Welcome to the Stay or Go podcast, where we're changing the dialogue around divorce so that no woman ever stays in her marriage out of fear. Get ready to dispel myths, learn life-changing tools, and build a solid foundation in yourself from which to make your decision. And now your host, me, Britta Joe. Hello. Alrighty, to start off this episode this week, I wanted to just take a little second to drop in here just you and me. My beautiful listener on the other end. Just take a deep breath and say, how are you doing this week? Maybe a little body check-in here at the start. This is something I like to do on my weather of the week calls. We always stop at the very beginning and we just kind of check in with our bodies. I don't know about you, but I realized the other day it is almost the end of April. I was like, oh my God, where has the first third of the year gone? Um, it has been a very, very busy 2026 for me. Maybe it has been for you. Or maybe you feel like time is passing really slowly. But wherever you are at on this beautiful Tuesday here at the end of April, um, I hope you are taking a second to just breathe with me, drop in with me, feel me reaching out through the sound waves to say, hello, my love. I am so excited to be connecting with you. I'm really excited about what I've got in this episode today. Um, this workaround values is going to hopefully shift some big things for you. So I'm very excited to dive into that. But first off, I just wanted to say that right now in the community, things are popping off. Um I'm very excited that tomorrow we will get to have our Juicy Group Tarot workshop with the fabulous Allison Alexander who I interviewed last week. I have been really looking forward to this. I'm gonna get to be on the call and just get to be facilitated and enjoy it with everybody else. Um, so I'm very, very excited for this. And as well, I wanted to mention here at the beginning of this episode that we had a pretty big milestone this week and past having 50 women in the community. So, as you guys know, those of you that have been longtime listeners, um I take bringing women to the community really seriously. It involves an application process and involves meeting with my assistant. We have an NDA and an end user agreement. Like there's a lot of parts to it, but that's intentional. Um, and so it was really exciting and momentous this week to realize that we've reached 50 women. And at the same time, it is such a special time in the community, specifically because it is still this beautifully small and intimate size. And I'm really grateful for that because we've been having our weather of the week calls lately on Fridays. Normally I schedule those for an hour and they've been going over into like an hour and a half just because they are so juicy and so yummy, getting to have all the women come in and have everybody kind of share what's going on for them. So it's really great right now because I am able to get everyone that wants to be on those calls in. And I was just thinking yesterday about how it's not going to be this way forever in the community. You guys know I've said this on the podcast before, like the only constant in life is change. And ultimately, I think when the community doubles, once we reach 100 women in the community, I'm really gonna have to think about. I'm already thinking and strategizing about it, but there are gonna be ways that the community will have to change in the future. But for right now, I am just very in love with this perfectly sized, cozy, badass group of women. And with that in mind, I think it's really an amazing time to join for those of you that are still wanting that small, tight-knit feeling. Um, I actually had a woman, longtime amazing member of my community. She was, I believe, one of my founding members or there really in the beginning. And she actually messaged me the other day to be like, oh my goodness, like it is so different already from when we first started, and her expressing like her gratitude that she was one of the founding members. She's one of the women that got to come to my very first stairgo retreat last year. And I agreed with her. I was like, I know, babe, this is life. Life is just change. Um, but also, you know, dropping in with her as well, that I'm excited that it's still small and it's still really intimate. So for those of you that that is your jam, you maybe you've been thinking about the community for a while, but unsure, um, I want to encourage you that now would probably be a really beautifully ideal time. I also have thought that in the future, you know, right now, I'm getting to run those weather of the week calls. I have a lot of exposure and connection with the women in the community, uh, just because it is smaller. And I think over time, that's just not going to be as possible. So if you've felt a specific connection with me or you're looking for a smaller group, I want to encourage you to do that now, especially with us reaching this milestone of 50 women in the community. As you guys know, super easy to be taken over to our landing page for that. You can text stay or go community to 33377. I also have had this last week some really beautiful 90-minute get unstuck and empowered sessions that I have already been hearing back about the big shifts that have been coming out of those. So before I dive into my episode, I wanted to drop that here as well. That if you are, you know, four months into the year, into 2026, and you are like, ah, I still feel like I am spinning my wills on this whole considering divorce thing. Like, where should I be putting my energy? You can shoot 90MIN over to 33777, and that'll take you right over to the 90-minute page where you can sign up, and you and I will change that this week because we are not getting through another year and feeling like we're right back where we were come the end of 2025. No, no, 2026 is the year of the fire horse. Let's fucking go. Okay, now on to this week's episode. And as you may have seen from the title, right, The Values Gap, Why Your Marriage and Your Life Feels Hollow, we are gonna be talking about values, which honestly, if I look back at my process when I was considering divorce, as I look at a lot of my clients, I think this is a heavily overlooked and very important area that I think when we're considering divorce, we are just so overwhelmed and kind of stressed and dysregulated and our minds are going in a million different ways that we don't think to go, oh yeah, values. We really need to check in on those. Are those still aligned? What's going on with those? And I have to give credit to Tracy Otsuka and her book, ADHD for smart ass women, for driving home to me last fall when I got the book The Importance of Values, because it was in her book as I got to the chapter that she has all about values, that I realized, and this beautiful list that she has in there, how important values are and how much they are driving everything behind the scenes for us. So I actually took Tracy's list and I went and was able to build out even more because her list is specifically structured for women with ADHD. And as I was writing this episode, as I was starting to outline and brainstorm, I realized I really wanted all of you to also have your own list as women considering divorce. Uh, Tracy's list was great for ADHD, and there are a lot of stuff on the list that I also include because they're just values that apply both ways. Um, but I actually found I had a lot more values to add to my list. And not only did I end up creating a list, but I went down a design rabbit hole and ended up creating up an entire worksheet PDF that I actually am going to be giving to my paid subscribers over on Substack. So if you are one of those and you are listening to this episode right now, if you go back to your Substack email over in your inbox from me, you will find the values inventory worksheet attached as well. If not, and you continue listening to this episode and you're like, oh my God, I want it as well, you can pop over to stayargo.substack.com to become a paid subscriber today for $11 a month. It will be over in the show notes. And I have to say, y'all, I am very, very proud of this worksheet PDF that I created. It is jam-packed and it's going to help you identify not only what you value most, which is helpful. It's helpful to understand those values, but then you have to map them kind of out onto your life and be able to see visually where you may be out of alignment, which are a couple other pieces that I added on and developed in my worksheet. So as I'll explain throughout this episode, knowing your current values is extra important when you are considering divorce, because for most of us, often the values we had when we got married to our partners may have changed over the five, 10, 15, hell, 30. I have a one-on-one client who just got divorced who was married for 28 years. The values that she had when she got married have changed since that time period for her. And that's why I wanted to focus this episode on values, because I think it's a really important piece that needs to be added to the dialogue around considering divorce. Now, when most of us think of values or think of the values that we have, if we haven't done the work that this worksheet I've created is gonna teach you that I'm talking about today in this episode, I notice that we often think of our values as things that have been instilled in us by our families of origin, by our religion, or by the cultures that we grew up in, rather than necessarily like things that are intrinsically chosen by us. And that's okay. I mean, it's just something to notice, but we typically learn our values growing up from the people we see around us. And, you know, some of us go the route of actually questioning those and figuring out our own values, which I would say my partner Joe is a great example of this. When we were recently talking about religion, he was telling me how, you know, he grew up Catholic and he just could kind of, there were parts of the religion that he appreciated, but for him, he could just kind of spot the bullshit. You know, he said here were people, you know, saying that they believed in these things or had these values, and yet the way they were showing up in their lives was very opposite to that. So he was able to spot that and and maybe not entirely take on all of the values of the religion because he saw that it wasn't exactly aligned. But I am the opposite of that. And I've actually found for a majority of the women that I meet who are in the process of considering, in our case, what I see most often for us is that the values we were raised with carry through our lives. And even in adulthood, even while we're, you know, maybe we've been out of our home for 10, 20 years, those values, though, that we were taught when we were younger, from our culture, from our religion, from our families, still seem almost fixed and immutable in our minds. And sometimes they will even have this like sacred, untouchable kind of permanence to us, like, oh, no, no, no, you can't touch that. That's that has to stay. And what's really shocking about that is that because we don't understand that values are not fixed and immutable, that values can change, we don't ever take the time to check in and go, wait a second, are these still my values? Do these still align with who I want to be? And if we don't do that work, we end up pouring so much of our time and energy into building lives that are ultimately being driven by someone else's values, whether that's the religion of our childhood's values, the culture that we grew up in, or our parents' values. I really want you to just pause with me for a second and take in the realization that the vast majority of people in the world will go their whole lives and not even question the values they got while growing up. So if we think of that, imagine someone whose soul calls who they are at a really deep level is actually not aligned with the family systems they're born into, into the culture they're born into, in the religion they're born to into, and then grow up never questioning those, never actually realizing that the life they're living that maybe feels uncomfortable or confusingly frustrating or empty and like they're going in circles isn't actually a them problem, but maybe a mismatch of values with who they really are. As you guys know, this was my story. This is this is the almost tragedy of my life that did not happen because thank goodness, seven, eight years ago I woke up to holy shit, my life does not feel like I dreamed it would. It feels empty, it feels confusing, what is going on? And I was very, very lucky to meet a therapist that instead of making me internalize that went, hey, I think the systems you've come from actually just aren't supportive of who you are. Let's figure out who you are and what your values are. So the heart of this episode and the most radical idea that I hope you will take away from this episode is that your values are not fixed eternal laws. No matter what your mother may have said, no matter what your priest or bishop may have said, no matter what the culture tells you, values are not fixed eternal laws. And really, if you if you take and you look at a value and you break it down, at the root of that value is just a concept or an idea that as it gets more and more enshrined in your life, it eventually makes it to the level of being what we would consider a value. And this is the part that nobody gives us permission to do, but I'm going to on this episode with you right now. I am going to give you permission to realize that as an adult, you have the innate sacred right to overhaul every single one of your values if you want to. And no one gets to tell you otherwise. Wow, right? That is that is how I live my life. Like I get to choose my own values. Um, and I want to be clear, right? No one else gets to tell you otherwise. Doesn't mean it's easy. There are lots of people that want to define, at least I found as a woman growing up, lots of people that wanted to define my values for me, that wanted to tell me what was valuable in life and what I should be valuing. And honestly, it served a lot of them to have me value those things. But I found more and more that ultimately the real truth is that once you're an adult, that's your innate sacred right to get to choose your values. Now, this may seem radical, right? Does this for some of you seem like out of control or irresponsible to take the reins on your own value systems like that? If so, I want you to just hang in there with me through this episode because I'm really hoping that by the end of it, you will instead walk away believing what I have come to know, which is that I believe it is actually more irresponsible to not deeply examine your values in adulthood and make sure they're in alignment with who you actually are. So just notice that if when you start examining your values and you start realizing I'm an adult and I get to pick my values and other people call you radical or irresponsible, they may have been benefiting from getting to determine and tell you what you your values were for you. One of the places I wanted to take us in this episode from the start was starting off with what are values? I've been using this word a lot already in the episode: values, values, values. What actually are our values? So let's start off with a quick, easy definition that I got off the internet that will just kind of ground the idea for you. So values are fundamental beliefs, principles, or standards. Remember, I talked about that, the kind of at the core, there are these concepts, beliefs, principles, standards that guide behavior, decisions, and priorities. Okay, so they have an actual effect on our behavior, on the decisions we make and what we prioritize in our lives. And values often represent what an individual or society consider desirable, important, or right. So values are often something, you know, when it says desirable, they're something we want. If we value something, it's something we are wanting to come into our life or to have more of. And this is an important piece too. Values act as internal motivators that shape our character and influence how we act towards others. So values are hella important. Do you guys? Just in this little section, like we are understanding that they can guide our behavior, they can affect our decisions, they can determine what we're gonna prioritize or not. They tell us what is desirable or important or right. And when we as a human are told what's desirable or what we need to be valuing is important, we are gonna be trying to move towards that. And as we move towards that, right, that becomes that internal motivator that takes us on this journey of our life that ultimately, when you realize, oh, that value is what's been motivating them, you see how that value has then shaped your character and influenced how you act towards the other people in your world. Now, I notice that when we think of the word values, we often think of them coming from something much bigger than us. But I want to keep emphasizing in this episode that values ultimately, at the heart of them, just come from thoughts. They are ideas, they are concepts, they are beliefs, they are principles. Ultimately, though, all of those are are empowered only by us believing in them. And if you look around the world, you will see that values are not consistent. Travel to different countries and you will see different values. Look at people from different age groups. You will see different values. Consistently, what we see is that values are not across the board consistent for everybody. Not everybody agrees on what is valuable and what is not, and they change over time. And this is a big piece too. Historically, what I am seeing more and more, and especially what I'm just glaringly seeing at the moment, especially here in the US, is that humans who do not know their own internal values, that have not chosen those from a soul-chosen space. That have maybe, you know, I'll just use myself as an example. My values were chosen by my religion. They were dictated to me. They were not actually chosen from like a clean space of me being like empowered, grounded in myself, and getting to choose from there. Humans that have values like that, where they are more fed them and programmed into them, they are very susceptible to being controlled by institutions and groups and governments that can then feed them certain values. I'm going to be doing an episode later this year about cults. I've finally reached a point in my process where I'm like ready to really take the lid off of that can of worms and talk about it, especially after just recently watching both of the FLDS documentaries on Netflix. Oh my God, the most recent one, the false prophet one. So good, so fascinating. And in both of those, I just once again saw how deeply humans can be programmed by other humans into specific values and beliefs that ultimately can cause them to forfeit their personal agency and make choices that may seem unfathomable from the outside. Highly, highly recommend if you are up for some good, good psychological understanding of value systems and how value systems can be co-opted and corrupted and taken from individuals, and then people can be controlled through their value systems. Those are two amazing. The I believe it's called Keep Sweet and Obra Obey is the first one, and then False Prophet is the second one. Like I said, we'll be talking about this more later this year. Another thing I wanted to clarify in this episode is that often most of us, you know, the way we were taught values growing up is more from a rules-based ideology. Okay. And when it comes from rules-based, the values are used more as an external directive around controlling behavior and kind of like, oh, I'm using this behavior to achieve a result. So I got this a lot in Mormonism where I was told to be obedient because obedience would get me into the highest kingdom with God. So looking at a values list, you know, back then, if the value was obedience, I would have rated that really, really high. Not actually because I truly value obedience, but because I had been trained through this rules-based ideology that obedience was a way to get something that I wanted, like getting into the highest kingdom with God. Or another good example, example of this would be the value of modesty. You know, in Mormonism, we were taught to value modesty, not necessarily when I look back on it, because I really like valued that, but more because it was a means to maintain my worthiness or to make God happy. This way of understanding and teaching values is very different from authentic values that I believe come from our internal compass. And I think if you'd asked me back then, in fact, I know, I don't even think. I know if you'd asked me back then when I was Mormon, if I could tell you the difference between these two, I wouldn't have known there was a difference. I would have been like, no, no, these are my authentic values. This like obedience and modesty. Like I choose modesty because I want to be modest. I'm like having some kind of flashbacks right now from the false prophet with the FLDS girls. Like they are so brainwashed into their values. They really do believe those are their authentic values, but they've never been able to choose values from a truly clean space of their own internal compass. So it can get very confusing if we come from highly manipulative or highly controlling systems, um, you know, narcissistic parents, um, high control religions. But a lot of the values in my list um are more authentic values that I want and that I believe come from our deep personal emotional states or these ways of being that actually feel inherently right to us in our bodies. And authentic values are not a means to an end. They are the actual end itself. So if you do end up doing my worksheet, you will definitely want to remember this piece when you are going through that beautiful list that I have of the values. And even if you don't use that PDF that I've created, it's so important to be checking in and noticing are these values that I'm using to try and reach as means to an end, or is this a value that just intrinsically feels right in my body? Now that we've talked about what values are, the next piece is to understand why values matter so much. And this goes back to the definition that I shared with you that values become our internal motivators. And I would offer, oftentimes, they are even hidden from ourselves. We may not even fully realize what we value, which is just such a terrible shame because even if they're hidden, they are still shaping our character and influencing the choices that we are making in our life. And for some of us, especially for myself in Mormonism or, you know, the young women in the cult documentary I was mentioning, values can take on an immense, almost mythical and godlike weight and power in our lives that can be really astonishing in its inability to change, in its difficulty to see it and recognize that it really is just thoughts and concepts. And thoughts and concepts that remember are driving our behaviors and choices without us perhaps consciously realizing it. One of the places I see this illustrated really, really beautifully is whenever I'm on my 90-minute sessions, because I love to start off those sessions asking two questions right at the beginning. And the first one is, who were you when you met your husband or wife? But my second one is, why did you pick him or her? And when you think about that question, you can maybe even ask it to yourself right now, asking yourself, thinking back on meeting your current husband or wife, why did I pick them? The heart of that question is going to take you back to what did you value back then? Because when you think, why did I pick them? the answer you give is going to show us what you were valuing back then that you saw in them that made you go, yep, this is the person I want to marry. So obviously, from six years of coaching women considering divorce, I've gotten to see a lot of answers to this question. And a few of the ones that I've been fascinated by and seen come up repeatedly are, you know, women who mention dating a lot of abusive partners before they ended up meeting their husband or wife. You know, partners that were maybe avoidant or um insecurely attached or had abuse problems or um addiction problems. And so they were coming from a lot of instability. And at the time, what they really valued and just wanted more than anything else was someone who was calm. So that's what I see often. Um, I'll see individuals who at the time, you know, their answer is well, we got pregnant. So in that case, you know, maybe the value came from religion and believing that if you get pregnant, you have to get married to the person that you got pregnant with. Others I've heard, you know, mention, well, at the time it just made sense financially. So maybe the values were more financial based for why they picked this person. Or one of us would have had to move and it made more sense. Maybe logistics were a big value piece at the time. A big one I hear as well from lots of women is this sense of I didn't really know myself. I was struggling to take care of myself or understand who I was, and he just seemed safe. This is where a lot of women end up marrying partners that feel more like a parent and then later on in life realize they don't want to have a like parent-child relationship with their partner anymore. But unknowingly, that's the very thing they were valuing when they chose them. Now, as I'm sharing some of these, as you may be thinking about your own values or the reasons why you picked your husband or wife way back when, I just want to pause here and let us all land in this space of going, whatever reasons you had, whatever values you had for why you picked your spouse back then, they are totally fine. Okay. I hope you guys know by now from this podcast, I am not big on regret. I am not big on shaming us for the choices we made back then. I really love to come to this space from understanding that, in my opinion, like values are very neutral in that if you decided you wanted to marry somebody because you'd had a bunch of abusive partners and they felt calm, that gets to be your truth. Um, I really do, you know, as you guys know, coming from a religion that really told me all of my values, I love as a coach being able to stay in the neutral space of being able to hold space for my clients, for those of you listening to this podcast, of not subscribing to certain values and holding them up as like the standard for everybody. So ultimately, everyone gets to pick their own values. We all get to have opinions about those values. But I find it's especially important to be coming to this space with a lot of compassion towards ourselves. Because more often than not, many of us, when we look back at who we were, maybe the age we were, the place we were in psychologically, at the time we chose to get married, many of us either didn't know ourselves well or didn't actually know what we valued most back then. And I feel like I am a perfect example of this, just the most beautiful example. Because, as many of you know, when I got married at 19, just barely had turned 19, as a very devout, very by the book little Mormon girl, the decision to get married was driven by values such as not having sex before marriage. That was probably like my very one of the top, top values up there, y'all. That was one of my values. And if you think back to back then, okay, well, if that's my value that I don't want to have sex before marriage, which I would say, you know, the value is chastity. Okay. If that is one of your top values and you are starting to really like someone and you're naturally getting more hot and heavy with them, but you know you're not supposed to have sex before marriage, what are you likely to do? You're gonna go get married. So you don't have sex outside of marriage. If chastity is more important than really knowing someone, really, you know, having a connection with somebody, you're gonna go get married to that person you just met three months ago, which is literally what I did. And I'm not alone in that. I can't tell you the number of Mormon youths that have done this or that have gotten married because they feel so guilty that they're already having sex. It just, it, it now, at the time, guys, growing up, it just seemed like, well, duh, like chastity was something I never questioned growing up ever. Now I am very clear with my children. I am like, you have protective sex and you do not get married until you have had sex with that person and you make sure that that works. Like now I am on the complete opposite other side. I am like, whoa, do not buy that car until you have test-driven it. Because I have seen the damaging, damaging effects of individuals who get married and do not know what that car drives like, physical intimacy-wise. So just such a crazy, like shocking. I think that this is why I love so much getting to share like my contrast and values, because chastity was top of my list at 19. And now it's not even, I mean, you know, I'd have to go into like a, I don't think chastity even made, I don't think it even made the list on my PDF, y'all. Which I'm realizing right now, in this very moment, may have been an oversight on my values list that I created for all of you. So feel free to add if chastity happens to be a value that you really want in that PDF, feel free to add that. But just a good example of big 180 for me around values and how that value heavily influenced why I got married three months after meeting my husband when I was only 19. Another value I had at the time when I met him was I really valued marrying a returned missionary. And I wanted to get married in the temple. So the religious piece was just a huge piece of, you know, instead of really asking, does this person see me? Do they understand me? Do we have similar interests? Do we enjoy spending time with each other? Things higher up on the list were like returned missionary, temple worthy. Um, another value that I had at the time was good looks and physical attraction. So my mom had, my mom really, really valued physical looks and she had trained me in this heavily. In fact, I remember my freshman year in college, I was dating a guy who actually was probably one of the kindest guys I had dated yet, like treated me really, really well. I felt very safe, very seen by him. And we'd been dating for a while, and then I finally took a picture with him because my mom was really begging for one and sent it over. And her, one of her only comments was how unattractive he was. And I broke up with him like a week later. So at the time, I thought, you know, good looks. That's uh, you know, attraction, physical attraction, top of the list. Another value I had was, you know, I wanted to be with someone who wanted to have kids and would allow me to be a stay-at-home mom. So at the time, I really valued being a stay-at-home mom. I have since learned that that value is actually not aligned with my ADHD brain. Oh my God, kill me now with all the executive functioning and so little. Uh, it's just, it just, yeah, stay-at-home momming was like a nightmare for me, 24-7. Um, and then the final value when I got married way back when was I valued money and earning potential. Um, you know, I definitely thought it was cool that my ex-husband had a forerunner and his parents had a summer vacation home. I mean, my mom really valued the finances. Um she and my dad had struggled and disagreed over finances. And so that was what she instilled in me. I mean, my mom was practically drooling when she saw those things. And being a young 19-year-old, I knew nothing else. I had no life experience really. I mean, beyond one boyfriend in high school that it felt different with. I got really caught up in all of these ideas, right? Returned missionary, really good looking. He's gonna let me be a stay-at-home mom. He's got, he's gonna make lots of money, he comes from money. Now, for those of you that know me more now, let's just contrast a few of these with my values now. I already did that a little bit with the, you know, chastity piece. Whoa, has that one changed? I mean, I sometimes joke with Joe all the time. I'm like, baby, if 16-year-old me knew that 37-year-old me was going to be not Mormon and living out of wedlock with her boyfriend and her kids, I would have died. I would have crawled into a hole and died. I would have been like, nope, I'm out. I'm not signing up for this. And yet here I am, and I couldn't be happier. I love it, it's like, it's like this, it's the most surreal thing for me. It's so surreal to me that I feel no pressure to marry Joe or any like, it's uh yeah, I can't even describe it, but it is such a testament to how learning my values, learning what is actually most important to me and what doesn't matter to me has really freed me to live the life that I want to live most. Another couple values that I've like realized were very, you know, undervalued at the time I was 19 were true emotional connection and depth. I mean, how much depth and connection do you think you actually have with someone that you just met three months ago? Right there was, oh, I just still, especially after dating post-divorce and the amount of guys that I dated for three months and then like we and ended dating, and I was like, holy shit, at this point I would have been getting married. Oh, just shocking, shocking. So, you know, big contrast there, right? Of now valuing connection and depth way more than I value, you know, how much money earning potential do they have? Are they Mormon? Are they a returned missionary? Um, and then finally, one of the other ones that came up for me that was really big was like, I value freedom. I value my freedom so much more now than I did back then. Back then, I just wanted someone to take care of me and let me be a stay-at-home mom. That was, I, freedom wasn't even on my radar. And I realized now nothing, in my opinion, for me personally, nothing was more anti-the value of freedom than putting all of my eggs in the basket of my husband's gonna make all the money and I'm gonna be a stay-at-home mom. And even looking at that now, I'm like, oh, that so was religious, patriarchal, cult brainwashing making me believe that that was a safe plan, right? Oh my goodness, to just put everything, all of it, to not invest in myself at all and put it all on him. That was a really good play by that patriarchal cult I got out of. But uh just have to say, too bad, suckers, I got out. Okay. So the issues that you see there in the example that I was sharing is that Mormonism had given me a lot of outer values. Okay. A lot of like things that looked pretty on the outside, but it had not helped me actually learn what my true inner world values are that actually align with the beautifully empathic and wild sea creature that I am. Which just going back to what I just said, right? About having been raised in a patriarchal cult, seriously, what else do we expect? Because what patriarchal religion do you know that actually teaches values that align with a deep, soul-led woman's values? Let that land, ladies. Let that land. Now, as I was just saying, when we've been taught values that focus so much on outer world presentation, this is where we start getting a life that feels hollow. If those outer world values are all being met while our inner world values are starving. So I know lots of us will relate to this. And this is what Instagram fuels. This is the, oh, I have the $10,000 sofa, I have the perfect family photos, and I have all the financial security, and we go on the trips, and it all looks really pretty. But if you don't have the things that actually matter deep down, soul-wise, like for me, some of those are authenticity and emotional safety. Um, I would even add now for me, like a value is neurodivergent safety. I need partners that get neurodivergency and can let me do my spicy neurodivergent self. If you don't have those, you end up living in a beautiful house with nothing on the inside. And that is that hollow feeling. That is when the outside looks beautiful, but the inside feels empty. And this is why it gets so confusing for so many women. I mean, this is where this is where my journey started was like, what is wrong here? And if you don't know that you have a value misalignment, you can end up thinking you're ungrateful. But it's not that you're ungrateful. It's that you're just out of alignment with what you actually really value deep down. And this is why building lives from values that are chosen for us rather than truly chosen at a period of our lives when we are knowledgeable about ourselves and grounded in ourselves, when we get to choose those values by us, that is why building lives like that causes us to create lives that maybe we just don't want at a deep soul level, but we don't realize until much later down the road when we are three kids, couple dogs, a house, a mortgage in. For me, that moment came, you know, 11 years down the road before I realized that my life was not actually the life I wanted, that what I had been sold did not actually work for me body-wise. And even, you know, when I think back to that moment of like 11 years into my marriage when I started going to therapy, when I was struggling with so much severe depression and suicidal ideation and just a miserable, like frustrated, um, you know, putting on the face for everybody else, but really dying inside. I even think back to her and I realized, whoa, even back then when she went into therapy, she had no idea how deep the misalignment of values was. I was barely, I was barely starting to learn what my values were because they had been so stripped away from me by my culture and the religion. And I've come a really long way since that, in the six years post my divorce. Um, and I'm very proud to say that I see the women in my community being able to cover that distance. That, yes, it's taken me like, I think six years post-divorce and like two and a half before that. So, in total, more like eight and a half years to really get to this point. The women in my community, though, are covering that distance in a fraction of the time because they actually have support and love from other women who are on those same journeys. That makes such a huge difference. Now it's all well and good, everything that I've been sharing, but I do want you to just take a second and really let this apply to you right now, right here. Okay. So you may have been thinking of some of the reasons that you chose to marry your spouse and what those values might correlate to. Of course, the worksheet that I've got is going to take you much deeper into that, but I still want you to pause here and play a little bit with letting this land in your body ahead of time. Not just hearing and listening to everything that I'm saying, but actually letting it land. So, in thinking about those values that you may have had when you got married, I want you to consider if you may have chosen someone that you knew would be a good mom or dad. So maybe at the time you one of your values was you were really eager to have children and you saw your partner and you were like, Yeah, I know they're gonna be a great parent. But perhaps at that time you weren't valuing as much your own need. Maybe you didn't even understand your own need for having physical attraction and feeling chemistry with your partner. Maybe you really undervalued chemistry at the time. Or maybe you also, you know, in looking at what a great dad or mom they would be, you undervalued the emotional depth and connection that you felt with them. This I see a lot in women. We want what's best for our kids. So we're like, yeah, they're gonna be a great, this person's gonna be a great parent. I definitely want to marry them. But we're not as attuned to what we are actually needing and valuing and wanting in a connection with our partner. I also want you to notice if maybe you picked your partner thinking, oh, they're gonna be a really good provider, right? Maybe finances had been difficult for you and you just wanted someone to like fix that. But you really undervalued the friendship piece or having someone that you could be playful or adventurous or explore and grow with. But in noticing these gaps, right? Because that's what we're talking about, the values gaps today, I want to emphasize that as much as we now have awareness of this, often for many of us, the path that has led us here in a lot of instances was just unavoidable. And what I mean by that is that we can only make the decisions of our past with the amount of knowledge and insight that we had at the time. And for so many of us, the insight and the knowledge that we had way back when we made these decisions came from our families, maybe from our religions or from what we learned from our friends, our culture, and few lived experiences. So when you are looking to the past, I want you to remember that we don't need to take the knowledge we have now and somehow apply it to our past self and feel ashamed or regretful that we didn't make different decisions. And instead put that energy to being very awake and aware now. Very awake and aware of why we made those decisions in the past and what we are feeling now. Because if we don't understand why we made the decisions we made in the past, we are very likely to repeat that again, which is the last thing that I want for you. And the reason why I'm recording this episode is to remind you of the great news that ultimately, once you are out of your parents' home and you are an adult, you get to pick again. I'm bringing you now, hopefully, firmly into the present. You get to pick again. And this takes us to the worksheet that I created for my amazing SubSec listeners. I want to share a little bit of the list that I created of all of those values. I actually took my list to over 70 different values. And I really love the list that I created because I feel like it genuinely reflects the values that women considering divorce are usually working with and considering. But I wanted to share some of them here so that you guys can kind of, you know, I've talked about a few different values, but I want to list them here so you guys can get a feel for what I'm talking about when I'm saying you get to pick your values. So some of the ones I've got on my list are acceptance, accountability. Maybe as I'm listing these, think to yourself: do I value accountability, adventure, agency, appearance, boundaries, certainty, commitment, curiosity, depth, emotional safety, growth, honesty, independence, multi-dimensionality. If you don't know what that is, I've got a little note that explains it in the worksheet, nature, obedience, peace, physical safety, pleasure, privacy, spontaneity, and sovereignty. So this is just a few. Obviously, this is not the list. And, you know, for those of you that maybe don't want to go do the worksheet, what's most important is just that you find a list of values that you identify as being important to you. Okay. And as I've driven home previously, I truly believe, contrary to what organized religion would tell us, which is everybody needs to have these similar values. I believe values are deeply individual and personal. So for one person, off that list that I just read, like depth and emotional safety might be something that they are like, yes, these are an always value for me. Where maybe obedience and spontaneity might be more of a like, sometimes I value these or never, not really. And it's really helpful to look across a list of values. And when you're noticing, you know, maybe, maybe you're thinking to yourself, well, Britta, how do I know which values are actually mine? I want you to notice how you feel when you think about those values. Because with my one-on-one clients, I actually do this exercise. We do it together where we walk through, I list off each of the values, and they're telling me whether they feel it, you know, in in Tracy Otsuka, I love the way she does it, whether they feel it, I think it's never, sometimes, often, or always. So with my one-on-one clients, when we're doing this, we do not only do a whole other connected piece. Like we have to do both their values, but then we also dive into their character strengths and their talents and skills and their passions, along with identifying a potential life purpose that calls to them. Um, that's some of the more deep work I do in my deep dive with them. But one of the things I consistently enjoy watching is that when we start doing this values work and we start hitting on their always values, when we hit those values, they like visibly, physically get lit up in their bodies. It is something I can see and watch in them whenever we hit on one of those values that is one of their always. So when you're asking me, Britta, how do I know what my values are? I come back to it's a body knowing. And if you're at a point where, you know, maybe you are back at where I was at, you know, when I was first starting to come out of the fog and realizing maybe I was just at the point of this just doesn't feel good. I don't even know what's wrong. Maybe you won't recognize yet what your values are. Maybe you're listing those values and you're like, ah, everything feels murky. If that's the case, the work is not so much, you know, okay, what are my values? But it's more of continuing to ground into like relearning self, self-trust. It's so much of what we're working on right now in the community with this core, strong ground work. That's what I've built this year around, is for those of us that are like, ah, who am I? Maybe I'm coming out of like a highly restrictive, very controlled, narcissistic marriage, and I feel like I've lost myself. That's the work that gets done in the community. Another fascinating way that you can use your values list once you have identified it, is to think back to how you would have rated that value back when you got married. So you guys saw me doing this a little bit with the whole like, oh, back when I was getting married, chastity was top of the list, always kind of value, very different shift to now. Um, in the worksheet that I have, it'll actually have you both do your then, you know, what did I value it back then and what do I value it now? It's important to be able to see those shifts. I also love once we have a values list created, is to take the time to really look at that list and notice do your husband's or wife's values match yours? And this is the piece when we are considering divorce that I see so many women overlooking because we are just so dysregulated by the fear and the overwhelm that we don't really sit down and go, wait a second, whoa, whoa, whoa. What do I actually value? What do I see for myself? What am I wanting for the next 20, 30 years of my life? And are these values aligned with my partners? Had the opportunity to do this with one of my one-on-one clients recently. And I would say it was instrumental in her making the decisions she did because once it kind of quiets all the noise, once you really go through, we'd gone through all those values together, we'd identified hers, and then we were checking in. And she started to see in a way she hadn't before that her husband and her really don't have similar values anymore. And actually, like some of her very top most important values are not even on his radar. And that is such a huge deal when you are making the decision of whether you want to keep investing and building a life with someone that is not on the same page as you. Because if we've got values that are really important to us, like deep connection or engaging communication or emotional intimacy, but those are not valued in our marriage right now, that also really creates that hollow feeling. And this is where a lot of women get trapped in this dynamic of, you know, maybe one of the values, a value that I have on my list is like loyalty. Well, maybe you have this outer value of loyalty to your spouse, to the marriage, or to the commitments you've made. But that can be in conflict with the value you have, perhaps in internal truth or self-connection. Because when we are in a marriage that is currently needing us to abandon our values that are at the deepest core part of ourselves in order to keep that marriage going, that also is going to create a lot of that hollowness and the feeling like we are a ghost in our own home in our own marriage. Another thing I want you guys to watch for when you are looking at your values is that sometimes things we might think we value are actually more fear-based. And I see this especially when my women are rating financial safety as a very high value and at the same time rating emotional safety as a high value. Yet they're staying in a marriage where the financial safety is covered, but the emotional safety is non-existent. And, you know, we look at that and we go, wait a second, while they're valuing both. If they value both, what are they supposed to do here? This is where we have to really like step out of the box and start thinking outside of the box. So in this situation, I would go, okay, if you really value financial safety and you really value emotional safety, but in this marriage, all you can get is the financial safety, then maybe it's time to start working towards developing skills to provide the financial safety value for yourself in order to free up being able to also experience emotional safety with a partner in the future. Do you guys see now how when we get down into the nitty-gritty of our values, this is where we really start to like weigh out the cost and the benefits of staying in the marriage versus getting divorced? And if you don't know, if you don't know what are the most important values to you, like for me, I didn't have the language around this, but I realize now looking back, I valued emotional connection and safety over financial safety. I did. There's no other way I didn't know it at the time, but it's it's obvious because I was listening to my soul calls, and my soul calls were telling me you value this more because I left a marriage with a man who was an investment banker as a stay-at-home mom because I valued and wanted that emotional connection and safety in a in a partnership. I wanted it, I didn't even know if it was possible in a partnership, but I wanted it at least with myself, right? I really valued, I realize now looking back, like I valued freedom more than I valued financial safety. And it doesn't mean I didn't, you know, it's not we, it's not that I value that I abandoned the value of financial safety, but it's that once you realize, oh, I just need, I need to develop more skills to be able to provide the value of financial safety for myself, then you can stop spinning your wills and really start putting them to work. Okay, so that was a lot of fun, extra ways to look at your value list. Once you get it completed, once you get kind of more clear on your values, these are lots of amazing ways that you can come back to that list and start looking at it from different angles and really expanding for yourself your understanding of how values may be operating for you. But before I end this episode, I really wanted to land just a few more key pieces around values that I think are really important from my perspective and that I want to make sure you guys have going forward whenever you're thinking about values. And one of the first ones is that I want to mention how important I believe it is to really allow yourself to be honest about things that you may value that others might consider shallow. Okay. I think the word value like often has, you know, these very big, uh, oh, it's gotta be these values. I will tell you all right now, I value really great sex. I value intimacy. I value a partner that knows what he is doing. And I am 100% certain that there are a lot of people out there that would really consider that to be shallow. That would, you know, oh my goodness, you left your marriage, you got divorced because the intimacy wasn't good enough. Um, or, you know, you that was that that was a reason that you broke up your marriage, right? Oh my goodness, right? I can just feel, I can feel the voices, the people that. Would be like that is way too shallow. You know, that's not a good enough reason to end a marriage. But I want to give you all explicit permission to let yourselves value those things that are valuable to you. Things like appearance, things like attraction, things like chemistry, things like pleasure, things like intimacy, things that anything that you might think is a taboo value or something that other people might not understand, especially in religious contexts, things that are often shamed. When you are reclaiming your life, it is very vital when you are working out the puzzle of self-actualization and understanding yourself. It is vital for you to allow yourself to have those values, to be honest with yourself about what you value. I want to have a partner that I am deeply attracted to physically. That is a really important value to me. Another key that I want you all to remember and think of when you're doing this values work and in the process of considering divorce is that often indecision, what's presenting as you being confused and not knowing whether you want to stay or go is actually at the heart of it just a value conflict. And what I mean by that is that when you reach a point in your life where the values that you built your marriage and your life on suddenly feel hollow and devoid of meaning, that can feel so big to start admitting, right? To start admitting, wait a second, maybe the deep values I thought were important, maybe aren't. I mean, I remember this is this is where I was at when I started realizing, like, okay, maybe Mormonism isn't everything I I thought I was cracked up to be. Maybe uh maybe being a mother and having my whole life revolve around being a stay-at-home mom and that that was going to be everything that was gonna completely, maybe that, that questioning, right? Sometimes that's really scary to do. And so instead, we just go into more of a default of just like living in the spin of indecision and anxiety. And it can be a way to distract ourselves, you know, to help the, I was a 30-year-old when I realized it, right? To help the 30-year-old brain keep trying to live by a 19-year-old's values. But I really want you to remember that your values are yours and yours alone. And you get to get rid of, update, and change any and all of your values. If that feels terrifying right now, if the thought of being that radically um permissive towards yourself, that um open, that uh quote, irresponsible to choose what you actually want, I highly recommend you join the community. Because that just means you have not been around women that are empowered enough. That is that is the brainwashing that so many of us are shedding from patriarchy teaching us that it is irresponsible and radical to choose to live lives that are actually aligned with the values that we feel at the deepest part of ourselves, instead of continuing to just build lives that support everybody else's values, right? Along with that is another crucial piece of understanding and coming back to something I said earlier that whatever you value matters. All right, my loves, it really does. So you guys know on the podcast, I value freedom, I value depth, I value connection. Those are things that are really important to me. But that is not, I don't hold those up as like everybody should value this, everybody should want this life. No, I really don't, I don't think everybody should want this. I don't consider this to be like the best way to do life. Um, what I want for everybody is to know their values and then to live lives in line with their values. I actually bumped up against this exact thing. This is actually why this episode is here this week. Because just last week I was on Instagram, happened to see a woman that I actually knew years ago. In the I knew her right in the like couple years before I got divorced. And at the time, really liked her. And she was also noticing things in her marriage that she was unhappy about. And she ultimately decided to stay. And as I was looking at her Instagram, I found myself really comparing myself to her. I swear, this is like, this is so what social media just does. I and my brain especially, I know it's got to be like an ADHD thing because it does not do a good job of filtering and like looking at reality and or looking at non-reality and being able to be like, this is curated, Britta. This is not real life. Like my brain intakes things and really is like, oh, that's I have to slow down and be like, wait a second, what was that? But my brain had been looking through some of these photos, seeing the things she was doing. And, you know, some of the things that I just seeing, you know, what her life is, it seems to me like some of the things she values are beauty and getting to travel and getting to go on vacations and home designs and homemaking and having the money to spend on all of that. And as I'm looking at all of these, you know, these are all fun things that I would absolutely love to have in my life as well. And when you see somebody else having those things, it sometimes creates that, you know, compare and despair. Wait a second, like, uh, maybe I should have, you know, should I have, would I have, could I have, my brain was doing all of it. And then I came back to my values work. And I went and I wrote down my list of my values to remind myself. And lo and behold, y'all, that's where I realized, and what this episode came out of is that when I looked back over those values, I saw that yes, I mean, sometimes I really value beauty, sometimes I value vacations, sometimes I value home design. But when we get to the values that are my always, my core values, those are not them. So even though I initially looked at her life and I felt like, oh, mine is not as successful in comparison. When I rooted back into my always values, values like justice and equality and authenticity and depth and freedom, I saw very clearly that the foundation for a rich and meaningful life for me looks different than what I need. And honestly, you know, her values, I don't know, right? I don't know her well enough to know this, but I wanna, I wanna believe that hopefully her values, you know, the values that she has still allow her to live her values within the constructs of Mormonism. For me, the values like justice, equality, and freedom, I could not live those values while still being in that box. That just wasn't a fit for me. And that is why the most important thing coming out of this episode is knowing your values for yourself. Because I tell you, you cannot figure out your values by looking at others and what works for them. My loves, that is the quickest way to get sidetracked off into somebody's L, somebody else's life and spending your time building something that ultimately leads you into a life that feels really hollow. So with this whole episode in mind, I want you guys to hopefully walk away from this, understanding and believing, like I do, that the most responsible thing you can do as an adult is to slow down and really take the time to re-examine your values and do it regularly, because values change over your lifetime. To make sure that you are actually building and pouring into a life that is aligned with who you are on a deep soul level rather than on what might look pretty on the outside or what you were told to want, but may ultimately, as I know so many of you know, end up feeling deeply hollow in your day-to-day lived experience. You guys know, as someone who has tried it both ways, I built my first 30 years of my life on my religion and my parents' values. And I can say from absolutely hard-fought, hard-won experience that the greatest gift you can give yourself is reclaiming your right to choose your own values and taking that time to re-examine what you were taught and if it actually still resonates with who you are now. I have seen over and over in my own life and in my clients' lives that we are the safest and best versions of ourselves when we do this deep work of examining our values and becoming our own central authority as women. Contrary to what religion or patriarchy taught me, that I was deep down unreliable and dangerous, and I needed God to tell me my values or a man to tell me. I have seen in myself and in the women I meet the exact opposite. We genuinely care about the people we love and the lives that we are building. And when we reimagine our lives to be more aligned with our deepest values, life gets better. It gets deeper and richer and more fulfilling for not only us, but the generations to come. And I truly believe that that is the magic of understanding values and that you get to choose them for you. All right, my loves. That is what I had for you all today. As I said at the beginning of the episode, we've got an amazing workshop happening tomorrow in the community with my fabulous guest from last week, Allison Alexander. I cannot wait to have her come in along with two more incredible guests that are gonna be coming in next month, one of whom will be teaching us some human design. And another, I'm excited you'll both get to you'll get to hear from them soon on the podcast. Um, another one of my guests is gonna be helping the women in the community create an internal sanctuary for themselves. So you are not gonna want to miss out on getting to join those guests with us in the community. If you've been wanting to join, you can text stay or go community to 33777. And if you have been itching to hang out with me one-on-one, remember that I've got 90 kick-ass and amazing minutes set aside for you and I to drop in together and get you unstuck and empowered, you can go sign up for that by texting 90MIN, all one word to 33777. And if instead you are wanting more than 90 minutes, maybe you're wanting that slow, deep burn change the rest of your life kind of work with me. If you are one of my one-on-one coaching clients for that deep dive work, go to the show notes to be taken over to my three-month one-on-one coaching container. Till next week, my loves. Go figure out those values.