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. Do we have a super juicy and yummy episode for all of you today? Um, I want to preface this episode by saying if you have not read the two previous articles that I released last week prefacing this episode, you are gonna want to do that, my babes. I am definitely getting into my jam over there on Substack. It has been such a delight to start writing. Um, it's been a long time since I uh was in that format. I did it a lot in the beginning of my business, you know, before I had the podcast. But really, the podcast has been my main place to share my ideas over the last year and a half. And to drop back into writing recently, y'all. I was just been like, oh, this is another medium that I just can't get enough of. So um, this topic, the good guy dilemma. I knew that I wanted to write a couple episodes. Actually, I thought I was gonna write not an episode, an article over on Substack, which of course, as we all would expect, quickly devolved into two articles. Because that's how we roll over here, y'all. Why say it in five words when you can say it in 20? That's just me. With me, more is more. You're gonna get more. So yeah, both of those episodes um, God, I am really gonna struggle, y'all, switching my verbiage from episodes to articles, but very different things. Those two articles dropped on Substack last week. And one of the things I love about those articles specifically is they are open. So they are free for everyone. The commenting is only for my paid subscribers, but both of those articles are available to anybody that wants to pop over and see them. And if you're going to listen to this episode, which this is our beautiful free episode of the month at the start of this gorgeous month of October, you are gonna want to have that background. Trust me, because there's a lot of historical information, emotional context that I explore in those two articles that I'm not gonna be talking about here, because this episode is really gonna be more of diving into the nitty-gritty with y'all. Um, and I talk about that, you know, coming off the second article, kind of prefacing where the podcast is gonna land in this kind of three-part saga of really diving into this topic that I know is so big for so many of you. You know, really where this is emerging is I had a woman in my community reach out. It's been a couple months now. Thank you for your patience, my love. I know you know who you are, um, asking me to do an episode on The Good Guy. And I know I even hinted at it like three or four episodes ago. It's taken me a while, y'all, to get these articles birthed out into the world. Um, but I'm so delighted to have this be the culmination of all of that work with this final episode that hopefully will take those of you in the middle of this dilemma deep into the heart of what it's like, and hopefully provide a lot of shifts and perspectives for you. You know, that's the heart of what I do in coaching is seeing where your brain is at currently, seeing where it's getting hung up, seeing where you want to go, and helping you rewrite those stories, shift those patterns in your brain, um, tweak those beliefs in the ways that you need to move into a future you most desire. So that's a little bit of prefacing for why we're here at this episode. Those of you tempted to keep listening, stop, go read those two articles on Stubstack. My beautiful assistant Alex will have them linked in our show notes and then come back here. For the rest of you that have already read those articles, let's dive the fuck in. I'm so excited. Okay, so to start, as you all know, anyone who has ever considered divorce can tell you how excruciating our most intimate relationships can be when we are not aligned with each other in the partnership and when our standards and desires for what that container is going to entail do not match. And I also want to start this episode off by saying that I do really get the excruciatingness of this whole process. And kind of opposite from what I did in those articles on Substack, you know, in those articles, I wanted them to really land with a very kind of like bold and brain-jolting approach. So if you read them, you know they were a little more like my strong, fiery big sister energy that's like, hey, patriarchy be fucking your brain. Let's like clean that up. In contrast to that today, though, I want this episode to be the cuddly, like, I've got your back. Yes, I know your brain is just topsy turbine you right now, sis. But I've got you. Let me get down into the weeds with you and into the nuances of the internal drama that I spoke about in those articles. So where those articles were a little bit more of like, let's go. This one's gonna be, hey, let's actually talk about that drama. Yes, we know from those articles, this drama is coming from our own centering of men and patriarchal programming, but that doesn't change what it actually feels like to be stuck in the middle of that spin of the drama, to be pondering and obsessing over these questions that keep you up at night and really agonizing over this decision. And I understand intimately what that is like. When I say I get it, it's because y'all, I ultimately lived it as well. Um, so some of you will remember when I was considering divorce, I too felt intimately like I was divorcing the good guy. In my instance, there was no physical abuse, no affairs. Many of you know I was raised in, you know, Mormonism, where divorce was heavily, heavily shamed, not even talked about, not even considered. So, you know, that on top of no affairs, no physical abuse. Um, he provided a home and abundant income. So there was no like financial issues. He loved me and the kids. And from the outside, y'all, it looked better than fine. It looked in, I would say absolutely enviable. Like I know there were people who saw us, especially when we were back in Oakland, when we were in our, you know, our church ward, who saw us as the gold standard of what a marriage should be. Really, really pretty on the outside. And yet inside, what I was experiencing personally was very, very deep pain. And, you know, even though there wasn't physical abuse, there was narcissistic and emotional abuse that I can see now wasn't so much conscious cruelty on his part. In fact, like not at all. It was not him being consciously cruel, but it was his coping mechanisms born out of his own childhood trauma. And those still played a part, as did mine. You know, on the flip side of that, I can also see how I had my own codependent, anxious attachment, protesting behaviors that were all just playing their part in our marriage. And I also want to kind of set the scene that I was deeply, deeply hopeful, y'all, that things were gonna work out. I had, when I was, you know, doing the episode on the six years, I mentioned that I kind of went back and read some of my journals. And y'all, I had blocked a lot of that out. Just how much I was in agony over the confusion, the hating myself, the wanting him to be different, the hoping we could change. I mean, y'all, I had two plus years of excruciating moments of thinking we were making progress, thinking we were on the same page, thinking he was seeing me, realizing we weren't. Um, I don't want to like dig into all of that, but I just want to really help you all coming off of those articles, understand that yes, I have a very different perspective six years out now, and I can see kind of what that was, but I definitely lived it, walked it, went through it, especially coming to the end of my marriage. And if you had talked to me back then, if we could bring Brita back in from six, seven years ago, she would have absolutely been tangled in the exact same drama I wrote about in those articles. She would have been spinning in the guilt, the shame, the endless list of reasons why I should stay, the hope that maybe if I just tried harder or I was different, it would all click into place. And I would honestly say that the only way I came through that was with the help of my therapist and my best friend, who was becoming a coach at the time. It was through them helping catch those thoughts and catch those feelings and helping me rework them and understand what they were doing to me and how they were hijacking me and keeping me in this cycle that I was able to come through it. So when I speak about these patterns, y'all, I am not speaking from the outside looking in. Okay. I know intimately how it feels to be caught in that cycle. I know how real the fear is, how paralyzing the guilt can be, and ultimately how lonely it feels going through all of that. Not being able to accept that you want more and shaming yourself. It's just a lot of spin. And now, six years later, y'all, the perspective that I want to help land and kind of bring in this episode for all of you is one that I hope helps the women coming behind me move through this with much more knowledge, much more of a big picture perspective and more emotional grounding than I had at the time. So that's what I want this episode to be. I hope you're seeing like, yes, I'm gonna dive into some of the drama with you. And just like my therapist and my coach did for me when I was in the thick of it, I want to bring that emotional grounding, that bigger perspective, and that knowledge through as well for you. And I want to kick us all off by sharing my truth. I shared this one in, I think, the second article as well. And remember, this is just my truth. It's not a capital T truth. It gets to be, you know, a truth that resonates for me. You get to feel it in your body, see if it resonates or not for you. But the truth that I learned through my own divorce and that I've honestly strengthened through watching many of my clients since that is that yes, divorcing the good guy is hard in its own particular way, my loves. And yes, it often feels like you are taking something from him. And yes, he may want the marriage to last and not understand at all why you don't. But ultimately, any marriage where one person has to sacrifice themselves to make the other person happy is unhealthy. Period. And that is the deeper truth I want to start us off with today. Um, because I know I wasn't taught that. I definitely thought you need to sacrifice yourself to make the marriage work. Um, I did that. That's what I lived by the first, you know, 10, 11 years of my marriage. Uh, that was really the life I was taught by my parents that I needed to sacrifice myself to make them happy. And I ultimately just learned by a really, really hard and difficult process that that was not sustainable for me. And so my truth now is that a marriage where one person has to sacrifice themselves to make the other person happy or to keep the marriage going is not healthy. Now, I want to dive in with you all first off, before we get into the thoughts, because I've got a beautiful section in the middle of this episode where we're actually gonna go thought by thought with this gorgeous list that my community member sent me. Thank you, thank you again, sending you all the love. But first, I want to explore with y'all why. Why does this feel so hard considering divorcing the good guy? Okay, so here are the some of the areas. I know I'm gonna miss some of them. So, you know, those of you that are my subscribers over in Substack, put them in the comments. Um, if this topic is big enough and we've got more that comes out of it, of course, you know I'll probably do an episode, um, a part two down the road as well. But one of the reasons why it feels so hard to divorce the good guy, I've found, is because we as humans often want to avoid discomfort. And I especially see this in marriages where one partner feels the marriage is enough, or they don't want to face the growth and discomfort that change would require. Now, for many of you, that's the pattern I see most, where you are the one asking for growth, you are needing more, the marriage is not enough. But when you approach your partner, they don't want to face the growth and discomfort that that would require. They are okay with it. They're satisfied, it's enough. I actually see this in a lot of men. It's just like, look, we're just going along. It's, you know, it is what it is. It's not great. I'm not actually getting like everything I want or even a lot of what I want, but like, it's okay. It's good, it's fine. Anytime people say things are fine, I'm like, mm, okay, okay. But meanwhile, though, you as their partner, the women that are my clients, right, are quietly, maybe not even so quietly, for many of you, starving inside. Um, and that's what can make this hard, is when, especially when a lot of you tend to have more codependent patterns of people pleasing and not wanting to upset others and not wanting to push things. If you've got a partner that's like, nah, I'm good, it's good, and you're protesting or asking for stuff, and they're just continuing to kind of fall back into leaving things status quo, you're gonna have to exert a lot more energy to move through that because you have a partner who's just cool with letting it slide back and stay the way it's been. And to do that, you have to lean into discomfort. So notice it's kind of like this push and pull. You've been asking them, like, hey, I want more. And they've been avoiding the discomfort of doing the work that would actually allow them to maybe show up for you more emotionally or connect with you more sexually or romantically. On the flip side, though, in them not being willing to lean into that discomfort, that means you are going to have to lean into a lot of your own discomfort to still go for those things you want, even if it means your partner is not interested in raising the standard. And that discomfort is going to be ultimately getting clear with yourself enough with whether you're okay with the status quo or whether you want what you want enough to take the steps of leaving the marriage and going out and creating it yourself. So that is one of the ways that it can feel really hard, is it's going to involve discomfort. When we are pushing up against someone that is avoiding the discomfort of their own growth, then we're also going to have to lean into the discomfort of our growth to make those things happen, even if they're not on board. Now, another area where it can look hard is it can look so great on the outside, y'all. Like so many people on the outside are like, you have it all. You have the beautiful house, you have the cute kids, your husband's gorgeous, he's working. And that can feel really, really uh isolating and confusing because there is a like a potent kind of pain that comes when you are wanting more in a marriage than what looks good on paper and what looks good on the outside and what everybody else is telling you you should be grateful for. Um, when, and I always come back to this, you know, yes, it looks great on the outside, but like nobody is living your life. Nobody is in your shoes, nobody is in that marriage day in, day out. Nobody gets to see how, you know, most of the time I hear from a lot of you that in your marriages you feel like your roommates, you know, you're just on different tracks. Yes, you're taking care of the kids, the two of you, but you know, he's a lot going along doing his thing and you're going along doing your thing. And especially because we live in a patriarchal world that celebrates and venerates the kind of external parts of life. Look, you have the house, look, you have the health, look, you have the kids, and really undervalues, if not even goes so far as to devalue the emotional aspects, the connection, the intimacy. You feeling that pain of wanting that, wanting, quote, more than what is already held up as, well, this is enough. You should be okay in your cultural standard, that can also make it feel very hard in its own way. Another piece that makes this hard, I kind of touched on this a little earlier, but I want to dive deeper, is that many of you tend to be more on the codependent end of the spectrum. And your empathy tends to get very hijacked in the good guy dilemma. Okay. And this is where um I've referenced this before on the podcast. I call it the empathic Achilles Hill. This is when our empathy gets out of control, honestly. And we feel so bad for other people and we want so badly for them to have what they want that we will sacrifice ourselves and the things we need and our wants for others. And y'all, as I said earlier, that just does not work long term. And I want you guys to notice this was a little like thing I wanted to throw in here. This is just such a sneaky little thing that our brains do of thinking I can sacrifice myself for others and that's gonna work out. Can y'all just pause for a second and notice that if you do this shit long enough, you actually, in my opinion, and I could be totally wrong about this. So throw this in the comments if this hasn't been your experience. But for me and what I've seen in my clients is I actually became less kind, less compassionate, less affectionate. Like the more time that went on in my marriage, where I was, I had this mentality of taking care of everybody else at the expense of myself, I actually became way more resentful, way more bitchy, way more reactive, way more yelly and angry. So notice that. Notice if you're, you know, playing this game in your head of, yeah, this is fine. See, I'm making everybody happy, but you're kind of disconnected from actually how you're truly showing up in those spaces, especially energetically, right? Because going back to the whole, like, I think they say like 90% of communication is nonverbal. Like what we say matters so much less than how we feel and what we do around the people that we live with. Now, a Another thing that can make this hard, which I know for all my girlies out there that are in affairs, this one's for y'all, is when you're caught in this space. I see this often, especially with women who are in this good guy space of like, he's not a bad guy, but I am starving and I don't want to hurt his feelings, what do you do? You end up going and having an affair because you don't want to hurt his feelings and tell him, like, look, this actually isn't working for me. Yes, I know you're happy. I yes, I know it's enough for you, but it just isn't a fit for me. And so instead, even though you don't feel good about the affair, you find yourself in the situation where you're having an affair, not telling him and hiding all of that because you have starved yourself so long that now we're in the realm of stealing the bread, right? We talked about this in a previous episode. So when we don't want to be honest and face the music, because we are stuck in our empathic Achilles heel of like, the worst thing I can do is disappoint some someone else or make them, quote, sad or um angry or mad that I don't want what they want. What we end up doing, y'all, is we end up justifying and starting to hide things, thinking that that is somehow better. And this, you know, this is just like that next layer for so many of you, right? Where we've really dug into the whole of the codependency of the people pleasing, where I will people please so much that I will do things that are out of integrity with myself. I have yet to meet a client of mine that's like, I feel great about the affairs that I had on my husband. No, most of y'all are like, I don't want to be doing this. I don't want to be hiding things. But you are so compelled by that deep, codependent coping mechanism that you would rather sneak and hide that than have to face the feelings of looking that person in the eye and having the conversation and letting them be disappointed and letting them realize oh, the life that I want to keep, I don't get to keep. Actually, it's going to change now. And so much of this has to come from starting to understand that I think many of you would agree with me that what we want most is for both people to experience and get to enjoy real love, not performance in our marriages. Yet what many of us end up settling for is those in your affairs, right? You're experiencing some form of that real love. I would offer it's not even, you know, close to what you can have when you're fully integrity with that want and desire, but you're getting a little bit of it and you're settling for performance being the rest of your life in your marriage. And here's the final kicker on this section, y'all. If you really think your husband is, quote, a good guy, then don't you think he deserves to be loved and in a marriage with someone who actually wants to be with him too? Let that one land, y'all. Because this shift, this perspective is really where I feel like we start stepping into like emotional adulthood. Prior to that, when we're down in this realm of the drama and, you know, if we're having an affair, the hiding and the trying to like perform and people please for our partner, but deep down, like maybe we don't even want them to touch us, or maybe we don't want to be around them. They may be a good guy, but we don't want any of that stuff. When we're in that space, nobody's really being the adult. You know, everybody's just kind of like little kids trying to just not disturb the status quo too much, trying to just keep the train on the tracks, just keep it going. And I want to offer here this call to what I think I hear from many of you, which is wanting and believing that everybody deserves to feel loved and known at some point in their life. And that in staying in the marriage to the good guy, even when he tells you this is what he wants, and you know you are not treating him that well anymore, or you are not connected, kind of like a kid telling you they want ice cream for dinner, and you know ice cream isn't actually nutritious for them. This is the emotional adulthood piece of going, yeah, no, I know my standard in my relationships is to really be able to fully see and love my partners. And if I'm not giving that to someone, even if they're a good guy, that's not a fit for me because it's out of integrity with myself. So I hope you guys follow that. That's a much, much deeper concept behind all of this that I want you to kind of be keeping in the background. Now, let's dive into all these beautiful thoughts, which I think a lot of you are going to relate to. And I took all of these beautiful thoughts that my community member sent me. And as I was looking through all of them, I realized there are kind of four areas that become our thought traps when we are dealing with the good guy dilemma in considering divorce. And ultimately, the answer to all of these, I believe, like the heart of where all of these, like the root of where all of these come back to, is going to be self-love, like deep, deep self-love and self-centering in a very like responsible and emotionally adult way, and deprogramming the beliefs that tell you that you should want and feel and be something other than what you actually are. Okay, so keep that also in mind as we go through this. Maybe come back to that later after we list, after we talk through all these thoughts, because that's really the overarching root healing that has to happen. Now, also, I want you guys to notice many of these thoughts are probably going to sound very familiar and seductive. By seductive, I mean they will be thoughts that maybe you have traveled many times in your head. And so they will be roads that your brain can easily go down. I want you to notice the ones that do that for you, that activate emotion in you, because that's going to be a little like, ooh, flag. These are areas where your work is in this scenario. Now, our first place where we get trapped, our first realm of traps is in this arena of women not being allowed to want more. And as I said in my first article on Substack, I there's a huge historical precedence for this. You know, just only like five to six thousand years of human recorded history with women being traded as property. Just that, just that. And I want to say that even with all of that history, you still have the power in this present moment, in this exact day. I mean, yes, I know we all have that DNA, we all have that programming, we have the lineage and all of those things passed down to us. But you have the power when you learn how your thoughts work, how your mind works, to start changing and reprogramming that right now. So, yes, this area of thought traps is going to be a pretty big one because I think it's very just endemic to our society. It's in the water, as I said. But I want you as you hear each of these thoughts to notice, because I'm going to be coaching you through them, that ultimately each of these, though, are just that. They are just a thought. And thoughts can be changed. Now, the first thought that I have from my community member was I feel like I'm ruining a good man's life just because I want more. Oh, can we all just feel the shame? Um, and yes, and in this area, in the not being allowed to want more, the predominant feelings that are gonna be in these thoughts are gonna be guilt and shame, y'all. Okay. So yeah, I mean, heavy dose of guilt and shame on this one. But what I want to point out to y'all is inherent in this thought, we can see the immediate devaluation of her wants, right? Just because that phrase, just because I want more. That shows that internalized, you know, belief that she has that her wanting more is so much less in comparison to ruining, quote, a good man's life. And we see there as well that external focus that I talked about in my second article on Substack, right? Instead of centering herself, her brain is going to what about him? What about his life? So notice yourself. As I'm going through and coaching through each of these thoughts, I'm just going to be giving you quick little perspectives to hopefully let you start catching yourself and seeing your patterns when you see thoughts like this pop in. Now, second thought she sent in was I worry I'm being selfish for breaking up a stable family for reasons people might see as frivolous. So maybe you guys can also follow along. As I'm showing you these different things, you can maybe start picking these out of these thoughts as well, right? So we have this thought, I'm being selfish. Once again, immediate shaming. The even the words that she uses about herself. Selfish often has a very negative connotation for many of us. So calling ourselves selfish already puts us in a position of, you know, negative perspective around what we're doing. Um, breaking up a stable family. Oof, right? Notice how inflammatory that idea is. Breaking up. And the reason why I think this is like a pretty inflammatory statement is because, as you guys know from the podcast, I have a much more nuanced perspective around, quote, stable families. And I know from all of my research, the amount of propaganda that has gone into feeding us the idea that these nucleus families are what are the most stable and safe for children. And having walked the path myself and having come from what on the outside would have been determined a stable family, as you all know. If you've listened to my episode where I talked about my the way my family of origin disintegrated, you know that I don't buy into this idea that just because a mother and a father are married, that family is actually stable. But you can see here she's got those internalized beliefs and she views divorce as breaking up a stable family. So there's some work there for her to do on opening her perspectives around what does a stable family actually mean to her? I would offer y'all, I'm divorced. I think I have a much more stable family than I ever did when I was married for my children. I will even go so far as to say, like, this family with the two of us, oh, a thousand percent. As I'm saying this, a thousand percent would I say my children have a much more stable family now with me and my ex-husband divorced than they ever did when we were married. And maybe this too is a little bit of a like softening into like, okay, yeah, sometimes when things aren't working, they need to be broken up. This is also like our disconnection in our society from like the death, life, death cycle that like everything has its times. And sometimes it's time for things to die so that new things can be born. Also, at the end, where she says, for reasons people might see as frivolous, notice this word, frivolous. Once again, we've got that her brain pulling her out of her body into external perspectives. What is everybody else outside of me gonna think? These people that don't actually live in my marriage, that have never walked a day in my shoes, but might judge me as frivolous. And this, y'all, is our people-pleasing codependency work, right? Getting comfortable with like other people can be disappointed. I'm not going to disappoint myself. Next thought. My marriage is good on paper. Stability, shared values, financial security, respect. Isn't that what a stable relationship is supposed to look like? Isn't that what I all caps should want? Yes, I love this thought, y'all. And I want you guys to notice, then this is something that I've learned from you know years as a coach, is just how powerful the words are that we use. So these words sound really lovely, right? Stability, shared values, financial security, respect. But, y'all, how it sounds or looks on the outside can be very different from how it actually feels. So, as you all know, I would definitely say I had a lot of these in my marriage. I definitely had stability. I knew he wasn't gonna leave me. He was not having affairs, like we were stable. Um, we actually had, you know, quite a few shared values, even though at the time I was leaving Mormonism, I think, you know, shared values of teaching our kids and being respectful and being relatively kind to each other and um supporting each other, financial security for sure. And respect is probably where things got a little tougher because my husband had, you know, more of the narcissistic side of his coping mechanisms from childhood. But still, y'all, in a lot of ways, a marriage that a lot of people would be like, isn't this what you should want? Isn't this what a stable relationship is supposed to look like? And you have to come back to how does it feel? Because our feelings don't just come from how something looks. And I think, y'all, this is where we have gotten so sucked into advertising in today's world, right? This idea that if it looks this way, it's going to feel this way. If it looks pretty, if it looks put together, if it looks stable, if it looks financially good, I'm gonna feel good in it. And as I think we all know, as you know, we've gotten glimpses. I mean, gosh, how many documentaries on Netflix do we need to see before we can really let sink into our bones that just because something looks good on the outside or on paper does not mean it actually feels good on the inside. It is way, way more complicated than that. So that's the first piece on this. And then, of course, the second piece is her saying, Isn't that what I should want? And this is just that de-centering that women do of their own lives, of thinking I need to be a certain person. I have a certain role I'm supposed to fulfill. And if I'm not fitting that role that society, religion, or my culture has told me I should be, then it must mean something is wrong with me. And this is the biggest thing I see women considering divorcing the good guy spin themselves out on self-hate. Focusing in on the problem must be me, the problem must be me, instead of slowing down and going, what are the systems? Right? I hope if you've been following the podcast for a while, you know from my episodes about the tragedy of heterosexuality where I did a lot of historical perspective on this. It is not a you issue. We are in very toxic systems that have not been built for us to actually mentally, emotionally, or physically thrive. We have like disintegrated our communities in the pursuit of capitalistic expansion and grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. And I really think right now our world is experiencing a moment of going, holy shit. Are we going to keep headlong down this path that ultimately is not, you know, mental health I would offer? It's not trending upward. And I am seeing more so, especially this year, it going the opposite direction. There is a cost to us continuing to put ourselves into these roles that actually don't feel good in our body, to create and build in the world with no respect for what it actually feels like. So in that moment where she says, Isn't that what I should want?
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SPEAKER_01Notice beautiful, just beautiful moment for y'all to see that question. So many of you are grappling with, right? Isn't that what I should want? But wait, my body and my soul calls are saying otherwise, that's the journey. That's the process right there of shedding in, and this is gonna be, you know, this is my take on it. This is why y'all come to me. This is what I'm teaching, is my process. We're shedding that. We're shedding the stuff that tells us we need to be something that ultimately feels disconnected, gross, unhealthy in our bodies, and we are realigning with where our soul calls take us. Okay, enough on that one. Next thought he is steady, responsible, kind, reasonable, and smart. Qualities I've always valued. Am I really walking away from that just to be free? Don't you guys love this one? Have you noticed this is like a combo of all of the other ones, right? Here she's once again listing off verbally all the things that in her mind should be what she wants. Um, and she even goes so far, I think, here, to say, like, those are the qualities I've always valued. And then at the end, right? The shame. Am I really walking away from that and the devaluation just to be free? So, y'all, on this one, okay. I want to first start by saying this is so much bigger than this, you know, kind of trite way that her brain treats this, which I'm sure she's heard from other people or picked up from the culture of like, oh, you just want to do this because you want to be free. Oh my god, babes, this is so much bigger than just quote, being free. Okay. Um, I kind of talk about this a little bit in that first article on Substack when I talk about women finally experiencing like true freedom, what it feels like to move in the world as a as a human being, to be treated as one, to be seen as one. Okay. Um, that's a piece of it. If you read Untamed, you're gonna get a taste of what this freedom actually means. Women Who Run with the Wolves was the book where I first tapped in and started really understanding the depth of this type of soul wildness that I, that I would call, you know, the freedom. And honestly, this freedom, this ability to be soul wild in my life, to move through the world, um, trusting myself, having an environment of people that love and also respect me and um that I feel deeply connected and seen by, that's what I ultimately left my marriage for, you know, was to live a life that had that at the center of it. And so when her brain, you know, just kind of throws this aside like a dirty little rag, like, am I walking away from this kind, responsible, smart man just so that I can be free? I say, whoa, baby, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It's like I'm stopping her and going back and I'm picking up that rag. And then I'm like holding an orb with an entire universe in my hand, and I'm using that wrapped rag to clean it. And I'm saying, hey, hey, hey, this is actually. What you're walking away from. Once again, going back to women have been taught to devalue their internal lives, to devalue their soul calls and their freedom. So yeah, it may seem like, oh my God, I'm walking away for something that matters nothing, but that's only because you've been taught to believe that it matters so little. Also, I just want to say, too, when her brain is saying, like, well, he's all of these good things that I've always valued, yes. That's what so many of you in the good guy dilemma are dealing with, right? Um, and and this is this is that part where so many of you are like, I wish he would just hit me, or I wish you would just have an affair. So you could have an excuse, which is more comfortable than doing the work to lean into the discomfort of admitting to yourself, yes, he is all of those things, and it is not enough. Let me let that land. I'm sure some of you are like, oh my God, what? Like, in a lot of ways, y'all. My ex-husband, I mean, steady, definitely responsible for sure, you know, worked so hard. Uh, relatively, yeah, kind, definitely kind, reasonable, super smart. And I was literally dying inside in that marriage. You know, there were still so many other aspects that made that relationship not a fit for me. And so this also I see this. This is where we get into like black and white thinking, where we want just the clear and cut answer of like, well, he cheated on me. So there we go. He's a bad guy. To divorce a good guy, yes, it's hard. And it's, but like that hard is a gift because it makes you do the deep fucking work to really know what you want and make that decision, not from a like, well, he did that, so I'm out. And instead from a, yeah, he's a good guy, and I feel called to something else, something different, something more. And honestly, you know, my list now is like, yeah, I want all of those things, and I want all of this other piece as well. And I will say very clearly here, I did not leave my marriage for the chance at another relationship. I want to be clear, you know, I left for me. I left knowing this was kind of my take on it, is I want to be all of those things. I want to be steady, responsible, kind, reasonable, and smart, and all those other things that I want that I am not currently able to experience or grow into in this dynamic in the way it is. Like, y'all, there is no way there really isn't that I would have become what I am today if I had stayed married. The journey of going on that trek out of my marriage and then these six years post-divorce is what brought me all of those other pieces of strength in myself, wildness. And I want to say here, it's not to say that that's not possible in a marriage. That's why it has to be so individual for each one of you. But you will know, you will know if it is or not by how it feels in your body and by the person across the table from you. I eventually reached a point where I realized with my ex-husband, there just wasn't the level of self-awareness and self-growth that I wanted in a partner. And I had to do the work to finally, the discomfortable work to finally go, he's not a bad guy, and I want more. Final thought in this section. I fear losing financial and logistical comfort. Realistically, I'd be fine on my own, but I'm even more comfortable in this marriage. And y'all, comfort is a big one for all my considering divorcing the good guy gals. Okay. And yes, I understand this acutely because what I was facing, y'all, was leaving the comfort of an investment banker that was making hundreds of thousands, dollhouse of dollars a year, possibly losing my house, and having to go out into the workforce, having been a stay-at-home mom for 10 years with no resume, like no work experience. But I want you guys to understand that comfort is not the same as fulfillment. Yeah, take a second to think for yourself how comfort feels different than fulfillment. And this is where I really want to be clear that what I'm talking about, the life you see me living, y'all, the life that I talk about, is an extraordinary life. I love knowing that my life is an extraordinary life. And an extraordinary life will always ask something uncomfortable of you. It will, because an extraordinary life is one, in my opinion, the way I define an extraordinary life is one where you're following your soul calls. And often soul calls lead us to go directions that are different from what we were raised in, directions that are different from what the collective, our culture, our religion has told us to do, what our families are doing. And here's the thing too, babes. You know, I mentioned in, I can't remember which article it was. I think it was the second one, the whole like the grass, is the grass gonna be greener on the other side? And let me tell y'all, it is gonna be 50-50 both ways. Okay, so the grass is not magically greener and perfectly manicured on the other side, y'all. That episode that I did recently where I was like, oh, here's things that I didn't expect would be mine six years post-divorce. And I talked about financially that I was like, oh, I didn't think I'd be where I'm at financially. Yeah, y'all, the grass is not magically greener here on the other side. Rather, instead of just wanting, and that's like our healing fantasy, you know, we hope that we'll make this decision and life will just magically become a fairy tale. No, babes, no. It's still, it's amazing. My life is so mine, and I love it, and it is not a fairy tale. It is still very human, very real, very filled with CPTSD. But you have to instead know which grass matters most to you in living a good life. So think about that, right? It's it's like I think of different varieties of grass, you know, and you have to know which is the grass that actually matters most for you to be living a good life. And that takes time, actually examining and asking yourself the questions of what does a good life actually mean to me? Not to everyone else, not to your mother, not to your pastor, to you. And the heart of that comes back to what I talked about earlier of, you know, the real question isn't what you should be wanting and why you don't want it. And as long as you keep asking that and staying in that realm of questioning, you will keep hating your original desires and thinking the problem is you, babes. You will. It's a never-ending loop, being like, why can't I fit in this box? Why am I a square peg? And why is this whole a circle? Why, why, why, why, why? No, the answer is to pull back and go, okay, wow, I'm a square peg. Hmm. What does a square peg like? What makes a square peg feel alive? What might a square peg be interested in? And then from there, right? Then we know what grass we're looking for. Then we know what grass we want to be watering. Because that grass isn't going to naturally be greener, y'all. It takes watering, it takes care. But when you know which grass you actually want to plant and what you want to be tending, oh, then the effort, the time, the energy that goes into your life feels like it's worth it. I was expending just as much energy, time, and effort in my previous marriage, and it did not feel like it was worth it. Now, just as much, if not more, energy, time, and effort, but it's so worth it because it's on grass that I want. Okay, let's move to our second section. God, y'all, I'm just enjoying this episode so much. I wish I was like with y'all, like getting feedback right now, because I'd love to hear your thoughts. So please, if you're really loving it too, I'd love to hear some of the things, maybe the thoughts that stood out to you the most in the comments. I'm so excited for opportunities to hear back from you guys. Um, second section is negative thoughts about the future. Okay, so this is our second, you know, area of traps that we get into. And this is where we are looking into the future, and all we see is negative thoughts. Big feelings here are going to be fear and regret. So, first thought she had in this section was I wonder if my kids will resent me forever. I will be changing their whole life. Ooh, this one, y'all. We definitely love to shame ourselves for our wants by making it seem like if we get what we want, people we love, especially our children, will be hurt. I remember when I had to work through this belief of like me getting what I want hurts the people I love. Well, many of us have that belief, y'all. And I just want to, you know, play and kind of work this thought a little bit by going, okay, first off, y'all, I really think that this fairy tale idea that we have been sold that, you know, oh, what kids need most is a mom and a dad living together. And that if you have that, their lives are going to be good. I don't actually buy that, y'all. And as I've, as I said earlier, gone back and looked at the propaganda related to this and the religious slant on this. And of course, you know, religion has a lot of patriarchal influences as well. I just don't fully buy in to the whole nucleus family, has to be the only way that we do this, and it will be the best thing for our kids. So remember that, right? That's always something that I'm trying to kind of open y'all to understanding there are different ways to do it just as well. Second piece is you can see her guilt in like, I will be changing their whole life. And to this, y'all, I'm like, um, welcome. Welcome to life, y'all. Change is life. It is. And once again, I think we got sold, our generation, what you know, multiple generations right around here, got sold this idea that if we could just stay married, we're gonna guarantee that our kids are gonna be like super stable and resilient and everything's gonna work out for them. No, y'all. Y'all, life is about change. And if there's anything I'm seeing right now, our lives, our world's about to get a lot more wild as we go forward. We don't develop resilience by things staying the same. Humans develop resilience by going through change and realizing, oh, I can go through hard things and there's still people there that love me. I can go through hard things. Things end, things die, things disintegrate, and the world doesn't end. Everything doesn't go away. So notice when your brain is catching you on this, like, my job as a parent is to make sure that my children are completely insulated and their lives never change, that somehow staying married equals stability. When you are really in that process, super undervaluing that, yeah, maybe you're still married and it's quote, stable on the outside. But is there actually secure attachment happening in your family? Is there actually nervous system regulation and genuine connection happening in that marriage, in that family where, you know, your marriage is what it is with your with your husband? That's the questions you want to be asking yourself on this one. Second thought, what if I leave and never find what I'm looking for? Y'all. This one. I have so many women. Okay, so first, first off on this one, don't leave your marriage looking for someone else. Don't do it. I I don't recommend that ever. Okay. Because it once again is a decentering of you. And when your focus is, I've got to find somebody who's finally gonna love me this way, you will be disappointed. You will have lots of years of experiences that you can't even appreciate because you're just so focused on, well, he's not the one. Well, he's not the one. When I went into dating post-divorce, I was not looking for anyone. I was just here for like, okay, let's see. I was looking for me. Like, what do I like? What am I into? This is an experience to get to meet somebody. This is an experience to like figure out more about my body, uh, figure out more about what I enjoy or what I don't. This is an experience to go try some new food. Every experience was a win because I wasn't looking for something external to fill me. I was participating with the external to learn more about myself. So that's the first piece on this, y'all. And then also, this is just, y'all, I swear this is like a CPTSD flashback, right? When we have our CPTSD flashbacks, we feel hopeless and helpless. And that's that, what if I leave and never find anything better? What if it never gets better? I am living proof. I have seen many women in my one-on-one coaching. I'm seeing women in my community proving it that when you leave and you don't leave from a I'm looking for someone or something outside of me to fill me. This fear that you're never gonna find what you're looking for turns out to just be like a boogeyman under the bed. It's not actually real. And I want to offer when you leave looking for a full life, a life where you are discovering you, exploring you, uh, coming to understand yourself better. You will never go wrong in that one. So, on this thought, the heart of it is just the issue of once again, she's decentralized and she's thinking, what if I never find what I'm looking for? You don't have to find what you're looking for in the way that I teach, if you are getting divorced, leaving divorce, and building that future life, it does not come from looking for something outside of you. It comes from building and enjoying and coming to love what's already right here. Next thought, what if no one out there can give me both stability and passion? And I end up realizing I threw away something rare. Once again, like it's just like another iteration, right? Of I need someone else to give me that stability and passion. And notice I just love this little like backdoor punch from her brain where she all of a sudden starts calling what she's got with her current husband something rare. Oh, y'all. And I get this. My brain did this too, and I get why you think it's rare. Because yeah, if you live in a patriarchal world where the way you want to live your life is that you've got to find a good guy who's gonna have all of the things and who's gonna be stable and not have issues and also is gonna be super passionate. Okay, that's a pretty big ask in today's world. I'm not gonna lie. I did not leave my marriage with that ask. I hoped, I held the hope, I hold the, I had had the door open, right? I was like, universe, this would be really fucking sweet. It'd be really cool to get to do life with somebody by my side like that. But ultimately, I'm gonna create the stability and passion regardless. I knew I was gonna have the stability on lock because I was like, I'm not gonna have my stability come from a person outside of me ever again, just not willing to take that risk. And then that freed up the passion part. It was like, okay, let's just go explore. And I had a fabulous time exploring, y'all. I had like three plus years of going out and just experiencing passion with other partners and letting the universe kind of lead me through those different dynamics and those different relationships as I grew and learned myself. And then I just happened a year and a half ago to meet my partner. And, you know, he became my full-time life partner for right now, because there is all the things I want. You know, there is the stability and the passion. So it's not so much a what if no one can give me the stability and passion, as much as like, I'm not settling unless anybody can. And if no one can, that's fine, because I'm gonna get the stability and passion, anyways. And this is really also like coming back to when she says, What if I realize I threw away something rare? And you know, y'all, I will admit, this is the tragedy. This is the tragedy that I see of so many women who leave marriages, who get divorced, not understanding that they are the rare thing, not leaving and going, it's about me. It is not about finding some new man who's gonna be rarer than my last man. It's not about finding that guy who's gonna give me all this financial security and stability and passion that I need. And it's about if you are going to get divorced, especially from a good guy where you have probably an even higher risk of your brain being like, see, it would have been so much better with him, which I'm not saying my brain didn't try to pull that shit on me post-divorce. It has multiple times, not ever seriously, but it's definitely been like, well, we could just go back. We could just get remarried. And then Quinn would coach me and we'd both be like, oh, no. Um it's about reclaiming your storyline. That's what this one is about. You have to come back to it's about me showing up for me in living my life. And great if I happen to find somebody else who provides a lot of stability and passion. If not, I'm going to keep building that stability, that passion, all the things I want in my life and opening to a partner coming in and sharing that, not from a place of, oh my God, I'm so desperate. I need to prove that I left my marriage for the right reason, but from a, yeah, my life's pretty fucking awesome. And if you want to share it with me, let's do this. Okay. I want you guys to notice with each of these questions, of course, from this section, y'all. Did you notice how all of them were fear-based? Okay. Please notice that this is your brain catastrophizing. This is what the lizard part of your brain is built to do. Ah, the unknown, probably gonna kill us. We should probably stay in the cave. Okay. That's just what your brain is built to do, that part of you. We have not evolved past that yet. It still crops up. But it is not your truth speaking. And this is where you want to get really good at being able to sift and sort through when is my body in a CPTSD flashback feeling hopeless and helpless and like nothing will ever be good? When is my brain just in a ah, unknown, bad, scary space? And when am I actually connected and grounded to my soul calls? When is my truth actually speaking to me? And I want to just drive home again, y'all, to really step away from this thought that like someone out there is gonna have the perfect grass. Or, you know, I need to be certain that I that the grass is gonna be there. And instead take on the role of being the creator of your life and going, you know, you're going to the nursery and you're looking at all the different plants in the grass and you're going, which grass and landscaping actually matters most to me? And then I'm gonna buy that and I'm gonna focus on building a good life, watering the grass I want rather than hoping that it will just magically appear for me. That's just, it's such a programming that we have as women. You know, the damsel in distress, white knight, someone will come save me and rescue me. That makes it really difficult, y'all, when you externalize your power, bring it back into you. All right, third main area that we have for our thought traps is. Not knowing or trusting yourself. And the main feeling that I see here is doubt. Lots and lots of doubt. So let's dive in with our first thought. What if I'm just in a phase? What if this is menopause? What if I'm having a midlife crisis? Oh, the amount of women through history that have had their inner workings, their soul calls dismissed as phases, PMS, perimenopause, midlife crisis. Babes, the answer to this is to stop. Stop discounting your experience and dismissing your inspiration. And I want to normalize that this is going to be a healing process for y'all. Okay. Especially if you are coming from a family or a religion that taught you heavily to trust outside sources more than yourself. You're going to have this internalized inner critic that's going to peck at you and say, you probably can't trust yourself. You just might be crazy. And that doesn't go away, babes. I still have that. That is an active part of my daily life that I manage, that I have to pay attention to, that sometimes gets louder than others. I mean, oh my God. My business coach last week would tell you my brain was just spiraling. Nothing you do matters. None of this work matters. You're nothing. I mean, y'all, it was bad. Okay. But I have learned through this work, through my tools, to be able to write those thoughts out, to be able to process the feelings around that and ultimately to come back to my foundation that I am the best authority in my life, that I can ultimately trust myself. And I want to say, you know, specifically to my community community member who wrote this, even if it is perimenopause, babe, that matters too. I trust our cycles as women. I trust, you know, I've learned enough about my cycle and PMS to know and to view PMS not as a negative, but as like that week before my period, I'm just raw. I'm just open. I'm just tender. It often means I'm much closer to the unconscious. I'm much more aware of things that I might have been suppressing all month. So another piece of this that I want to finish on this thought is let go of needing scapegoats for your desires. Do you notice? Like you're wanting to scapegoat it as a phase. You're wanting to say it's menopause. We want to blame something. Instead of just coming back and being with, hmm, this might be me. This might be what I want. This might not be a phase. This might go much deeper than that. Next thought. I keep waiting to feel 100% certain, and I'm constantly looking for signs and validation. Oh, do I feel you on this one? Y'all, this is, I just want to so normalize this. So many of the women I see have a lot of shame around how much we are looking for signs and validation. Y'all, oh my God, the stories I could tell from when I was going through my separation, going through the divorce. I was a sinnaholic. I was just like, signs here, signs there, like synchronicities, trying so hard to just pick up on anything and everything that the universe could send me to help validate me through that experience. And it's okay. Can we all just like, it's okay, it's normal. This is a very real, I would say, consequence of us as women being trained to need that, to need all of that external validation. And when you're coming off of that drug of all that external validation and you're trying to go in a different route that's no longer externally validated, oh, it's like we're having to go through detox. You know, we're detoxing off of all that external validation. And it's a process when we're doing that. Okay. Um, and what I want to recommend on this one is that we really need to support ourselves in this space. You know, we need to support ourselves with people that can validate our truth. This for me was my therapist. This was my best friend at the time. They were crucial. This is what I see women in my community doing. Having other women who are like, you can trust yourself, babe. I see you. Sometimes, you know, those people that love us, they can see us more clearly than we see ourselves with all of our internalized self-hatred going on. So it's really important to support yourself with this. Okay. It's okay to get validation, especially from people that like genuinely, unconditionally love you and want you to have the future that you want. Now, also at the heart of this, though, babes, I want to be very clear that you will never be 100% sure. You will never be 100% certain, babes. Welcome to human life. It is not like that. And the invitation within this thought, within this desire that you have so badly to be 100% certain is to start touching those parts of you, start moving towards them and doing the difficult work of beginning to make peace with an even deeper truth of realizing you're not actually in control as much as you think you are. I'd have to do a whole podcast episode on this one. But it's this acknowledgement of like, whoa, I am bigger than I thought I was. My life is bigger than I thought I was. Here I had all these plans and these expectations, and now my internal world isn't fitting them. And it's making peace with that you're part of something much bigger, including like the you that you are. And at the same time, remembering that along with that, though, you do get to choose. That's the beauty of remembering. I get to choose my thoughts. I get to re-choose them in this exact moment. I can choose again how I want to think and how I want to feel. And then from there, you trust your process and you keep walking the path. Now, her next thought was will I even want freedom once I have it? Or will I regret leaving? So I want to be clear on this, y'all. You will regret leaving if you have not done the work to change your thoughts and beliefs ahead of time. That, like, that is a fact you can see. You probably know a woman, you probably heard of a woman out there who is like, my divorce was the worst thing I ever did, not happy about it, wish I hadn't done it. They are out there. Uh, regret is absolutely a real aspect of divorce. But I want to offer that often what I find, well, and I'm just gonna go, I'm just gonna go straight at this one, y'all. Regret is optional. It is always optional because regret is a feeling, and feelings come from our thoughts. And so, yeah, if you go through your life post-divorce, looking back at it, thinking, man, that was such a mistake. Man, I should have done it differently. When you come up against obstacles and things don't go the way you think they are, you look back and go, oh, I probably should have just stayed married, you're gonna create a lot of regret. And that's something that is human. It's human to want to go back and be like, oh, and obsess about the past and wish that we'd done things differently instead of staying in the present and being with what is. But this is once again something that is within your control. This piece of catching those thoughts, noticing when you're spinning in the regret and shifting your storyline. I've definitely had moments post my divorce where I thought, you know, where my brain was like, let's just go fondle that thought a little bit around regret. And I was just like, no, I am not going to go down that road. And in fact, when I got divorced, I very clearly made a commitment to myself that I was never going to regret that choice. That if the option post-divorce was to regret it or to dive in deeper and be like, whatever this obstacle is, I'm gonna overcome it and my life's gonna be what I want it to be, it was gonna be that choice. So remember y'all, coming off of this space, right? The not knowing or trusting yourself aspect of these thought traps that we get into is the biggest takeaway is that you don't need 100% certainty, babes. Okay. Instead, what I want you focusing on is clarity around what the kind of life is that actually feels aligned to you. And I want to also drop here a pretty important truth, which is that going for that life that is aligned for you, living a life of freedom, what I've seen and what I've learned from my own life is it's always gonna feel terrifying before you start walking the path. Like when my clients are making this choice and they're ultimately like, I think I want to get divorced, I'm not looking for them to feel like, yep, this feels totally calm, peaceful, grounded, like this is exactly what I want. Usually it's gonna feel like I feel grounded and I'm scared because this is the unknown. And I'm like, yep, that's what it's meant to be. Because when you're genuinely stepping toward a soul call, it often is gonna be kind of terrifying because entailed with that is big moves and changes and steps forward. Our brains don't often like that, so they feel fear. That's okay. The point is noticing if this is towards that life that is most aligned for me, I'm gonna move through the fear, anyways. Final section that I have for you all in these thought traps is programming, our cultural and religious conditioning. And ultimately, I think, you know, all of those previous feelings, our doubt, our fear, our shame, our guilt can all kind of pile up into this one. So I only have a couple thoughts in this one, but I definitely wanted this, it was not the biggest section, but I felt like programming just needed to be, you know, have its own section. I tied it in through everything up above. I talked a lot about programming, but these two thoughts specifically land directly there. And her first one is marriage is forever, leaving is failure, passion is fleeting and sinful. And for her, all of these were coming from a religious perspective. And y'all, can we just like wow, like, look, here's religious patriarchy in a nutshell. Marriage is forever, leaving is failure, passion is fleeting and sinful. I swear this idea, especially the last one, uh, that passion is fleeting and sinful. Y'all, I know I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure this came from men who really sucked in bed and were like, you know what we're gonna do? We need to shame women into staying in marriages with us instead of learning new skills. Like, what what's the easy way out here? We're gonna teach women, we're gonna teach everybody, in fact, that passion is fleeting and sinful and we're good. Because, oh my God, is that not just what I also was raised in in Mormonism? For sure. For sure. So, to combat programming like this, y'all, you have to get your coaching skills on point here. And the biggest one is recognizing that these thoughts, because that's all they are, y'all. Marriage is forever, that is just a thought. That is just a thought.
SPEAKER_00Do you guys do you guys know that? That's not a truth. Nobody can prove that. That's not a fact.
SPEAKER_01Not a fact. Forever. Nope, nobody knows if marriage is forever. Leaving is failure, mm-mm. Nope, not a fact. Passion is fleeting and sinful, also just a thought. So if we remember these are just thoughts, because that's all they are, then you have to check in with how does this thought land in my body? And babes, you know this from the podcast. If the thought feels shitty, it is not for you. If the thought feels shitty, it is not your truth. It is as simple as that. I believe, as I was saying earlier, that that tr those passion is fleeting and sinful was probably the truth for those guys. Good for them. They can live that life. But that is not the truth for me. Passion for me is not fleeting and sinful. Passion is the lifeblood. Passion is what makes me a creatrix, what helps me put things into the world. Passion is one of my favorite things that makes my life juicy. It's a lot of the marrow in the bone for me when it comes to my life. So remember, your soul knows what your path is. Some dudes with a pen and paper centuries ago do not. That's my hot take on that. Okay. Final thought in this area is I feel bad breaking the promise I made to him and to my family. Okay, so this one, y'all. I see you guys. We get just tangled up in knots over this one. And this is because we're navigating our integrity. Okay. And for many of us, especially, you know, cultural, religious, we were taught with, you know, platitudes, right? Which is the whole honesty is the best policy. You should always tell the truth. You make a promise, you need to keep a promise. And the reality is, life is way more nuanced than this. You know, this is really the black and white thinking that many of us come from you're either good or you're bad. You're either sinning or you're righteous. And with this, you have to dig deeper. You have to stop just taking the sound bites and the things that we've been fed from external sources that say this is the way to live a good life. And you have to start getting really intimate with your own deepest internal promises and knowing for you, you know, what does it actually mean for me to keep a promise? You know, if if I'm staying in this promise to stay married, but I'm actually now showing up as a worse version of myself, I'm slipping into depression, I'm showing up as a worse mom. Which promise matters most? Which one? This is the this is the gray, y'all. This is how we get to navigate and become way more human. I know I always reference this movie, but it's just so good. Um, inside out, that moment where she feels both, you know, the sadness and the happiness at the same time at the end, this is emotional adulthood. When we understand that choices in adulthood are not just black and white, right or wrong. They are complex. And when you start doing this work and you start growing into emotional adulthood and seeing things through the more humane and gray perspective, and you become, often in your marriage, the most emotionally mature person in the room that can see all of that, you start to realize that not everyone is going to get it. I know my ex-husband definitely did not get it at the time. He did not, I don't think he, you know, maybe he still doesn't get it. That the choice I was making was way deeper, you know, on the surface, it looked like I was breaking a promise to him, but it went all the way back to me understanding that in my childhood, I was asked to break a promise with myself before I could even have the consent to break that promise. And the promise I broke was the promise to love myself and to live a life that was mine, that was taken from me in childhood by my religion, by patriarchal standards. And so as you navigate the messiness of this, of understanding that integrity doesn't always look like just I'm always honest about everything. I always tell the truth. It doesn't look like once I make a promise, I always keep it. It looks like evaluating what's actually inside that marriage, what's actually here for myself, for my children, what's actually happening to me in staying in this space and coming back over and over to remembering it is not black and white. Ultimately, so many of us were raised with that. Good, bad, black and white. We see that right now in the world immensely. People who want to just, you know, hold on to their side and be like, we're the good, you're the bad. That gets us nowhere ultimately in the world or in our personal relationships with ourselves. Final thought on this is I want you all to remember that a majority of the voices in your head are not your voice. They are the echo of rigid religious and cultural training. And when they come up, I want you to notice and choose again. Okay, those voices benefit from you living under their strictures, under their rules, even if it's at the expense of yourself. But it is your right as the sovereign of the thoughts in your mind to be able to choose again. That is the heart and soul of coaching. And that's what I want you to really remember with all of these areas of thought traps that we talked about today. Now, I want to have one final piece here before I close out the episode, which is talking about a hidden emotion that I think is, in my opinion, what blocks most of you the most. Yes, all these other sections may seem important, but if you really want to start getting movement in your good guy dilemma around considering divorce, this is the emotion you need to start feeling. And it is grief. So I really have come to view grief as a gateway emotion because what I see often is we use the guilt and the shame and the doubt to ultimately escape from our grief. And when I say grief, I'm talking about grieving that the fairy tale you hoped was going to happen didn't turn out how you wanted. Grieving that ultimately you were lied to about what a marriage was going to be, grieving that you were totally unprepared for what that was going to entail, grieving that your soul wants more than the status quo or what you were told would be enough. Grieving the residue of the trauma that you have come from, that your partner has come from, the families and cultures that created that for both of you, and that now you are both having to live with the consequences and repercussions of in your marriage. Y'all, the book that helped me connect into this the most, just understanding the complexity of this, would have been Women Who Run with the Wovs. I feel like the way Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes really showed me how much deeper my emotional life was. And the way she writes taught me that grief is powerful. Um, there's a section in the book where she talks about, I'm not going to remember the name because it's a beautiful Hispanic name, but I'll have Alex, I'll find it on the page and I'll link it in my show notes. But there's this practice that she does where you put things on an altar, basically, and you write out like all the things that you're grieving. And I did that practice, and it was really, really life-changing for me because grief allows us to move into the dark spaces. And when we move into the dark, we are able to transform them. And we have a very broken lineage with grief, especially here in the US, but I truly see it as sacred. And when we grieve, we are able to start shifting out of hating ourselves for wanting more into grieving what has been, grieving what got us here, the people, the systems, the cultures, and then rewriting the storyline, rewriting our legacy of creating something different for women and relationships in the future to come. So don't forget this piece. Grief is truly a portal that can help you start shifting things. All right, y'all.
unknownWoo!
SPEAKER_01I loved this episode. I'm sure you guys could hear it in my voice. Hopefully, this episode has given you much deeper insight into your own thoughts, how they keep you spinning. I know many of you probably were like, Yep, I've got that one, I've got that one. Remember any of the ones that stood out to you? That's where you want to go, do some of your deeper work. And most of all, opened you to a perspective of all of the like bigger pictures that are possible. Possible here. You know, ultimately this work in the podcast, right, it's done through the lens of whether you should leave or stay. But truly, y'all, coming back to that heart I mentioned at the beginning, this is actually about knowing yourself deeply. So that instead of avoiding this decision because of the constant guilt, shame, or fear, you come to know yourself so deeply that your decision ultimately comes from this intense frequency of your personal truth. And that's really where my life is now led from. And I love knowing that on my deathbed, I will be able to look back and know confidently that I lived a life guided by my personal truths. I mean, that's that's where I landed. Most of all, that's what I wanted for my life. And I get to pick that. It's my life. Isn't that crazy? Sounds so revolutionary for a woman to be like, yeah, I get to live by my personal truths. It's my life. Also, y'all, as you're seeing, those truths can evolve and change as we grow. That's what nobody teaches us. They make it seem like truths are written in stone. Nope. They evolve and change as we grow, as we become adults, as we learn more about ourselves. And when they change, y'all, that's when we're asked to do the work to make our lives change and evolve and grow in order to reflect our changing truths. As always, my babes, if you're ready for that one-on-one support, if you are like Britta, yes, I love this episode. Oh my God, I am feeling it. This is me. And also, can I like tell you my thoughts? Yes, your community members' thoughts were amazing and I related to a lot of them, but like I want you to be coaching on my thoughts. I want you to be hearing my exact scenario. I've got you, babe. I have my incredible 90-minute get unstuck and empowered session that y'all is just getting better with time. I'm like wine. And I have literally been watching it change women's lives. I get so many replies from women after my 90 minutes where they're like, holy shit, that changed everything. Um, and in that session, we do a beautiful before and after process. And it really gets you clear on not only where you're at now, but kind of how you got there, what those cultural patterns and programming are. And then on top of that, we focus in on what you want most. And through that process, I am pulling all of the obstacles that I can find that are keeping you stuck in the middle. It seems like we can't do all that in 90 minutes, but we do, y'all. It's amazing. Yeah, we always go in and come out the other side, and people are like, holy fuck, that was a portal. I'm like, yes, this is what I love doing. So we do all that in the 90 minutes, and then I afterwards take time to craft up an individual like roadmap for you. And I record an audio detailing all of those obstacles that I've pulled and giving you my solutions. Basically, what I gave you in this episode, kind of where I was like taking all those thoughts and be like, here's the work, here's the work, here's what you need to do on this. And I send you a PDF and that audio afterwards. So I can't say enough how life-changing these sessions are. If you are wanting one, you can text 90. That's 90 M-I-N to 3377. For my babes in the back, wanting the high touch, really once-in-a-lifetime kind of experience of getting to work with me and doing work that I can unequivocally say changes everything going forward in your life. I've really seen that with my one-on-one clients. Um, and really gets at the heart of exactly what I was saying of like this work is about you. I had a one-on-one client that I just signed this week. Oh, if you're listening, I'm so excited. Um, and she wrote me this week saying, like, yes, I'm in, let's go. And she mentioned how she knows this amendment is for her, not just the divorce. And I was just like, ah, giddy with excitement because yeah, this is so much bigger. Yes, I'm gonna teach you the tools that are absolutely going to move you through this process in ways that, you know, make it easier, make it smoother, help you see things. You've got support, you have someone walking every step of it with you. But also all of those tools are applicable going forward afterwards. So if that's you, I want you to consider the deep dive, which is my three-month one-on-one coaching work. You can find that linked in the show notes. That's over on my website. And then finally, y'all, when this episode drops, I actually will have just gotten back from our first stay or go retreat with a bunch of women from the community. Um, I am so excited to get to share insights from that in the future. I am sure that Quinn and I are probably gonna want to do a joint episode, like maybe breaking that down, um, because Quinn has been very involved in the community. She's watched it grow. It's really special to me to be doing this retreat this month because this month marks a year of the stay or go community. And y'all, it was such a huge leap for me to change my business and kind of focus in on that a year ago to really switch into a new platform. But damn, am I just so happy, especially with the 2025 we've been going through. I am seeing so powerfully how important community is. And it fills my soul to be someone who not only sees the value of that, but is, you know, actively holding space that I have created a container that allows women to create relationships and connect in so deeply that they are now, you know, I have women, a couple women flying in from the UK, like they're coming all over to this retreat. Um, I was saying to Joe today in the closet, I was like, babe, what the fuck? This is so amazing. I have created a space that is so loving, so welcoming, so expansive, so connected that these women who, you know, have met each other just through the community virtually are now wanting to like come and actually be with each other in person. Um, and adorably, like a bunch of them are meeting ahead of time and they're like doing fun stuff down in Dallas. And some of them are riding going on trail rides and going to Billy Bobs. I just, I'm obsessed. It's such a huge light and exciting thing for me to be experiencing right now. And um, I hope, I don't know, we'll see, but I hope to be able to have retreats like this in the future. And I have a feeling it's gonna be for my women in the community because it's also very special for me to really know these women before I end up meeting them in person. So if that is something that you are like, oh my God, yes, I want amazing women like that in my life. I want to be able to be um to have the option of being in on something like that in the future. If we do get to have more in the future, I really want you to um consider joining. The community is totally blossoming right now. It's at a very special point in its growth where it's still small and intimate. Um, you know, in comparison. We had like nine women on a recent call, and I was like, oh my God, that's the most we've ever had. Yet it's growing in size, which makes it still very, you know, there's lots of women coming in and there's lots of commentary and discussion. So it's a really special time for it. And I know that will change with time, you know, as it grows, we'll have to expand. That's the beauty of the journey. And like I said earlier, you know, you got to grow and evolve as things change. But for right now, it's in a very, very special, special time where everybody still like knows each other and it still feels really intimate and cozy. If that's something you have been considering and you're like, oh my God, I want to be a part of it, go ahead and text Stay Or Go Community, all one word, 2337. All right, my babes. Ah, love you all.