Lukewarm Love EP3: Nursing Love Language #2 - Protection

If someone has told you they appreciate you and still gave you an unsafe assignment you already understand the difference between being valued and being protected.

 This week we're talking about the second Nurse Love Language: Protection. Not boundaries the buzzword, but the real, structural, embodied experience of having someone in your corner. Of knowing that if something goes wrong, you won't be standing there holding all the consequences alone.

We get into the nurse who won't call out and what's really driving that. The difference between resilience and being repeatedly exposed to things you never should have had to become resilient to deal with in the first place. The bully everyone works around because leadership won't move. And what happens when the absence of protection becomes so normal that speaking up is treated like whining or weakness.

 This stuff doesn’t stay at work! We talk about home life too. 

If you've ever been praised for your strength while the thing that required it was completely ignored, then you’ll love/hate this episode (read: you really need to listen to it).

Fan Voicemail

Link in the show notes! Tell me: a time when someone protected you and you could feel it or a time you realized something was missing and decided to stop accepting it. Stay anonymous or don't. Your voice matters here.

Transcript

Welcome And Series Context

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hi, my loves. Welcome back to Lukewarm Love, How Not to Love a Nurse. This is our current mini-series. I am the host Reva, your ritual nurse, and I'm coming to you today with the energy of a woman who has deeply personally been betrayed by her own calendar. I looked at it this week and it looked back at me with absolutely zero remorse, no apology, just pretty much yeah, and vibes. So it's Monday and we're here. Honestly, given what we're talking about today, showing up when you are being run over by your calendar is really kind of on theme. So this is episode three of Lukewarm Love. We're three episodes into our six-part series, which means that we're fully into discussing these so-called love languages. You're going to want to listen to the intro episode for the source of the snark in that direction. If you haven't listened to episode one or love language number one initiative, then I want you to go back and start there. They're short. You can also listen afterwards, but whatever you do, listen to all of them. In fact, save them because you're going to want to listen to them multiple times and really dig into them, really roll your sleeves up, listen to them in pieces, journal about it, ruminate on it, all those things. But if you are here right now for the very first time, welcome, pull up a chair, beanbag, cozy, whatever. Today we're talking about our second nurse love language, and that is protection. I want to start there with that word specifically, because I think when

Defining Protection Beyond Boundaries

SPEAKER_02 1:49

most people hear it, our brain immediately goes to boundaries, which, yes, we are absolutely going to go there, but not yet. I think that protection is bigger than boundaries. It's deeper than that. Where we start with it isn't where we think we should. It really starts with the fact that nurses are some of the most skilled protectors in the world. And somehow we're also the group least likely to include ourselves in that protection.

SPEAKER_03 2:23

So, yeah, let's get into it.

SPEAKER_02 2:27

So here's what I know about nurses. We protect patients from bad outcomes. We protect families from confusion and fear. We protect new nurses from the mistakes that we made in the past. We protect physicians from missing information. We protect entire healthcare systems from collapsing under the weight of their own terrible decisions, actually. Okay, that last one was a little spicy, but you know I'm right. We become incredibly good at identifying who needs backup, who needs someone in their corner, who needs protection in the most real, most functional sense of the word. And we do it automatically, instinctively. We don't even think about it. It's just an innate response in the body. It's one of the most genuinely beautiful things about nursing, honestly. And it is also 100% one of the reasons that nurses get hurt. And I don't mean that we get assaulted at work or anything having to do with workplace violence. I mean other types of injury that are trauma-based, that are pervasive. We'll go into that in further detail in further along in the podcast. But somewhere in all of that protecting, we don't include ourselves. We don't think about ourselves usually. We really aren't ever encouraged to by anyone but each other either. And usually the nurse that's encouraging us to think about ourselves gets flack for being a disruptor by leadership, organizations, middle managers, you name it. Most of us don't even know that we're doing this in terms of exempting ourselves from the protected class. I was thinking about this recently because I was having a conversation with a nurse that I respect enormously. She's been doing this work for decades. She is sharp, committed. She's

The Habit Of Working Around Harm

SPEAKER_02 4:29

exactly the kind of person you want next to you on a hard shift. She was telling me about a situation at work, a situation not important, circumstances well known, something that was unfair, something that should have been addressed, something that had been quietly costing her energy in ways that were really starting to add up. And after she described all of it, you know, after walking me through all the details, she paused. And then she said, Yeah, it's fine. I'll just work around it. And we both sighed at the same time. In my head, I'm thinking, why did we both just act like this is just the foregone conclusion? Because I've said it, you've said it, every nurse I have ever met has said some version of that sentence. Eh, it's fine. I'll just work around it. We work around unsafe staffing, we work around broken systems, we work around toxic co-workers, we work around leadership that doesn't show up, we work around policies that make absolutely no clinical sense. We become extraordinarily skilled at adaptation. I mean, that's real. I'm not dismissing any of this. Adaptation is a very necessary, important skill for us. But there is a difference between being resilient and being repeatedly exposed to things we shouldn't have had to become resilient to in the first place. There's a difference between adaptation as a skill and adaptation in a forced environment where that's those aren't the things we should have had to develop adaptation skills to in the first place. Those distinctions really matter. Resilience is a trait that our psyche has, that we have psychologically, that literally is there to help us recover. It's part of self-preservation. Resilience is not the justification for repeated harm. And that's really what the misconstrued narrative has turned it into. Really almost weaponizing resilience and then being able to use it as some kind of blame factor, as if, well, nurses just need more resilience. That sentence right there, used in the inappropriate context way, is the 2026 replacement for get a thicker skin, or, you know, in my day, we just pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps. That bullshit. Used in the wrong context, that sentiment of, well, nurses just need more resilience is exactly that same game. And we know this instinctively. In our bodies, we know this. You know, if you've been in healthcare for more than 17 minutes, you've probably had a moment where someone praised your strength while completely ignoring the thing that required you to be strong in the first place. Which is a little bit like complimenting someone's ability to swim while actively throwing them back in the ocean. Like, thank you, I guess. You know, I mean, could we talk about why I'm in the water again? Like why I'm back in the water. And that's the perspective that we're discussing this from. Because before we can talk about what protection actually looks like, we need to name the things that are happening when it's missing. And what we know is happening is that a lot of nurses have spent years fixing things, working around things, dealing with it, however you want to phrase it. Not because it's an optional choice that we're making, but because it's what we're trained to do and what is culturally and system-wise expected of us. So let me let's just talk about something that happens every single year that I find genuinely fascinating. Nurses

Nurses Week And Hollow Appreciation

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Week. Every year, healthcare organizations and systems tell nurses they're appreciated. They tell us we're heroes, they bring pizza, sometimes, they hang signs, they send emails that begin with, we see you, and end with, thank you for all that you do. Have I, as an executive, sent those things out? Yes. Did I, as an executive, have a vastly different meaning to them than what you would normally expect? Yes. My actions supported those meanings. Were they carefully worded so that I didn't get immediately fired upon hitting send? Yes, of course they were. It genuinely fascinates me this week that happens. And I mean, don't get me wrong, I like being appreciated. I am not anti-appreciation when we're talking about genuine appreciation, when we're talking about genuine recognition. But there's a very real, very big difference between saying those things and nurses feeling valued and feeling safe. Because you can say that you appreciate me and still keep giving me an unsafe assignment. You can say you appreciate me and still keep tolerating the bully on the unit. You can say that you appreciate me and still keep expecting me to come in when I'm sick or supposed to be off work because you're short again. You can say that you appreciate me and still keep building a culture where saying no to anything feels like professional suicide. Our nervous system is specifically tracking, and I want you to hear this because this explains a lot. Our nervous system doesn't register safety through words. Our nervous system is specifically tracking constantly, automatically, below the level of conscious thought, our context and environment. So, regardless of what words you say, our nervous system is tracking. Am I contextually, environmentally actually safe right now? Is there backup here? If something goes wrong, will I be standing here holding the consequences alone? Is there danger present? And there are so many different forms of danger outside of just being physically in danger. That's what your nervous system cares about. Not the poster in the break room, not emails and graphics, not speeches from administration, the actual contextual and environmental safety, support, backup, protection. And a lot of nurses exist in environments where the words say you matter, but the systems, the context and environment, just say productivity quotient. The nervous system always believes your context and environment because you don't feel empty words. Because words don't impact your context or environment. The praise can land completely hollowly. And it's not because you're ungrateful. Let's just get that out there right now. This has nothing to do with nurses being grateful or holier than thou or any of that kind of nonsense. That's gaslighting. And no. Your body, your nervous system has already registered what you know is true when it comes to your context and your environment. The gap between being told you're valued and actually being protected is one of the reasons nurses carry this very specific kind of exhaustion. Not just physically tired, but depleted. Like you've been dragging dead weight around constantly. This part kind of makes people uncomfortable. And if I'm being honest, me too sometimes. It's called the hero narrative. I understand why it exists. Nursing is remarkable work. The things nurses do during the worst moments of other people's lives

The Hero Narrative And Self-Destruction

SPEAKER_02 12:40

are legitimately heroic actions. Here's what the hero narrative, however, does functionally. Heroes don't get tired, heroes don't need breaks, heroes don't have limits. Heroes sacrifice. Heroes endure. Heroes keep going endlessly. And the moment you assign someone hero status, you have also quietly stripped away their right to be a human with a nervous system, body, actual needs. You've made their self-destruction not just acceptable, but expected. And nursing culture does this ad nauseum. The nurse who comes in sick gets called dedicated. The nurse who skips breaks gets called a hard worker. The nurse who stays late every shift gets called reliable. The nurse who cries in their car every single day gets called passionate. None of that is healthy or preservative. That is reward for self-destruction. And I think nurses have been living inside that reward structure for so long that thinking outside of it feels really taboo. We've been told so many times that the best nurses are the ones who give the most and have altruism as a blood type. That somewhere along the way, we started to confuse abject sacrifice with quality. And it's not us having the confusion problem. It's the fact that systems designed to move people around, aka manipulate people, are really good at manipulating people. In fact, they pay experts to know how to do it most successfully. And so creating this narrative, this isn't something nurses created about themselves. This is created by the systems that need nurses in order to function. And out of that function, they have something to gain. Here's what I want you to think about. Just let the scenario kind of sit there for a second and really gauge your reaction to it. If your patient were in a situation where their basic needs weren't being met, where they had no control, where they had no rest, no safety, no backup, and were expected to keep functioning on willpower and good intentions alone, you would be writing incident reports. You'd be calling everybody under the sun. You would be advocating immediately. We advocate for patients with far less dire circumstances. You sure as hell wouldn't tell them to just be more resilient. And yet, when it's nurses in that exact same situation, somehow the answer is always be stronger.

SPEAKER_03 15:21

Don't break ranks, don't be the weak link. Why? And more importantly, why is this an accepted part of our culture?

SPEAKER_02 15:33

Because here's what I think is actually happening. I think that nursing culture has taught us that the truest expression of love for our patients, our teens, and our profession is our willingness to sacrifice, aka harm ourselves for it. And I just want to plainly state that that's not love. That's a trauma response we've been conditioned to call a virtue instead.

SPEAKER_03 16:01

And we gotta stop. We have to stop.

SPEAKER_02 16:06

Here's a specific kind of take on that. And I think this one happens in real time for so many of you listening. You know who you are. The nurse who won't call out.

Stop Covering For Staffing Failures

SPEAKER_02 16:21

You've dragged yourself into work completely depleted, physically sick, emotionally fried, running on nothing. I mean, maybe something I can only describe as spite-powered like muscle memory, I guess. If somebody asked you why you came in, your answers are never about you.

SPEAKER_03 16:39

The team is already short. My patients need me. I don't want to leave anyone hanging. They'd be totally underwater without me.

SPEAKER_02 16:50

My patients are gonna be lost without me. XYZ has to happen. I have to finish up XYZ. Your answers were about everybody else. I hear the care in that. I legitimately do. That instinct comes from something real. And I'm not, I'm standing right next to you while I'm pointing in the mirror at our reflection. Because I've been there, I've done it. You know, we we think of it as loyalty. We, I don't know, sometimes we don't even put a name to it because that would require us to define what's happening or, you know, actually take a look at our what we're doing. And we just kind of, you know, circumnavigate that. What I want you to notice, though, is that when you come in sick, the staffing problem doesn't get solved. When you come in exhausted, the staffing problem doesn't get solved. When you drag yourself in on your day off for the ninth time in six months, the staffing problem doesn't get solved. What happens is the staffing problem gets temporarily covered. And because it got covered, nobody has to fix it. You coming in heroically is the thing that prevents the system from having to face its own failure. And I think we've been so conditioned to be the bridge between a broken system and patient safety that we've started to feel personally responsible for problems that belong to organizations. A staffing problem becomes your problem, a retention crisis becomes your problem, a budget failure becomes your problem, a scheduling disaster becomes your problem. After enough years of stepping into those gaps, your brain just normalizes those steps as yours. So now taking a mental health day feels like abandonment, feels like a crime you have to lie about. And in many cases, with many policies, it is something you have to lie about, which is absolutely ridiculous. Even though, logically, you know none of those things are true. One nurse calling out did not create a staffing crisis. One nurse taking a sick day did not create a staffing crisis. One nurse choosing to protect their own mental health and self did not create this problem. The staffing crisis was there before you got there. The team doesn't need your sacrifice. The team needs systems that don't require sacrifice to function. I know, I know the entire idea of that is uncomfortable. No matter where you are, whether you're a bedside nurse, a charge nurse, a CNO, it doesn't matter where in these areas you are. And I know, I know, I a lot of you are like, fuck administration and leadership. They don't get to account for themselves here. And if you haven't been leadership, administration, or an executive, I get that. Believe me, I completely understand your perspective. And given some of the administrations and leaderships that I have worked for before I stepped into those roles, I know exactly why. Because those administrators and leaders and executives taught me everything I made sure I didn't do when I became one. But showing up and self-destruction are not the same thing. One is commitment, the other is a trauma response. And I say this with all the love in the world because I have been that nurse. I've also been that nurse at an executive level. When I was a nursing exec, I still worked full on the floor shifts. Like, not I'm just, you know, sweeping through anything I can do to help, you know, while I go sit in my office or, you know, am at home, you know. I'm right. I'm I'm right, just a phone call away. No, I'm talking on the floor shifts, on knock shift, so that my team wasn't short-staffed or unsafe. Because I had no other options that I felt were acceptable. I'd work a full knock shift, try to wash my face and brush my teeth in the sink, throw on business casual and work all day. And yes, some executives actually do have full work days to deal with, despite the appearance that many of them do put out there. Some of those weeks were easily 70 to 80 hour weeks, both day shift and night shift.

SPEAKER_03 21:20

I did all that throughout the years that I was an executive. Sometimes months at a time, not just like one off here or there.

SPEAKER_02 21:34

I worked in a system that had no problem putting people with ethics and morals in positions where they either lose those and let staff work unsafely or dangerously, or they do the work themselves. Instead of the cost of fixing staffing and improving retention, regardless of what the research shows, in terms of the upfront cost of that versus the long term ramification. Of what fixing staffing and retention actually provides the bottom lines of these healthcare systems. So I've been that nurse because there was no way that I was going to do that to my team, all the while fighting for more resources and being told no by a system, like I said, again, that valued the bottom line over the positions that they put people in. This again kind of segues, especially when it comes to leadership, into another aspect that really sits

Bullying, Retaliation, And Quiet Absorption

SPEAKER_02 22:40

right flush with everything that we've been talking about, but it really deserves its own moment. Primarily because this aspect in nursing culture is one of my only two zero to 60 hot buttons. And this one's bullying. The nurse who works around the bully because their leadership won't handle the problem, is the thing I want to focus on. Because right now, this is everywhere. It has been for decades. I'm not going to get into what the research says about why this is a phenomenon in nursing culture. That is its own episode. But we all know exactly what I'm referring to. There's somebody on your floor, or in leadership, or in a provider role, or a teacher, who makes the environment unsafe. Maybe it's through intimidation, maybe through chronic undermining, maybe through behavior that everybody sees and no one formally addresses. Because those with the ability and responsibility to fix it don't. Nurses quietly learn to route around that person. We adjust our workflows, we warn the new nurses, we cover for each other on the shifts when that person is on, we absorb the fallout. We tell ourselves it's fine because the patients are still being cared for. The unit's still running. Here's the problem: like I really don't need to spell this out, but working around the harm instead of demanding that it stop, we're doing two things simultaneously. One, we're absorbing all the nonsense that is not ours to absorb. And it costs us physically, emotionally, and mentally. The second thing is that we're making it possible for leadership to continue to pretend the problem doesn't exist. Because if the unit is still running, if no one's filing formal complaints because they're afraid of retaliation, if patients are still safe because nurses are quietly compensating for everything, then it can be misrepresented as a non-impact, as a non-problem.

SPEAKER_03 24:38

When it wasn't, you managed it. Your body, your expense, that's not protection. That's absorption.

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And there's a very real difference between these things. And I want to be careful here because I understand that calling something out, filing a report, demanding that leadership act, those things all have real consequences in real environments where retaliation is possible, in toxic cultures where retaliation is actually a thing. So I'm not dismissing that. That's not a small thing. I'm not gonna, I'm not pretending that it is. What I am saying is this the answer is not to become better at absorbing the harm. The answer is protection, real structural, organizational protection, environments where speaking up doesn't cost you your job, where psychological safety isn't a poster on the wall, but an actual cultural standard. Like it doesn't have to be spoken about because it's a cultural standard. That kind of environment doesn't build itself. It builds when nurses stop quietly covering up for systems that are failing them, when we leave toxic environments where leadership refuses to handle the problem. One conversation at a time, one documented report at a time, one refusal to normalize what is not normal at the time. And if needs be, one resignation at a time. This is what protection looks like when it's being built at a system level, when the culture is being built and crafted with protection as an actual value, as an actual standard in how we operate within that culture. Big topics, I know, are the first section of this entire podcast. And you know, right now it's

Dance Break And Nervous System Reset

SPEAKER_02 26:46

totally the dance break. We gotta shake it out, we gotta deep breathe, come down a little bit, unwind. So I want you to stand up if you can. I want you to roll your shoulders back, shake out your hands, let your body just kind of exist for 30 seconds. If you've been listening while charting, truly the multitasking is impressive. Zero judgment. If you're driving, please keep your eyes on the road. We are not adding to anybody's oh shit list today. Take a breath, a real one, like a deep one. In fact, yawn or sigh if you need to. I bet you've been holding your breath for some of this. I know at times when I'm recording the episode, I actually wasn't breathing and I had to pause a few times to yawn because I wasn't, I was holding my breath while trying to discuss the information. So it's the dance break. The second half of this conversation is where we're gonna bring everything together, bring it home, as it were, no pun intended, because I mean it literally, because what we've been talking about at work doesn't just stay at work. All right, I'm back in a moment. All right, loves, welcome back. Here's something I want you to know about human beings and chronic stress. We are extraordinarily adaptable.

When Chronic Stress Becomes Normal

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When something painful happens repeatedly, the nervous system learns to prepare for it in advance. It adjusts, it finds a new baseline, it decides that this is just how things are. Which means that when protection is consistently absent for long enough, we stop expecting it. And this is the part of the conversation that concerns me the most. Once you stop expecting protection, something very specific happens. You stop experiencing the absence of it as a problem. Being dismissed starts to feel normal, being overloaded starts to feel normal, being told to do more with less starts to feel normal, having your concerns minimized starts to feel normal. Feeling unsafe in a place you go to every single day starts to feel normal. And it doesn't feel like giving up. It feels like toughness, it feels like high tolerance, it feels like being someone who can handle things. What research actually tells us about chronic exposure to environments that lack psychological safety and physical safety is this. It doesn't build resilience over time. It doesn't, it erodes it. Over time, it affects how you perceive your own worth. It affects how you communicate what you need. It affects your ability to trust that something good, when it does come along, is real and not a setup. I think it also matters to say something here that I don't think gets enough airtime in the burnout conversation. It's discussed in research all the time, but media plays this down, I think, so that people don't get the wild idea that nurses are emotionally impacted by our profession. I think that scares people. And it's called moral injury. Moral injury is not burnout. Burnout is exhaustion from doing too much. Moral injury is what happens when you are forced to act against your own values,

Burnout Versus Moral Injury

SPEAKER_02 30:31

when you know what the right thing to do is and the system won't let you do it. When you watch something happen that you cannot stop, and then you show up the next day and it repeats over and over. A lot of nurses are walking around with moral injury and burnout at the same time. Many nurses don't think they're burned out because physically their moral injury and trauma exposure haven't started to manifest yet. They haven't started to physically affect them yet. These all require different things to heal. Burnout responds to rest and workload reduction. Moral injury responds to realignment, to accurate witnessing, to having your experience named correctly and validating the mismatch between what was present and the conflict with your values, which is part of what we're doing in this series, because I really want you to understand that this is what is actually happening.

SPEAKER_03 31:25

It has a name, it's real, and you are not the problem. Let's talk about this last piece because it's really a sleeper issue.

SPEAKER_02 31:37

This stuff does not stay at work. The patterns around protection that are missing at work or present at work, if you're in a place that's actually doing it right, tend to follow nurses directly

How Work Protection Follows You Home

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into their personal lives, like so much of our profession. Because nursing doesn't just change what you do, it changes how your nervous system is calibrated. There's no way that we can do what we do for 12, 14, 16, however many hours a day your shift ends up being. The hypervigilance, the constant critical thinking and assessment, that we can do that for so much of our lives at such a high threshold and then take it off and step into an entirely different lived experience.

SPEAKER_03 32:28

Not a thing.

SPEAKER_02 32:30

Nursing changes how our nervous system is calibrated. We don't stop tracking everything when we walk out the door, we don't stop anticipating needs, we don't turn off hypervigilance, we bring all of it home. In fact, some of us are nurses because we were already hyper-vigilant. Hello, eldest daughters and eldest granddaughters. I am indeed talking to us, pointing the finger at all of us. This means the nurse who absorbs everyone else's chaos on shift is very often the same person absorbing everyone else's chaos at home. You're the one who makes sure everyone's cared for, you're the one keeping track of everything that needs to happen, you're the one running the whole system. And when you're at your limit, you don't ask for help, you just get quieter. You just lock in. And the people in your life may not notice because you're very good at not showing how bad things actually are.

SPEAKER_03 33:27

So let's say something specific here.

SPEAKER_02 33:31

Just as an example. Nurses need their sleep treated like it's sacred. Not because they're precious or different, but because it's

Sleep, No, And Emotional Labor

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physiologically necessary and clinically meaningful. Shift workers and nurses specifically live with disrupted circadian rhythms. The cognitive and emotional impairment from chronic sleep disruption is real, cumulative, significant, and can be deadly. This is not a preference issue. This is not an opinion. This is medical reality. And yet, how many nurses come home after a night shift and are immediately called, texted, asked questions, expect to make decisions, expected to parent, expected to perform life before they've been able to meaningfully meaningfully sleep. Not the, you know, I get home, have a cup of coffee, and have to take care of a whole bunch of things, and finally get to sleep at 10 a.m. to get up at two because I've got another night shift, but I have stuff I have to cover in the afternoon that apparently nobody else can cover or take care of or put off until my three shifts that week are done. Protection at home looks like your sleep is not negotiable. Not try to get some rest. Your sleep is protected by the people around you, and you are allowed to ask for that. It also looks like this: your no is accepted without interrogation. You don't have to explain why you can't go somewhere. You don't have to justify needing it to be quiet. You don't have to earn your right to recover. And this one is big. You are not the default emotional regulation system for everyone in your life. Nurses are extraordinarily empathetic people, many times. Everyone in your orbit can feel that. It's kind of a joke with nurses that even like we must have like invisible name tags or something because people will confide in us and emotionally, almost kind of like trauma dumping, just really being vulnerable with us in that space. And you know, everybody in our orbit, like I said, can can feel that about us. So what happens sometimes is that you become the person everyone brings their hard feelings to, which is a beautiful thing about us, until it's harmful, until you are consistently holding space for everyone around you and no one is holding space for you, until you are being asked to regulate other people's nervous systems while yours is completely overwhelmed. That's not a loving environment or protective or preservative. That's labor without reciprocity. And you're allowed to name it. You're allowed to say, I cannot be the place where every hard thing lands right now. I need space to be a person, not just a container. That's not selfish. That is self-preservation. That is protection. And here's something about self-protection that we don't say out loud, or maybe we feel guilty saying out loud. But you protecting yourself is not taking something away from the people who love you. It is modeling something for them. It is showing them what it looks like to have a nervous system and honor it, to have needs and name them, to be in a relationship where care flows in both directions. The people who genuinely love you will want to know how to protect you. First, you have to believe that you deserve it and you have to communicate it. Okay, so what do we do with all this? Since recognizing a pattern and changing a pattern are two different skills, and right now we're working on both. So what do we do? So we start small. Here's three things I want you to sit with this week. It's going to be part of your self-care ritual this week, in journaling form, in meditation, in whatever way you work through your ideas and learning. Action step

Three Small Protection Practices

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number one. I want you to name one place in your life at work or at home where you have been unprotected in the ways that we've been discussing. We're not talking about fixing it this week. Just see it clearly. Say it even quietly to yourself. This XYZ is what's happening. I have been treating this like normal and it isn't. Action step number two. Find one moment this week where you let the system show its hand instead of covering for it. Let it be small. Maybe you don't volunteer to come in on your day off. Maybe you don't smooth over the friction that leadership should be addressing. Maybe you let the problem be visible. Just one moment and see what happens. Action step number three. Tell one person in your personal life what protection looks like for you. You don't need a full conversation. You can be direct and simple. Maybe sounds like after a night shift, I need a minimum of four hours of uninterrupted sleep before I can talk to anybody.

SPEAKER_03 38:26

Specific, clear, true, and delivered without apology. Four hours, six hours, eight, whatever it is that you need.

SPEAKER_02 38:37

These are small steps. Okay, so we're not no big overhauls, no big steps just yet. I want you to notice, validate, express. Three small actions this week. Reflect on them in your daily self-ritual practice, how you feel, what your body is doing, what changes around you or doesn't. Those are the things I want you to focus on. Notice, validate, and express. Speaking of ritual moments, it's now time for our favorite segment: coffee, crystals, and divination. I want to breathe together for a second. I know I need

Coffee, Crystals, And Tarot Pulls

SPEAKER_02 39:11

to stretch. Take a sip of whatever you're drinking. I hope it's something delicious, revitalizing, or both. Something that requires no justification, something you made or chose just for you. So I'm going to tell you what I've got, and then we're going to drop into crystals and divination. And it's actually an energy drink without sugar, but it's an energy drink. It's mid-afternoon for me here, and around that time, my ADHD-wired brain sometimes struggles with sustained focus. I say sometimes, haha, laughing. The small amount of caffeine sans any sugar helps me really stay grounded and focused. I don't do it every day. Hello, BP, but I do use it when I want to really utilize a block of time to the best of my ability in the afternoon. Being aware of my body and how my brain functions and honoring that are ways that I work with myself to be successful, regardless of how neuronormative people move through their week. I know what works for me and I honor it. All right, let's settle down. Let's get cozy or relax. We're going to calm down a notch. None of this has a chokehold on us, okay? It's just information there for us to be curious about and work through. So I want you to relax right now. Get excited with me about what our crystals and divination are going to be. And as always, take what works and leave what doesn't. You are always the authority on your own experience with this. So let us look at what our crystal divination is gonna be for this week.

SPEAKER_03 40:41

Or for the next two weeks, actually.

SPEAKER_02 40:45

And we've been focusing on protection. Those of you guys that are new to the podcast, the weird sounds that are not being edited out right now that sound like background noise or whatever. I'm actually live shuffling and I live draw and live pull every single episode. Nothing is scripted. It's okay.

SPEAKER_03 41:09

That's a lot of crystals. We need to come on now. What's actually important out of here?

SPEAKER_02 41:18

As I was saying, I live draw and nothing is scripted. Whatever shows up in the cards is whatever shows up in the cards for both crystal prescription and divination.

SPEAKER_03 41:33

We're gonna go with one, two, three, three. Normally I do two. A bunch of them jumped out, so we're actually gonna look at three of them. And oh, maybe I should reshuffle because these guys last week weren't in there. It's okay. I think I think we're solid. So the first one that we have is oh okay.

SPEAKER_02 42:10

Well your girlfriend here needs to get her books in order, and uh I put the tarot in the crystal oracle and put the crystal oracle in the tarot. If you guys have ever seen on my socials, I've I've done a number of times where I've done pictures of these decks. They look incredibly similar, and it makes me laugh. So maybe that's why we had kind of a vomit of cards there. Okay, let's try this again. Too funny. They look incredibly similar in coloring. I absolutely love these decks. They are by Moonstruck Crystals. I have the Crystal Portal Oracle, and I there's one, and I have the Crystal Struck Tarot. I have the full size cards, which are huge cards for my hands. I I mean I have pretty big hands, but these are pretty big cards. So we have our first stone that showed up. Let's see if we have another read for this week, or if we just have the one.

SPEAKER_03 43:16

Oh, nope, we have another one. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 43:20

Ha ha. Wow. Alrighty. So the first one is alignment and that's Morganite. The second one is release and that's obsidian. So let's get into it and let's see what we have here.

SPEAKER_03 43:33

Morganite.

SPEAKER_02 43:37

And for those that are new, I do always read what the author has to say about it because when they created the intentions that they created the deck and the artwork with, I think are very important. And I always include that in what we're discussing, whether it's the crystal prescription or whether it's the tarot. But Morganite is alignment, signifies emotional balance. Harmony and compassion. Embark on a cosmic journey of alignment with Morganite, where finding harmony means syncing up with the planetary rhythms of the universe. Just as this crystal radiates love and compassion, you too can attune your spirit to the harmonious alignment of the planets. Surrender to the universal flow and allow its gentle guidance to lead you to an emotional balance and your true alignment. And then the next one is obsidian, which is release. And this is cleansing, transformation, and protection. Ha ha ha. Okay. I'm going to read it and then we'll discuss. Break free from that cage of negativity and let your inner butterfly soar with the help of obsidian. Just as this powerful crystal cuts through all of the negative bullshit, it's time, and it actually says that. It's time for you to escape from self-imposed limitations and transform into the vibrant, liberated being you are meant to be. Release what no longer serves you and soar towards your highest potential. So I think it's really clear when it comes to alignment and release, especially because it obsidian is protection, that it does take a lot of introspection to kind of align with the truths with this love language. And protection is really empowering in the greatest of ways when it comes to implementing and upholding that standard and that boundary. So Morganite and Obsidian are going to be your crystals for the week. And now I'm going to reshuffle since I have the decks actually on top of the right boxes. And uh let's see what our cards have to say for us now that I'm actually holding and looking at the right vehicle.

SPEAKER_03 45:52

That's so funny. And I think I might have some cards mixed in here. I have to go through my deck. Indeed, I have to go through my deck.

SPEAKER_02 46:09

Because I draw them both at the same time, and then a lot of times I take pictures of them and post them on socials, they get kind of shuffled around a bit, and I didn't realize that I had put them in the wrong box.

SPEAKER_03 46:20

Oh, the wrong boxes until I pulled them out, shuffled, and picked what I thought were the there's one. Okay. Oh my. And there's two. And three. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 46:52

So the very first one that I pulled is Obsidian, and it is the tarot card representing death. And before you freak out, death doesn't always mean negative things or bad things or scary things.

SPEAKER_03 47:05

This is a beautiful card. It does make me laugh that it is also obsidian. That's totally unrelated. I kid, I kid. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 47:18

So death signifies endings, change, and release. And obsidian is grounding, protection, and transformation. Out with the old and in with the new. Don't freak out, but the death card is actually the end of a phase or cycle that is no longer serving you. You're going to release past attachments so that you can focus on what's ahead of you. Literally, couldn't be more apropos to our entire podcast at the moment. It's an absolutely phenomenal pull. All right, so now we are looking at cups.

SPEAKER_03 47:54

And we have the two of cups, which is also emerald, which I really like.

SPEAKER_02 48:02

So the two of cups is partnership, unified love, and connection. The emerald is harmony in relationships, compassion and hope. This card can symbolize any type of positive relationship between two people that is being built on a powerful and balanced connection. You may be entering a new partnership of any kind where you are on the same wavelength and one that is beneficial to both of you. I literally repeated myself a number of times talking about reciprocity and balance and self-preservation in partnership and what that has to do with the love language of protection.

SPEAKER_03 48:45

Again, they must have quite the sense of humor today. And then the last one that we have is judgment and it's karawhite.

SPEAKER_02 48:57

Which I absolutely could be pronouncing wrong. So if I am pronouncing it wrong, one of you guys let me know in the comments or on socials. B if you're listening and I your head's not in a book, let me know if I'm pronouncing it right. So judgment is reflection, decisiveness, and awakening. And Karawite, again, pronunciation, is spiritual insight, transformation, and clarity. The judgment card reminds you that there are some decisions that need to be made, but you're finally about to realize what the right decision is. Self-reflect and trust your judgment. Know that you are on the right path to your destiny. So I think these cards together are the perfect summary for this podcast episode and phenomenal prompts for your self-care ritual space, for your journaling, however it is that you want to take them. Tarot is not for you, then that's not what these need to represent. They can represent manifestation prompts, journaling prompts, anything, conversation starters. So for your crystal prescription, you have again Morganite, which is alignment, and obsidian, which is release and protection. And then for our divination, we have death, which is change and protection. Obsidian is the stone. You have the Two of Cups, Emerald, which is a balanced partnership and relationship, and then judgment, the Karawite, which is telling you that we know that decisions have to be made. And with that self-introspection, it literally exactly the homework that I gave you to do, you'll know exactly which judgments need to be made, and you can make them with confidence. Absolutely love this deck. Love both decks, actually. So, all right, my loves, this is the end of this episode. And really, kind of where we're at is that protection is not something you earn by suffering enough. It is not a

Final Takeaways And Voicemail Prompt

SPEAKER_02 51:08

reward for perfect performance. It's not a privilege reserved for nurses who've been in long enough to deserve it. Protection, self-preservation, those are biologically necessary for best functionality mentally, physically, emotionally. And here's what I want you to take with you today. The goal is not to become someone who never needs protecting. The goal is to become someone who believes they deserve it and stands up for it. Those are very different people. One of them just keeps adapting, and the other one starts intentionally moving in ways that create protection, require protection, and sustain those boundaries. And you're allowed to be the second one. Period. I do want to hear from you. There's a voicemail link right in the show notes. You can also text me. It's all over the website, it's in the show notes. Tell me about a time when someone actually protected you at work, at home, a moment when somebody had your back in a way that you tangibly could feel. Or tell me about a time when you recognized what was up and you decided to stop accepting it. You can be anonymous, you can be brief, you can get all the way into it. I want your voice in this conversation. Because the more we tell the truth about what we actually need, the harder it becomes for anyone to hand us nonsense instead. And your reflection questions for the week could sound a lot like where in your life are you choosing adaptation instead of asking for protection? Maybe what would actually change if you stopped doing that. So I want you to take a breath. I want you to stay hydrated, drink some water, take your meds. Make sure you carve out the time for a ritual space the next few weeks because protecting that is protecting self preservation. And until our next episode, I love your faces.