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Against All Odds Podcast, The Less than 1% Chance with Maria Aponte
Maria highlights stories of people that have been the "less than 1% chance" and have come out of their situations thriving and seeing life as happening FOR them and not TO them! Inspiring and empowering stories that will show you that against all odds you can make it through anything!
Against All Odds Podcast, The Less than 1% Chance with Maria Aponte
She Dropped Out at 13 Believing She Was Stupid- Then Became a Doctor with Dr. Jodi-Maree Cronin
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
A kid who leaves school before 14 isn't "supposed" to become a doctor, and that's exactly why Dr. Jodi-Maree Cronin's story hit us so hard. Her childhood was marked by domestic violence at the hands of her father and two separate sexual assaults before she turned 12- the kind of trauma that quietly shapes everything: confidence, relationships, body image, the ability to trust. But she also carried something just as real: a stubborn belief that hard work and the right support could change a life.
We follow the turning points that made the impossible practical- returning to study as a young mom, tackling a bridging program alongside her own mother, and meeting a teacher who didn't hesitate to say "you can do anything you want to do," then mapped out the exact steps to medicine. Jodi-Maree shares what it was like to push through imposter syndrome in biomedical science and finally feel the weight lift at her medical school graduation. Then we go deeper into the cost of caregiving and burnout: the PTSD she developed as a first responder, and what she calls "emotional debt" - the interest you pay when you keep saying yes while abandoning your own needs. In 2014 that debt came due when she attempted suicide, something she says most doctors don't survive given their access to lethal means. She did...then relapsed in 2017, lost her decades-long relationship, her medical career, and declared bankruptcy.
Maria also shares her own story of surviving sexual assault, staying silent, and later facing HPV and cervical cancer, connecting the dots between suppressed emotions and the body's breaking point. Together they talk about the circle of control, being the "thermostat" in tense moments, and why happiness often shows up as a side effect of inner peace rather than something you chase directly. Jodi-Maree explains how her assistance dog Benni taught her relational safety and inspired the work she does now, building emotional wealth through values-based living.
If you're healing from trauma, navigating mental health, or trying to rebuild from ground zero, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find these stories.
⚠️ Content Warning: This episode includes discussion of domestic violence, child sexual assault, and suicide. Listener discretion advised.
If you or someone you know is struggling: the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text (988), and the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline is available at 1-800-656-4673 or online at rainn.org. You are not alone.
Connect with Dr. Jodi-Maree Cronin:
🌐 Business site: https://pack4life.com.au/
🌐 Personal site: https://jodimareecronin.com/
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jodimaree.cronin
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/benni_the_gsp
📚 Books:
Memoir-
Benni: The Best Medicine Has Paws: https://a.co/d/03PGDoDw
Children's Books-
Belle is Sad: https://a.co/d/02v2uT5y
Assistance Dog Benni: https://a.co/d/03su2rUs
📖 NEW BOOK: Against All Odds: The Less Than 1% Chance
I wasn't supposed to survive. As the surviving twin with less than a 1% chance at life, I've spent my whole existence beating odds nobody expected me to beat. In this memoir and anthology, I share my story alongside eight other unbelievable accounts of people who refused to let impossible circumstances write their ending, from cancer and addiction to childhood trauma and grief. Eleven stories. One roadmap for anyone who's ever been told "you can't."
Get your copy here: https://books.by/love-your-life
Love Your Life
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Welcome And What Less Than 1% Means
SPEAKER_00Welcome back to the Against All Odds, the Less than 1% Chance podcast with your host, Maria Aponte, where we will hear stories of incredible people surviving against all odds. And my hope is that we can all see how life is always happening for us, even when we are the less than 1% chance.
SPEAKER_01Hey, hey, welcome back to Against All Odds, the Less than 1% Chance podcast with your host, Maria Ponte. I am so excited for this next conversation. I am so honored that Dr. Jodi Marie Cronin is here with us today. She is in Australia, and at the time of this recording, I honor her because it is three o'clock in the morning her time. And it's afternoon for me. So totally honor the fact that you are giving us this time. And thank you so much. I will quickly introduce her and then we can get started so we could hear your story. And I'm just so excited for our listeners. So Dr. Jodi Marie Cronin is a retired medical doctor and author who overcame childhood trauma, including domestic violence and sexual assault, and left school before her 14th birthday, believing she was stupid. After having her children, she went back to school and with the encouragement of a wonderful teacher, eventually earned her medical degree. That's amazing. She became an OB doctor, then an educator, and eventually a medical manager at an area health service. Today she helps other others heal by defining themselves by their values rather than external labels. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Jodie Marie Cronin, and I would love to hear your against all odds story.
SPEAKER_02I'm really happy to be here from
Growing Up With Violence And Fear
SPEAKER_02the other side of the world.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02So there's a little bit of a backstory as you alluded to. When I was young, I lived in a very difficult home environment. I had a quite an aggressive father. My father I met when I was two because he was in jail for the first two years of my life. He came back and by all reports had a lot of difficulty readjusting into society after going to prison for theft, basically. So they had a three-long car stealing thing going on, and Dad was caught reselling one of those cars. So I met him when I was two, and I really apparently didn't like him very much because he wasn't very nice to my mother. We settled into life a little bit, then trying to reintegrate Dad into society, had difficulty finding work. As a result, he was quite aggressive and difficult with my mother. And there was domestic violence throughout my early childhood and into my teen years. And that not just against my mother, but also me particularly. He took a particular disliking to me. And I think that probably had something to do with that early lack of bond and relationship. As a result, I was pretty difficult as a teen. I think I was everyone's worst nightmare as a parent. I was truant, I was getting drunk, I was smoking, I was drinking. People had offered me cocaine by the time I was 13. I thankfully had the common sense not to take drugs and drugs I knew that I didn't want the trouble that could give me. Around age 11, I experienced my first sexual assault, which was at the hands of an adult. And it was it was relatively minor compared to the other sexual assault, but it still made me lose trust in the people around me, in the adults around me. They couldn't protect me, my mother couldn't protect me from my father. That that experience also created the little inner voice in my head that would say to me constantly, and these were the words it used was to if I was fat and ugly, this wouldn't happen to me. And so weight became a long lasting, ongoing battle because it created a buffer between me and unwanted physical attention in the world. I also experienced a sexual assault at school at the hands of several boys when I was in the later years of primary. So that 11 to 12 year old period was a very difficult period in my life. And then when I was 13, that all came out with rebellion and difficulty and truancy. So I left school because I was failing school. I was I failed Union Science and I was failing just about every other subject. I scraped a pass in English, but I really wasn't thriving in that environment. Thankfully, my father, for all of his foibles, he really didn't believe in schooling, and he was very good at allowing me to live. And that my mum had a business when I was young. And that made me believe that as a young woman, you could probably do anything if you really set your mind to it. My parents were incredibly resourceful human beings. But yes, I left school just before my 14th birthday, and then I met my long-term partner and had children. And when my children were young, I remember thinking to myself, I if I'm uneducated, how am I going to expect them to be educated? Somebody needs to help my children with their homework. And if it's not going to be me, who's it going to be? Yeah. So I felt a huge amount of pressure, but internally I had no self-worth. None. I used to apologize for my existence. If somebody ran into me, I would say, oh sorry. Sorry. And yeah, I was apologizing for my very existence that I had been indoctrinated. Dad had some favourite words for me, stupid, idiot, subordinate when I was old enough to understand what that meant. And it took a long time for me to think that I could be doing something different. And really, it wasn't until the birth of my second child that I went,
Assault And The Inner Critical Voice
SPEAKER_02I have to do this. I have to do something different because I don't want them to have the same life that I've had. So I went back to school and that was really, really complicated. The first time I applied, they said, no, you don't even have a year 10 education, we can't take you. And that was for early childhood education. So they said no. And I went, that's no fun. And then I found this bridging program. And I sat there, I begged with them, I said, I will be the best student you ever had. I will do exactly what needs to be done. And I still couldn't gain entry to a TAFE programme, which is in Australia, we have a tertiary alternative, it's not really tertiary education. So TAFE, it's a skills-based education system. And I couldn't even get into that. So I'm like, okay, I need to do something different here. So I went and did a bridging course, and actually, my mother left school when she was 15. And my beautiful mother left school because of illness and because she had, by all accounts, a really horrible upbringing, far worse than my own, and ended up with this man, Dad, who was volatile, violent at times, and she was still quite oppressed. And despite all of that, she taught me some really valuable lessons. Underneath all of that, there was a vibrant, really skilled, very intelligent woman. And somehow she made that shine with the business that she ran. And despite the fact that she didn't have the confidence to make decisions, she seemed to make things happen. So she came back to school with me. So the two of us went back to do a bridging course together called the Skills for Tertiary Education Preparatory Course, and it's called Steps. And she failed the English entry exam. I failed the math entry exam. And we vowed to help each other. You help me, I'll help you. I think it was the other way around. I was good at maths, she was good at English. And so we helped each other get through this course, and at the other end of that, she went on to do disability services, and I went on to do biomedical science because in that course I had this one lady, and I still firmly believe that I was unintelligent, stupid, incapable of doing anything else. But Dad had taught me something that was incompatible with that, and that's that hard work can overcome nearly anything.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And so somewhere in there, these internal values were fighting with each other. And that happens often in life where our values are in conflict with one another, and you have to choose one over the other. And I had to choose. And this I said to this lady, Lois Pinckney was an amazing human being. She was my maths teacher. And she said to me towards the end of this course, she said, What is it you want to do? And she just said to me, You can do anything you want to do. Let's just
Leaving School And Losing Self Worth
SPEAKER_02pick whatever it is you want to do. And I said, I want to do medicine. And this woman flipped the board over. She had a whiteboard in front of her. She flipped that board over and started writing what I needed to do. Not for a second, I was crying. Not for a second did that woman have a doubt in my ability to achieve something so unachievable. When she flipped that board over and she started writing, you need to do this course and this course. Once you've done that, you gain entry to biomedical science. Once you've done that, then you apply for medicine. And I vowed in that moment that I would be that person for other people who would have that belief, that undying belief that you have the innate ability to do whatever it is that you aspire to do. And you have the innate desire to better yourself. It doesn't matter where you come from, what hardship you've had. We all have that inside us. So I did, long story short, I did biomedical science. I knew I would have to top the year. I knew I would have to really achieve. So I won three university prizes. And not because I was super intelligent, but because I worked harder than anybody else. And that's what Dad had taught me. You work hard, you can overcome anything. And when I got into medicine, I was quite surprised. And I was still grappling that whole time while studying medicine with that imposter syndrome. I'm not smart enough to be here. I got here through dumb luck or whatever. The day I graduated from medicine, all of that internal dialogue around being unintelligent, being stupid, all of the words that had ever been used to derogatory words to describe me, they were crushed under the weight of that achievement. When I went up and grabbed that certificate, I felt the weight of the world lift. And that version of me never returned. I let it go that day. I didn't need to seek approval. I didn't need dad's approval. He didn't turn up to my medical graduation, predictably. And we had a strained relationship for a really long time because of those failures, those areas that I felt like I was really let down as a daughter. And then as a mother, as soon as you become a parent, you start to realize what it takes to behave that way towards a child. And that was really confronting. So when I became a parent, I actually mourned a little bit over that childhood that I didn't really have.
SPEAKER_01That you didn't get the experience.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that I didn't get.
SPEAKER_01How old were you when you started medical school and graduated and all of that?
SPEAKER_02So I was 24 when I went back to school to do the steps course. 25 when I when I actually started bi medical science, and about 28 when I got into medicine. I was 31, 32 when I graduated from medicine and became an intern. So at the bottom of the medical rung and worked my way up. I really obstetrics chose me because I absolutely love looking after women. It's a vulnerable time in life, but it's a really positive time in life as well. There's so much joy
Returning To Study With Her Mom
SPEAKER_02around having a baby, and even when it goes wrong, there's still that capacity for joy and that capacity to continue trying or to have another baby when things go really wrong for most women. So it's a fairly joyous time. I loved being a doctor. I found it the most incredibly privileged thing that I could do in terms of service to others. I always felt that urge. Like even when I was young, I needed to help other people or I didn't feel of value. And I think that's still a core value of mine. That unless I'm in a helping profession, I've I'm really I'm not living to my values. So medicine didn't like me. So I loved medicine, but the hours, the trauma and the accumulation of trauma as a first responder is quite significant. And there'd be many other people out there who've experienced trauma, vicarious trauma, burnout, and PTSD, which is ultimately what I developed, which I think was a bit of a combination result of my childhood trauma and trauma in that first responder role. The managerial roles I absolutely loved as well. And that they gave me a lot of skills that are still able to be used today. But yeah, absolutely loved being a doctor. And what I didn't realize is what had been happening all that time, that all of those times when I didn't consider my own welfare, all of those times when I put somebody else above myself, all the times when I compromised my own values for somebody else, or said yes when I really meant no. I was accumulating what I refer to now as emotional debt. And when you accumulate that emotional debt, it just keeps earning interest until you've got to pay the ferryman at some point in life. And that happens either through the quality of your relationships start to decline, your health, your physical health starts to decline, your mental health, which is what happened for me, starts to decline. And you can no longer keep that pace up. You can no longer compromise anymore because your body says, No, that's enough. Yeah, I can't do it anymore. And if you don't listen, it will just do it for you.
SPEAKER_01Believe me, I know. I definitely can relate. I feel similar to you. I was very young. I was 16 when I was sexually assaulted, and I stayed quiet, didn't say anything to anybody because that's the guilt and the shame and all of the things. And knowing, I feel like knowing I come from a Hispanic, very religious Catholic background, that in my thought process is like they're gonna blame me, they're not gonna be there for me, they're gonna insult me. Like all of these things were going through my head. So I stayed quiet for three years. So at 16, your child trying to figure out who and what you are, the thought process of how did I provoke this? Was it something that I did? Was my skirt too short? All of those things that you start internalizing and what did I do to deserve it? And so I stayed quiet, didn't tell anybody, not a friend, not anybody. And for my first Well Woman checkup at 18 that I was able to go by myself to the gynecologist, I found out that I had cervical cancer because he had given me the HPV strand that causes cancer. And because I didn't say anything, I never got checked, I never
The Teacher Who Changed Everything
SPEAKER_01got treated for anything. And that was like my first welcome to adulthood, welcome to womanhood, you have cancer. And I was this was I'm 43 now, so this was a long time ago, and there was not very much information out there yet about HPV and everything. So I had a leap when I was 18. So they took that part of my cervix that had the affected area, and then the doctor was like, Okay, every six months we'll do we'll do a follow-up. So I went for my first six months, everything was fine. I went for my second six months, the cancer had come back. The cells were not as aggressive, but so they did a cryosurgery. But at that follow-up, the doctor told me it doesn't look like you're gonna be able to have kids, partially because of the HPV, you're also not ovulating. There was just so many factors. And this is where looking back now, I feel like when your body is in dis ease, it creates a disease, right? You're like you said, your body keeps the the interest and accumulates that interest. And so I remember just feeling completely devastated. At that time, I had I was already with my now ex-husband, but we were engaged, and I was sure that I wanted to be a mom. And so I finally was able to tell somebody. I was in cosmetology school, and the director of the school after my surgery, I stopped going for two months. And she called me and she's like, Maria, we're gonna have to tell your parents that are paying for the school that you you're you're failing out, you can't, you're not showing up, you're not getting the credit. And I was like, No, no, no, don't do that. Can I go in and talk to you? And these are the your teacher that was there and believed in you. This is what I felt with Miss Baker. I went in and talked to her, she was the director of the school, and I sat down and closed the door. I don't I remember just sitting there and closing my eyes and literally word vomiting everything that I had gone through, why I was dealing with cancer, like all of the things. And when I finally stopped and I I was crying, and I opened my eyes, and she was crying, and I was like, Miss Baker, why are you crying? And she's like, Maria, because two years ago at that time, two years ago, I was called to pick up my daughter from some boys at a party had abandoned her by a dumpster after they raped her, and I had to nurse my daughter back to health. And so we and so she felt like that connection with me that maybe she had found purpose in the reason that she went through this with her daughter, and not because her daughter ever deserved that to happen to her, but now that she's being presented with this other young lady that is in front of her, not knowing what to do, not talking to anybody about it. And she got me to therapy, she told me that I could go during school hours, just show up to school, and so I started to show back up. I finally developed the courage enough to tell my then fiance, and he was like, You have to tell your parents, and I was like, Oh, that's a whole different story. I don't know if I can do that, and so I've ended up doing that. I feel like as an adult with children and knowing that as parents, we're always just trying to do the best that we can with what we have. I see now that when I did tell them and they reacted the way that I thought they were going to react to their there was the insults and the making me feel guilty
Medicine, Imposter Syndrome, Then Freedom
SPEAKER_01about it. It was their reaction of I couldn't protect my baby, and their guilt was coming onto me. They were projecting their guilt onto me. I could see that now. I've had a conversation with my parents before my dad passed away. I sat down with them and I was like, This is definitely not the way I needed you to react. And I understand that I'm not blaming you because I know now as a parent myself, I know that there's no manual to parenting and you work with what you have. And so I understand that now, but it it took 20 plus years for me to be able to actually have that conversation with them. And when the doctor told me that I couldn't have kids, I was like, watch me, nope. And so I got married, we started trying. He put me on Clomid to try to get that ovulation to start, which didn't work. He doubled the dose for six months that didn't work. I was like, oh my god, I'm gonna have 10 kids because I was a twin. And my ex-husband is an identical twin. So I was like, oh my gosh, the odds of all of this, it's crazy. And with that being said, I ended up at 20. When I told him, I was like, I'm done. We had been trying for a year and a half, and I was like, I can't. This emotional roller coaster is just not I can't do this anymore. We ended up getting pregnant that month. And on vacation.
SPEAKER_02That's often the case. Yeah. When you stop stressing about it, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, when you let it go, your body's okay, I can relax now. We went on vacation. We ended up learning that I could just couldn't go on vacation because that's when I would get pregnant. Got pregnant with my three kids on vacation. So it's it's crazy how our body keeps the score of everything that we're just pushing down. And I years ago followed this mentor that I the one thing that one biggest thing that I remember was when our body is in dis-ease, it creates disease. And it made so much sense to me in that moment because I was like Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely it does. And I think what you're saying is absolutely true that the more we stuff things down, so emotions particularly, if you don't allow yourself to express emotions and emotions, the biochemical reactions that create emotions last on average 30 to 90 seconds. That's how long they last. It's when you engage, so the way that we relate to our emotions, and this is where the body of work that I do now comes in, which is called relational awareness and wisdom. It's the way that we relate to our emotions and we relate to others. So it's how we engage with them. When you engage with an emotion and then you keep engaging with it, of course, it's going to continue to cycle and continue to exist. Even grief, I had the incredible pleasure and privilege of looking after both my parents when they died. So both my father and my mother. And it taught me something enormous about life. Having changed the way that I emotionally relate to myself, so my in internal dialogue is very healthy. It's the way that I talk to myself is a lot kinder than it used to be. The way that I relate to others, and that includes the most difficult people in my life. I have compassion for them and I don't try to control. I don't know if you've heard of the circle of control, but there's like this much that you can control. And basically that's what happens on the inside of you. It's your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions. You have no control over what somebody else thinks of you. Somebody feels about you. What they say and do is completely out of your control. We waste a lot of emotional energy and we engage a lot with emotions like fear, obligation, and guilt. We engage a lot with those emotions and we keep them going. Um even when we can't control the situation. You can't control it. So when I was looking after my father when he was dying, I administered the medications that were prescribed by the palliative care nurses, made sure that he was really comfortable. What I came to realize was that I could choose to demonstrate the compassion for him and the love for him that he'd never demonstrated for me. I could choose that. I couldn't control whether or not he showed it to me, but I could control
Burnout, PTSD, And Emotional Debt
SPEAKER_02how I showed it. And then my mother died four months after my father, both of cancer, dad of bowel cancer and mum of leukemia, secondary to ovarian cancer treatment. And then when I was looking after my mother, being able to look after somebody that had not deeply hurt me, but somebody that I had deep feelings for in the exact same way and demonstrate the same compassion. It was at the end of that I had a massive catharsis, and that's that I didn't end up like my father. But I totally, and I think it's the biggest gift you can give any human being, before he died, I accepted him for exactly who he was, exactly what he was capable of, understanding that his limitations were about where he was in his life. He had an incredibly difficult life, an incredibly talented man with his hands. He could make just about anything, and resilience you've never seen before. Like to be able to come back from going to prison and establish a career for himself, an honest career for himself for the rest of his life, and to continue being able to provide for his family and his third wife, who I'm still friends with, by the way. And yeah, look, there were there was a lot of good in dad, but there were circumstances that he did the best that he could with what he had at the time. And I firmly believe that everybody does that. They do the best they can. There were times when I I was not doing well in any of my roles. But when you define yourself by those external roles that you play in everybody else's life, it's unstable, right? In 2014, that trauma hit a tipping point for me and I attempted suicide. I survived my suicide attempt, which I think was very fortunate because most doctors don't, because we tend to use fairly lethal meetings. It took eight months of recovery in and out of hospitals. I had a liver injury as a result of the medications that I took, the overdose that I took, and the recovery was enormous. I got back to work, I went back to work in medicine and I started to understand that my values weren't in alignment with the values of medicine as a whole, the juggernaut that is medicine. I valued taking time with people, I valued compassion, and the thing that I found out is that I valued compassion over loyalty. So I had a relationship for decades, three decades of my life, and that broke down as a result of what I saw as an inability to be compassionate at a time when I really needed it. But I realized that the loyalty didn't matter to me as much as the compassion did. And that's that you have to sometimes you have to balance your values and decide which ones are better. When you define yourself by the values that are inside you and not by the external roles that you play wife, mother, sister, daughter, healthcare worker, whatever role you play to somebody else, it's much more stable because all those external things were taken away from me in 2014. It was 2017 before it was all taken away. But I lost my marriage, I lost my role as a doctor. I really wasn't being great as a mum because I was too busy looking after my own illness. And then financial security, I ended up bankrupt. I couldn't earn income. What could I do? And at that point I went, yeah, it's true. The sky fell in. Chicken Little was right. The sky does fall in. The rug does get pulled from under underneath you. And then I took that little spark that I got from my parents of resilience, and I went, What are you going to do now? Because you can reinvent. You don't have to be defined by those external roles. And when I reinvented, I thought this is the perfect opportunity. There's nothing left here to salvage from an old life. Ground zero. What are you going to create? What do you want to create? And my beautiful mother came and visited me towards the end of my admission, the second time in 2017, when I relapsed and I realized I could no longer work in medicine because I was a risk to my patients if I couldn't stay well. The PTSD had caused me to dissociate a couple of times. And I'm just like, I can't do that. She came and visited me when the world was completely gone, and I'm as ground zero. And she said to me that I might benefit from an assistance dog. And that gave me, it was that Lois Pinckney moment. She flipped the whiteboard. She came and bought me a piece of paper and a pen and she said, What can you do, Joe? I've seen you reinvent yourself before. You can do this. Let's figure out what else you can do. Now at the time I couldn't do that, I couldn't do that structure. I just didn't have the mental capacity. What I could do is plan how to get an assistance dog, what I was going to do to train it, what breed it was going to be, what sex the dog was going to be. And that's when Benny came into my life. And Benny, she taught me something about relational safety. It was the safest relationship I'd had in my life. This little dog, the joy that she brought into my life, and she just taught me about presence, being in the moment, compassion and understanding, even when you don't feel like it. Benny never greets me with anything other than kindness and compassion. It doesn't matter if I've had the crappiest day, if I'm not being the best version of myself, if I'm fat, if I'm skinny, it doesn't matter. She has this unconditional positive regard for me that I vowed all those years ago that I would have after Lova splipped the whiteboard for me. And this little dog brought that into my life. And I started to think about where does this come from? And neuroscience-wise, how can I replicate it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And that's led to my work around emotional debt, reducing the debt, paying the ferryman, and let's start building emotional wealth. And I think for me, where that emotional wealth came from was internal definitions of self and making sure that I live truly in alignment with my values. So when you're in alignment with your values, and some people don't even, I didn't know what values were. What are you talking about? I didn't know what my values were. But when you get to the real crux of what your core values are, and then you start trying to find ways to do that in your day-to-day life and live those values, the whole world changes. And that circle of control, when you keep it all about what can I do. So even when somebody treats me badly or does something that is what I deem to be not very ethical, the way I respond, I still have control over. So the way that I respond is going to be with compassion, love, and care, regardless of what their response is. And it just it's this there's a sense of freedom that comes from that's just unmatched.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I call that emotional awareness. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I even joke with my kids again as a single mom for many years while they were growing up. I understood. So my my oldest daughter had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And so her teenagers at home were really difficult. And that was also the year that I ended up getting a full hysterectomy at the age of 32. So I was not only trying to
Maria’s Story Of Assault And Cancer
SPEAKER_01process the lack of hormones in my body, but also because she was 12, almost 13, when all of this was happening. So all of the emotions and and mental health that she was dealing with. And I had these two other kids. And so I learned, and through a lot of trial and error, I learned that I had I controlled the temperature of the room. And if I can control my temperature, so keep it even, then she would have to come down to a level at some point because I wasn't going to continue to fight that temperature, if you will. And so like things like when I get cut off driving, and the thought process of instead of being like, Oh, you jerk or whatever, getting mad, I would tell the kids, oh, he definitely has to go poop. And that would then make it like have more of a compassion. We've all been there, we've all been driving, and oh my god, I gotta get to the bathroom. And or maybe the wife is having a baby, is is whatever. There could be an emergency that we don't know that what's happening. The only thing that I can control is how I respond to it. And it it has become now a running joke that my son, he's 21 now, so he's the second one. But like he could be on the phone and saying, Oh mom, this guy's gotta poop or whatever. And it it has become the like, even when some when someone isn't reacting the way again you think is ethical or you think is right, then you can decide okay, am I going to say, well, what a jerk and respond that way, or I'm gonna say, Man, that guy's got like constipation issues, and he's just really unhappy with himself because you can't control that. That's right, and you do have a choice, yeah, you have a choice, and so I I love that you said that because that's what I've tried to teach them. Because with my oldest, that I couldn't always control her emotional up and down. I can only control the fact that before I would wake her up in the morning, I would wake up earlier, I would meditate, I would be in a place of peace myself because I remember when before I learned this, that when I would wake her up and it would be rushed and it would be with the energy of like, come on, let's go, she didn't react well. And then it would become a bigger issue. So when I learned that, oh, okay, so I need to be the thermostat and keep that thermostat at a certain temperature so that when she is in her 80s, 90s, really high, I could be like that that good, cool.
SPEAKER_02You could regulate, yeah.
SPEAKER_01And help her regulate.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think that's a really valuable life lesson that obviously you've passed on to the kids, but it's a valuable life lesson for everyone that one of the things that I came to terms with, all of what had gone on in my life, is that happened as a series of of choices that I made. And it was a really it was really hard for me to come to terms with the fact that I had chosen to be in this difficult situation, and it was choices that I'd made and reactions that I'd had instead of responses. And so you can absolutely choose something different. If life is getting too hard, you feel like you're in a pressure cooker, it's like you're swimming upstream, then somewhere you're not in alignment with your values, and you're making choices that aren't in alignment with those values. And when you make those choices, there's consequences, you just don't realize it at the time. But there are there's physical, emotional, psychological consequences, and those consequences can affect everything, they affect how you relate to the world, and choosing to respond instead of react, what you've just gone through there. Look, I love the way you describe that because what happened is it gave you the ability to control the regulatory rate of the room. And like you said, you were the thermostat, you decide what the temperature is, and when you're in alignment with your values and you can regulate well enough to respond instead of react, that is exactly what life's like. It's all of a sudden somebody's opened up time between when the trigger happens, this thing happens, and you respond, and there's all this time to think about all of a sudden how you're going to respond. And when you respond instead of react, what ends up happening is that it doesn't build, like you don't get this escalation like you were talking about with your daughter and with the situation that you were going through there. The escalations don't happen, and that happens in all your interpersonal relationships. What I call that is peace. I always had this big idea that if I got more of this, more nicer car, nicer house, more stuff, went on more international holidays, did more with the kids, did all of these things that life or world expects you to do, and I maintain these external expectations. Somewhere at the end of that would be happiness, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02And that's not true. And what I've come to find is that happiness comes from peace. And true inner peace is only there when you're in alignment with your values and you're able to respond and not react. And that it's a learned skill. That's the other thing is that I often used to see people, and everybody does this, they look at everybody, oh, they've got their life together, they're doing so well. It's also wonderful for them. I wonder how they do it. And people do that, they judge from the outside. You have no idea what's going on the inside of somebody's life, and kindness is free. That I think that was a Robin Williams statement. Kindness is free, compassion is free, understanding is free. And the only person it hurts when you don't utilize those three skills is you. And that's something that I came to learn. Yeah. Like you think that you're hurting somebody else, or you think that you're fighting a battle that's worth fighting. Or I always say to my clients, if you want to fight a battle with somebody, make sure that you're prepared to go to war and fight to the death. If it's not worth that, don't fight. Because the only person you're hurting is you. So, yeah, that I think those are really valuable lessons, being able to regulate yourself enough to respond instead of react and to be really true to your own values. The only person you have control over is yourself.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, my oldest daughter, she's 22. My son is about to be 21, and my youngest is about to be 18 in September. So now my repetitive hate, the only thing you can control is you. So just how you show up. Good and bad choices have good and bad consequences. So just understand that because if you don't stay aware of you have free will to do the things that you want to do, absolutely. Just know that if you choose something good, you'll have good consequences. There's such a thing as good consequences. If you choose something bad, there's going to be bad consequences. So just be aware of that. And when things happen, you can then step back and be like, okay, how am I going to respond to this? Because I'm coming from a place of reaction, and the reaction is the immediate. But the moment that you can step back and be like, is it even worth like getting worked up inside? And no, it usually is not worth it. So, like you said, it's like if you're not willing to go to war to the end of this, then it's really not worth it.
SPEAKER_02It's not worth it. Is it really worth it? And the that I think is a really great philosophy because then you don't fight the unwinnable, right? Because there's so many battles that are completely unwinnable. You can't change someone else's opinion, you can't change their beliefs, you can't change any of those things. So why fight to do that? It's just not worth it. But the other thing that's
Respond Not React And Find Peace
SPEAKER_02really important with that, and you just touched on that with your kids, is that there's one person in this world that you need to be absolutely honest with. You must be honest with yourself. And often we actually we're pretty dishonest with ourselves because oh, it wasn't me, it was them. There's a lot of that in life, and there's a lot of not accepting your own part. Like I had to really honestly look at my life and go, why did my relationships break down? Why did I end up alone? Why did I end up bankrupt? Why did that happen? And how did I contribute? Without, like, I'm not self-blaming or self-flagellating. But how can I not do this again? I don't want to repeat those patterns. And we do, we repeat patterns until we learn the lesson. And when we learn the lesson that life has to offer us for that particular thing, that pattern truly does stop happening. So when you stop engaging, so lots of people have really difficult people in their life, and I certainly had my fair share. When I with my father, we reached a point where I went, I actually sat him down and I said to him, I love you, and I'm one of your daughters, and I know that you have, I'm one of your daughters, I'm a child of yours. But the difference between me and other people's daughters is that I won't chase you. I will never chase you for attention anymore. It's never going to happen. If you want to spend time with me, I will always be here and I will always take that time. And for probably a decade of my life, there was almost no contact because I left that decision up to him. And then when he was around, when I did see him, because I dropped all expectation, I loved the time I spent with my father. I picked his brain, I had a wonderful time learning about his childhood, his adulthood, his life and how he felt and the trauma he experienced when he was in prison. So and I talked to him at length and very honestly about the beatings and my childhood and the difficulty. And while he never apologized, I didn't do it for that. That's not what I did it for. Because if you have an expectation, then again, you're trying to control someone else. I just wanted to be able to, as you did with the person at your school, disclose and say openly to somebody, this is what you did. It hurt me. This is how it impacted on me. I didn't care what his response was, it didn't matter to me. I just needed to get that off my chest. And that's that what the longer you carry those unexpressed emotions around and those unexpressed feelings around, the longer it's doing damage to you, right? That's that emotional debt. It just you will have to pay one day if you don't process things. It doesn't mean that you have to do it in front of people like I did, in front of the perpetrators or in front of somebody who's done you harm. But it certainly does need to be processed and dealt with so that it doesn't sit there festering inside you and causing you damage. And it's not about forgiving to help the other person, it's about forgiving and having compassion to help you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, I had that experience. So I had a conversation with my parents right before a few months before my dad passed away. And it didn't come from a place of of blame or shaming anybody or anything like that. It came from a place of when I told them that I had been sexually assaulted, they didn't know how to react and respond. To such uh situations, right? So they reacted the way that I thought they were going to. Very like it was what did I do? Making me feel ashamed and guilty. And I had done the work, I had gone to therapy. I was 19 when I finally told them. And I think that what really shaped this conversation that I had when I was in my late 30s, so 20 years later, was being able to be aware enough to be that parent that I needed from them to myself. And so I went to therapy beforehand, and I was speaking to my mindset coach beforehand. This came as both these people in my life guided me towards this is something that you probably need to relieve your heart from. And so I sat my parents down and I was like because after I told them that I had gotten that I was sexually assaulted, it never got spoken about again. And so it just felt like another guilt or shame that we just put under the grug. And so I was very prepared. My therapist is like, be prepared to go to a park and just hug yourself and be that parent that you need it for yourself if it should go away that you don't want it to. And I was like, okay. So I readied myself and I sat them down and I said, I really feel like in that moment, I'm not coming from a place of judgment or shaming or guilting you in any way. Knowing that I have my own kids, knowing that there's no manual to children and how to parent and how to react and how with every circumstance that we go through, knowing that as a parent myself, know that I'm not coming to you from a place of you should have known better. This is what I need, and you didn't fulfill that. But I said, in the moment when I told you guys that I was raped, instead of coming to me with love and support and compassion and empathy and all of that, I got the shame and the guilt. And I really just needed a hug. And to know that you guys loved me and supported me, that's all I needed. And my mom has always been my dad and I have the same love language, physical touch. I he was the person that I hugged and that that really fulfilled that that part of my mom was not. My mom was more acts of service, and so I know that I can show my mom love when I help her with her to-do list or things like that. So she was never very physical touch, very I could have counted at that point in in on one hand how many times I ever felt embraced by my mom, not just hugged. And the first thing my dad, the ego was like, Oh, but and my mom was like, maybe it's time for that hug now. And I lost it. But it was kind of not having the expectation that they would do this, going in with no expectations of them fulfilling what I needed as that child, and when I got it, it was amazing and I feel blessed that I did. However, I had gone into that conversation not expecting it at all, and being prepared to be that parent to myself to nurture myself.
SPEAKER_02It's a funny thing because people often, when there's difficulty, when I had my suicide attempt, for instance, when there's a difficult situation, mental health is another one. So when something's happened and it's really difficult, they often don't know what to say and they have no reference point to take that from because they haven't experienced that difficulty for themselves. So they react instead of respond. And one of the things that Benny, my assistant's dog, taught me is that sometimes you don't need somebody to with all the answers. You don't need somebody to tell you what to do, you don't need somebody to pat you on the head and say it's okay. You just need somebody to stand with you in the darkness. They just need to stand by your side and go, I'm here for you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And then maybe they can see the light for themselves, they can find their own way. And I think again, that comes back to that. Everybody has the intrinsic desire. I believe that everybody has the intrinsic desire to better themselves and to become the best version of themselves. And they have the intrinsic ability to make that happen. You've just got to unlock inside them the desire. And sometimes the way that you do that is just to stand by them. And for me, that's there's a gestalt therapy concept called commitment to dialogue. And that's what I did with my dad. I will stand with you through the darkness, dad. I will be here, I will scare the monsters away. That song, the monsters, I love that song. I think it's Bernard Fanning. I can't remember who sang it, but it's a brilliant song. And it's just, I will stand here, I will help you, and I will be the compassion, the care, and the love that you couldn't give me, and I'll show you what it looks like. Yeah. And the catharsis that occurs when you're able to do
Boundaries, Forgiveness, And Telling The Truth
SPEAKER_02that either for yourself the way that you did, which I thought was beautiful, like to be able to be there for yourself, to nurture yourself, to be the parent that you really needed to be for yourself. Or if you can't do that, to be able to do it for someone else is just magical. And there's a catharsis that happens. It's just it changes your world, it changes your life. Because if you could do that for somebody who wouldn't do it for you, it makes you intrinsically different and it means that you're living to your values.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And so what would be one message you would like to share with our listeners that may that may help them navigate through their difficult time?
SPEAKER_02Okay, I'd say just remember that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and it's not an oncoming track. You can literally, I think, probably your podcast vet guess and your podcast is evidence and yourself that you can overcome just about any hardship in life if you can process it and you can come out the other side, having dealt with or paid the ferryman with that emotional debt, and stop accruing it for yourself. Understand that that happiness comes when peace is living on the inside of you. And I think that's don't pursue the happiness through things and objects and achievements and your roles in everybody else's life. It's in here, it's not out there somewhere else. So I think my key message would be look within. That's where the answers are. It's where the only control you have in this world and this life exists. It's in here. And the more work you can do in here, the more emotional wealth you will build, and the better your relationships and the quality of the way that you interact with the world will be. And that's where joy lives.
SPEAKER_01I love that. So I know that you have a few books. Please tell us about your books and what they're about. What can people expect?
SPEAKER_02So I have three books. I've written a couple because I'm a play therapist as well. They're over that shoulder. Bella is Sad is a resource. When my mother died, her assistance dog Bella came to live with me and she was very sad. And it's how Benny helped her through her grief. So it's a resource for children experiencing grief and loss. Assistance dog Benny is an education, I always go over the wrong shoulder. Assistance dog Benny is an educational book about the a day in the life of Benny the Assistance Dog, who is still with me but now a little bit older. And Benny, the best medicine has paused, is the book at the front. And that's my memoir. It chronicles those experiences in life and those turning points in life for me. And then there's a little bit in there, it's I think a heavy read sometimes. It's a bit in there about domestic violence, what it's really like to come through that as a child, what it's really like to survive sexual assaults as a child, and what it's like to have your world turned upside down and reinvent. And there's a bit in there at the end about grief and loss with mum and dad, about their journey through death and dying, but also the catharsis that occurred, a few messages
Key Message, Books, How To Connect
SPEAKER_02of hope. Really, it's a story of hope and how you can overcome adversity. So, yeah, Benny's my inspiration.
SPEAKER_01I love that so much. Do you currently have a way to work with people? Give us a little bit of details on that.
SPEAKER_02Yep. So I'm an emotional wealth consultant. I don't like the word coach because I try to get people to see things for themselves and to actually process things for themselves. But I'm all about building emotional wealth and stopping people from accumulating emotional debt. And I have a website, you can find me on jodymarie cronin.com, and it's Jodie with just an eye. And Marie's M-A-R-E-E. But yeah, on there you can see the different ways. So I have an emotional wealth intensive where we go through from the beginning of what's life look like right now, what's the landscape look like, what areas is it relationships, is it work, is it health, is it mental health? What areas are you struggling to find emotional wealth in? And how what where are we accruing emotional debt and what are your values? So we go through values. There's a couple of free tools on the website as well. So there's a little values tool because people often don't know what their values are. We drill right down into those and look at where can we express those in day-to-day life? How can we get those values to express themselves more in everything that we do so that you feel in tune, attuned, in alignment, and what you choose to do is in alignment with the values that you have on the inside. So, yeah, those are the ways to work with me.
SPEAKER_01And so I'll also put everything in the show notes so that and the ways to connect with you on social media as well, so our listeners have a way to connect directly. Honestly, thank you so much. This was so amazing to have this conversation with you. I felt so connected with your story and my story, even if it was very different but very alike in certain aspects. Thank you so much. Again, thank you for coming on in the middle of the night for you. And really, I I really appreciate the fact that you jumped on. You gave so much good wisdom, and I'm excited to follow you along this journey as well. So I appreciate you. Thank you for jumping on.
SPEAKER_02Thank you, Maria. I appreciate you, and I'm very grateful to have been here. It was lovely to hear some of your story as well.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. Thank you. Listeners, I hope you got as much from today's conversation with Dr. Jodi Marie Cronin as I did. I totally encourage you to connect with her and thank you again for listening or watching however you consume this podcast. I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day. Peace out. Love your life. Bye bye.
