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          Welcome to the Stay or Go podcast, where we&#39;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. Well, hello there. I want to start off this episode by um, you know there&#39;s so many of you out there listening, but I wanted like a little moment of just like from directly me to directly you, a little, hi babe. How&#39;s it going this week? I have been thinking about you. I&#39;ve been so excited to connect with you. Yes, specifically you on this episode today. So wherever you are, if you are out walking, if you are driving, if you are laying in bed, if you are skydiving wherever you are, this episode is for you today. And I&#39;m really hoping I have a lot, a lot of episodes in the podcast that are geared more towards like, chill out, babe. You know, the timing is its own. You&#39;ve got this. Today&#39;s gonna be a little bit more for my girlies that have been sitting back a little bit and letting fear drive your life. And I had a bit of a not a wake-up call, but definitely a like, oof moment this last week that I&#39;m gonna share with y&#39;all in the episode that really drove the heart of this episode this week and me feeling like, okay, come on, y&#39;all, let&#39;s not be waiting for the breakdown of our lives, of our bodies, of our minds. If we&#39;re noticing the check engine lights, let&#39;s get to it. Let&#39;s dive in. So before we do, I want to frame out a little bit the episode for y&#39;all. I am gonna be using quite a bit of car lingo analogies today, as you guys can tell from the title. Um, and I&#39;m kind of excited to play with that. Everybody in the community knows not necessarily cars, but we&#39;ve been doing this thing with weather lately and using weather analogies. And I&#39;ve realized it&#39;s kind of something I love. I really like analogies. Maybe it&#39;s my neurodivergent side, but I love having imagery to help kind of ground the episode. So that&#39;s also made me super excited for today because we&#39;re gonna have a lot of that tying in throughout the episode. And I&#39;m gonna be talking about the importance of not avoiding what is asking to be addressed in our lives. That&#39;s that warning light, the check engine light that I&#39;m talking about, in order to be more prepared and ready when life sends us unexpected roadside tests, which I&#39;m gonna explain in a little bit, in the future. Um, from there, I&#39;m gonna share my own story from this last week and how this, what I&#39;m calling a roadside test, really drove home for me these four truths uh that I took from it and that really made me like, okay, this is why being proactive really matters. And then I am gonna spend some time talking about the cost of ignoring our warning lights, why I think it is more important than ever before in today&#39;s political climate, in today&#39;s world climate, especially as women, to be doing this work now and finish with a little peek into in true, like if I&#39;m gonna, if I&#39;m gonna preach it, then I&#39;m gonna practice it, y&#39;all, fashion, into a big shift that&#39;s gonna be coming around the podcast and in my work here with y&#39;all in this way, in this exact way of noticing the trek engine lights coming on, wanting to honor those. You know, I hope this will be a heads up for y&#39;all, too, that this episode, although it is, you know, structured in my fashion towards those of you considering divorce, I&#39;m ultimately teaching you a skill, though, that is gonna be applicable the rest of your life. Like, yes, it&#39;s gonna be absolutely important right now in this period of considering divorce, but you are gonna come back to this tool of, and I do have the tool, I&#39;m gonna talk about what I think is the best tool for maintenance when you&#39;ve got a check engine light coming on, but that it&#39;s gonna be something you&#39;re gonna use the rest of your life to ultimately be prepared ahead of time for whatever the future brings. Because what I&#39;m noticing, y&#39;all, is we just don&#39;t know what the future holds. So, with that said, let&#39;s dive in. So, I want to start off the episode by talking about the check engine light. Okay, you guys know what this is on your car, right? Is that light that comes on and it&#39;s like the oh shit light. Like, ah, which, you know, if you just need an oil change, it&#39;s not a big deal. But if you got other stuff going on, it&#39;s like mm, the, you know, that kind of feeling. And newsflash, if you have been contemplating divorce, my loves, then your tech engine light is on. And it may have been on for a very, very, very long time. And I want to compassionately say this is not the time to turn up the radio and pretend you don&#39;t see it. Okay. Where even, I don&#39;t know, two, three, four years ago, I don&#39;t think I felt like this year has really driven home for me, like, okay, it&#39;s it&#39;s time, y&#39;all, to start moving with purposefulness forward into what life is calling you into. It is not time to escape into the fantasies. I think a lot of us do. I haven&#39;t done an episode on this yet. It&#39;s a key aspect of um being raised by emotionally immature parents that we have these healing fantasies. So a lot of us get stuck hoping that something, someone, right? Not to mention Disney has programmed us this way. That prince is gonna show up, that thing, that um experience, that person&#39;s gonna come in right in and save you. And I just am learning more and more that, you know, this is gonna sound so harsh, but like there&#39;s nobody coming to save me. And yes, there is grief in that process of acknowledging that, right? Nobody&#39;s coming to turn that check engine light off for me. I&#39;m an adult now. And in that process, fuck yeah. Because actually, when I really stop and think about it, I&#39;m the most capable person in my life. Like, really, honestly. And if you don&#39;t feel that way, I promise you, if you are listening to this podcast, you are. You have that seed in you, or you wouldn&#39;t be drawn to me. And that is something that you can develop, that capableness, that ability to like see the light, handle it. Also, babes, the longer you keep driving your life, ignoring those check engine lights that are coming on. And, you know, we could we could take this analogy further. You probably got lights in all sorts of different areas, right? But specifically in this area around considering divorce, with that, what I&#39;ve noticed is there is a higher chance over time, and especially as things become less stable in our external worlds, especially here in the US, in the government. I&#39;m thinking specifically of discussions of no fault divorce eventually leaving the table. Like, y&#39;all, there is a risk in the future. There is a higher chance that you may end up broken down in the future in the middle of your life&#39;s desert, and I don&#39;t want that for you. Okay, so that is the starting point for us is like we&#39;re putting on our big girl panties, big girl thongs. Although I really love panties, y&#39;all. Thongs drive me crazy. We are pulling those on and we are going, okay, ooh, looking out on the horizon, it&#39;s looking like there may be some deserts ahead. We do not want to break down in that desert. Let&#39;s service the car now. And I want to frame today&#39;s episode as really driving home that as hard as this moment is right now. This is the whole like, when&#39;s the best time to plant a tree? It&#39;s like, oh, it was 10 years ago, but when&#39;s the second best time? Like right now. Right now is your best chance. This is your best time to get under the hood, to make the repairs and to avoid that breakdown that I am concerned in the the things that I&#39;m learning about the world, the things that I&#39;m seeing may make things much harder for you in the future. So we&#39;re all taking a big breath. We&#39;re all stepping, it&#39;s like I feel like we&#39;re about to like step on a racetrack or something. Like, all right, babes, let&#39;s go. You got this. Now, I want to frame out for you before I dive into this whole second part of the analogy, which is these roadside tests that I&#39;m mentioning, that where the warning lights, I like to think of them as more of those are kind of closer to home, your check engine light. Okay. These are things that are like, hey, this is a problem. It&#39;s coming up, like we need to resolve this. And I think of those as things that you can change, things you have influence over, things that you can actually deal with right now. And if you do deal with them, you&#39;re gonna be able to protect there being bigger problems in the future, right? This is why we get oil changes on the cars. Versus where I&#39;m gonna take you guys now, which is a roadside test. So roadside tests, I like to think of them as things that are out of your control that just happen in life. Trump getting elected last year was a roadside test. It continues to be one. It will be a four-year roadside test for the United States of America. Big example. Um, other roadside tests, you know, illness, getting sick, um, job loss. That&#39;s something that&#39;s out of your control. Death, the political sphere that you&#39;re in, governments changing, like all of that I consider to be big roadside tests where you&#39;re on the road in your vehicle, and something happens, it&#39;s out of your control. And in that moment, you need your vehicle to perform at its highest capabilities. Okay. And really, when we think about this whole episode, I really think I&#39;m advocating for the phrase. I hope some of you have heard it. I really love this. I always come back to this phrase, which is the whole an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So we are talking about being proactive when we notice areas in our life that we&#39;re like, this is just not aligning or this is not feeling good, and moving towards and into preventing and working with that before we have to clean up the mess afterwards. That&#39;s the pound of cure. Now, why I&#39;m excited about this episode, especially, is because I know there are quite a few of you. I feel like I had one of you just come into the community. Yes, I&#39;m thinking of you specifically, where you were like, I am just getting really stuck, really bogged down. I know what I need to do, I know the next steps, but I&#39;m getting really, I would say just collapsed by the fear. And I want this episode hopefully to be a wake-up call. I want your body to like, okay, yeah, I want it to step up. I want it to be like, okay, let&#39;s get things in order. And to kind of give you guys a glance down the road a little bit by putting you guys in my own shoes, I want to share with y&#39;all the roadside test that I had this past week and some of the things that it really drove home for me about what a massive difference it can make to go through the unexpected in your life when your most important areas in your car, which is yourself, are well oiled, upkept, and maintenance in a really beautiful fashion. Okay. So, in a lot of ways, you guys can think of what happened to me this last week as like, okay, if if you had to go through what I had to go through last week with your car and the current condition that it&#39;s in, how do you think you would have handled, right? Now, let&#39;s dive into this roadside test of mine. So last week, y&#39;all, um Monday evening, I was at my son&#39;s, my middle son&#39;s football practice. Mind you, football is new for us. This is the first of my kids that&#39;s ever tried playing tackle football here in Texas. I bet you guys all know where this is going. And I have really very little experience with it. I mean, I love, I watch football, I know how it&#39;s played, but I&#39;ve never seen one of my kids really play, nor have I ever had a kid in tackle, as I said previously, but I&#39;m driving that home. So you guys all realize how like shocking this was for me. So thank goodness I had agreed to go to practice this night, crazy enough, like the week before I dropped him off. I now realize like, no, don&#39;t drop your kid off at tackle football and leave. But thankfully, last week I stayed. And sure enough, y&#39;all, like halfway through the practice, I am deep in some work on my phone. I&#39;ve got my headphones in, you know, practice is happening out on the field, tons of people there. And all of a sudden I look up and there is my son standing in front of me, holding his arm, and it looks not normal. I mean, I immediately looked at it and I was like, oh my God, that is not normal. And both of the coaches, like, you could just see it in their faces, the like, uh, like, yeah. Everybody knows it&#39;s broken. And then the ensuing, you know, experience that comes out of that, which was a lot, y&#39;all. You know, this was having to reach out and get a hold of Joe. Turns, you know, just the universe knew what it was doing with this roadside test, y&#39;all, because literally that morning, my um ex-husband and my oldest son had flown to Mexico for an opportunity to go just like have a quick vacation before going back to school. And my in-laws are also out of town for summer. So where I normally have some kind of support system, it was, it was just me and Joe, and then my middle son and my littleest. Like that&#39;s the crew. That&#39;s what we had. Thankfully, somebody drove us over to the um hospital. Joe had dropped us off, so he was able to meet us there. And y&#39;all, over the next, I mean, God, we so we ended up being at two different hospitals, had to be taken down to the second hospital, a children&#39;s hospital by ambulance. And we&#39;re ultimately through the whole thing up until like we didn&#39;t get home until 5 a.m. the next morning, you know, and practice had started at six o&#39;clock the night before. So really, really long, very stressful evening. One where thank, thank goodness, I had a friend from school that I could call that was able to come pick up my littlest. And then for the rest of the evening, it was just, you know, me and Joe going through that experience together with my middle son and being there for him in a situation where you are completely at the mercy of the people around you, the paramedics, the nurses, the doctors, like you don&#39;t have access to those pain meds. You don&#39;t know how to administer them, you do not know how to fix this child&#39;s arm. Can&#39;t tell you how many times I sat there thinking, my God, if this was like, you know, back in the 1800s, like early 1900s, what would I do? Thank goodness. I live in the day and age I live in. But it really was, y&#39;all, through that experience, looking back now, I see how much it was a roadside test from life that I am really proud to get to say we passed with flying colors, y&#39;all. And I know that&#39;s because I have invested in dealing with my check engine lights and doing the work ahead of time to be ready for things like this. And that&#39;s the crazy thing, right? I didn&#39;t even know that I was needing to be ready for something like this. But boy, once you go through it, you&#39;re like, oh fuck yeah, thank goodness we were ready. And it showed me how in doing the work ahead of time, you know, before life ultimately forces you to do that work. Um, this is the whole being preventative intentionally. Wow, wow, did it make handling this future roadside test? I was able to handle it with so much more power and grounding and way less panic. Like I was blown away at the level that I was able to function in comparison to what I would have done in the past. Now I want to kind of dive in with y&#39;all into some more of the details of what I noticed in this experience of the roadside tests that I&#39;m talking about. And I want to specifically talk about four truths, four of my truths, right? They might be yours as well. Remember, a truth is anything that like resonates deep down inside of you. But these were the four truths that came out for me that my roadside test taught me that I think will be really applicable and helpful for y&#39;all in building the case for why I want you handling your check engine lights ahead of time. So the first truth I realized and that was really driven home for me was the importance of trust and true support with your partner. So I hear from so many of you, right, that what you are most afraid of is being alone, not having someone be there for you. And I think that&#39;s a very human experience. Like I think how many moments of crisis can leave us feeling smaller, can leave us feeling like, oh my God, no one&#39;s gonna be there for me. Like I&#39;ve got to just stick with the group that I have or the people that I have, even if they can&#39;t show up with me to the extent that I need. At least I have somebody. I&#39;d rather have somebody rather than nobody. But y&#39;all, this is where I want to really advocate for what that experience was like. This was really the first time I&#39;ve gotten to go through, especially something like this, where I am experiencing a really pretty massive crisis with my child. I&#39;ve never had right three boys. I&#39;ve never had any of them break a bone, y&#39;all. I&#39;ve never had to go to like an ER with any of them like this, just to frame out how big of a deal this was for me. And what that was like getting to have a co-pilot in the car with me who was so fucking steady, y&#39;all. Instead of me having to keep managing Joe as well as my child, I did not have to tell him what to do. He fucking thought ahead. He showed up for me. I didn&#39;t have to manage him at all. He supported us. And even as I say this, I want to lose my shit that this is like um shocking for so many of us. But this is just the reality of how when you are partnered with someone who is actually emotionally mature and securely attached, and then you go through roadside tests with them. Oh my God, the additional support rather than drain on your nervous system is phenomenal. I mean, we&#39;re talking simple, like things that it makes me think so much of the tragedy of heterosexuality, where she was talking about how like women just naturally think of these things. Joe just naturally thinks of these extra things, like me being able to send him home with a list of stuff and him getting additional things. Like he at one point went home to get all of our things then to meet us at the hospital when my son and I were transferred down there in the ambulance. And he showed up with a stuffed animal for Ander, and he showed up with like extra snacks for all of us, and he showed up with two different sweatshirts for me, and you know, two different types of socks in case the socks that he&#39;d grabbed would be too big for the ones I might want to wear. I was like, yes, yes, this is what I need and deserve in my life. And so many of you have not experienced this in your. Marriages. So much so that you probably don&#39;t even think an experience like that is possible. And I just want to make sure in this episode to drive home how deeply healing it is to experience it and to call out to all y&#39;all that it is possible. And in it being possible, it hopefully gives you permission to want more than just not being alone when you go through hard things in your life. Even after the whole experience, I had a moment where I told Joe that honestly, looking back, I think it was a total gift that everybody else was out of town because it allowed me and Joe to just lock in with each other. There was, you know, we did, I did not have to be managing and like handling other adults and having other people in the room with us. It was just him and I supporting each other and taking care of my middle son. And I really think that combo was incredible. So the takeaway on this first truth is realizing that y&#39;all building out your pit crew now before you are stuck on the shoulder cannot be emphasized enough. I keep getting blown away the more that I am in this partnership with someone who is emotionally mature and securely attached, at what a game changer it is for life. How much easier it makes not just the day-to-day, but the really difficult roadside tests, you know, flat tires, you name it, whatever analogy we want to use. When you have someone who goes through that with you, supporting you, there for you, able to handle themselves as well, it&#39;s a game changer. Now, second truth that I learned from this experience was the importance of knowing my role. Okay, so this one&#39;s gonna be a little, I&#39;m gonna like have to lead you through a little bit of different things to get to the point, but I want this point to be made. So, first off, what I mean by knowing your role is understanding that we&#39;re gonna use the analogy of you&#39;re the driver, and you don&#39;t have to also be the mechanic, the gas station, and the map. Okay. You are the driver. I saw this in multiple ways during the experience, right? Of like, okay, I am not the nurse, I am not the doctor, I am not the paramedics driving us. Like learning how to sit back and do the role that is yours to do, which sounds like really simple, y&#39;all, but it&#39;s actually very difficult. That&#39;s that is the emotional maturity piece of being able to ground and center yourself while going through stressful things. And this is the other big piece. Like a week before this, I had been in a conversation with my ex-husband, and I came away from that conversation with a lot of like it was a CPTSD flare-up, uh, definitely on me, you know, my my own stuff coming up around just feeling inadequate, you know, hearing how much in many ways my ex-husband still shows up so big, like financially. Obviously, you know, he, when we were married, he was an investment banker, he still is, and in many ways he supports and covers in that area. And me, with my expectations from last week&#39;s episode and my perfectionist side, felt this real like, damn, I want to be that, you know, I don&#39;t want to depend on somebody in that way. At the time I didn&#39;t realize it, but as I&#39;m sharing this episode, clear moment of like getting my roles a little bit mixed, you know, a little bit of like wanting to be everything to everyone and be able to do all of the things, right? And not only want just, you know, wanting to do all the things, but even moving into the space so far as like shaming myself that I couldn&#39;t. And then after we went through this whole experience, you know, turned out we got very like, thank you, Universe, my ex-husband, who my kids&#39; insurance is on, he had surgery earlier this year. So all of his deductibles are met and everything&#39;s covered by the insurance. And there was a moment where one of the nurses was asking me, you know, like, can you put any money towards this payment? And I had to like just say, my ex-husband&#39;s gonna be the one covering it, even though I didn&#39;t, I didn&#39;t know if that would be the case. I knew I&#39;d talk to him later. And I felt in that moment that little twinge of like, oh, I want to be able to do it all by myself. And coming off of that, um, there was this moment where my ex-husband picked up the kids after he got back, you know, that was like a couple days after Ander had the accident. And I saw in his like wanting to connect with him, I saw this moment of like almost him, you know, as a parent feeling that grief of like your kid just went through something really hard and you didn&#39;t get to be there for that. That was the moment when I was like, oh, like I played my role. I played the role that I was meant to play that night. And that role was that I was in town, I was at the practice, I was there to take him to the hospital, I was there to hold his hand through all of it. I was there to manage his emotions and his needs and to support him and to communicate and to carry all of the load of communicating with the doctors. And thankfully, I have, you know, an incredible co-parent as well that entrusted me with making all of those decisions. I tell you guys, like five years post-divorce, we really do an incredible job now, co-parenting together. But it was a moment of me going, that&#39;s right. Like I have my role to play in this constellation that is my life, my children, my co-parent, my um partner, my in-laws. Like it is a community in its own way, and letting my role and my part be enough. And it was a beautiful moment of connecting, right? And realizing that these CPTSD shame spirals we get in, and especially as women, where we kind of self-abandon to prove that we&#39;re capable, that we can do all of it, that we can be the mechanic and the gas station and the map, like all of the things. I want us also remembering like we cannot do it all. We are just human. And coming back into like, what is actually my role? What can I do? I may not be able to provide and cover everything financially right now for my kids in the way they want, with their dad being an investment banker. They love, they love like name brands. I was thinking the other day, I was like, I don&#39;t, I never wore Nike growing up. And yet my children like that is that is what they wear. And instead of shaming myself that that&#39;s not my role, leaning in and being like, yeah, but the role that I that I can do was what I did that night, right? And also, like huge acknowledgement and fuck yeah, for me, in the role of dating and becoming the kind of person that was ready to be in a relationship with the partner that I have now. Cause that was the other big moment where I was like, wow, you know, not only am I here showing up for my kid, but I have a partner that is also showing up and supporting both of us. And that directly comes from me. So at the end of this one, I have one question for y&#39;all that I want you to think of, which is where are you taking on all the roles in your marriage and perhaps running yourself ragged in the process? And if you are taking on all of the roles and ignoring your engine lights, if that is the cost of running yourself ragged to really scale back and come back into what I think is your most important role, which the first and foremost is taking care of yourself, filling your cup first. This leads us right into the third truth that came out big time for me, which was the importance of building resilience before you end up needing it. Y&#39;all, thank goodness I had been just, you know, the way I&#39;ve built my life, the way I have intentionally chosen my partner, chosen my work, um, chosen the communities I&#39;m a part of, the friends that I have or don&#39;t have in my life. I was really, I would say, very well resourced going into this. I had a depth of, I had deposits in the bank that I could pull from. And, you know, I had built the nervous system resilience to be able to go through something like that without um, just to provide like some contrast, I&#39;m thinking of how my mother, like the one time that I got taken to the emergency room as a kid, it was because I fell and had a concussion. And obviously, because I had a concussion, I couldn&#39;t remember stuff. And my mom, I realize now because obviously she was probably in a CPTSD flashback, was freaking out and yelling at me because she thought I was pretending that I couldn&#39;t remember stuff to get attention. Uh, when no, it was that I had a concussion. And I just remember as a child that being so stressful that not only was I suffering from a concussion and couldn&#39;t remember, but I was also being yelled at by my mother as to like why I was like faking. In this instance with my child, I had built up the resilience ahead of time, right? To not start getting frustrated. And y&#39;all, it was tough, especially in the beginning. For about an hour, he was without pain meds. And I watched him where in the beginning, the shock kind of kept him going as we got into the ER and back into the room and we&#39;re just waiting for a doctor to come see us. As that shock started to wear off, his mental health, or you know, his ability to kind of hold it together really started to fall apart as the pain increased and the adrenaline went down. And that was really difficult for my nervous system to sit there with my child like screaming in pain, begging me to help him and having to reassure him for a good 30 minutes to come through that with him. So one of the things I loved that Joe pointed out to me afterwards, because I just expressed a lot of gratitude to him for all of it and even said at one point, like, I couldn&#39;t have done this without you. And he was like, No, baby, you absolutely could have done this without me. Yes, I&#39;m glad I was here and it was easier with me, but I know you could have. And I know he is right. I know that about myself. That if I had been single, as I have in, you know, years previous to this, I know that I could have managed this roadside test alone. And that is because I have really deepened my physical and emotional resilience and reserves by taking care of myself. That&#39;s the level of strength that I&#39;ve built. And I want in this episode to really that rallying cry, like build your capacity now, y&#39;all, so that when the road gets rough, you are not running on fumes. By the end of that night, y&#39;all, I was running on fumes, but at least I did not start out at the beginning of it running on fumes. And for those of you that may be in typical CPTSD fashion, feeling like, oh, I need to build my capability. I&#39;m not to that spot yet. Heads up, so many of you are already immensely capable now. I remember um coming off of my divorce, just being shocked. I was like, oh wow, I am actually so much stronger and more resilient than I realized. Um, I&#39;ll talk a little bit later in the episode historically about why that is, why we undervalue ourselves as women and why we don&#39;t think we can do these things. But what I see over and over and over, this is why I love, I am such a lover of women, is women, we have those deep, deep reserves. Often we drain them to their dregs, trying to be perfect and be there for everybody else, which is why I&#39;m saying, look, back off on that. Give yourself the care and the checking those engine lights that you need and fill up your reserves that way instead. But y&#39;all, even drained, we can show up to very, very, you know, deep and amazing levels. Now, the final truth that also landed for me coming out of this roadside test was that having a safe place to land after something like this, something traumatic, something out of your control, just something that is life, right? Having that safe place to land afterwards is everything. And this is where I really want to normalize like post-crisis dysregulation. Because it felt, you know, of course, when you&#39;re in the moment, you&#39;re running off of a lot of adrenaline. And so you&#39;re showing up in these really big ways. But this week post all of that, y&#39;all, oh my goodness, have I been very sleep deprived, very um vulnerably human, definitely cranky, a little bit off. And having to really remember to be really compassionate and remind myself that being this way post something like that does not mean I am failing. It means I am human. And actually, something that was really important that I also learned in this like having the safe place to land afterwards was, you know, the day after on Tuesday. So this all happened Monday night. So Tuesday, I felt like I was kind of walking around in a fog, a haze. Just I don&#39;t think we, I don&#39;t know about y&#39;all, but I definitely like no one&#39;s really taught me how to like go through traumatic experiences and then post like how do you care for yourself? But um, I had a moment where I finally, you know, just kind of been existing and floating through the space, and we&#39;d been watching a lot of movies because Andre just needed to sit on the couch and I wanted to be near him. But I finally had a moment where he was relaxing and I went into the other room and I asked Joe to hold me. And we laid down in the bed together and I just started bawling. And it was like all of the holding together could finally come out. I have a moment I&#39;ll share a little later where it did come out while we were at the hospital. But this was the moment where I could kind of start reckoning with in the moment, the trauma that&#39;s coming up that like we just have to kind of hang in there and get through. So we can&#39;t process it. So I&#39;m like shoving it down in my cells. Well, the next day I needed to come in and like unpack it from the cells. Like, okay, let&#39;s take this back out. What actually came up here? And thanks to the NVC work, the nonviolent communication we did this summer. I was speaking to him through terms of like, what am I feeling and what am I needing? And I realized the whole experience had really put me into a place I was feeling very, very fragile. And it was a lot of thoughts of like, life is out of my control. I am out of control. Honestly, y&#39;all, this was, I think, the first moment in my life, even with all of the loss I&#39;ve had. This was the first time I&#39;ve had someone that I like really, really love, love, love deeply and experienced like seeing them in massive pain. And then because he had to go under anesthesia, feeling like a loss of control in protecting them. And it it did a number on me, y&#39;all. I told Joe, like, I don&#39;t want to live in a world where I love people and they can be taken from me. I don&#39;t want to live in a world where people I love can be hurt, and just in being able to acknowledge all of that, being able to say that aloud, acknowledging the fear and the the pain and the sadness and the trauma that had come through the whole experience was huge because after I had cried and shook it out and just said it aloud, then I was able to like, okay, this is where I want to be. This is the life I want. And um, you know, I just kept saying to Joe, like, I don&#39;t want to do life without you, especially after going through something this hard with him. And him just saying, like, we&#39;ve got time, baby, we&#39;ve got time. And uh, like, yeah, that&#39;s right. I want this time. Now, obviously, I had that safe place to land with my partner, which newsflash is what I ultimately want for each and every one of you. I truly believe if you&#39;re gonna be in a partnership, this is what every single one of us deserves, is having someone that can be a safe space to land when we go through the hard shit in life. But I want to apply this also for those of you, you know, in the considering divorce space. Obviously, your soft place to land is not your partner currently, or you wouldn&#39;t be in this in this moment of your journey. And instead, cultivating that soft place to land with others, whether that is your best friend, as I&#39;ve said before, with my therapist, with a sister, with I see women doing it in my community all the time, cultivating their safe spaces with women in the community. That is essential preparation for whatever decision you end up making because you need, and you know, and uh, and ultimately I&#39;m realizing too, that&#39;s for those of you that are staying, that&#39;s what you&#39;re doing. You&#39;re doing the work of seeing, can my partner evolve into someone who can be a safe place to land? And can I do the work to be that for him as well? But that is so essential. That is something that I don&#39;t hear many people talking about that, like life is hard, we&#39;re gonna go through shit, there&#39;s gonna be traumatic stuff that happens, and how vital it is to have people that get to be your safe space to land afterwards. And it was very, very healing for me. Yes, there were these gorgeous aspects of like I am resilient, I am strong, look at how I&#39;m showing up, but so healing for my inner child parts to come through strong and afterwards not have to be strong to truly have a place to have my own breakdown. So I am so proud, honestly, of me and Joe. I feel like we passed this roadside test with flying colors. And my middle son is doing really well. He had an amazing doctor at the children&#39;s hospital. It was like a 20-minute procedure there. I guess he does them all day long. Um, bone set, cast on, not in pain anymore. It&#39;s crazy how fast kids can end up healing. Um, and hopefully, right, you know, the opposite of what I experienced in my childhood with my ER experience. My son went through that with me being grounded, solid, able to function and support him and my partner as well. Right. He got to go through that in a world where it was like, there are people who have got me. There are emotionally mature, securely attached adults that I can lean on and that will take care of me. Now, y&#39;all, that&#39;s my example of the roadside test to hopefully like give y&#39;all some long-range perspective of that piece of we don&#39;t get to control what&#39;s gonna happen in the future. We don&#39;t know what&#39;s gonna happen in our lives, but we wanna be ready. And I want to acknowledge that historically women have been trained to ignore their check engine lights. Yes, y&#39;all. Yes, y&#39;all. We have been trained to defer to others for safety, to stay in naivety, to avoid growing up, to kind of stay in that um more childlike deference place, especially towards men. And so I want to really drop in a little bit and just make sure that we all remember that this is part of the programming. That us not being in charge of our lives, not feeling capable or feeling really afraid. I&#39;m thinking specifically of that woman that joined the community this week, right? Being like, I feel really stuck. Why? Yes, baby, this is because of thousands of years. Of programming for women towards not being empowered and being supported in checking their own lights, taking care of themselves in this way. And I actually had this week in my ecstatic dance community on our on a Facebook page, there was like a conversation happening where there were a couple men in the community that were, you know, advocating for like, well, safety needs to be, you need to be self-responsible or for your own safety. And it, you know, it needs to be a balanced thing. And as pretty as that sounds, that I just had to, and I did, I popped into that thread really clearly and was like, this denies and glosses over thousands of years of history and ultimately like control and violence and abuse against women. And I really don&#39;t want to do that in this episode. I want to also bring in remembering that, like, y&#39;all, women&#39;s freedom is really perilously recent in the five to six thousand years of recorded human history, like women&#39;s rights have only been in the last 105 years. Okay. So even if, for my listeners that like weren&#39;t raised in an ultra-conservative religious home, or you know, maybe were raised with more female empowerment, you still have patriarchal and cultural conditioning in the water, in the air you breathe. Um, and not only that, but in the DNA passed down from your mother and your grandmother and your great grandmothers going back. And this is why I really want to help us kind of remove the shame around, okay, yes, I have the check engine light, but like I am struggling to check it. I&#39;m feeling all of this, like, uh, I don&#39;t, I just don&#39;t want to look. Many of us have been conditioned to do that. And this is the whole idea that good girls don&#39;t talk about the engine light, right? Good girls learn how to cope and they learn how to ignore and they learn how to suppress and they learn how to silence those things and run off of the least amount of resources possible. And to do that in order to not disrupt other people&#39;s peace or how other people are feeling or what other people need. And also doing all of that, trusting that someone else is steering the ship. And y&#39;all, if that is not just a microcosm of the macrocosm of what many of us see in governments as well, believing that there is some bigger group out there that&#39;s gonna take care of us and really trusting someone else is steering the ship. And if you&#39;re in the US right now, for some of you, realizing, like, oh my God, I don&#39;t know where this ship is not going in the place that I think is the safest for any of us. We have to acknowledge that this has its roots for many of us in our childhoods. Okay. In spaces where we were not in charge. Okay. When you&#39;re a child, you your parents are the ones that are in charge. You&#39;re really at their mercy. And to survive in those spaces, you might have had to prioritize others&#39; opinions and thoughts first. That might have looked like not wanting, this is like what I see in so many of you, just not wanting to upset other people&#39;s feelings, not wanting to, quote, hurt others&#39; feelings. I just don&#39;t want to hurt him. He&#39;ll be so hurt. And then like torturing yourself, feeling horrible when other people feel sad or upset. And that&#39;s the abandoning and ignoring your own feelings and needs to try and make that better for them. If you were a child of a narcissistic parent, this is your bread and butter, babes. And this is how the patterns quietly got set up for you that you are probably now seeing and unearthing in the marriage that you ended up in. So, as you guys all know, like, welcome to the club for most of my life, y&#39;all. Like, seriously, I was think about it today. 29 of my 37 years. Let that sink in. I was not in the driver&#39;s seat of my own life. I really was for the most part. I mean, you know, and I think of it as like, okay, so maybe I was like allowed to make trips to the grocery store, allowed to do, you know, like little things in my tiny prescribed realm of being a stay-at-home mom here or there. And, you know, in my case, I would say that wasn&#39;t even necessarily. I talked about this in the podcast with Maya, Bialik, and Jonathan. That wasn&#39;t even necessarily because my ex-husband was this tyrant that was like, no, you can&#39;t, but just we were both raised in a culture that taught us nothing else. So our world was tiny and we didn&#39;t know you could go beyond the boundaries. But I was very like buckled in, quietly trusting someone else had the map and was driving the car. While literally my entire dashboard is lit up with check engine lights and check tire pressure, and we are not doing well. You are drowning in depression. So know that this programming, okay, y&#39;all, this historical programming, what it does is it leaves us as women blind to our own agency, to our own power, and to our own sense of deep internal wisdom. And as I will say again many times on this podcast, that is why I am so in love with the process of considering divorce. Because with the process of contemplating divorce comes, I think, your real first crash course in reclaiming those things, in reclaiming your agency and your power and your wisdom and really becoming an adult. And in today&#39;s world, I want to offer more so than ever before, I want to advocate for relationships, marriages that are interdependent. Okay, where there&#39;s actually like adults, an adult and an adult, you know, in interdependence with each other, not just two emotionally immature children in adults&#39; bodies doing codependence and narcissistic abuse with each other in a marriage. Okay. To do that, even if your partner&#39;s not on board with that, right? If your partner is, great, you&#39;re in the stay zone. You&#39;re working together to build that. But if your partner isn&#39;t, that&#39;s where you get to start doing the work of becoming securely attached to yourself. Now, if we ignore the lights, y&#39;all, I just, I&#39;m like, I know you, I know y&#39;all know. I know you already know, many of you, the cost of ignoring the lights that are on. And boy, do I know it myself, right? I mean, I really was hitting quite a pretty deep rock bottom mental health-wise back when I started my journey seven years ago from just ignoring the lights. And I think honestly, as I&#39;m thinking about this now, y&#39;all, it wasn&#39;t, I think it&#39;s that I knew the lights were there, but I just didn&#39;t know where to go to service them. And everywhere I kept servicing them was not helpful. Like the religion I was in kept telling me, you&#39;re not praying enough, you&#39;re not this enough. It just kept feeding me back on myself. Um, same thing in my marriage. At the time, you know, my ex-husband definitely had narcissistic wounding. So it was a lot of like projecting and reflecting back onto me. And that just increased all of the symptoms. So it wasn&#39;t even necessarily that I was ignoring the lights, is that I didn&#39;t have the right person to go to to help me fix those things. I didn&#39;t have the right mechanic, I didn&#39;t have the right oil shop, I didn&#39;t have somebody who actually knew what we were dealing with and how to fix it. So that&#39;s part of why I love this podcast. Because I hope that this podcast provides so many resources for like, here&#39;s something you can do for this light. Here&#39;s something you can do for this light. But what happens when we are ignoring those lights or when the people we&#39;re going to to get those lights fixed by or worked on do not actually know how to help us. That&#39;s where we get, you know, the suicidal ideation, the depression. I see so many of you coming with autoimmune diseases. Our body starts breaking down. Um, we are showing up unhappy, we are showing up angry, we are showing up out of integrity with ourselves. We&#39;re doing things or are taking actions in our life that we thought we would never do before, but we&#39;re doing them because we are so desperate to have something make these lights go away, to have something bring back that feeling of moving through our lives and feeling good, right? When I talked about that, like that power, that wisdom, that agency that we have historically been denied and even still now are massively culturally indoctrinated to not even realize we have. When we live without that, we get sick. It&#39;s like trying to extinguish someone&#39;s light when they have to live out of sync with what their body is telling them, with their rhythms, with their cycles, when they have to deny the knowing that is right in front of them. And one of the things that I&#39;ve noticed most women that I&#39;ve seen go through this process, what they mention being the biggest cost that they don&#39;t really realize until they&#39;re on the other side. I&#39;ve heard this the most from women who have gotten divorced, is the cost of time. They realize, damn it, you know, they realize how good life is on the other side, and they go, oh, I want more. I wish I had more. And so I want that not to be, you know, I&#39;m so against us like spiraling into regret and really being hard on ourselves. Like the amount of time is the amount of time you have. Makes me think of Joe the other day when I&#39;m like, I just want to, I don&#39;t want to live life if I can&#39;t have you. And he&#39;s like, look, we got time. Like it is, it is what it is. And also for those of you finding yourselves stuck and just kind of treading and spinning your wheels, that is the cost. The cost is time. The cost is getting to live more of your life, getting to show up for your children in a more resilient, resource, more securely attached, emotionally mature way, and how that affects your children growing up. If you don&#39;t have children, it&#39;s the gifts you&#39;re gonna bring to the world that can change the world more quickly by you bringing them to the table more quickly. I&#39;m gonna talk about this a little bit more later on in the episode two, of like now more than ever, I believe the world needs the gifts that are lying dormant in so many of us that keep, you know, our check engine lights are on and we either are ignoring them or we&#39;re too afraid to look at them, or we are keep going to people that actually don&#39;t know how to help us fix them. So thankfully, I don&#39;t have many examples of my clients like losing really big things from waiting. I am so grateful. I don&#39;t think I&#39;ve heard any stories where someone&#39;s been like, because I waited, this horrible thing happened, right? So yay. Um instead, what I want to share to kind of like give you, I don&#39;t want to necessarily use the like, oh my God, if you don&#39;t go do these things, this is the awful thing that could happen. As much as I want to use the perspective of if you do these things, here are the awesome things that can happen. And I want to use the example from my own life of how y&#39;all, when I filed for divorce, for sure, like scared, overwhelmed, all the things, all the shit shit shit, shit show. It was a shit show. And as hard as it was going through it, um, it was finalized in September of 2019. Y&#39;all come the spring of 2020 and COVID and us going into lockdown. Who was so happy? Me. Who was over here like, oh my God, thank God. Who was filled with relief and gratitude that that was done? Because you know where we went from there? We went into delayed divorce timelines, backed up courts, judges that couldn&#39;t see people, divorces that went on and on because the system got backlogged with COVID. So instead of me getting to experience stress and freaking out and all the parts on top of that, I got to go through COVID having recently been divorced, like at home, chilling with my kids, in my space, healing. My point with that is calling out to y&#39;all to not wait with the little brain trick that your brain does of saying, oh, we&#39;ll just stay. And if we stay, that&#39;s so much safer than leaving, especially for those of you that are like, I&#39;m not really feeling this. This is not working. That mechanism of your brain saying we&#39;ll stay, it&#39;s so much safer, isn&#39;t actually true. It is just your brain preferring the known to the unknown. Brains do not like the unknown, they immediately associate the unknown with danger. But if your current known is not good, is not actually safe, then the unknown is where it&#39;s at, my dears. And to move into the unknown, you have to pay attention to your check engine lights. You have to be going, uh, something here&#39;s the known. And in the known, a lot of lights are on. There&#39;s a lot of things happening that are showing me the car isn&#39;t functioning well. Are we gonna keep driving like this? Or are we gonna go into the unknown and find what else is ahead? Now, this was also this piece, y&#39;all, of not waiting, right? This was really driven home for me this last week in my roadside test as well. So during the procedure for my son, they actually did have to give him anesthesia. And I have never experienced that with one of my children. I&#39;ve never, you know, and and we were just we&#39;re in this experience where like I&#39;ve been with him the whole time by his side. And nothing could really prep me for that moment. I mean, as much as the nurses told me and explained um what he was gonna be experiencing and what it was gonna look like based on what they were giving him, you know, I&#39;m just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I&#39;m thinking like, I&#39;ve got this, I&#39;ve got this. And then when they actually did it, um, of course, right after he goes down, they made us leave the room and we had to go down the hall to a different room. And y&#39;all, no one, no matter how much they prepared me, no matter how much they told me what it was gonna look like, prepared me for that. And that moment when um when he went under and I had to leave that room, um, it was like feeling all of my control just be stripped away. And we got down the hall to that little room, we followed the nurse out. And as soon as we got to that room, I was like, Joe, shut the door, and I just buried my face in his chest, and I just shook and cried uncontrollably because it was so much harder than I had expected to be away from him, to have to put my child&#39;s. I just you never know how your kid&#39;s gonna react on um anesthesia. And so that moment was like, whoa. Whoa, y&#39;all, that was the closest I&#39;ve ever come to feeling like the loss of someone that I truly, truly love, the risk, the like, oh my God, you know, and sitting in that room and knowing there is, even if it&#39;s just a super small chance, there&#39;s still a small chance that they could come back and say, you know, something went wrong. Um, and I was so grateful too. That&#39;s another moment where so incredibly grateful for my partner because as I it was like the first time that evening that I finally could just like let, let go, lose it, just really cry and let out all of the stuff I&#39;d been holding in from the whole evening. And as I was crying and being like, I don&#39;t want to leave him, Joe was like, I know, baby, but but they&#39;ve got to lock in. And as he said that and provided that perspective, I was like, oh, he&#39;s right, you know, like, and he said he&#39;s like, they don&#39;t need you in there right now. Like, you need to be right here with me. And they&#39;ve got him and I&#39;ve got you. Although that was super terrifying, y&#39;all. I&#39;m gonna just drive this one home. That is reality. Like, this is the reality we live with every day. That life is not guaranteed, that time is not guaranteed, that the people we love are not we are not in control of what happens to them. And it really brought to the forefront for me this like, whoa, I am so grateful. That&#39;s what it was like. I am so grateful. In that moment in that room with Joe, I knew that like I had shown up for Ander in the biggest ways possible. Even if something had happened to him, I really know that in that moment I would have been able to go, yeah, I was the best mom I could be at this point of my life. I have done massive, massive shifts in my life to become more of that person. And by the best mom does not mean I am perfect or that I do everything right, but it does mean I have a much more regulated nervous system, that I have made huge, massive steps in my life to be able to create an environment for myself and a life for myself where I get to show up regulated way more of the time. Where seven years ago I was dysregulated probably a good 90% of the time, maybe only 10% was I regulated. My life now operates at a pretty steady, I&#39;m 85% of the time regulated. That is phenomenal, y&#39;all. And I&#39;m not alone in this moment of, you know, something medically happening and realizing, like, whoa, life is precious. This is not guaranteed. I often see this in women that I&#39;ve coached who have a parent pass away, or especially parents that um get diagnosed with cancer and then lose their parent to cancer. Major loss sometimes shakes us enough to deal with the reality that life is short and unpredictable. And it makes us like rebalance the scales and we go, whoa, wait a second. Is staying in this space where I am paralyzed by fear? Is avoiding the fear truly worth the cost of missing out on the experiences or the person I want to be or the way I want to show up for the people I love. So with that piece, I want to drive home that we can&#39;t control that unknown future, right? We we don&#39;t know when the roadside tests are gonna happen, but what we can control, y&#39;all, is what are we going to believe and choose today? This is strategically which of the lights are on, and how am I gonna work with those lights? And what am I going to believe about myself and my future so that I can make choices that clean up my car, the car of myself, the car of my life, so that I get to when those moments come, and if they come in a way that doesn&#39;t end in the happy way I had, right? I got to walk out of the hospital with my kid, that I don&#39;t look back with regret, that I go, yep, nope, I was showing up fully. Now I want to apply this to helping us face the reality of what I believe is the road ahead today. And although I&#39;m speaking kind of specifically. Specifically and directly to those of us in the United States, because it is really hitting hard here. I see this though out in the rest of the world as well. Not nearly. I&#39;m like, the US, though, is really, really like doing a terrible job right now as far as the road ahead and what is on the horizon. So for those of you in other countries that maybe have healthcare and still want to feed your children school lunches, I know that you&#39;re made, your road may not be as rocky, but I do see in the world at large growing trends of inhumanity and misogyny. So this isn&#39;t about wishing for smooth highways ahead, y&#39;all. And instead, it is about being realistic and grounded in our own power and wisdom so that we can handle whatever unexpected detours lie ahead of us. And for me personally, y&#39;all, especially in like my views of the world and what is ahead, 2025 has been the year of unexpected detours for me. This month, especially in Texas, um, for those of you that don&#39;t know, we&#39;ve had our just the politicians trying to um re make our boundaries. I&#39;m botching this terribly with all the words. Basically, the word is gerrymandering, but rezoning our districts to try and get five more seats to keep Trump in power. It was something that I was like, well, fuck. Didn&#39;t know they could do that. And really woke me up to like, okay, like this this year has been for me just removing those, those rose-colored glasses of privilege that I have gotten to live with as a white woman in America and realizing more and more how vast this machine is. This machine that, you know, the more I&#39;ve researched, like this moment in US history has been 50 plus years in the making. There are many different facets to what&#39;s happening now. And as much as I wanted to kind of in that healing fantasy way believe that this was gonna be a blip and go away, I do believe that some of that naive optimism for me is getting replaced with a deeper, more mature adult understanding of like, okay, we&#39;re gonna be in this for the long haul. And although there&#39;s grief with that, when you wake up to like, oh, this is what people without privilege have been living with forever, this system is broken and it&#39;s hurting people. Then you get to get down and like get your get your elbows dirty, though, and get in with the work. And this is, you know, the machine that we&#39;re talking about is the machine of patriarchy and misogyny and racism and all of those pieces. So when we are thinking of this machine and the reality of the road that seems to be emerging, at least in the US for many of us here, what is the biggest tool that you can use just for yourself when your check engine light comes on? Because as I said previously, I think one of the biggest issues is maybe you see those check engine lights, but you don&#39;t know where to go to fix them. Here is the number one tool it is self-trust. This podcast is about anything. I, you know, the the bigger the podcast is about considering divorce, but if you guys have noticed throughout all the episodes, the heart of this podcast comes back to self-trust. Because when you self-trust, you&#39;re able to take the little bit-by-bit steps that make the changes that move you, that can, you know, reorient you back to the paths of your soul calls. And looking back over my own journey, planting that seed of self-trust is really that was the foundation for every big step that followed. And those big steps were always, you know, just tiny steps of self-trust that were accumulating along the way. Joe always tells me when my brain gets a little bit like, I don&#39;t know how to do this. He&#39;s like, How do we eat an elephant? We eat it one bite at a time. So I want you to think of your daily self-trust practices, whatever those are. I received an email, I think a couple weeks ago from someone being like, oh my God, your Chat GBT tarot guide is killing right now. It was the sweetest thing. I&#39;ll have to find it and actually read it on the podcast before because she was like, I have done so many other things, and this is helping me more than any of those. So if you guys are, if you still haven&#39;t gotten that, um, you can go look in the show notes. But you texted to 33777 to get that guide. Maybe that&#39;s one of your daily self-trust practices. Maybe another one is meditating. Maybe another one is listening to a Sarah Blondon episode. We&#39;re doing a lot of those in the community right now. But those are the small things that help us move towards preventing the bigger failures. And I really want you all to realize that many of you are already doing these. These small decisions that you have made from these places of self-trust, they are proof that you are already building this future that you want. And you&#39;re doing that through handling the lights that are on your dashboard that are coming on. Now, what I want to offer though with this episode is I would love for you guys. It&#39;s almost like a like a push goal. I feel like my PBS days of them calling in and being like, we&#39;re now going for our push goal, are showing through. Um, can we all just cry about how PBS is not gonna be funded anymore? Oh my God. Okay. Um, back on board. I want you to take some time to post this episode, ask yourself, what is one big move that you can start moving towards today for helping your emotional engine thrive. We&#39;re not just talking like your car runs, we&#39;re talking like your engine purrs. Okay, my loves. And the reason why I want you to shift here, I&#39;ve been talking about those small little maintenance moves, but I want like big moves coming out of this episode. Because as I&#39;ve been looking at these systems that I feel like are falling apart and seeing the bigger pictures right now at play in the world, what&#39;s been driven home for me is that when we do this work for ourselves, we end up getting to be ahead of the curve, y&#39;all. If anything, that&#39;s like that&#39;s what I&#39;ve seen so much in my own journey. I really feel like I was ahead of the curve when it came to COVID. Like I got divorced and then COVID hit. And I got to really enjoy going through COVID in a much less stressed place. I feel like I&#39;m ahead of the curve right now as well. When I look at the political world at the moment, y&#39;all, I am incredibly grateful that I am dating a partner who was a feminist long before I even was. Like that&#39;s what I&#39;m talking about when you get to be ahead of the curve. You get to go through kind of the tough big world events, but you&#39;re already pretty stabilized and safe in your own life. And then because you are ahead of the curve, you get to contribute, you get to build new systems of support for others. That&#39;s literally what I have done with my own life. Right? That is what this podcast is. This is me saying, from a place of my own reserves and safety that I have created for me that allow me while going through this, you know, shit show of a political world right now. I am not having to argue with my partner about whether feminism is the right path. I am not having to argue with him about whether misogyny is real. I&#39;m not having to explain to him his privilege as a man. That is already established. So now that energy that would be taken up in that gets to be spent building systems of support for others. And here&#39;s the like aha moment for all of you that may be like, well, fuck, like I&#39;m having to go through this without a feminist partner, you know? Yeah, I get it. Like that was me just three years ago. Three years ago, I was dating a dude who I definitely did not have this kind of support from, who was not showing up for me in ways that actually like filled and helped support me and my children, but were actually really draining. So it&#39;s okay if you find yourself in the point where you&#39;re like, lots of check engine lights on, not having a really great co-pilot. I feel like I&#39;m kind of drowning here. This episode is the call to say, yeah, it&#39;s time to shift. It&#39;s time to start moving, it&#39;s time to go. The fear and the being stuck is worth less to me than the possibilities of what&#39;s ahead. And I want to be ready for what&#39;s ahead. And when we take this perspective, like we&#39;re we&#39;re really trying also in this episode, I&#39;m trying to bring you up into like a macrocosm view of yes, there is like the interworkings of your own personal life. But when you think big into like how am I influencing my children&#39;s lives, the lives of other women in the world, the movement of the world in general, which way is the pendulum going to swing? When we take that perspective, we are able to reframe for ourselves the grief that has to be paid. Okay. There is grief in realizing, oh shit, I&#39;m gonna have to really show up for myself. There&#39;s nobody coming to save me. We reframe that grief, though, and the clear-eyed seeing that comes with it as portals for ourselves into our deeper purpose. And when we do that, we take the steering wheel back from fear, from our parents, from anybody else, from our husband, from anybody else who is driving our life. We take responsibility for the maintenance of our own car, of our own life. We take that back. And I want to encourage you all that this work is about facing what is in front of you. It&#39;s about seeing it for what it is, letting the rose-colored glasses fall off. And this is where like the deep soul work of Women Who Run with the Wolves really, I&#39;m so grateful that that was really the first book, I think, that started off my journey and really launched me into this deeper connection with my soul calls and with life. Because when you approach life from her deep understanding of the life, death, life cycle, right? Which is like life is born, things die, and then they go back into the earth, and then life comes again. You start to understand that in your life, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of these cycles throughout your entire life. This is not just like the decision of divorce is just one of many. That&#39;s actually what I think it means to be a human. If you want to be a human that is growing, that is expanding, that is becoming your full self, instead of like when we stop growing, we calcify, we start. The image I have is just of something like, you know, shriveling. And when we try to like, or when we try to, you know, stay indefinitely young and never die. We don&#39;t allow for these cycles of things dying, the leaves dropping off the tree, decomposing, and then in the spring being born again. It makes me think too of like a client I spoke with this week. Um, she&#39;s actually almost to the a finalized divorce. It&#39;s been a long process in the divorce proceedings. But we were talking this week and she&#39;s like, wait a second, like, so this is this this life, death, like this is gonna be ongoing. And I was like, yeah, this is this is life. Life is your engine lights coming on, you realizing, oh, something is uncalibrated, not working, diving down in, looking under the hood, examining things, and realizing, okay, maybe we need an overhaul. And that those lights are a gift from the universe, telling you something is ahead that you want to be ready for. And acting now is preventative care for your future self. So to tie all of this in at the end, I want to use an example of this in my own life, because you know, I&#39;m big on practicing what I preach. I&#39;ve always been someone who does not want to coach things that I am not like actively doing and living in my own life. And as many of you have heard in my episodes over the last month, two months or so, right? I am really in a deep process of examining and overhauling my own systems of support and looking to the future for how I can best support myself and all of you. I mean, another thing that&#39;s come out of this um, out of the podcast, especially out of the community, is a feeling of uh responsibility. Like I&#39;ve seen what has been created. I want to steward and protect it going forward. And especially now, as I said before, as I&#39;m seeing government systems of support in the US uh being taken away and collapsing, worrying discussions away around women&#39;s rights going forward. I feel like more than ever going forward in the future, we are going to need community. We are going to need communities of women, we are going to need women&#39;s voices speaking out and teaching us how to self-trust, how to take all of that trust we have imbued in the external and to return it back to ourselves where it really is best served and belongs. Because as I&#39;ve met so many of you, I&#39;m like, God, you all are amazing. Like, that&#39;s who I want to trust. I want to trust y&#39;all. So, with that in mind, I&#39;ve been working on some big shifts behind the scenes in how I&#39;m going to get to connect with you all through this podcast going forward. And it&#39;s been some hard, some hard, uncomfortable work, y&#39;all, of getting clear-eyed for myself around my own financial security and making big steps to value what I&#39;ve created and to protect and make sure that my voice and my message is something that will sustainably last for many, many more years to come. Especially as I feel like what I&#39;m teaching, like the need for this, is only going to grow in the future. And along with that, too, I&#39;ve also, you guys know I&#39;ve had like a love-hate relationship with social media. I&#39;ve been looking for ways to engage more and to grow with, you know, I have this amazing, um, deeper, way more high-touch community, the stairgo community, but also getting to connect with those of you through the podcast in a more interactive way, a way that can possibly not just be this one-sided conversation from me to you, even though I know so many of you have emailed me and sort of like, you know, I feel like we&#39;re best friends, but opening a way for us to dialogue. I also want a space where I can receive comments from y&#39;all more easily and requests for specific topics because I&#39;m just not very active on my social media accounts. I mean, any of you who have sent me a DM through Facebook or Instagram, I&#39;m sorry, y&#39;all. It&#39;s just not, it&#39;s just not my thing. It&#39;s not my platform. I&#39;m finally, I will still have a space, you know, I&#39;ll obviously still have a presence there, but I I I&#39;m hungry for another space to be connecting with those of you through the podcast. So in the next couple of weeks, I am going to share exactly what that&#39;s going to look like and how y&#39;all can be a part of it. And I will also just say this that I&#39;m hoping that this will be a way for those of you that have ever wanted to take the conversations further or that have like something I&#39;ve been feeling so much lately is I want to know that I am contributing in real-world ways to places that I care about. Um a way that I&#39;m considering doing that right now is I found like a skate park down in Dallas that does food rescues on the weekends. And I told Joe last weekend, I was like, baby, next weekend we don&#39;t have the kids. I want to go because I want to be with my hands grabbing things that are helping people, with my money contributing to people that are making a difference in the world right now. Um so if you also are feeling that call, this will be a way for you to get to contribute to keeping women&#39;s voices loud, unapologetic, and well supported in this world, which is what I believe I&#39;m doing. So if that is something you&#39;re passionate about, you&#39;re going to want to hear about this next step. And to stay tuned around it, I want you to reach out if you are not already on my email list, because that is another piece that I am hoping to use a lot more in the future. Um, you know, this is just me learning how to run a business, y&#39;all. Something that I&#39;ve really loved about myself is that I&#39;ve just come and given myself to this space so freely and so big. And now I&#39;m getting to learn how to also set up more ways to receive back from all that I have given. And that is a vulnerable space to be in and also very necessary and important growth for myself if I want this to be something that lasts into the future. So we&#39;re gonna be using our email list more. And if you are not on it yet, go ahead and email my assistant Alex. Her email address is alex at stayorgocoaching.com. That&#39;s A-L-E-X. And she will get you signed up because um that&#39;s where we&#39;re gonna be sending out. Obviously, we&#39;ll be talking about it on the podcast too, but that&#39;s where you&#39;re gonna be able to get a lot of the details and the links and everything. So that was super, I was like, ooh, so that was like a big vulnerable piece for me. Often, y&#39;all, I kind of like to keep this this area specifically. I think my business acumen and learning how to be an entrepreneur and how to do that well and to really provide for myself has been one of the toughest areas in my work by far. It&#39;s an area that I have not dived into deeply just yet because it&#39;s still so raw for me. But it&#39;s something that I know I want to get better at sharing and letting you all into as well, because it&#39;s a huge part of what I believe the future is going to demand of us as women. And um, so this was just a one little step for me, this moment of like sharing this in this episode and being like, hey, here&#39;s a check engine light that I&#39;ve been seeing for a really long time. That I am now actually like diving in and being like, okay, as you guys have heard me mentioning, my business coach lately, diving in with my business coach to be like, help me look at these things, help me to see the uncomfortable things, the things that need to die, the things that I have to let go of, the things I&#39;ve built that were working that are no longer working, and help me refashion them so that I am ready for what&#39;s ahead and the future that&#39;s coming. Because I want to be. I don&#39;t want to just approach this future running on fumes. I want to approach this future with my engine purring. And not only purring, but you know, with ample space to bring others along, to share and to let the overflow from my cup activate and open those that want a life like that. As well. Okay, so with this example, right, y&#39;all, me showing up. I have my own tech engine lights as well, and I&#39;m doing preventative maintenance at this moment so that I don&#39;t have to scrap this car in the future. I want to speak directly to you. If you are considering divorce, what have we learned from this episode? Your tech engine light is on, and it is on for a reason. And if you&#39;re one of those listening to this episode where you&#39;re like, this is kind of recent. And I&#39;m by recent, I mean like, you know, the last two to five years, babes, catch those lights early enough. Like, let&#39;s go. Start investing in the episodes where I&#39;ve talked about staying, start having those conversations with your partner. Start asking, start being more honest. Now is the time to do this. And if you are someone where maybe those lights have been on for a really long time, and you&#39;re starting to wake up and realize, whoa, this engine, it&#39;s been a little too long and it might be too late. I know so many of you struggle with accepting that that&#39;s what&#39;s presenting for you, is like, this is too late. I want to reassure you that it&#39;s okay. That is not the goal. I don&#39;t think the goal is to like save the engine of, you know, and we&#39;ve got so many different analogies here, right? The car of yourself. I think you can think of it as like also there&#39;s like a car that you&#39;re in with your partner. And if that engine, the lights have been on for too long and that engine is no longer running and you&#39;re breaking down all the time on the side of the road. It&#39;s okay. That&#39;s what I&#39;m here for. That is what my community is here for. Because it is okay to get out of that car and to get in a different one. Get in a self-partnered one. For a long time, y&#39;all. That was my car. It was a car that only fit me and my kids post-divorce. And that was more than enough. That was actually exactly what I needed in my life at that time. Now it&#39;s a car that fits me and my kids and my partner. And I love it. This, you know, a little bit more room, a little bit more people. I really believe that life is not about picking one car and staying with it, no matter how dangerous it gets, no matter how difficult the road becomes, no matter how much you break down. That is not what your life is about. Your life is about you. It is about you getting to live a life that you get to be proud of at the end of your life. And the car that we choose to do that journey in is less important than you. So coming off of this episode, I want you to pick one way, one big way, remember, to service your life this week, whether it&#39;s emotionally, practically, or both. That could be maybe you&#39;re getting in touch with that, you know, therapist you&#39;ve been considering. Um, maybe you are reaching out to a best friend that&#39;s offered to help you make those next steps that you&#39;ve been nervous about. Maybe you&#39;re talking to an attorney. Maybe you&#39;re signing up for that retreat with your husband that you&#39;ve been wanting to go to. Maybe you&#39;re um finally sharing with him what you&#39;re actually thinking and feeling. Okay. We are moving out of waiting and hoping the light will magically turn off and letting fear drive us into turning up the music to pulling over and going, who do I talk to? How do we fix this? And when we do this, we get to go first, y&#39;all. This is like this is this is the kind of culminating point of instead of as women waiting for something to happen or deferring to others, we get to go first. We get to step in, lead out. And I see this as a massive reclamation of choice as women that goes against our patriarchal conditioning. And if there&#39;s anything you love about me, y&#39;all, it&#39;s this. This is what you like when you listen to me. It is the satisfaction I get to live with every day of knowing I chose this. And that satisfaction outweighs for me the discomfort of the risks I&#39;ve taken and I continue to take to live this life. Now, I also want to provide some other ways. When I say pick one big way to service your life, your vehicle, please remember you don&#39;t have to do that alone. That is another thing we&#39;ve been trained as women to do, to think we have to do it all by ourselves. That is not the case. If you are needing a full workup, like you are like, I have gone to multiple car places and they keep giving me the wrong advice, or I feel like they don&#39;t understand these lights, or they&#39;re just not seeing me. Guess what? I own an auto repair shop, a soul auto repair shop. That is what my 90 minutes are for. I love thinking of these with this analogy as you bringing in that soul car into the shop. You&#39;re also letting me look under the hood of the marriage, and we are looking over it together. It&#39;s like we&#39;re standing in front of both of these cars and we&#39;re like, look at this, look at this. You get to tell me where it&#39;s making sounds, where it&#39;s getting bumpy or screeching. And I have got you. This is my passion. This is my life&#39;s work. This is what I am really hella good at is looking under the hood, getting down underneath your car of your soul and your marriage, and being like, here&#39;s the diagnosis. And not only the diagnosis, but with those 90 minutes, here&#39;s a path forward. Here are the next steps. Now, if you are more in a space of needing a crew of ride or dies to be on the journey with you, this is where I think of like motorcycle gangs. Can we all have a motorcycle gang together? The stay or go. I actually saw so many motorcycle groups this weekend with their little embroidered, you know, leather vests. Y&#39;all, I can see it. This is gonna be amazing. Um, if you are looking for more of the ride or dies to be on that journey with you, babes, that is what the community is for. That is the community is where you get to be on live calls each week. Um, this week, I think tomorrow we&#39;ve got our intimacy chat. That&#39;s one of my fucking favorites where we get to talk about all things sex. Because who doesn&#39;t love chatting about sex with girlfriends? I mean, nobody else in my life will talk about these things. I need to get the details. I need to know the ins and outs. Live calls about that. Live calls at the end of each week this week. We&#39;re doing our meditation moment where we get to drop in, catch up on how the week&#39;s been for everybody, and also meditate together. This is what community is about. It is being in the heart together. It is also being in the highs together. It is laughing, it is connecting. Um, we&#39;re doing a bunch of meditation this month. We&#39;ve got guided meditations going out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday that we&#39;re all trying to do in our respective places on those days. So it&#39;s like this connecting in with a really big sisterhood of energy that is there supporting you, along with all the other aspects of the community, the chat, the um feed, the being able to DM people privately, like it&#39;s just an incredible space that takes you into, yeah, just just truly a sisterhood of women in this process of considering divorce. And then as always, y&#39;all, this podcast. This podcast is your place each week to get to drop in with me, to pop in your headphones and reconnect with someone who loves you, someone who gets you, someone who, you know, I&#39;m thinking of a woman where I got on a 90-minute with her last week, and we went into a part of her story that I could feel she was kind of unsure of how I would react or feeling maybe a little bit um, you know, embarrassed or nervous. And I was like, I just paused her and I was like, whatever you&#39;re gonna tell me, it&#39;s not gonna surprise me. And I&#39;ve got you. Like, there is nothing you can tell me that&#39;s gonna throw me. It really isn&#39;t. I have done enough work now as a coach to be able to approach things from such a beautifully neutral and supportive space of just, yeah, this is life, and life is messy. Um, and I love that through the podcast, you get to connect with me each week. You get to keep coming back to me and to hopefully this source that I bring into the world that will always be about coming back to your self-trust. All right, my babes. Oof, this was a long one, y&#39;all. I couldn&#39;t help myself. This is just, I knew it was gonna be an episode like this. All right, y&#39;all. Sending you love. See you next week.
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