. I will go ghetto on their ass if they do.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:But seriously, please don't hear these things and use it as an excuse to tolerate bad behavior from people. Because I know, when I was at the beginning of my spiritual journey, I was all up in this unconditional love and you know, you know all their toxic behavior is. You know it's and is like it is a reflection of our own wounding and our own energetic blueprint. And that's how I got to do a lot of this work. But I don't have to tolerate it. I don't, and that was a hard lesson.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:I don't have to be unconditionally loving to somebody who is toxic. I don't. Um, I mean, yeah, I, yeah, I can unconditionally love and accept them and I can see their light, I can see the goodness in them, but I don't have to deny their shadow. I don't have to deny the traits about them that I don't like or that treat me badly or that hurt me or that are disrespectful. I get to acknowledge all of that and I get to decide who sits at my table based on that. So please don't let anything take the power of choice away from you. You get to decide always who gets a seat at your table, without guilt, without shame. People without guilt, without shame. I don't care what their story is. If they don't treat you well, you can walk away and hold your head up high saying, hey, listen, I tried to love this person. I tried. They were hurtful towards me, I had to walk, that's it. You know you don't have to explain yourself. You don't have to justify yourself. You don't have to prove yourself. You don't have to.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Don't take these ideas that you hear online, that that people love to pontificate all the time and regurgitate from one channel and one profile to the next. You know it's not like that. Um, and I hear so many. I I sometimes. I think I want to do an episode on all the stupid sayings that I hear in the spiritual community that actually are very unhealthy and very, very, very toxic.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:You know when it comes right down to it and you know, hurt people, hurt people is one of them. Yeah, it's a good explanation to understand why people are hurting, but just because you're hurt doesn't mean you automatically hurt people. There are many people walking around here in a lot of pain and a lot of unhealed trauma that are still not making the choice to hurt other people. I'm guessing you're probably one of them. If you're listening to this podcast, you know, I'm guessing you've probably had a fair share of your own trauma and your own painful experiences and you ain't walking around here like trying to, like you know, project your trauma into other people. Maybe you have. Maybe you have, maybe you've made that mistake. I know I have.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:I know I've projected a lot of my pain onto other people many times, right, but I'm taking the steps to rectify that, and so are you from being here, you know, um, and to be accountable for, for our behavior and to show up as the best version of ourself, and that's all we can ask for at the end of the day. And if somebody is not wanting to do that, that is not on us, that is on them, right? So for you, that means being able to walk away without guilt or shame, knowing that you're doing the right and the healthy thing for you, because even though we can love and accept everyone and accept that hurt people hurt people, we still have to have unconditional love for ourselves, and that means being able to set a boundary and to say when and what we will and won't tolerate in our relationships. And that gets to always be a choice that we make, and we can make it anytime and we don't need to feel bad for it or feel like we need to justify it, okay. So compassion, yes, but does not equal tolerance, right?
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Compassion does not mean tolerating bad behaviors. You teach people how to treat you by taking a stand for yourself and being clear about what you will and won't tolerate, and you set the standard for your relationships going forward. Because I can tell you right now, every time I tolerated a relationship that treated me badly, I only attracted more relationships, because it's almost like an energetic intention when we tolerate people who treat us badly. It's almost like an invitation for more people to come and treat us badly into our lives, you know. So you know, resist the urge to self-abandon, resist the urge to want to justify their bad behavior and make up a really good reason for you to stick around through it. Because, at the end of the day, that's what we're doing.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Because I was, you know I would have I love, I would have loved to stick around with some of those individuals who were treating me badly. It was so easy, oh. But see, he's just, he's so wounded on the inside and that, that, that that you know I would make up all these romance. I would even romanticize these stories of the wounded dog who doesn't love that love story, you know. So, please, when you find yourself wanting to justify their bad behavior with trauma and childhood wounds, and listen. Yes, that may be where their bad behavior is coming from. I'm not discrediting that, I'm not. I'm not insensitive to that, I'm really not. But that is not yours to bear, that is theirs.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:You, even though it comes from a wounded place, even though it comes from where you still get to choose yourself and say this actually, this is not how I want to be treated, and I understand where it's coming from and I, you know I send you all the love in my heart, but no thanks, I can't like, I cannot put up with this. I cannot accept this. I cannot tolerate being treated in this way. That, to me, is not healthy. Anytime a relationship is hurting you, consistently doing things that are, that are hurtful or mean spirited, that's not to say that you know we're not going to have arguments in our relationships. Of course we are. Of course we are. But when the relationship is mean, it's hurtful and it makes you feel bad about yourself. You do not need to be in that relationship. I don't care who it is, I don't care who the person is. But you know and I get that you might not always be easy to make that decision.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:But if you can walk away from this podcast and this episode knowing that you can make that decision to not want to be with this person, to not like this person for the way that they treat you, to not feel good about the way that they're treating you, even though you know it's coming from their own unhealed shit, that's okay. You're allowed to have your feelings, you're allowed to set your boundaries, you're allowed to be clear about what you will and won't tolerate and you get to decide, going forward, what you do with those feelings that are coming up for you, no matter how icky they might be. It is all okay. There is no right or wrong emotion, only what we choose to do with it. So if you take anything away from this podcast, please take away that and please stop letting these other influencers kind of fill you with these ideas that you need to tolerate bad behavior from people because that is the emotionally intelligent and unconditionally loving thing to do, because that is absolutely not the case. Emotional intelligence means you get to experience a full breath of human emotion. You just get to do it in a very healthy way and you get to examine what that means for you and how that's trying to evolve you. That's all Okay. So please don't let anybody deny you from feeling something that is coming up for you. Okay, full permission to feel your feelings and do the right thing. So hopefully that helped. I hopefully.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:I've been having a really hard time trying to communicate today. I don't know why it's taken several takes. I've recorded two episodes. I think each one took 10 takes, so hopefully that lands well. That resonates well. Let me know in the comments if it did. If this is a complete hot mess, let me know. I will never record in this state, ever again. And if you love this episode, please leave a positive rating and review on Apple, itunes or Spotify or wherever you're seeing this. Until next time, you guys. Massive love.
