Finding Your Voice After A Lifetime Of Silence | Part 1 | Jenny C. Cohen | 209

What if the parts of your story you've spent years trying to overcome... are actually the very things that help you find your voice?

In this powerful Part 1 conversation, host Amanda Russo sits down with visibility and embodiment coach, speaker, author, and Dance to Heal podcast host Jenny C. Cohen for an honest discussion about childhood trauma, identity, resilience, healing, and learning to reclaim your voice after a lifetime of putting others first.

Jenny shares her remarkable journey from immigrating to the United States as a young child without speaking English to navigating cultural expectations, people-pleasing, family dynamics, motherhood, breast cancer, and the experiences that shaped who she is today. Together, Amanda and Jenny explore how childhood experiences influence adulthood, why boundaries are essential for healing, and what it truly means to stop living in survival mode.

The conversation also dives into generational patterns, therapy, trauma recovery, self-worth, parenting, and the courage to become the person you were always meant to be. Through deeply personal stories, Jenny offers hope that healing is possible, no matter where your journey begins.

This conversation is a reminder that your past may shape you, but it doesn't have to define you.

Sometimes finding your voice begins by finally believing that it deserves to be heard.

💡 In this episode, listeners will discover:

💜 How childhood experiences can shape self-worth well into adulthood
🧠 Why people-pleasing often begins as a survival strategy
🌱 The importance of boundaries in the healing process
✨ How finding your voice can transform every area of your life
❤️ The role therapy can play in processing trauma and reclaiming your identity
🌍 Jenny's journey from immigrating to the United States to becoming a visibility coach
🌟 Why healing starts with giving yourself permission to take up space

⏰ Timeline Summary:

[2:00] Jenny shares who she is at her core and what it means to be a "conduit"
 [8:30] Growing up in Taiwan, immigrating to the United States, and adapting to a new culture
 [18:00] Childhood experiences, family expectations, and how people-pleasing became a survival strategy
 [29:30] Breast cancer, boundaries, and learning to finally use her voice
 [36:30] Starting first grade without speaking English and adapting through resilience
 [44:30] Finding dance, college, occupational therapy, and discovering her passion for helping others
 [54:30] Relationships, healing from trauma, and meeting the man who would become her husband

To Connect with Amanda:

Schedule a 1:1 Virtual Breathwork Session HERE

📸 Instagram: @thebreathinggoddess

Follow & Support the Podcast:

📱Instagram: @MandersMindset
👥 Join the Manders Mindset Facebook Community HERE!

To Connect with Jenny: 

Website: https://movetobloom.com/

Transcript

Intro And Why Two Parts

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Manders Mindset Podcast. Here you'll find both monologue and interviews of entrepreneurs, coaches, healers, and a variety of other people, where your host Amanda Roosevelt will discuss her own mindset and perspective, and her guest mindset and perspective on the world around us. Amanders and her guests will help explain to you how shifting your mindset will shift your life.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

And rather than making this an extra long episode, I decided to split it into two parts so it's a little easier to listen to. Today is part one where Jenny shares her incredible life story from immigrating to the United States as a child to navigating trauma, identity, motherhood, healing, and finding her voice. There are so many powerful moments in this conversation, and I truly know you are going to take away something from it. Be sure to come back this Friday for part two, where we continue this conversation and dive even deeper. Now let's get into the episode. Welcome to Meander's Mindset, where we explore the power of shifting your mindset to shift your life. I'm your host, Amanda Vusso. I am

Meet Jenny And Her Work

SPEAKER_01 2:00

here with Jenny C. Cohen, and she is a visibility and embodiment master, helping high-achieving Woody Plus entrepreneurs transform fear of being seen into bold leadership. She's the creator of the Spotlight Confidence Formula. She's the host of the Dance to Heal podcast, ranked in the top 10% globally, and she's an author. Thank you so much for joining me, Jenny. Amanda, I'm so honored to be here. Thank you for having me. So who would you say Jenny is at the core?

SPEAKER_03 2:40

That's something I've actually been struggling with because now that my kids are grown and I'm understanding that even though I joke about raising my husband, we're married like 35 years old and been together almost 40. If I take away those roles, who am I? And I would say that I am a conduit. I'm a conduit. I'm when I'm very clear and anchored, meaning I'm very present, I get downloads all the time for people, from people that need to go, other people. And I would say that. And I would like to be a joyful conduit. You know, that's oftentimes for women who are past our 40s, we forget to check in with ourselves. And I would say that's what I would love for people to remember as we hit the second part of our lives.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

That makes a lot of sense. I haven't hit that second part of my life, but it makes a lot of sense, you know, as both change, as the kids grow up, as they move out, as that main identity of caregiver mom is shifted.

SPEAKER_02 3:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 3:58

Would you say you've always been a conduit? I would say I've always been a conduit. I don't know if I was necessarily present during the conduitcy. I would dare say, I would dare say everyone's a conduit. And it's just more how willing are you to be one? Because there I love this analogy that we're all meatbags flying through space on this little planet that's blue. I have never heard that in my life. Really? Because at the dance school they talk about us all being meatbags,

Conduit Identity And Midlife Reset

SPEAKER_03 4:30

like meaning because we're all unified in being alive and bodies made of mostly water, right? And so water conducts energy and frequencies. And I would say all of us all have cells, atoms, blood, uh, brain, skin, hair, and we're all conduits.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

Can you take us down memory lane? Tell me a little bit about your childhood, upbringing, family dynamic, how however deep you want to take that.

SPEAKER_03 5:07

Oh, that would be my pleasure. So way back when the dinosaurs were alive, I'm kidding. So I'm level 57, Charlene Johnson calls ages levels, right? So I'm level 57 about to turn level 58 in July. And back in my day, that's 1968, y'all. I was born in Taipei, Taiwan. And unfortunately, it's a very patriarchal family I was born into. A lot of Asian cultures value sons over daughters. And I my birth wasn't recognized for a month after I was born. Now, as a 57 level, I can understand the impact. Back then, I didn't understand it. And I really wasn't assigned a role, which was second mother to my brother when he was born 18 months later. And so most of my life has been serving. Later on, once we immigrated to the States, I was about five and put right into first grade. Later on, the role of serving for safety became necessary because I didn't speak English and I was thrown into a culture I didn't understand. So if you're an immigrant and you come to this country, things like the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus and a whole turkey for Thanksgiving, I didn't have when I first came to the States. So to my surprise, Tooth Fairy and Santa always bypass my house. I left so many teeth under my pillow, so many empty stockings because I didn't understand. And then we realized, oh, those are the parents that do that. I was lucky enough to have parents that could afford for me to go to college. So I went to Brandeis University and I had been volunteering at a camp for kids with disabilities at Camp Jabberwock and Mothers Vineyard. And that there I've been an occupational therapist, and I thought, oh, I'm gonna do that. So then I graduated from Brandeis and went to BU to become an occupational therapist. And I will tell you, occupational therapists, we learned to break tasks down, which made me an excellent mother when my fraternal twins were born. My fraternal twins were through in vitro fertilization because my husband had testicular cancer when we were newlyweds. So yeah, could you imagine my mother-in-law drove us to the sperm bank? That's another story. And no, serious. Like it was interesting. And so when we had our fraternal twins, they were at that time, they're 27 now, back 27 years ago, when you're born at 36 weeks, that was considered premature. Not now. That's pretty full baked, but back then it was considered premature. And so I was very grateful for my occupational therapy training because I had some idea of what proper development was, and I caught some things that my kids were delayed in. And then I ended up homeschooling them, and they were competitive baton twirlers, then rhythmic gymnasts, then competitive dancers, and then they dabbled in fencing. And then I got breast cancer and we moved out west.

Taiwan Roots Serving And Belonging

SPEAKER_03 8:00

And then the pandemic hit.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

You've told me your life in like four minutes began to breathe. So we're gonna backtrack this to Tad. So do you only have one younger brother? I only have one younger brother. And no older siblings? No, I'm the eldest daughter. So you said you you weren't recognized until your brother was born. Do you I don't know if you would remember, but do you know at all what that looked like by not being recognized?

SPEAKER_03 8:42

As an adult, I understand, it meant that my parents, first of all, I was a firstborn, so they didn't know what to do with me. Right? Even though I know that my mother raised her five younger brothers after she was born. My mother came from a family of nine. So there were four daughters. She was a fourth daughter, and after her came five sons. And she helped raise all five sons. She's still very close to her brothers. So my mother knew how to deal with babies. I think she just didn't expect to have a baby that soon, and it wasn't a boy. So she had to deal with her own personal feelings about that. I mean, she's resolved it. We have a much better relationship now. But back then, right, she was married. Um, my parents were the first non-arranged marriage in their generation. So they they yeah, they married for love. Their story is that my father saw my mother working in a seamstress shop, ripped his shirt to have her fix it. That's how they met. He ripped his shirt on purpose. And my parents were they were good looking back then, you know. So Ornacy did that. And what my mom didn't quite compute in her brain, even though she understood the patriarchy type of setup, was that when my father was quote unquote successful, at least making money, all of his money was sent home. It did not matter if he got married and had gave birth to a baby. He wasn't keeping any of that money. All his money was sent back to his parents in the country, even after marriage. And my mom didn't know that. So then it was a double burden on top of the fact that, oh, the firstborn wasn't a son. So it's just this burden on burden on burden. And in retrospect, I understand that affected me in utero after birth, when I was growing up, that I wasn't really beloved. To this day, if I see these videos now where it doesn't matter what the baby is, boy or girl, usually it's girl, and the parents and grandparents are so excited with the little baby, I didn't experience that per se. And so I understand now coming forward, all the things I went through, why that was allowed to repeat over and over. Like I would date the wrong guys. You know, I would let people take advantage of me over and over again. You know, when you learn your patterns from your past, you start to be like, well, this isn't good enough for me. Like, no. You're gonna be a real friend to me because I'm one to you, right? And then I also learn not to do things I didn't want to do. That's a hard one, Amanda. Because all women are conditioned to say yes. No's are not allowed, right? We're not allowed to be like, no, I don't feel like it. Then we're branded as selfish, right? Or too independent. And that those are some you would think I'm married almost 35 years, been with the same guy for almost 40, homeschool my two kids, I would have somehow learned that before I hit 50. And it wasn't until after I hit 50 I learned to say no and set limits and be like, wait a minute, I'm surrounded with people other than my family, but my friends, that I would just let walk all over me. And I realized, wait a minute, it's gonna go both ways. How'd you realize

Breast Cancer Boundaries And Voice

SPEAKER_03 12:00

that? When I got breast cancer and when I was asking a trio their name and why it sounded so racist to me, and they got me kicked out of the venue that I was hosting someone from California, and I was in New York in the middle of my chemo. And then they asked me to keep it quiet, not to cause any waves in the dance community there. And I'm going through chemo, so I have chemo brand, I didn't know to put up a ruckus. I wrote about in my book. Don't you worry about that. Like I I hadn't really learned that I had a right to my voice. And that's part of the whole outside and recovery that my book talks about is that if you don't use your voice to fight for you, I was really good at fighting for my kids, my husband, but not for me. If you don't speak up, then you will internalize the blame to yourself. And I want to tell you that really was a part of my recovery because I know, because I have no history of breast cancer. I was under so much duress in my life that I literally set up my own immune system to get cancer. And that's something I want people to understand. The more boundaries you set that are healthy for you, the more your body can fight off diseases. But if we don't do that, we're opening up a lot of pathways. We just don't even know. It's ridiculous. I know it sounds woo, but I think it's really, really important to learn.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

No, I've never had cancer myself, but I I believe that maybe not necessarily like just cancer in general, but like diseases, illnesses, they come on more frequently than not from some sort of stress. Whether it it's stated that way or not. Yeah, and it it is correlated.

SPEAKER_03 13:43

Oftentimes, has women hit mid-age, like perimenopause and menopause, or even pre-perimenopause, we have things happening in our bodies that we don't know about, like the education level has to go up. And it's affecting also our autoimmune system. So combined with inability to say no, it puts a lot of stress on our nervous systems and our immune systems. So it's time for us to learn about that kind of stuff because it's all correlated. When I got breast cancer, and I'm, let's see, since January of this year, 26, I will be 11 years breast cancer free. And back then, at 44, I was diagnosed. That was considered very young. Now we're getting women with younger and younger ages with breast cancer, which is ridiculous. Like, why are younger women getting breast cancer? It's it was considered like an older woman's disease, and now it's getting younger. I think it's because of the stress and the environmental factors, all of that is affecting.

SPEAKER_01 14:44

I'd love to transition back, Atad. You mentioned starting first grade when you moved to the United States around five, and you didn't speak English. I cannot imagine that. How difficult that was for you.

Immigration Shock And School Survival

SPEAKER_03 15:00

I can't fathom it as an adult, right? You think about it. I had been separated from my father for a couple of years, and then he came back to Taiwan and picked up my mom and my brother and I, and we flew, was it 18 hours to, I think it was south of Brooklyn, and then we ended up in Massachusetts. And I remember they put me right into first grade. So certain parts of the country have different start dates for kindergarten and first grade. In Boston area or Brookline area, where I Somerville actually was my first grade, my first year. They're cut off September 1st. My birthday is in July. So I was the youngest of my class when they put me into first grade. I really should have gone into kindergarten. I was tiny. So I was not only the youngest, I was the smallest of my class, right? And I remember the first day they found another little girl that spoke my dialect. So she translated for me for one day and then she refused to afterwards because all the kids were making fun of her. So I had no one to translate for me from day two. And then actually I had an accident in my seat because I didn't know how to ask for the bathroom. So I like peed myself the first week of school. Yeah. If I were to consciously think back, I have no memories because it was probably so traumatic. My brain just shut off any memory because I didn't want to deal with it. Well, you learned ask kids adjust quick. Really, truly, my kids who were homeschooled, they were very resistant to learning to read. And I'm one of those parents, I'm not a helicopter parent, like an Asian helicopter parent when it comes to learning, because I hated being forced to get A's when I was growing up. My thing is my kids had classes that I would have them signed up for, but if they couldn't explain to me what they learned, they had to repeat that unit. Right. And then my kids didn't want to want to read. So then I found audio books that had amazing sound effects and actors actually speaking the lines in the book and reading. And then I got the book. And then I don't think I consciously knew this, but every time I got to an exciting part, I had to pull over and exit. We'd have to get out of the car. So my kids are so frustrated, just pick the book and taught themselves to read to find out what came next. So kids are very adaptable, and I know that I learned to adapt very quickly. It was kind of learn to speak and listen, and or you're gonna like it was a survival technique. It's more hard to have to do it.

SPEAKER_01 17:26

Survival technique. So you mentioned you don't remember a lot of a lot of it. What would you say is one of your earliest memories that you do remember?

SPEAKER_03 17:35

One of my earliest memories I do remember is before we came to this, right before we came to the States. So we came to the States when I was like five. So maybe when I was about four, my earliest memories are I had been playing hide and seek in the street with my cousins in Taipei. And they fell on me. And I didn't realize I broke my arm. But we were afraid to tell the grown-ups. So I was hiding from them with my arm cradle. And then after that, I remember waking up because they had to re break my, they had to break my arm because it wasn't in the right thing, and I was in a cast. That's the earliest memories. So when I was four, my brother was two, and my parents, my father immigrated to the states, and my mother was working in Taipei. So you think of Taiwan has like a bean? We were in the northern tip of Taiwan, the capital, Taipei. Very, very city cement, plumbing, electricity. And when my father came to the States, my mother had a job, and so she couldn't care for us, and there was no one to care for us. And so they sent me down south to the bottom of the bean, down here, and it was very rural, like Shrek country, no electricity, no plumbing. There were dirt floors in the house, two-room hut that we were sent to. And my grandparents were not literate, and I didn't speak the Taiwanese dialect because I had been speaking Mandarin. So they sent us down there for eight months. I don't have any memory of that because that's kind of traumatic for a four-year-old. And I was told that my mom went back to visit me, like almost us, both of us, every weekend. And I would be screaming and crying and chasing after her when she left every time she came to visit. And I'm like, oh, I'm glad I don't remember that. You know, and then there's one thing I remember of that particular time. One, two things. I hated the dark because I would always fall in the chamber pot. I fall in because I was so small, the chamber parts, because their bathrooms were like the Shrek closets in the middle of outside in the dark. There's no electricity. So they had the chamber pot and I would fall in that a lot. And two, because they left my brother and I during the day alone, they were farmers. My job was to get my brother into like close the doors when the dusk when it got dark. And the way they scared me to do it was that everyone knows the story. If you're from Taiwan, they have a fable or more like a horror story, that there's a fox that liked to eat children and it could assume human form. And they would look for kids that hadn't closed their doors at dusk. And they could imitate your family members. So you had to, I know, I'm four. And I just remember the story about how, and how would you know your kid was eaten? The fox would leave one pinky finger of the child. My mouth is wide open. So when I talk about this, anyone from town were like, Yeah, I know the pinky the adults laughed. And I'm like horrified, you told me for the four-year-old to scare her, so she would close doors and lock herself and her two-year-old brother in the dark until you came home because this fox would want to eat them and leave just her pinky finger on the floor, and they would know she was gone. Those are my earliest memories. I told you I would hold nothing back in this interview man.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Do you remember I have so many questions about the arm, but you probably don't remember like telling you obviously told them if they if somehow it got rebroken in like five You know how they talk about how Gen X in the States you just came home after dark, you were expected to come home when the streetlights came on?

SPEAKER_03 21:11

I think they eventually realized I've been missing for a few hours. But it is what it is. Like you expect to keep yourself kids were expected when I was little to be quiet and not see. It's just like what do you mean you have feeling? It's like hello, like you had a roof over your head and clothing and food. What more do you need? Because my parents came from really, really levels of poverty I don't know people understand these days. Because my mom's side of the family, they were in the middle part of Taiwan, a little bit quote unquote more affluent. They had a light bulb in the courtyard. That was considered like high tech. One lone light bulb, but they somehow were able to access electricity. But the rest of the houses had no electricity, just one light bulb, because everything else was lit by candles. That was it. So for them, if my brother and I got the bare necessities, and we didn't have to test because they my parents immigrated to the states because here in the states, access to education was more, you know, SATs. And if you could have the right GPA. In Taiwan at the time, only the top, I believe, 3% went on to college. The rest were expected to go into the labor force. Could you imagine that? Like it didn't matter if you were top 10%. You had to be top 3% to be able to go to like top university or even university. Wow. Not now. Back then it was just understood you had to be top, top, top. And my mom didn't go to grade school. She actually went to Taipei to earn money to put herself through high school. So my mom didn't have a higher education at high school level. But she still ended up being a ranking military in in Taipei before they came to the States.

SPEAKER_01 23:08

I am curious how schooling was for you once you were in the United States growing up, evolving, middle school, high school, like how that was for you.

SPEAKER_03 23:22

Well, I learned to rebel here in the States because let's remember in the States there's a lot of emphasis in schools placed on individuality. Expressing yourself because now it's going into the 70s, right? I came here in 1974. It was all about liberation, self-expression, and I was getting exposed to that at schools. And then I had to go home and it'd be it was expected to be obedient and not question your parents. There were many fights as I entered puberty. And so then I learned, oh, I have a choice in getting good grades. I know. I know. And there's a lot of extracurricular things that I enjoyed that had nothing to do with grades, which I detested. And I now when I look back, I had some level of undiagnosed ADHD. Because now they talk about, right? What were the signs for girls with ADHD? They lived in their own worlds. I lived in my own world a lot. And it wasn't just because I came from a biculture where it was one culture at home and one culture at school. You know, I had a lot of difficulty. I dare say I more also had some form of odd ADHD because I didn't understand social cues. I would think someone was my friend and they weren't. I would think I was being good friends to someone. They'd be like, you're not being good friends to me. I'm like, why? What did I do? What did I not do? Like I didn't understand. Because there were no parents to even show me the my parents were busy, you know, working a restaurant they had opened, and those are seven-day weeks, 12-hour days. I was one of the latch kids with the key tied to a string around my neck because I had to get home from school by myself and keep myself busy until my mom came home with takeout from the restaurant for dinner. But then she had to go back to work, and I had to get my brother and I to bed. We were quietly watching TV until we heard the car come

Rebellion ADHD And Dance As Safety

SPEAKER_03 25:30

home.

SPEAKER_01 25:31

Oh my gosh. Okay. Did you ever get out of this rebellious phase that you were in?

SPEAKER_03 25:38

I would say now I finally came out of it. Now, okay, listen. You have to you have to understand. I was one of the first interracial couples in our family because I married a white presenting man. Okay. And I loved it because I could say I was Jenny C. Cohen, and people are like, oh, you're not Mrs. Ling for two o'clock. I'm like, no, I'm Jenny C. Cohen, you're three o'clock. I didn't keep my maiden name just so I could mess with people. And I did not apply to all of the Ivy League schools my parents wanted me to. I didn't want to do it. I refused to. I mean, first of all, I wasn't competitive enough because I made sure my grades weren't good enough. Like subconsciously, I just didn't want to do it. And then when our kids were born, I homeschooled them, which was unheard of in the Asian culture back then. It's very invoked, more right before the pandemic. And then there was the awfulness of people who had no choice and had to do it. We felt bad for people like that because it's not an easy choice to homeschool your kids. It's just a completely different universe and perspective. And people were also trying to work full-time. And it's just not a fair back-to-back type of thing. And I understood that. But I did not work that whole time when I was homeschooling my kids. I chose not to because it was just I had them a handful. Just they were elite athletes. So at one point, my both my kids were junior Olympians. Like they had gone all the way up there and they ended up meddling. And that takes a lot of time on top of homeschooling. I couldn't really, other than you know, side jobs like teaching dance here and there or being uh like a parent coach of the team, that was all I had time for.

SPEAKER_01 27:41

I gotcha. Now, you mentioned not even applying to Ivy League schools. Where did you go to college?

SPEAKER_03 27:48

Brandeis and Waltham, which was like the Jewish Harvard that I would like to go there because my parents knew a local judge in Brookline who told them that's a very good school. I've been out of that school. Brandeis University, it's in Waltham, and they did a lot of medical research breakthroughs at that university. They came up with Brandeis because at for a while Jewish people weren't allowed into the Ivy Leagues. So they came up with their own college. How'd you enjoy that? I loved it. I really did. And I was allowed to live on campus, which was the first time. Of course, in retrospect, I would have liked to have been more in my body and present because I picked all the wrong guys to date until my husband. When I was unknowingly like a complex PTD PTSD survivor, I didn't know that I was kind of a homing beacon for anyone who was looking for victims. Does that make sense? We learned through some therapies that if you've gone through any type of, so there's a trigger warning for your audience. If you've gone any type of type of SA, um sexual assault or pedophilia, where you're the child victim and you don't know it, it affects our chemistry and that we almost have like an unconscious homing beacon for people who are looking for us. It's hard to be aware that we're doing that. And they've done studies where they've asked criminals or pedophiles, you know, a room full of kids, they can pick up the kids who are already abused like that. They know. There's a aura we give until we're healed. Wow. I didn't know that there's more and more data coming out, and it's a shame because more of that goes on than we are actually willing to okay, because I'm again Gen X, and my generation was all about, oh, boys will be boys, men will be men behaviors. And a lot of that wasn't really good behaviors that we allowed. Right? And even now these days, for the younger generations, because we're so much on the internet and there's no actual responsibility for what you type online, there's way more allowances for behaviors that would never be tolerated in person. They just came out and there were like 600 million views. 600 million views in this academy, literally, of anonymous men talking about how they were like essaying their own wives or drugging their wives, streaming, making money off of it. And people like what these people, their own partners, and 600 million views people. Like, I'm like that has to be talked about. We have to be more aware of it. Like, I have a a person I know in the this might be trigger another trigger warning for your audience who's in the sex sex industry, right? And she was a pastor, she's very out in the open about this, and she was a pastor, and the amount of shaming she gets for that, and I'm kind of like, oh, more power to her because she's a single parent. She had an abusive husband before, right? She has multiple partners. I'm like, great, but if a man did that, no one would care. They'd be like, he's just a boy being a boy. And I'm like, like, they can't just swing both ways. When I was moving out to Utah, they had known for sister wives here. And my girlfriends were all like, Are you gonna become a sister wife? I'm like, no, I'm gonna have brother husbands. Because I need at least seven people to replace what I do, which is true. We're all expected to be seven different people. One guy can't do what I do, there'd have to be seven of them to do what I do.

SPEAKER_02 31:39

Right?

SPEAKER_03 31:42

Real talk, like really seriously. And my husband is the first person to agree. Like when I travel and I go on away on a short trip or a long trip, by day two, and this is someone I've been married to for over 30 years, he'll start sending me texts. Where kids are grown right now, Amanda. They're not little babies. And he still feels the pressure of being a parent and working full-time and managing our plethora of pets and his own personal feelings. And you're like, by day two, I'm getting texts from him. I so appreciate what you do. You're such a wonderful person. I'm like, I'm still not coming back early.

SPEAKER_01 32:17

You're so right though, about like standards being still different for men versus women. And it's it's kind of crazy to me in 2026 that we're still dealing with this.

SPEAKER_03 32:32

It it feels a lot like growing pains for the human race. We're like tweaking like puberty or something, just across the board. I don't know what's going on. You know, just feel like a giant shift for us. Right? And I feel like like you have a little bit of backsliding before you launch to the next level. I'd rather look at it as that way, even though it does feel like we're very going backwards. The original Charlie's Angels were three white women, but the brunette we could imagine was Asian because she was brunette. She had bangs. We kind of pretend she was Asian. We didn't have the Lucy views back then, if you really think about it. So the world is getting different, even if it feels like we're backsliding. We are shifting.

SPEAKER_01 33:16

No, I I like your analogy about like the puberty, but it makes sense. So you went to college over there, and did you study occupational therapy?

SPEAKER_03 33:28

Undergrad was psychology because it fulfilled a lot of the prerequisites to get into Boston University occupational therapy, master's degree program. Now, I've heard that they've already discontinued that, and the current administration was they took a certain number of degreed jobs and made them certificates. So, like right now, occupational therapy in the country is not a profession anymore. Don't ask me why. Like it there was a certain number of like speech therapists, occupational therapists. Oh, okay. I know. I keep stuff like that. I don't know why. They just decided it wasn't it wasn't worth the government funding, and so they demoted a bunch of professions. Okay. Anyway, but yeah, I ended up going to get my master's degree at at Boston University. That was fun. The leftovers? Yeah, because they would the medical students would actually do the dissecting, and then we would go in and study all the actual human anatomical things that we were studying to understand better how the body worked.

SPEAKER_01 34:39

Uh okay. Now, did you go for your master's right after undergraduate? Yeah, I went right into it. Okay. And you you liked your master's better than undergrad?

SPEAKER_03 34:50

Well, undergrad was it was my first time away from home. So I made some four choices in terms of boyfriend, boyfriends, and still was rebellious with grades. Because I still remember, so that we had this chemistry professor. Professor And she was German, so she spoke with a very thick German accent. And she would write and erase at the same time. So you if you weren't fast enough, we didn't have telephones with iPhones with the screenshots, so I could never get half of the things she wrote down before she erased it. And then, you know, she would have the disappearing stacked over chalkboards. So she would write it out. If you weren't quick enough, she would slide it up, you couldn't see it anyways. I ended up getting a C in chemistry. She was very intelligent, very nice, but just teaching was terrible. And I remember thinking to myself, oh, you know, why is this so hard? And I I had so many extracurricular things. I did dance, I did modeling, I did crew for sports. I really enjoyed that. But I didn't really find my way until master's degree and said, I really want to help people as an occupational therapist. And that was completely different. It felt like I actually learned things, but not undergrad.

SPEAKER_01 36:03

Okay. Now you mentioned you did dance in undergrad. Is that when dance first came into your world?

SPEAKER_03 36:10

Actually, dance first came into my world when I was very young. When I was like an itty bitty, I convinced my mother to let me do ballet, and I think I was maybe nine. In the US doing ballet. Until I came to the States when I was five, and it took me four years to convince my mother don't let me take ballet. And I did some ballet and I liked it. And then she was kind of like, I guess a waste of time, it's done. So I was like, okay. And then I didn't really start to do any type of dance until I hit high school. And Miss Lamine taught ballet and modern, and I took her as much as I could during those four years in high school. And I loved because I remember ballet from when I was nine, how safe it made me feel. Even though ballet is really hard, but it got me really present because it was so hard to do. And it was one of the few times, if I sink back over my youth, where I have like happy feelings when I think about it, and I was really actually in my body. All the rest of the time, it was like survivorship, and I wasn't in my body. I don't remember much of anything other than when I was in dance classes. Yeah. And then in college, I struggled the first year. I like I like some art classes, but my parents made it clear you're not gonna have a career in art, okay? This is their art for you. Like, come on, lawyer, doctor, right? Something like that would be nice where we could brag about it to family. And I was like, all right, well, I'll be an occupational therapist. That means I still wear a white jacket and I'm in a hospital. So you have to be happy with that. I'll do that, right? But I'm not gonna be a doctor, it's too much debt. I don't wanna do that. I had no, not even a nurse, that wasn't high enough level for my parents, right? Okay. Deborah Messing and I were in the same year at Brandeis University. So I got to take dance classes with Deborah Messing. And so we took two semesters of classes, but then I realized, oh, I want to go get my master's degree. So I had to start focusing on prerequisite. And then that turned into my psychology major. And then I really didn't get back to dance until I graduated and started working as an occupational therapist. And I was in New York City and I was going to Broadway Dance Center, and I got to do those classes after work. And I loved hip hop, but I couldn't get the rhythm of it until I started doing belly dance in my 30s. Because belly dance talks a lot about interrhythms off of the downbeat. And then my hip-hop was hip hopping at that point because I couldn't listen and hear the beats in between the beats. Then my hip hop got good.

SPEAKER_01 38:31

Wow. Now, when you were doing these in high school, was that at your actual school for like classes? Yeah. Oh, wow. You actually had that type of stuff. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 38:44

That's cool that you were able to do that. It was amazing. I think my senior year, I got to take two classes of dance because I have fulfilled all my other high school diploma things. And so I finagled a semester to where I got to have Miss Livine twice, twice a week instead of like one class. I think she was an amazing teacher, one of the few that I felt seen by. I mean, obviously, I still remember her name.

SPEAKER_01 39:11

You're so cute. So I am curious, transitioning again at you mentioned picking non-suitable, non-good men for you. How did that transition for you?

SPEAKER_03 39:25

So this will be a trigger warning for your audience, okay?

Trauma Patterns Marriage And Trust

SPEAKER_03 39:28

I had a semi-serious boyfriend behind my parents back in high school, which wasn't really anything because we went to Taiwan, came back, and then we didn't really pick up anything that we left off with. Like I skipped a couple of classes to make out with him at a movie theater, and that was it. Then I went to Taiwan, came back, and then he lost interest, I lost interest. I had a kind of boyfriend for the prom senior year, but he was more interested in flirting with my friends than really being with me. So then I learned early on that your girlfriends aren't safe because they rather have the boys' attention than be your friend. And I tolerated, right? Until later. And then college, my very first boyfriend was a senior, and he was going off to medical school, and he was Catholic. And I had told him quite firmly, I wasn't gonna lose my virginity. This is a trigger warning for your audience. I wasn't gonna lose my virginity until I married someone. And then he got me drunk, and then he forced me to have sex with him. And then he cried because he was Catholic and he had sinned. So I'm comforting my rapist. So then I promptly forgot about it for a year. And then when I remembered a year later later, after he left for med school, I had a breakdown. Like no one knew. I was just very quietly, very depressed, and honestly suicidal for a good three years. But you know, you don't see these things that that they were danger. Does that make sense? And then that boy ex-boyfriend had the audacity to come back, expect to sleep with me again, and then compare me to a big screen TV. I'm not making mess up. This is true. He came back and said, I didn't I didn't appreciate you. You're like a big screen TV that you first get you want to show her off to your friend, then after you for for a few months you take it for granted until it breaks. And then you miss it. I'm like, oh my god, you're gonna be a doctor? Like, stop. That was my first serious boyfriend.

SPEAKER_01 41:13

Oh, Jenny, I'm so sorry you experienced that.

SPEAKER_03 41:17

Yeah. Wow. You asked about the shift though. My husband, we he was a year younger than me, and we dated for a year, and then he proposed. And I remember when he proposed, the immediate thing I heard in my head was, he'll be a good father to your kids. That was the thing. I could see him being a good father. None of the other men before that I dated could I ever see trusting my kids with. Because I think I didn't realize that another trigger warning for your audience, I didn't realize that I was essayed when I was in the country with my grandparents. I just didn't really feel safe as a child. And I knew I had to be with a partner that I could trust with my babies. I was like, yes, I could totally trust them. And so then I said yes.

SPEAKER_01 42:06

That makes so much sense. Wow. No, you said he was a year. Did you go to school with him? Yeah, he was a year younger.

SPEAKER_03 42:13

Like we first met, the first year we met, he was a photographer, and I was a volunteer clown. And I was with another clown, and his name was Steve, and we were just clown. And he would not crack a smile. And I was like, He's got no sense of humor. That's the first year I met him. Then we went about our lives, and then the second year, we were both on the volunteer committee to bring in the first year students. So at that point, he was a junior and I was a senior. And we kind of started to click a little bit, even though I had a boyfriend at the time. And then eventually we ended up just staying together. And then a year later he proposed. Oh, that's so sweet. Yeah. So sweet. He almost drove us to Canada that weekend because he was so nervous about proposing. He almost drove you to Canada. We decided to go away for the weekend, and he was driving me up to the outlets in Burlington, Vermont. And he missed the eggs and didn't realize because he was so nervous. He kept going and we were getting closer and closer to the border between the States and Canada. And then he had to turn around and go back to Burlington, Vermont. That's my favorite part of the story. Not him proposing to me romantically at the Wolf Wolf Park reservation out in the middle of nowhere. The favorite part is that he like almost drove us to Canada.

SPEAKER_01 43:35

Oh my god, Jenny. I'm dead. That's funny. And you you mentioned you have two twin twins. Yes. Twin boys. Is that just all the kids? Just the two of them? We have fraternal twins through in vitro.

SPEAKER_03 43:49

So back in the day, they didn't know how successful it would people would the fertilized eggs would take, you know? And though, so like my husband had had testicular cancer before his second surgery and before he did the chemotherapy, he donated sperm. When we wanted to have kids, we defrosted his sperm and then they harvested the eggs. And here's the silver lining part of this, okay? When you go through in vitro, they have to work up the female part. And we they discovered I have very severe. Your endometriosis and a chocolate system, one of my ovaries that could have turned cancerous. So the silver lining was if he had never gotten cancer, we may never have had kids. Because, you know, normally without the cancer part of it, right? With the sperm, what is it, storage. If you can't have kids, they do the most lowest level of intervention before they go to in vitro, which is the highest level of intervention. If he hadn't gotten testicular cancer, we wouldn't have gone straight to IVF and hadn't he worked out back then. It would have been like, oh, we'll do this low-key thing. We'll pump up your hormones. They didn't know that much about endometriosis back then either. It wasn't a recognized disease in women. Do you know now that you've even found endometriosis in people's eyeballs? It's altered at your body when you have it. And now what is endometriosis? It's a type of tissue that overgrow it okay. Endometrial lining inside the uterus that grows outside of your uterus. So when you're cycling in your period, it will fill with blood. Here's the scary part. The endometrial tissue is almost like a what's that lizard that can blend in with his environment? What is that? You know that animal? A chameleon? Yes. The endometriosis tissue is like chameleon. It will assume the color and shape of the tissue it's with. So if they just remove your uterus if you have bad endometriosis, you may still have endometrial tissue in your lungs, your sphincter, and your intestines. But it mimics the tissue it's on. So they didn't, until recently, recognize, unless you trained with a surgeon to specialize it, to know and show you what it looks like when it's in other parts of your body. That's because it in the beginning they would just, oh, she's got severe endometriosis. We'll just remove her uterus. And then the woman would be like, I'm still in pain. And then a nurse really pushed doctors to go back and figure out what's going on. And so now there's no whole specialty now on endometriosis. They've even found endometriosis in men now.

SPEAKER_04 46:36

Hmm.

SPEAKER_03 46:38

You don't know what you don't know until they figure it out, right? So the endometriosis and the calculus would have prevented Nashley getting pregnant. So when we did the inmetro, we ended up with two miracle babies.

SPEAKER_01 46:52

Wow. That's amazing though.

SPEAKER_03 46:55

Yeah, total blessings. And I do have permission to speak on this because my kids are of legal age, and we are more open about this particular part of what I'm going to share with your audience because it's really important. Because my kids were miracles. When my son, because I gave birth to two girls, but my son transitioned female to male. And when he first told me, I was kind of like, okay, what do you want us to call you? What pronouns do you want? And they've they expected another reaction. I was kind of like, no, I've met parents who actually lost their kids. Their kids died. You're not dying, you're just transforming to something else. Like you're still alive. And I was very honored they shared that transition and kept me in there live. So it's not ever like I didn't get a say in what they want to be or need to be. I just my goal is just to support them. And so my son is my son and my daughter's non-binary. And she uses she they pronouns. I'm still understanding this, y'all. Like I don't have all the answers. Okay. I just am glad my kids are alive. That's a high-rated suicide for people in those populations because their family members don't understand and they don't support them.

SPEAKER_02 48:10

And I much rather have two light kids with their family.

SPEAKER_01 48:16

That's an amazing perspective to have.

SPEAKER_03 48:48

If you think about all the things I shared with you. Right? And here we have these miracle babies. I take that role very seriously. I adhere this belief. Like my kids picked me as their parent before they were born. I'm very blessed. I could have easily been a single parent. Lots of money, by the way. Be out of debt right now. I could be living the highlight, but I was like, no, I want to be a parent. And again, I wouldn't ever choose any different.

SPEAKER_02 49:26

Is there anything that helps you have that perspective? Because it was so hard to become a parent.

SPEAKER_03 49:36

Like literally every step of making the baby, there was no private part about it. Y'all, like if you've never had an internal ultrasound where a person's like driving a stick-shift car inside your

IVF Endometriosis And Miracle Twins

SPEAKER_03 49:48

hoo-ha with a stick, you have no idea what I'm talking about. It was a very public pregnancy. It wasn't like, I'm just gonna have sex with my husband in the privacy of my room and get pregnant. It was, oh, we have to operate on you and clear out your plumbing. It was driving into New York City with your mother-in-law and then sitting in the waiting room with her while your husband went and donated sperm. Like the room itself, okay, sperm donation centers, but when they feed your sperm, okay. I have to tell you this is a funny story. I thought it was funny. So they're gonna have to enjoy the story. We get into this office, but then the room where they have to donate the sperm, it looks like a porn office. Like this dark lighting and the chair with paper and all these porn videos and porn magazines to try to get the man to be able to ejaculate into a cup. And my husband was like, Are you gonna stay in here with me? I was like, No, I am not gonna stay in here. This is one of the few times you have my full permission to fantasize about anyone and anything you need to. And then I left in that room, and then I had to go wait out in the waiting room with my mother-in-law. And then when they furlined the eggs, we have pictures of my children as the eight-cell organism. Not that I have the naked butt baby pictures, but I literally have pictures of them as like little cells, like little balls multiplying. Like, how much I when I got quote um pregnant, they took an instrument that looked like a turkey baster and squirted them into me through my cervix, and then I had to lie there for an hour hoping that they would take on my uterine wall. And you know, so I'm like, it's it's a miracle that that I got to be a mom. So technically, God was like, no, we would like you to be a dink, you know, dual income, no kids. I was like, I beg to differ.

SPEAKER_01 51:32

I would like the baby, and the gods like, ah, give me two. I'm like, So I've got a question, Jenny. If anybody listening to us has a parent and has a child that is transitioning or they want to, do you have any suggestions for them to be more open-minded to it? Yes.

SPEAKER_03 51:54

So, first of all, we do have to be careful because current administration makes it actually against the law for you to enable your child to be any gender they are, any other gender than what they were assigned on their birth certificates. Certain states will not allow you to do that, just so you know, like unfortunately, legally, okay? And we transitioned my son at that cusp between 17, 18 when you become legal age and a legal adult. We didn't know that that's how it worked out. But what we did was more at first, I was afraid that he, before he was he, was just rejecting it because I was going through breast cancer at the time. I was like, Are you just afraid of your giant boobs that you inherited from you know your my grand my mother-in-law? Because I had tiny boobs, and my kids, when they went into puberty, got these boobs that are like bigger than my head, and we did not know, like, what the hell? And it was because it was for my my husband's part of the family that inherited that. And I was like, Are you just afraid to have boobs because mom's going through breast cancer? And we had discussions about that. And the answer was like, no, I do not identify as female. So I was like, all right, well, we just moved to Utah. What pronouns would you like? What would you like to be called? And they gave me a nickname that was a shortened version of their birth name. And they asked for different pronouns. So we switched their identities because we had just moved. And I was just like, the old people that we nicked the Hack East will just start referring to you as your preferred name. Here, though, in Utah, what we did was we set him up with a therapist. We started investigating a doctor that would start him on hormones. But he was already 16, 17 because he really wanted

Supporting Trans Kids Through Healing

SPEAKER_03 53:48

the top surgery. And when we met with a specialist, they were like, you may want to start the T first before you do, be on the T before you start this, before you go for the top surgery. The biggest thing as an adult, like your parent, is that you support them and keep the conversation open. Because here's the thing: if you are their parent and you accept them for whoever and however they want to be, your goal is just to keep a safe path for them and be their support. Because oftentimes, what causes them to be a little bit more inclined to self-harm or to take their own lives is when their own most beloved people don't accept them for who they need to be, to want to be alive. That's the biggest thing. Because no one chooses a hard life like that. I'm gonna tell you. No one's like, I'll wake up and be the opposite of and just mess with it and have people always not re like, hey, let it be a fight every day, everywhere. No one chooses that. It's not a choice. It's like, and I was lucky enough to have that, that I was conduit for them that moment that I didn't want just to first make sure you were afraid of boobs. No, okay, great. Then what do you want to be called? What's your preferred pronoun? Done. I was always in the back of my head going, are they just having an identity crisis? But I didn't have that conversation with them. I had it with my husband. And he was completely confused. He's like, What is going on? I was don't worry about it. I got them. You work, just call them by the assistant saying, use this pronoun for now, you know. We did have some problems with my in-laws, and they still play games up until the time we cut off with them. So we don't have a relationship with my in-laws anymore. But we discovered that my daughter was essayed by a family member on my husband's side when she was very young. And we did not know that. We thought, oh, your dad having the emergency ball obstruction, mommy having cancer, your twin transitioning, movie cross-country all within two years was what caused the self-harm and the suicidal ideation. Wasn't that? Those were the straws that broke her back. But when we trace back two years of therapy, growing medication, we watched her very closely for two years. Fostered a lot of kittens. That's why at one point we had 12.3 kittens. Anyways, but we didn't know that she she had like some like it happened when she was three. And it finally downloaded, she was safe enough in the middle of a therapy session. We were really lucky that she told us because I could have lost her 10 years ago if she didn't tell us. And we it was touch and go a lot of times. People don't I don't talk about it, and I have permission to speak on it, but we almost lost her a few more times after that. It's pretty scary. You know, and we're really grateful that she hung in there. It's hard when you're that low, you don't want to be alive anymore. That never goes away, it just becomes managing every day. Now, did you go to therapy doing any of this? Oh, yes. I had to go to therapy because I had so many unprocessed things, and then we found this amazing therapist. Now she is a complex PTSD specialist. Okay, so PTSD is one big trauma that your body and your mind and your nervous system cannot process. Complex PTSD is a series of T's, big and little, it doesn't really matter, that occur mostly in your childhood. That because you know, babies and young children can't make sense of the world, we only have power on ourselves. So we turn a lot of the powerlessness into blaming ourselves, and we come up with all these imaginary rules to make sense of the world. And then there because she's more curl-young-based, and that is also overlapping with internal family systems, meaning the point is that the ages that you had your traumas, there's parts of you stuck in those ages. And so when you're triggered now, those parts will come out and relive the trauma like it's happening right now when it was like years ago. And what we've been really doing is integrating, like bringing your lost parts back. So then you can understand when something's getting triggered, and then make sense if it has a present you that's way more powerful than the child part that got stuck back. That makes a lot of sense. Wow. If I dare to say this, because not everyone can afford it. I want to recognize that. We should all be seeing a therapist regularly that allows you to ground and anchor yourself because they're trained to be trauma-informed and hold space. This present therapist moved from the first day that most likely my daughter had been like essay'd as a child, but she never brought it up. She just held space for her until she had that. My daughter had to download during therapy two years in. She never said anything. She didn't suggest it, it never came up. I know because I was at the every therapy session because my daughter needed me to be there. She didn't trust anybody. And you know, now she goes to therapy by herself online. But those first three years, I was at every two-week therapy session. Because they're homeschooled. I had no one to blame but me. Like I was like, I'm taking full responsibility. What did I do? You know? Yeah. So I was there for the download when she was like, mommy, I think I was essayed by grandpa. And she said, What's what are we gonna do if daddy doesn't believe me? I said, I guess I guess daddy doesn't have a place in our lives then. Of course he believed each other, by the way. We're still married.

SPEAKER_01 59:41

Oh gosh, what if daddy doesn't believe me? Is that they're not gonna be believed, whether it's by a loved one or just by whoever they're telling.

SPEAKER_03 59:58

And here's the thing, it's like you deserve that acceptance in that space.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:05

You don't have to remember the details. You just need the recognition in the space to be held. Completely agree.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:15

Thank you, Jenny. I really appreciate this, and I appreciate all your time recording with me. Thank you for having me, Amanda. Absolutely. And thank you guys for tuning in to another episode of Amanda's mindset. Thank you so much for tuning in to part one of my conversation with Jenny. As I mentioned at the beginning, this conversation was simply too powerful to squeeze into one episode. There's still so much more to unpack, and trust me, you don't want to miss what's coming next. If you thought today's conversation was powerful, just wait until part two. Part two drops this Friday, where Jenny and I continue this incredibly honest

Part Two Teaser And Closing

SPEAKER_01 1:01:08

conversation and explore even more about confidence, visibility, and what it truly means to step into your fullest authentic self. Until then, keep breathing, keep shifting, and remember, everything is figure outable. In case no one told you today, I'm proud of you, I'm voting for you, and you got this. As always, if you enjoyed the show, I would really appreciate it if you would leave me a five-star rating, leave a review, and share it with anyone you think would benefit from that. And don't forget, you are only one mindset shift away from shifting your life. Thanks guys, until next time.