Becoming Someone I Can Trust: ADHD, Depression, and One Year of Nervous System Healing

What does it mean to become someone you can trust — especially when living with ADHD and depression?

In this one-year anniversary episode, I reflect on how understanding my nervous system changed my relationship with effort, consistency, and self-belief.

For much of my life, I didn’t trust myself — my energy, my follow-through, or my ability to show up consistently. Living with depression and undiagnosed ADHD, difficulty with motivation and focus was often interpreted as personal failure.

In this episode, I slow things down and reflect on what has shifted over the past year, shaped in large part by creating this podcast and showing up for weekly episodes 

I share how learning to befriend my nervous system — rather than trying to override it — became a turning point. Through a polyvagal and neurodivergence-informed lens, I explore how patterns of avoidance, shutdown, and inconsistency were not signs that I was broken, but signals that my system was in protection mode.

This episode is about repair — not only in relationship with others, but in relationship with Self. About what it has meant to build trust slowly, through repeated acts of showing up with compassion rather than force.

In this one-year reflection, I share what has supported my growth, including:

• Befriending my nervous system instead of fighting it
• Learning to rest without earning it
• Taking anchored, sustainable action rather than pushing through
• Acknowledging grief for what was lost and misunderstood
• Making room for celebration — even when growth has been uneven

In this episode, we explore:

• What “becoming someone I can trust” looks like in everyday life
• How ADHD and depression shape our relationship with effort and consistency
• Why willpower is often not the problem
• How honoring true capacity can yield more progress than trying to push through to do what you think you "should" be doing
• How self-attunement and pacing support sustainable change
• What one year of showing up — imperfectly — has taught me about healing

Gentle note for listeners:
This episode includes discussion of depression, ADHD, and nervous system states related to shutdown and overwhelm. Please listen with care and take breaks as needed.

If you and your partner are ready to co-create the roadmap to the relationship of your dreams, join us for the next in-person "Getting the Love You Want" Weekend Couples Retreat! 

For support in how to have deeper connections and better communication in the relationships that matter most in your life, follow the host, Trish Sanders on Instagram , Bluesky or LinkedIn.

Transcript

Podiversary And Purpose

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, and welcome to When Depression is in Your Bed podcast. Today's episode is a special one as it marks one full year of making this podcast. Over the past year, this podcast has become so much more to me than just a weekly release schedule. It's been part of how I have come to redefine myself, especially as someone living with ADHD and depression. In this episode, I'm sharing how showing up consistently, even if not perfectly, has helped me reshape how I see myself, what nervous system healing looks like in real life, and why progress does not have to be linear to be meaningful. I'm your host, Trish Sanders, and I am delighted that you are here. Let's get started. Today is such a special episode for me, not only because it's my one-year podiversary, and I have officially been able to release one episode every single week for the last 52 weeks, which is a pretty amazing accomplishment, in my opinion, for me specifically, but also because the topic that I sort of just naturally came to today. As I've mentioned before, my podcast is just an ongoing conversation for me. I don't plan out in advance. I sort of just plan the next one out as it makes sense coming off of the last one that I recorded. So this natural flow of episodes led to the topic today, which happens to be directly connected to why this podcast even exists and also what it has done for me and how it has helped me in my own healing process. And so it feels very aligned and very near and dear to my heart because doing this podcast hasn't just changed what I've done professionally. It really has deeply been a part of how I have been changing who I am personally and not really changing who I am, but changing who I used to be to become more of who I really am. And that's really exciting. And I'm really excited to share this episode today with you. I've talked so much on previous episodes about how I have defined myself and the beliefs that I've held about myself for really as long as I can remember, up until only just the last few years. And I'm a mess was definitely a huge narrative in my head. Certainly being inconsistent, having potential, but not having follow through in a lot of ways, and really seeing myself as fundamentally inherently defective in some way, and really feeling like inevitably I was going to fail, that I could make some progress, but I'd always fall back to the old pattern, which is a very typically depressed experience, feeling like it's inevitable that you're going to go back to feeling miserable. I think that that's pretty typical. And it certainly was my experience. And I don't want to speak for my husband's, but I I'm pretty sure that he would identify with that as well. And over the years, I didn't just think this, I really pretty actively gathered evidence of my case, how I was not capable and how I was not really going to ever be able to fulfill the big dreams that I did, in fact, have. And as I look, there really was evidence in lots of places because there certainly were plenty of unmet goals, big ideas that I had that never came to fruition, books that I wanted to write that maybe got listed as a title or a thought in a Google Doc somewhere, but never got followed up on the group therapy practice that I have been quote unquote planning to start for over a decade, and even habits that I couldn't maintain or at least not maintain consistently from flossing my teeth to daily meditation. And every time I looked at my life and I was able to collect these failures, so to speak, I just had more and more evidence of this belief that I was not good enough, that I wasn't going to be successful in the way I had envisioned when I was a teenager. As a matter of fact, as I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about in today's episode, that song Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind came to mind if you recall it. And it was very, very popular in the 90s when I was growing up. And back then it really felt like a personal anthem for me. And not because of the addiction that it speaks to, but because of the cycle that it speaks to. There's such a hope, joy, lightness followed by crash, and then like the repeat of that cycle that you can't maintain the high, so to speak, in the song is what they're talking about. But whether it's my depression that I couldn't maintain my happiness or with my ADHD, which I didn't recognize as ADHD then, but the cycle of having energy or quote unquote motivation to do things and then crashing and not being able to focus and feeling scattered and overwhelmed and avoidant and shut down. And I really identify with that idea of having this semi-charm life that I had definite skills. I see myself as having certain strengths. I think I'm an intelligent person. I think I'm a helpful person. I think I'm a caring person. I truly care about other people. I really want the world to be a better place. I want all people to be heard and seen and valued. I want peace. And I think that those were strengths. I saw those as strengths, but there was this big thing in the way. Like, okay, you want all these great things, you have some things that you could bring to the table, but you're not really gonna make it as far as you think. Because I had some capabilities, but I was inconsistent. And so I couldn't make the progress that I wanted to make. And I was always falling short of who I wanted to be. And I am a planner and I think I'm a dreamer too, and I had big, lofty goals. I've been calling myself a world changer since I was a teenager because I really believed that I wanted to change the world because I had a vision that included wellness for everyone on this planet. And I wanted to take the actions that I could take to create that vision, to do my part in creating that vision. And I knew I couldn't do it alone. It wasn't like I thought that I was here to save everyone, but that I had something to do. I had a purpose in being here. And I really did believe that. I was excited about it and passionate about it and dedicated to it. And as the years went by, and I did some nice things, I did good work in not-for-profit agencies for many years. I started a private practice. I think I did good enough therapy with many clients who I legitimately cared for and wanted to help, and I think did help many in some way or support them and helping themselves. But the big impact that I wanted to have was definitely not happening. And there was a very long period of time where the narrative that I had was like, well, this is just growing up. Those were naive thoughts or dreams that I had back then. And I'm really not going to be able to have the impact that I thought I was going to have. But I have a good enough life. Certainly, my relationship was really challenging, but I could say, all right, well, not all relationships are great, but I have a relationship and we are trying to work on things, even though it's tough a lot of the time and we're both struggling a lot. And I have these amazing kids. Those were always certainly bright lights for me, my children. I do have a private practice. We have a life, we have a house, we have some nice things, and it's good enough. This is the good enough life that I'm going to to lead. And in many ways, it was a lovely life and good enough. And if I can articulate this, it wasn't that I didn't feel like my life was fulfilling. It's just that I had these dreams of doing things, of creating things, of putting things into the world, of helping people in a way that I just wasn't doing. And so it felt like I was falling short. And I really focused on that for a long time. And as I talked about in my last episode when I was 17 and I had an experience involving a mental health hospitalization, essentially because I couldn't read this book that I was supposed to read for this thesis paper, and I ended up sliding down this very dark, slippery slope into a really deep depressive episode that I now recognize having much more to do with ADHD than depression. But I had mentioned in the last episode that when I came back from that whole experience to school, they didn't make me do the thesis. They took that assignment away. They took it off my plate, which at the time I was like, oh great, I don't have to do it. It felt like a relief. But what I have since come to realize is that that was such an identity-shaping experience for me because I came to think of myself as somebody who couldn't quite do it. And a huge part of my narrative was the things that come easily to me, I can do. But if there's a challenge, then I probably can't do it. I don't have the grit, I don't have the drive, I don't have the consistency to make those things happen. And people even understand I was fragile, I was delicate, I was incapable. The teachers didn't make me do it. And so that just carried along with me into my life. And of course, I think, um, well, I say of course, but this is an assumption, but I think that this is very related to my neurodivergence. And I imagine that other people can identify with this experience, especially if they don't know that it's because of ADHD, which again at the time I did not know. And so from there, I just developed this protective habit of not trying so hard, not putting in effort to the things that were hard. I did the things that came easily enough to me, and I functioned largely at the bare minimum of life in a lot of ways, which may land in a particular way for people. Therapists even said to me, and other people in my life said to me, but you have a relationship and you have a family and you have a business and you have a home. And I don't want to sound ungrateful for all of those things. They were amazing, and I'm grateful for those things every day. And I understand that other people may have much less, and I have a ton of privilege as well. So I completely understand that this isn't like a woe is me story. This is just my reality that I had dreams for myself that I wasn't able to pursue. And I realize now how small I was playing it for so much of my life that it was safer for me to not try to be in shutdown, to avoid than to take these chances, which felt like I was going to fail. And I just couldn't tolerate the idea of more failure. It was too painful for me. So fast forward from 17 to 40, and right around my 40th birthday, I really got to a place where I was absolutely sick of being stuck. I was sick of being miserable and the old narratives, and I was sick of feeling miserable and not good enough, and in so many ways, not being able to appreciate the wonderful things that I did know I had in my life. And I made a commitment to figure out how to do it differently. Even though I have, in fact, been in therapy, and I would say on a complete lifelong wellness journey, I really got to this tipping point, this place where I was like, no, I'm doing it differently. I refuse for this to be the rest of my life. And again, there were plenty of things that were good enough, but there were so many things that were painful that I was carrying with me. And I was ready to let it all go. And I made the commitment to myself to start figuring out a new way, something that I hadn't found before, something that I didn't know. And my personal motto became struggle as so last year, which eventually became the title of my first podcast episode. And from that place, things began to shift in a profound way. And what I did and what I learned, I'm going to briefly share with you now. And I just want to be very clear that my progress was not linear. It was not just a complete straight upward line on the graph. There were plenty of tough moments. I've talked about many of them on the podcast. Even as recent as the holiday season, I had a dip that I was not expecting as far as feeling pretty down and feeling that pull into that kind of depressed space, which I handled very differently than in the past. But just to say it's not like things have been perfect and amazing since I turned 40 when I made this decision. It's been a journey, but it has overall been one of incredible progress, incredible healing, and incredible growth. And I share it because I think that what I did, even though the specifics in many ways are unique to me, a lot of the larger things that I did or the framework is pretty generalizable to a lot of other people. And if it can help one person, if it can help you, then I certainly want to share it in hopes that that's the case. I hinted at this in the last episode, and it's a topic of many of my podcasts. So it probably comes as no surprise. But a huge amount of what I did over the last several years has been related to nervous system work and in Deb Dana's words, befriending my nervous system. And for me, what that means has been understanding the importance of nervous system work and how our nervous system is actually, even in some ways, I would say more important than our brain. A lot of the time we talk about our brain and how our brain functions, and our brains are certainly important, but when it comes to our lived experience, our nervous system is really our first point of contact in creating our whole lived experience because it is constantly interpreting the experience we're having in the world, our internal experience, how we feel about the things in the world, from you know the room we're sitting in to our town, to our country, to the entire world, to the experience we have between us and other nervous systems or in relationship. And understanding that was so powerful because the nervous system gets these cues, this information, and that gets sent up to the brain. And then the brain starts making stories about it. I've talked about that lots, and I'll talk about that more as well in future episodes. But our nervous system is the beginning. It really is. And so when I started to understand my nervous system, I could start to see these patterns that were in my life and how I was so often living in a state of self-protection. And my nervous system was so rarely in that safe enough grounded space, which is called ventral in your nervous system. Your ventral state is when you're in that safe, grounded, connected space. And once I started realizing that, and I started realizing I could do things about that, I learned what deep self-care was to be able to befriend my nervous system and care for my nervous system in such a way that I was able to begin to move out of near constant self-protection. And as that began to happen, I started to literally see the world differently and see myself differently because when you're in ventral, things like hope can be present and you can have self-compassion as well as compassion for others. And I've talked about this in previous episodes, but the way that you see the world and yourself and others is completely related to the state that your nervous system is in. So when you're in this dorsal state, which is the shutdown avoidance state, the depression state, if you're stuck there, then you have on depression goggles. And if you're in the sympathetic state, that's fight or flight, then you have on sympathetic goggles. And when you're in ventral, I would say you don't have on any goggles at all. You actually just see yourself through an authentic lens, who you really are. And I only got to see that way with such clarity, see my true self a small amount of the time over my whole life. And over the last few years, I've been able to increase the amount of time that I really feel like I'm in alignment with who I truly am. And when I had those moments where I could feel myself going into dorsal shutdown, which I mentioned earlier that over the holidays I had that experience, I was able to recognize those in a new way and therefore respond to them in a new way that actually helped me so that I could move through my experience by meeting that need, whatever that was. I recognized the overwhelm or the need for rest. And I would respond to it differently so that I could move through that experience and my nervous system could get back to ventral as soon as possible. Maybe not instantly. Maybe it would take a few days. The holidays was hard for, I'm not sure, maybe a week or two, but not hard in the depths of depression, hard. Just me noticing that my system was calling for some slowness. And I was able to respond and give it that slowness. And then I felt much better and I came out of it feeling restored and renewed and actually excited. And it ended up just kind of falling very much in line with the new year, being really ready for the new year. And this is really why I started the podcast because as I started to see the power of nervous system work, I started to understand that I needed to share this work, which I will also say briefly here that when I found a relationship therapy a decade ago, I felt exactly the same way. At the time, I was a kid therapist, only working with children and teens, and I had no desire to work with adults. But when my husband and I got separated and we found a MAGO therapy and we started using it and it transformed my relationship and my clinical practice actually, I then felt the exact same way and I had to give it back to the world. And I started seeing couples, and I have absolutely loved seeing couples for the last decade. And that's why a lot of the work that I focus on right now is couples work. And now I'm bringing in this nervous system piece as well. So stay tuned if you're interested in hearing more about that, because I am going to be releasing my coaching work, and of course, I'm available for therapy if you're in New York and New Jersey, if you want couples therapy as well, but more on me being able to support people in a more direct, personalized, active way soon. So that's coming if that's something that you're interested in. But this nervous system work, I had the exact same experience. I found something that helped me so deeply, like a Mago had 10 years ago and has continued to help me. And now I found nervous system work and I wanted to be able to give it back. And perhaps one day I'll talk about how my path led to me starting the podcast. Maybe I talked about it a bit on my earlier episodes. I don't specifically recall, but I had not always dreamed of having a podcast. Rather, through the work I was doing in myself, it became obvious that sharing my journey through a podcast would be a way that many people could hear about it for free because I wanted to help whoever I could help, whoever found their way to me, whoever I found my way to. If the content I was sharing resonated, I wanted to be able to reach them. And I thought that a podcast was a really good vehicle to do it. Doing this nervous system work has really allowed me to reconnect with being able to rest. And I've talked about this again also in other episodes, that dorsal shutdown depression is not really a restful restorative place at all. It's a draining place. And being able to bring in that ventral energy that I mentioned into dorsal, it's a blended nervous system state, allows us to have restoration and renewal. And I've been able to reconnect with that nervous system state. And I have, in many ways, I'm still a work in progress, but in so many ways, I've been able to stop pushing and striving. And I've been able to let my system, my brain, my body relax in ways that I certainly was not able to do many years ago. And it has absolutely been transformative. And if you're interested in hearing more about rest, I have many episodes on rest in my podcast. And it's certainly something that I will continue to talk about in the future. But that rest was absolutely necessary for healing to take place because pushing and striving didn't allow me to come out of survival mode. It actually kept me stuck in that survival mode and in that pace of like go, go, go, crash, go, go, go, crash. And being able to slow down helped me to do things in a completely different way, which then led to what I think of as anchored action, which is being able to act in ways that don't have that push and strive, which is really a very sympathetic. That's like a fight energy, actually. It's like I have to do something about the danger. If I don't do something or take action, then bad things will happen or whatever it is. I'll fail, I'll be a failure. Nobody else will do it. There's a lot that could be in there. And I started being able to, again, also another blended state, being able to take that ventral energy and pair it with that sympathetic energy to what I call flow. And I started being able to listen to that ventral voice that started emerging, either when I was in that really aligned state and thinking, well, what do I really need right now? What do I really want? And being able to respond to that. And then also I've called it the ventral narrator in states when I was dysregulated, when I was in more survival mode. And even if I had really intense feelings of wanting to shut down or really strong fight feelings or whatever was happening, I also noticed that I started having this ventral narrator of, like, oh, you're really in survival mode right now. And like, oh gosh, you're you really need to take it slow right now. Your body is really calling for you to take it easy. Or my goodness, you feel so upset right now. You're really feeling strongly that you need to be heard. How are you gonna go about doing that? And I started being able to respond to myself in such a new way that really was quite extraordinary by my own experience anyway. It certainly felt new and transformed how I was experiencing myself and how I was able to show up and move in the world. The way I look at it is that I was able to work on being being in that slow state first with all the rest I had, so that then I could move into a safe doing experience. And I was able to access steps that I hadn't been able to access before. As a matter of fact, I found doors or options or choices that had been previously invisible to me that had probably always been there, but I literally couldn't see them. But the more aligned I became, the more. Opportunity presented itself to me, and I could tell you story after story about it. I'm sure I will in the future. If you want to hear more, let me know, and I'll be happy to make an episode sooner rather than later about that. And I began to see the next step and take one often small step, but also a focused step. I tell my daughter a lot of the time, don't go fast, go focused. And every time I tell her, I think to myself, I know I'm really telling myself that because that's the story of my life that often I go so fast, but unfocused, that I feel really busy and overwhelmed, but I'm not really making progress on the things that are important to me. And I've really been able to start to rewrite this narrative, actually connect it to new action so that I can meet myself where I really am today and take a step from here, as opposed to that I should be further along than where I am now, anyhow. And then I would feel so defeated. I thought that I was behind or failing, that would really become very unmotivating and I wouldn't take a step towards where I really wanted to go. And I was also able to make a step towards what was accessible to me. So instead of thinking like, well, this is where I am today, but really I want to already have a fully running, successful private practice. So since I can't go from where I am today to there, again, feeling defeated, and I'm not going to take any steps towards anywhere and I'm going to keep myself stuck, which was a terrible way to live for a very long time. It was very unpleasant, I have to tell you. But I didn't see another way. I didn't understand until I started to take care of my nervous system. And then, like I said, these possibilities started to emerge. And I will also add here, because it feels to me very much in alignment with anchored action, that the more eventually anchored I became, the more I was able to help my nervous system go back into that safe, grounded space, the more I found a reduction in my ADHD symptoms, which has been pretty astounding. And I won't tell you that they're gone. They are not gone, but they are much improved when I am anchored. And I can actually slow down enough to see what I'm doing and to then make a new decision of like, okay, well, what do I really need right now? Do I really need to get up and get that snack or that drink of water? Or do I really need to do that other task? Or is this a distraction? And I've been able to do new things that really support me on focusing on the things that are hard to start, that are hard to sustain, and actually take steps every single day in my life towards creating the me in the life that I really want to create, which has been pretty incredible. And I also want to say that tied up in this experience of me being able to have this really cool forward movement and this growth experience, there have been many moments of grief over the past few years, wishing that I had been able to figure this out sooner and feeling sad about what I could have created earlier had I known these things 20-something years ago. And also a lot of grief over the identity that I've carried and both the sadness for how negative the self-identity that I've carried has been, because it has been really harsh. I've been pretty mean to myself for a really long time, a lot of the time, not all the time, but quite frequently. So there's a grief and a sadness in that. But there's also a loss of that identity, which you might think, like, well, it should be great to lose such a negative identity. But that's who I've been. That's who I have felt like I was for a long time. And becoming somebody new, even though I feel so much more aligned and I feel like the new person I am is actually the real me. It has been strained to let go of some of my old parts. And I have found ways to integrate and understand those parts. So I don't know that I'm losing so much, but the experience has definitely been one of grief in many moments. And allowing that and acknowledging that has been really helpful again to let me move through it instead of getting stuck in it. And as I've been able to move through all of these experiences and continue to live really in a new way, I've been able to redefine who I am. And I started understanding that I actually am a capable person. And it's not just that I'm capable, but I'm inconsistent, so I can't achieve my goals. I now have been able to shift to understanding how I can create the conditions in my life, support myself in such a way, accommodate myself in such a way that I can allow my capabilities to show up and to shine. And now, as I mentioned before, I'm really coming to see myself as somebody who takes care of herself every day, which is not the person that I've always been. And as I continue with these new behaviors and I continue to show up in these new ways, that contributes to solidifying a new identity. And as I solidify my new identity, it's even easier for me to do more self-care behaviors. This is very like atomic habits, if you have read that. And there's also a book, Better Than Before, which I read a few years ago, which was incredible because it helped me have a lot of compassion for myself as far as not being able to be consistent and realizing that there's really nothing so very wrong with me. It's just sometimes hard to start new habits. And I've touched on the idea of how when you're depressed, it can almost be frustrating to think about being empowered, like that you can do something to change it. And this isn't about self-blame at all. And I don't want anyone to feel guilty because guilt is pretty easy, at least for me, it has been. Like it's so easy to beat yourself up and be like, oh, well, I can't do this or I should be able to do this and I can't, and that means there's something wrong with me. So like please, if you're going there, I please urge you to come back. Please don't go there. Please take a step away from that space, that self-criticism and self-judgment. And to know that wherever you are today is okay, it really starts with a decision of wanting to figure out how to do it differently for you. And if you make this commitment to yourself and you start figuring it out, some of the things that I've been through, I hope will be supportive and helpful for you. But the details of what you do will be different. Maybe you will not start a podcast on your journey. But being able to become more aligned with who you really are is so very possible. And being able to see yourself in a new way, not being able to see yourself as this depressed person or this stuck person or this helpless person or this failure or this defect or this person who can never be happy, all things that I have seen myself as, you actually can see yourself in a new way. And I believe this to be true because I have done it for myself. And I am not somebody who had a tough few years. I had a tough few decades and I figured it out. I'm figuring it out. I still have a whole lifetime of work to do, but I'm way more excited about doing that work today because I've come so far already. And I can only imagine that more wonderful things are in store because I'm going to create them. And I trust myself more than I ever have before to be able to do that. So that really brings me to another important piece and maybe my final piece that I'll share for today, which is celebration. I have celebrated myself along the way in little tiny moments that maybe other people wouldn't even feel are worthy of celebration, but they were meaningful to me. In those little moments where I was able to do something different, in those little moments where I felt the call to dorsal, but I didn't go into shutdown. Instead, I slowed down and was able to take care of myself in a different way and treat myself with compassion. That was an enormous win. And I celebrated it. And I celebrated when I released my trailer from my podcast a year ago, having absolutely no idea if I was going to be able to actually keep up with it and release an episode every week. I just felt that that's what I needed to do and I needed to try. And so I did. And a year later, here we are. And I'm so excited and I'm honestly so proud of myself. And as I say that, what I want so deeply is for you, as you're listening, to feel that feeling of being proud of yourself too. Because I have come to realize that the ways that I've treated myself over the years, I am not proud of. And I could never feel good about myself because I wasn't treating myself in ways that felt good. And this may seem very obvious to other people looking in from the outside. But today, as I am here talking before you, it was a new learning. And I want everybody to be able to have access to self-care and to support and community and wellness and resources so that everyone can treat themselves in ways that they feel proud of. So more on that surely to come. But I celebrate today and I invite you to celebrate with me wherever you are today and wherever you hope to go to, to know that this life really is about progress, not perfection. And if you continue to show up and you don't give up and you take one little step every day, and maybe sometimes it'll be a bigger step, but if you continue to take steps every day, and you can actually even imagine these steps, by the way, don't forget you don't have to be doing these big actions all the time. Like I said, you don't have to start a podcast. That was huge and kind of bananas, to be honest, but it just worked toward where I was in my life. And it's been continuing to work. So I'm gonna continue doing it, but you can find what resonates for you. And the more you take care of yourself and treat yourself with compassion and kindness, which again, I know it's hard to do. I've talked about it before. I get it, but believe it or not, it is possible, even for you, even for your partner if they're struggling, there is a way through. And every little step that you make is something to celebrate. And you can grow your capacity and you can become more and more of who you are and who you're truly meant to be and have the relationships that you really want to have in this world and feel the way you really want to feel. So if you're new to this podcast, I thank you for listening today and allowing me to share such an incredibly special episode. If you've listened to me from the beginning, I thank you so much for sticking with me. I'd love to hear from you and I'd love to have you in my community so I can continue to offer something that feels helpful and supportive and resonates for you. And if you've listened to a few episodes and this resonates for you, I thank you so much for being here. And I hope you continue to show up. I'd also love to hear from you. But for any listeners, and even if there's no listeners at all, I have to be honest with you, this podcast hasn't just been a way to document my journey. It's actually been such an incredible part of my journey. And it has allowed me not to just talk about my healing experience, but actually for me to be actively involved in my healing experience because it has helped me to show myself that I can be consistent. I can show up, I can put my voice out into the world. I could be seen and heard, or at least have the potential to be seen and heard just as me, just being myself authentically and real and as transparently as I can be, in hopes that it'll help other people to be their fullest, most authentic, real, transparent full selves. And as I talked about on the New Year's episode, your healing and growth journey doesn't have to take you to being someone new. It can actually take you to being more of yourself. I hope that you can choose that for you. And also, I think that all of this really applies very much to my relationship as well, both because I am showing up more in my relationship as my full self, and I have so much more potential in my relationship because I have so much more capacity for how to care for myself. I have so much more capacity for how to care for my relationship. But also for me, I don't need a new relationship. I want to put more effort in with my husband and we have been to becoming the real us and more on that to come really soon. In closing, if any of this sounds familiar to you, if you feel like you're inconsistent or broken or not good enough or somehow falling short of who you really want to be or having the life you want to have or the relationship that you want, I really want you to hear that all of this is truly deeply connected to your nervous system state. And your nervous system state does not have to be your identity, even though your nervous system state will likely contribute and has contributed to creating the identity that you're holding of yourself today. But it doesn't have to contribute to the identity that you create for yourself. And progress is not always linear and forward moving and getting better and better and better up, up, up. It can be a very imperfect journey. But if you keep coming back to the commitment, if you keep coming back to trying, if you keep coming back to showing up, that is how you will continue to make progress. And I know how hard that can be, but it is possible. And so wherever you are today, as you're listening to this episode, I do want to remind you that with the right support and safety and compassion, your capacity to do and be and have whatever it is that you want to do and be and have can grow, and your capacity for hope can grow too. And I hope that it does. As our time comes to a close, I ask you to keep listening for just a few more moments. Because I want to thank you for showing up today. And I want to leave you with an invitation as you hit stop and move back out into the world on your own unique wellness journey. In order to move from where you are today to the place where you want to be, the path may seem long or unclear or unknown. And I want you to know that if that seems scary or daunting or downright terrifying or anything else, that is totally okay. Know that you do not have to create the whole way all at once. We don't travel a whole journey in one stride. And that is why my invitation to you today is to take a step, just one. Any type, any size, in any direction. It can be an external step that can be observed or measured, or it could be a step you visualize taking in your mind. It can be a step towards action or towards rest or connection or self-care or whatever step makes sense to you. I invite you to take a step today because getting to a place that feels better, more joyful, more connected than the place where you are today is possible for everyone, including you, and even when depression is in your bed. If today's episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you can be notified when each weekly episode gets released. I encourage you to leave a review and reach out to me on social media at trish.sanders.lcsw. Your feedback will help guide future episodes, and I love hearing from you. Also, please share this podcast with anyone who you think may be interested or who may get something from what I have shared. Until the next time we connect, take care of yourself and take a step.