29. Healing Generational Wounds Through Christ With Melissa Krupp

In this deeply powerful episode, I sit down with Melissa Krupp, co-founder of The Abundant Catholic, to discuss healing trauma, breaking generational cycles, reclaiming identity in Christ, and living the abundant life God desires for us.

Melissa vulnerably shares her journey through childhood wounds, complex PTSD, shame, addiction, marriage struggles, and deep healing through Christ, therapy, Theology of the Body, and the sacraments.

Together, we discuss:

•  Identity wounds and generational healing 
•  Boundaries, people pleasing, and shame 
•  Therapy, EMDR, and Catholic coaching 
•  Living beyond mediocrity 
•  Healing marriages and families through Christ 
•  What it means to truly live abundantly 

This conversation is raw, honest, hope-filled, and a reminder that no wound is beyond God’s restoration.

“ I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” — John 10:10

Connect With Melissa:

The Abundant Catholic Website

The Abundant Catholic Free Resources

The Abundant Catholic Podcast

The Abundant Catholic Instagram

Melissa and Anthony's Marriage Testimony E-Book: He Makes a Way

Melissa and Anthony's Podcast Testimony

Other Resources Mentioned: 

Theology of the Body Institute

Theology of the Body Institute YouTube

Connect with Carrie:

Follow Carrie on Instagram @livingwholeandholy

Schedule a Free 1:1 Catholic Coaching Clarity Call with Carrie

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Welcome to the Living Whole and Holy podcast, where the Catholic faith and intentional living come together. I'm your host, Carrie Jane, a recent Catholic convert and Catholic coach here to guide you toward a life that's rooted in Christ, centered in his love, and aligned with God's call. Whether you're a convert, a revert, a cradle Catholic, or simply exploring the faith, you're in the right place. Join me each week to hear inspiring conversations including conversion and reversion stories, timeless wisdom from the church, and practical Catholic coaching tools that help you deepen your faith and intimacy with Christ, cultivate Christ-centered habits, and be transformed through the renewing of your mind. If you're ready to discover and align to the beauty and richness of a fully integrated Catholic life, you found your home. I'm so excited you're here. Let's get started. Melissa is a lover of Jesus, wife, and home educating mother to five. She has a passion for intersecting truth with beauty while building community and connection within the church. She and her husband Anthony are the founders of The Abundant Catholic, an online inner healing apostolate that helps start the intentional Catholic journey into deeper healing, restoration, and freedom through Christ alone. Together with their team, they offer services of Catholic coaching, couples mentorship, and a free inner healing ministry to help others reclaim and restore who God made them to be. She's the host of the Abundant Catholic Podcast and is a Catholic mentor, content creator, and writer. Melissa, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you here today.

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Thank you, Carrie. It's such a blessing and it's just been an honor to meet you and learn about your mission. It's always good to be alongside fellow believers who have the same passion for Jesus Christ. So it's just an honor to be here. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Absolutely. Well, Melissa, you have a beautiful testimony. And I would love for maybe you to start with your journey with cat with Catholicism, where it started, and we'll go from there.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

Okay. Yeah. Wow. That's a loaded question. A really loaded question, but a good one. Uh I think for many of us, our journey starts um when we're young, right? Like when we're when we're little. And um, when I was raised in into the Catholic Church, I was brought up into the faith. I am the youngest of five, which makes me a little rent in my family. I've always like stayed the littlest, even though I've become an adult. And I feel like most younger siblings understand that. Like you always remain little, and I'm I'm loving Saint Therese because her little way is the holy way, right? But um for me, I grew up in a family of five. The youngest grew up in a Catholic household. So I went to Catholic schools for elementary. I was born and raised Catholic, um, baptized as an infant. I didn't know any different, right? Like this is just a faith that's been integrated into my every being from the minute I came into this world. And so my Catholic identity has been a part of my identity for forever. That's what I know. But yeah, so a loaded question because I didn't really experience Catholicism in the way it's meant to transform us until I was an adult. And I went through my own reversion, my own kind of breaking point where I met Christ in an intimate way. So I had known about Jesus my whole life, and I've known about God. I've always had a very deep, intimate connection with God, like a deep knowing of him. I remember talking to him as a little girl. My mom had this bust of Jesus' face on her dresser. And I would sit Indian style and like talk to him. And I remember uh this one time when I was young, I um had cheated on a test in elementary school. And I remember sitting, talking to God about it, and how I had to tell the truth, and I know I knew it was wrong because my conscience um was really pricking at me. And I remember like talking with God interiorly, even at a very young age. So, yeah, so like I said, I grew up in the Catholic Church, was raised not knowing anything different other than we go to church on Sundays. My family knew what the rosary was, but I do have to say that there was a lot of disintegration in my home. Um, and so my view of Catholicism was very broken. I didn't know that when I was a child or an adolescent until my adult years, and I went through my reversion, where the Lord brought truth to my identity because I carried so many identity lies rooted in my childhood. So, really, I grew up Catholic and I've always been Catholic, but I've really uncovered my faith more in depth in the last 10 years more than I ever have through my parenting, through my marriage, letting it transform me, coming to know Jesus. The sacraments have always been a part of my life, but there was a lot of wounding in my childhood and disintegration in the family that I was raised in, in the and the community that I was raised in. And so I carried a lot of spiritual wounds and physical wounds that really affected my spirituality and my formation and the way I viewed God and the way I received love in general, the way I perceived others. And so that really affected me. Do you have any more regarding that? Like you you can date it with me.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

Yeah, well, uh what you just said about wounds and maybe some lies that you picked up along the way from that disintegration. I I'm curious to know what some of those things were that you came to believe about yourself.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

Yeah. So I mean, a lot of this stuff wasn't processed until I was older. Um, I can give you a little bit of the backstory here. I had my first child with my husband, Anthony. We got married in 2014, had a child within the first two years of marriage, and I started to exhibit symptoms of what I thought were postpartum depression, which a lot of women suffer from postpartum. There's major mood swings. Sometimes you have nutrient deficiency, big changes in life. You know, there's a lot going on when you're welcoming your first child. And me being the youngest, I never watched my mom bring a child into the world. Um, I was breastfeeding. I didn't have tons of people. I had a couple of family members who breastfed, but like I didn't see it a lot. I was having tons of issues. And I was just in this deep depressive state where I just felt like I couldn't mother my child. It wasn't going away. It was getting worse. And so at that point, we were like, well, this isn't the baby blues. It's more. And I was becoming more and more enraged. I would almost disassociate at times from certain things in these experiences I was having. My world just felt like it was in a storm. Things were just collapsing around me. And I was like, this isn't how it's supposed to be. I knew something intuitively was really wrong. I didn't have the language though, or the capacity to really understand what was happening interiorly. And so it got to the point where I was suicidal. I want to say it was like within the first year of my daughter's birth, maybe even the first six to eight months. Um, and I was just a wreck, and my husband didn't know what to make of it. He didn't really have the emotional capacity like he has now. And so at that point, we just reached out for help. But then, I mean, in both of the families we came from, if you get therapy, you have some issues. You don't get therapy unless you're diagnosed with some label that people don't like talking about. And it was kind of this like big red X over any, we don't talk about that. That's for crazy people, which is so insane when I look back on that, you know.

SPEAKER_01 8:12

Yeah, absolutely. And it's it's I think it's becoming less of a stigma now, but for me, certainly that, you know, that's been an issue for people in the past.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Yeah. And I knew nobody who had been, and so it made me feel extremely isolated. And then those labels that I built in my head surrounding it were hovering over me, you know, kind of self-inflicting in that sense. So I went and got help, and by God's divine intervention, he connected me with a Catholic therapist that somebody I had known, one person I had known, I take it back, I knew one person on my husband's side who had childhood trauma that she had healed from and she had kind of opened up to me about that. And it kind of started opening my world to a whole new way of living. Cause I was like, oh, I can kind of relate to some of the things you're talking about. I don't, trauma is just a big word. I don't know what that means. And so I got a hold of this therapist and I started working with her. And truly, when I speak of her, she was the first person to ever accompany me and sit with me and who I was in that present moment. I wasn't too much for her. There was a space for me to be, to unwind, to explore, to discover everything that I had been that had been encapsulated in my heart, which was so much at that time. Newly married, I was dealing with all of these issues. I was having these crazy rage fits where I didn't even recognize myself. I was scared of myself. I felt like a monster. All these identity lies were just coming to the surface so abruptly to this point where like we couldn't ignore it anymore for the survival of our family. Um, and so and it really threw my husband for a loop because he just had this sense from his own childhood too. Like, you get married, you have a family, and the women just know how to do it. They just figure it out, you know, instead of looking at like, oh, well, humans are complex creatures. We all have our own story. We relate to individuals based on how we were formed and how we were formed to relate. And so, you know, those identity lies we're talking about, I immediately had shame throughout this whole first, you know, this season. And I had carried that into my marriage. Um so there's many layers to our story, but really what started my healing journey and got me to know Jesus in an intimate way was reaching out for help and saying, I can't do this alone. I can't keep masking. Um, a lot of people didn't know what was going on. It was pretty private on the outside. We looked like an okay couple, you know, we were doing okay. There wasn't like a crisis or anything. Um, that didn't come until a couple years following with my husband and I story where we were actually in crisis. But fast forward a little bit, I sat with my therapist for a matter of years. And within the first few months, I was diagnosed with not postpartum depression. I could have had symptoms of that, yes, but I was diagnosed with what's called complex post-traumatic stress syndrome or CPTSD. Um, so people know like PTSD, they often think war veterans or victim of sex trafficking, or um people who have been even in that car crash, you can have PTSD from really, really life-threatening situations or situations where our bodies just can't process. And unfortunately for me, that happened um because of the home atmosphere I lived in. Um, it wasn't safe or secure in the way that somebody needs to properly develop. So I was also diagnosed with childhood developmental disorder. And I just had to speak into that a little bit because a lot of us come from disintegration, whether we recognize it or not, because of the fall, right? Like this is where the Lord has really opened my eyes. None of us are exempt from rupture. And if we look at the word trauma, it's some sort of rupture. And Sister Miriam Highland James says that really well from the Abiding Together podcast. She talks about the big T trauma. Yes, like those big events that some of us unfortunately carry as a cross, or the little T traumas, those little ruptures in our life. It can it can be somebody not responding, it can be a form of betrayal, little things, right? Where we have these interactions with individuals and we're struck sometimes in ways that we can't fully process. And then our body gets into a survival mode. And so for me, I had carried that survival mode from a very young age. Later on, I was able to process some of the trauma and abuse that I had endured from very, very young into my adolescent years. And then I went to live from that place of trauma and act out because of the symptoms I had. I was unable to really understand the complexities of what had happened to me. And so I was really living my life out of a wound and trying to function and keep up with feeding these identity lies. And I had so many footholds to the enemy. And so, yeah, basically I went into therapy and I was diagnosed with these these things and it rocked my whole world. I was looking through my life now, through this looking glass, I had never looked through holding the Catholic identity there, my Christian identity, knowing that I was God's child. Like I've never not known that, which was always a gift and a grace from the Lord. Um, and I really believe that's because I was baptized too, because of the power of the sacrament of baptism. Because when we're when we're baptized and we partake in the sacraments in the Catholic Church, literally we receive these theological virtues infused in our soul, faith, hope, and charity. And so God, from my infancy, was infused in my soul in a way that could never part. And so I really know his grace is what carried me through to that point. So in therapy, I got diagnosed with that. And so I was starting to get treated for that. And my husband and I were building a family at that time. We didn't just put our life on hold. We still had dreams of building a family. And so we were very much open to life. And um, as hard as it was, God was showing me purpose in the pain and in the suffering. And I knew early on, from a very, very early point, as he started to reveal truths to me and the veil almost be lifted little by little of this like cloak or this cloud that had been covering me and who I was and my perceptions and my identity, as he began to lift the veil, I began to see more clearly and understand, like, God, you have so much purpose in this story of mine that you're transforming. Like I just had this deep sense in me that there was a reason why I was going through this. There was a reason why I was being taken out of the grave. Um, and I didn't fully understand at the time what I do now. But fast forward three, four years in, I did a lot of work. I did a lot of work. I did sensory processing therapy, something called EMDR, which you're learning to desensitize the body. So I was very symptomatic when I started to enter. Oh, go ahead, Carrie. Did you guys?

SPEAKER_01 15:01

Oh no, I was just gonna say I did EMDR as well after my mom passed away. Oh, wow. And it's it's such a powerful modality.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

Oh my gosh, absolutely. I try and when when we support individuals in the healing journey, we bring them to the body. God made us body and soul composite. You talk therapy is great. It's a great tool and it will get you far, but it won't get you to the place where the body needs to heal on a neurological, biological level. Our nervous system store so much. And in a lot of the work I did, I was able to release trauma from my body through somatic work, through body work that was rooted in my Christian identity. So we were doing nothing that would have been crossing into new agey. I remember being even cautious in the beginning and being like, I don't know, I have questions. And I was able to ask questions and make sure I wasn't going to be taken to some other space or inviting something into that space that wasn't the Holy Spirit. And, you know, my therapist, I trusted her and she was Catholic, but I think it's always good to ask those questions and make sure to preserve and respect the boundaries that we have as Catholic Christians because we have to be very cautious, especially in today's modern society when working in the healing realm with the Lord. And so she's very much an individual rooted in the Holy Spirit. And so um, I wasn't doing anything like hypnosis where I was in an altered state. We were always in the present moment. But when the spirit took us to a place in the past, it was only to integrate and heal so that my symptoms would could then be reduced. And there's different modalities for that, right? So the ones I used were the tapping, sensory processing EMTR, like I said. Um, and they really helped me. But there was a time where it just was too much at times and we had to slow down because I was still symptomatic. I was dealing with a lot of issues at home. My family was falling apart because I started to heal. I I was really wrestling with my identity. And it was really difficult for me to set boundaries because I wasn't familiar with boundaries and it felt like I struggled with so much guilt. But it was all because of the way I was, I was trained and I was raised up, and there was so much manipulation in my upbringing where like I wasn't held as a person. My my personhood wasn't respected or really like understood enough. It was a lot of um, a lot of a lot of manipulation growing up. And so there was a lot of shaming, a lot of disintegration really blossoming into an individual just wasn't there. Like there was so much battle going on all the time. We were constantly in chaos. Um, and there were, there were parts of my childhood, like when I speak of my story, I don't want to make it sound all terrible. I have good, wholesome memories, but the overarching was emotional intelligence was non-existent. Emotional literacy, we just did what we did. We didn't talk about it. Things were pushed under the rug. There were outbursts, there was anger, there was confusion, there was fighting, there was a lack of connection, a lack of emotional intimacy. So growing up, I didn't know that. And that affected my early years of marriage. And so what had happened was Anthony and I, as I was healing and going through this work in the early years of my recovery, um, which has taken me nearly a decade to come out on the other side. I want to say like five, six years in is when I started to really experience the light, the burden lift a little bit. But a lot of that work, it really triggered a ripple effect. You know, like thinking like you drop a rock in the water and there's this big ripple effect. And so doing the work wasn't just me sitting with a therapist. It went outside of myself because when we choose to heal, it literally changes, it changes everything. It changes the output of our life, it changes our energy, it changes what the spirit's doing, the fruits, and and no longer was I producing as many bad fruits, right? There was a lot more repair. I was learning tools I had never known before, emotional literacy. I was learning that my feelings are not bad. I was learning that my anger was actually holy and righteous. It wasn't bad. And so as we got into the work even deeper, I was able to uncover sexual trauma from my childhood that I had fragmented memories of, but I was not able to fully identify. It was so foreign to me. It's all I knew, it was my world. I only knew what I knew through the lens that I had. And so to sit with somebody who was well trained and formed in reality of the whole person and what is harmful to personal development and adolescent growth, adult growth, right? Like anything. It's what's harmful to the person. Um, to have somebody, you know, hold that for me and to recognize have compassion on me, where I couldn't have compassion on myself because I didn't even understand. That changed my whole world. My whole world changed. And I started to feel this weight lift off of me where I didn't feel so crazy anymore. I felt like, oh my gosh, this is why I have these symptoms. So I remember looking at this list of individuals who suffered sexual trauma or were sexually abused and reading the list. I don't want to trigger anybody, so I'm not going to say anything in particular, but reading the list, I marked 80% of those things. The symptoms I was experiencing, just even just like uh implicit, I would get interjectory thoughts come in my my mind that freaked me out, that were so perverse or were so grotesque and just outrageous that I was like, oh, where is this coming from? It was almost as if my body was saying, hey, there's something you need to pay attention to that you're not looking at. And I would always just kind of push it aside and push it away and remove it from my mind because I was so stunned by it sometimes. Some of these symptoms I was experiencing in my body. And at the time, I was still battling with sexual addiction. I was in a marriage where my husband and I like entered into our marriage sexually broken and we didn't really know it. Like he had a pornography addiction early on. I had a pornography addiction before we got married that went away after we got married, in the sense like I wasn't actively engaged in any anymore. And he knew about it, but I had always just wanted to be married. And so that wasn't something that I partook in after we were married. But in our minds, he had said, I'm not looking at it anymore. But we were very sexually broken. And then when things got hard in our marriage, where does he go? You know, of course the enemy is going to bring up something that never was fully healed or integrated. And he went back to the pornography. And so my husband and I wrestled still with symptoms on and off, but I was able to heal from and recover from generational abuse that I later discovered was incestual abuse that I suffered from as a young girl. Um, you know, and then when it's generational, like you don't, you don't know any different. These things happen quickly, they they happen in the dark. They happen at families' houses, and it just is a whole family system. Um, and so what the Lord's taken me out of by miracles, by grace, is generational bondage, um, which I think a lot of us are battling, whether we like to recognize it or not. We have in the world a plague of divorce, we have alcoholism, addictions, promiscuosity, infidelity, whatever it is, these things are passed down through generations because if we're not healing from our wounds, if we're not becoming a wounded healer is what Henry Nowen calls it, we're transferring our suffering onto another. And this is how the pattern continues. And so if we're not learning to sit with ourselves in the places where we carry the most shame or where we're massed up or whatever we're dealing with, even those introductory thoughts I had that I would not really sit long enough with myself to pay attention to and stay curious about and go, why am I, why am I having this thought? This is not who I am. What is this? And to sit with somebody long enough to actually work through some of these things and to carve the time and the space out. Like many of us just Satan wants to keep us busy, right? I think the acronym for busy is like um bound under Satan's yoke. Oh, isn't that good? That is really good. Really good. So, so there's a lot there with our story. So it really affected my whole identity, right? Because I had all these identity lies, the lie that my body was not safe. And I didn't even know that until I got older. Um, and started to really work through a lot of these trauma wounds, these really significant ruptures to the self. I didn't know that my sexuality was a gift. I was not taught about my femininity in a way that upheld the dignity of my personhood, that my sexuality is indeed a gift. It's not something to be ashamed of. And I had carried so many wounds and ruptures, and then my own sins compiled in there, trying to sort through my own, my own longings. Like I had these deep holy longings for intimacy, for union. But the way that it manifested was in something like what Satan hands us, which is pornography or self-stimulation, or in the marriage bed, you might be doing something sinful with your husband that's not aligned with the teachings of the church. And there's a reason why, right? Because Satan wants to give us the cheap fix, but the Lord wants something so beautiful for us that's really rooted in truth that will fulfill us. And so it took me so many years to get to a place where I was actually able to not just only educate myself on my sexuality, learn emotional literacy, come out of the fog of the wounds and the ruptures that I had grown up with. And then on top of that, I was raised in a Catholic home. So there was still a lot of warping of my spirituality in there. And I was wounded by men in the Catholic Church. We had a priest who's no longer a priest, unfortunately, because of his own behaviors. And I have so many crazy male wounds. It's just mind-blowing to me how much the devil was trying to keep me from knowing the holiness of the masculinity of the bridegroom, of Jesus himself, trying to keep me from this perfect love himself. And so I have come to know Christ in a way that has been so fulfilling, where he has, he has come in and literally been like, you know, how as little girls we dream of our knight in shining armor. Christ, the bridegroom, has been that knight in shining armor for me. Like he has come and touched these places in me nobody could even go to. I didn't even know I had in me to be transformed. He has come into the interior self in a way that I wasn't even able to enter in unless I had said yes to him, unless I had said, Lord, heal me, show me, teach me your lessons in love. There's gotta be more than what I know. There's gotta be a reason for my suffering, for these ruptures, for these things that have happened to me. You know, and in the mystery of our faith, Carrie, we don't know why, but we do know that there is a cross. We do not, in the mystery of our faith, we can't separate the cross from the resurrection. It is a part of our humanity, and Jesus himself shows us that. And so, yeah, my story, I carry sorrowful mysteries. I carry many agonies, and I probably will still in this life, but in that, I know the joy of the resurrection. I know that there are glorious mysteries to my life and joyful mysteries. And there's so much there. There's so much more I could get into. So I definitely, my whole world shifted and I began to see myself in the light of God as who he made me to be, not what the world was calling me to be, which is what I was always running towards. I went for the next thing. And at the Abundant Catholic, our whole apostolate is founded on John 10, 10. I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly, because God doesn't just call us to live in mediocracy or just to live life to live life and check the box. He wants us to live in abundance, in overflow, and perfusion of his love, of his joy, of his goodness, of his mercy, of his glory. However, in John 10, 10, he says, anyone who comes before me is a thief who comes to steal, destroy, and slaughter, right? And so I was going to the thief. We can't serve two masters. It's either God or the enemy we're serving. If we're serving two masters, we're not serving God, because the first commandment is thou shalt have no other God before me. Right. And so I was committing idolatry in my Catholic identity. I didn't know this at the time. I was committing idolatry looking for fulfillment in all of these other things, but really compassionately, now I can look at myself and go, oh, I was very wounded. I was very wounded and I didn't know I was doing those things. Also, I was very sinful. I have free will, and I was choosing to do something that I knew the church said was wrong, like look at pornography or commit sins or whatever whatever it may be that I was that was a symptom of my trauma, yes, but it was also my free will. And so even in my recovery, there were times where I was idolizing my marriage. I was idolizing family life as I was grieving the loss of my family and what I needed and and what I the betrayal that happened in my in my childhood. I was idolizing many things. And so it's a really a complex topic. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:22

Yeah, and I just I just really appreciate your vulnerability. And Melissa, I really honor the fact that you know, these things happen to you before you could form your own opinions about things, and that's how our identities are shaped. And unfortunately, unfortunately, so many of us are born into families with brokenness. And then we pick up what they believe, and that becomes our identity. And these are the lies, like you said, that the enemy just capitalizes. He loves coming into where we're most wounded, where we're weak, and that's where he enters in. And so we can choose to move forward into our adult life by doing something about that, but by becoming aware, by having the courage to say, I need to go see a Catholic therapist. It doesn't make me a crazy person. Actually, it means that I'm healing and that I care about how I want to leave a legacy for this world. Because I think the work that you're doing, when you have five beautiful children and they're seeing you and your husband in what you're doing. And so by you healing these wounds and confronting these identity lies, you're that's a huge ripple effect for for your kids, for their future families. So the generational wounding is real. And I recently went to a workshop uh about a month ago about healing the family tree and how the sin goes back. I mean, they talk about it going back 10 generations. Generations, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

We don't know, we don't know what's you know, past maybe even curses. There are actually generational curses we could be enduring that we don't know.

SPEAKER_01 29:57

Yeah. And this this priest was saying that he gave this beautiful offering to us of when you go to mass, there was a prayer, and when you go to mass, say this prayer for each of the ten generations on your mom's side and on your dad's side. And like I said, we don't know what happened in these previous generations, but the Holy Spirit does. And what I'm just feeling such gratitude for right now and hearing your story is how we have these modalities like therapy, but we have we can add the faith back into it. Because when I did therapy, I've done therapy a few times in my life, and I did therapy before being Christian EMDR, and then I did therapy after with a Christian therapist. I wasn't Catholic at the time, but but I love that we have these modalities, but then I feel like Christ is the divine physician, he's the one, he's the one that comes in and we really cannot find healing outside of him. And I know that's one of the things that you guys talk about in the abundant Catholic. And I just want to applaud you for all these years of work because that takes courage. And what ultimately it does is it helps you to live more intentionally, it helps you to live out your Catholic faith faithfully. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 31:18

And to really be who God is calling you to be. Yeah, and that's a that's a big part of our mission. We say reclaim and restore, reclaim and restore who God made you to be. And the word reclaim literally means to bring back to the hawk back to the glove, like go back to the Father, go back to who we're made to be in him, to to take hold of all the fragmented parts of self and to integrate them. But the only yeah, the only integrator is really Christ. They have these tools, but if it's not rooted in our in our Christianity, if it's not rooted in our master, and if it's not rooted in God, the fruit of that we'll see. You know, St. Paul talks about testing all the spirits and and looking at the fruits, right? We have to test the spirit and know is this something that is rooted in God? Is it not? And I do have to speak into that for a minute because when we were talking for anyone listening, if you're Catholic or if you're Christian, you don't have to only see a Catholic therapist. I just warn individuals because of the new age movement. And I know you know this, Carrie, and you talk about this podcast, we have to be careful about what we're inviting into the space with our bodies, with the movement of our body and with our spirit, who's around us and what they're rooted in, especially somebody who's working with us and we're creating soul ties with. That's a whole nother topic for a whole nother time. But Anthony and I, and a lot of the work we do, I mean, he went through Encounter Ministries School of Ministry and he got is certified in that. And that really opened our mind and our eyes to a lot of the spiritual realm. And we know we live in a spiritual realm. The Bible, if we're rooted in scripture, it says we're constantly at war spiritually. It's not just about the flesh, but it's about the spiritual and the principalities around us, we're at war with and and um we're battling. And so I think holding that in light, a lot of healing work is biological. It's neurological. So we don't always need to have a Catholic therapist because I know there's a shortage of that, right? Everyone's looking, I have to have a Catholic therapist. And this was something I wrestled with until I had this conversation one time with my therapist, who I have been very blessed to walk alongside of. However, a lot of this work is biological. And so, Carrie, it sounds like you had a lot of healing from the EMDR in your life, even if it wasn't with a Catholic therapist. So just a word of caution in that sense, we should always be we should always have precaution with anything as Christians to preserve what we have in our spirit and to keep hold of the mind and the heart and protecting it with the proper boundaries and barriers we need. But I don't think that we have to see a Catholic therapist in order to heal as Christians and Catholics. But I think it's good. If you can find one, get one. But not all Catholic therapists are created equal either. And so let the Holy Spirit lead you. That's what it comes down to is like we are these unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable creatures. And we have these unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable relationships with God. The way God speaks to me is not the way he speaks to you, is not the way he's speaking to our listeners. So honestly, let the Holy Spirit guide you. If you're somebody who's listening to this, like, oh my gosh, I can kind of relate to a couple things. Maybe I would benefit from having somebody accompany me on the journey or guide me or hold me accountable in these symptoms I'm dealing with. I like to use the word symptom, but it might be somebody who's struggling with vocational discernment, who's struggling with identity lies, who's struggling with shame, who's struggling with sexual addiction, who's struggling with whatever. Maybe you're post-divorce. I don't know what the story is or the storyline, but if we invite the Holy Spirit into our being, he guides us to the next right person, to that next right step, because he is healing. The word resurrection, we're in the Easter season right now during this filming. The word resurrection literally means to restore. So when Christ came and died and he rose again, he embodies the resurrection, he invites every one of us into the resurrection, which is ultimately into restoration. If we're not broken, if we're not recognizing that we're in need of a savior, what is there to restore? Right? If we're living in a place where we don't think we have anything wrong and there's nothing going on that we need to look at and heal from, um, we probably have some problems. We're probably dealing with the great sin of pride.

SPEAKER_01 35:29

Yes. Right?

SPEAKER_00 35:30

I mean, truly, which is like number one of the deadly sins, the sin of pride. Um, I always try to gauge it. Like, if you really don't think anything's going on, like ask the people around you. I wish the people who hurt me, I wish they would have asked me. Yeah. I wish that they, for that reconciliation, I wish that they would have been like, How have I hurt you? How are we doing in our relationship? Right. Can we grow together? How can we mend places of pain? I think I've hurt you in years past. And so a lot of my recovery has been in layers over time because as I've healed, the Lord's gone deeper even into the layers of self. And he's revealed places of unforgiveness that I've had or of bitterness or resentment that I didn't even know I was carrying until the time came for that to be illuminated in my mind where I could handle that and be like, oh my gosh. You know, he'll bring things to the forefront of my mind even now, where I'm like, wow, this is an area that I can't keep ignoring. And this is a forever journey for all of us until we die. We're not in heaven. And I think that's what a lot of us are caught up in, is that we're searching for fulfillment in this life, somewhere else, where we're not ever, ever gonna find it. I'm not gonna find fulfillment in my vocation of marriage. Is it a gift? Yes. Will it be lovely and joyful and will it be easier? Yes. But will there be a cross? Absolutely. In every vocation in this life, there's a cross. We can't escape the cross. It's whether or not we choose to carry it. And if we choose to carry it and enter into the cross with Christ and let Him truly transform those places of our lives where we're hurting, we're suffering, we're literally sometimes rejecting parts of ourself or rejecting our own cross, right? There will be no transformation. We will not find fulfillment. That issue we're dealing with that we're going to the new age movement for, or we're still, you know, stuck in the addiction cycle with, or we're acting out of whatever it is. If we're gonna keep pretending, we're just gonna keep prolonging, right? And then we're gonna have to deal with it sometime when we die. I know that sounds so jaded, but like I totally agree. And I think when you really sit in that reality and you ask yourself the question, like, why am I here? Who made me? What was I made for? What is all of this? When you start asking questions, you're entering into a relationship with God. And when you orient those questions to him, he will answer them. He says, knock and I will answer. Seek and you will find. This is his promise. His promises in the word. To have a relationship with God, you have to build it. You have to be intentional. I love how you said that, Carrie, being intentional because a lot of us are just living in the movement of the world of the culture, which is to just go move, strive, commit, build whatever it is, but build in the name of what? Building, right? Like I built so many towers in my life and God revealed them to me. And guess what? They all fell down when my world collapsed. My husband and I went through a literal collapse because he could no longer watch me heal and not look at himself. He was every time I was healing, he was looking in the mirror almost. I was holding him accountable just in this beautiful sacred sacrament of marriage. There are so many graces that flow from these sacraments that we don't even see, even when we're struggling. We speak into that a lot in the work we do. But my husband couldn't stay masked up and I knew he had issues. Like I knew of the, like I talked about the pornography, I knew he had a drinking issue. I didn't know it was alcoholism until into our marriage, and I was doing my work. I was able to identify that, try and get help. I was trying to fix my husband because my awareness started to catch up with me. And then I was like, wait a minute, we're not in the same place anymore. This is really awkward and hard. Right? We're not matching anymore. What happened? However, we always had our Catholic identity behind us. And so when we were in crisis, we always knew to go to the rosary. We always knew to go to Mary. We always knew to go to the foundation was always there. Praise be to God, our parents baptized us when we were infants. I know some people are against that. And I know your story is very unique too in that, Carrie, but the sooner you can get baptized, the better, right?

SPEAKER_01 39:39

Oh, totally. Yeah. I mean, I think that I was baptized as a baby Lutheran. Oh, you're okay. I was. And then I think kind of going back to what you were saying about being baptized, I think that protects us from certain things in this life, even if we fall away from God and come back. Um, yes.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

Yeah, we know. It's infused in our soul. We don't see it because you can't separate the body from the soul. And and and our world tries to do that. Our world is so obsessed with yoga or health and vitality, but they're not tending to the spirit. You're gonna be sicker than sick. If you're just spending your life trying to get fit and idolizing an image of self and idolizing health and wellness, but you're not integrated in your spirit, you're gonna be in trouble. Amen. Amen. And this is where this wounding happens. So for me, I was having all these symptoms and they just kept bubbling to the surface. Well, you can only suppress that so much until it will start to spill out, right? Yeah. And wreak havoc. Yep. So what I was experiencing essentially was the symptom of generational abuse and neglect. I had a deep level of neglect that I carried from my childhood in my formation. And that has taken me years. I still struggle so much with carrying crosses. It's like a thorn in my side. Like I really relate to St. Paul because that anger I was experiencing was actually my body speaking to me of something under. That anger is a secondary emotion to grief or loss. And so for me, I've had to truly, my healing journey is entering into the grief of what was lost, right? Like I was grieving something I didn't have that I needed, and God was replacing it and reordering it and filling everything in time and teaching me all these really hard lessons in love, too, which he often does. It's just a different way. His ways are not our ways, his thoughts are higher than ours, right? You know, we we learn these ways. My symptoms were a result of generational abuse. And because I chose to heal and look inward, justice was reigning. So many of us in this culture, we're having our hands up like we want justice. We're gonna fight for whatever we're passionate about. And we want to see all this evil end. We want to see things rightly ordered in the political realm. We want to demand dignity. We we want to see things go away because it's too hard to look at, especially in our times. I know you know of the things going on right now in 2026. We are in dire need of Jesus Christ, right? Yes. And I let God's justice reign by letting him into the pain, into the places of grief, into the places of shame, and to the places of sorrow. Instead of ignoring my symptoms, because I think when we were talking earlier and you were you were saying such kind things about my family and the ripple effect, and look what that does. But in the reality of that, Carrie, doing this work is extremely difficult. It's a it's a narrow way. It is very narrow. And Jesus says, you know, my way is narrow. Like it is not wide. That's what the world is, is false Christianity is plaguing the world, saying, the way is what? No, no, many are called, but few actually enter through the narrow gate. And so, you know, in that, the recovery process itself is not easy. It's never linear, it's up and down. The values are low, but guess what? The summit, the mountaintops are high, and the glory makes up for it, right? In this life, like we we are gonna have sickness, we are gonna have sorrow, we're gonna have pain, but we can choose to let justice reign by beginning with us. There's a song by Abby Gamboa, she's a Christian artist. And in this song, she's got such a beautiful voice. If you've never heard her, I love her stuff. It's like really melancholic, like it's really low, kind of low vibe in, but it's really it's spiritual, it's good. And in one of the songs, she says, I was praying that he heal the church, but he put a mirror to my face, right? If we want to see justice prevail, put a mirror to your face. And that is the hardest work ever.

SPEAKER_01 43:43

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 43:44

That's it, that's the work Anthony and I do. That's what our team does. We walk with people as they begin to look at themselves and go, What am I doing? Why am I doing this? I can't keep pretending like this is fine. We keep hitting these walls, I keep hitting this cycle over and over again. I keep having these symptoms. For years, I was having night terrors. I just thought they were normal. Like, no, they're not. You're not made to sleep in a state of unrest. It's exhausting. And our bodies speak to us. And if we come to know that the way God made us is so wise and so divine, we come to realize, wow, we actually share in this divinity with God. And I have authority over my flesh. And my voice carries, it's prophetic, it carries authority. It can carry Christ, it can be used for good and for God. It can be fruitful, right? That changes your whole world. And I had no idea. My upbringing, God bless my parents, they didn't teach us that we had that. Even the church at the time I was raised in Catholic schools. I didn't know the things I know now. And so I really believe that the Holy Spirit, for such a time as this, like He is bringing us so many individuals in the realm of Christianity to speak these things to us that are true so we can be better equipped to face the times we're living in. I'm a huge lover of theology of the body, which literally means our bodies through like looking at our bodies through the lens of God, right? And so I really believe John Paul II's message, if you're anyone who's struggling with identity, look into Theology of the Body. You can go on the Theology of the Body Institute website. There's tons of organizations out there, the John Paul II Renewal Center. We have resources for you on our website. You can go and download a free book list on Theology the Body, which helps you just better understand who you are in the eyes of God, in the maker of God, who he made you to be, as sons and daughters of God, but truly, as male, as female, that our femaleness is good, that our maleness is good, that our sexuality is a gift. It's not something I think Satan's distorted it so much that we're so far away from the truth. And we just like our desires are often rooted in something very holy, right? But they're coming out disordered. And so, how do we reorient that back to God? We have to really learn a new way. Um, and like I said, it's very narrow, but that's how God's justice prevails, right? And so if we can learn these things and educate ourselves and be intentional and maybe stop trying to grow our 401k, but try and grow something more spiritually inside of us. There's nothing bad about being prudent in other areas in life, but we have to be cautious of that idolizing, like I was talking about. And maybe we can link some things in the show notes.

SPEAKER_01 46:17

I was gonna say, I'll link, I'll link all that in the show notes. Um, what's coming forward for me is when we're talking about intentional living, that is very opposite of living a life of mediocrity. And I love what you said earlier that God doesn't want mediocrity for us. And I think there are people out there who believe that it's not okay to dream. And God does put desires in our heart that are from Him. But some people feel like, oh, I can't do that. That's not Christian like, or but I have the same philosophy as you that God does not want us to be mediocre. And if He's there's something that's tugging at us and it doesn't stop, and we've prayed and it keeps showing us, yes, I want you to go after this, but it feels like something way beyond what we can do, way impossible. I'd just love for you to speak on that too.

SPEAKER_00 47:07

Yeah, that's so good. Exciting. That's a good one because I really believe right there in that longing or in that desire that keeps tugging on the heart in the in the inner voice of self, right? If we have to come to know our inner voice. If we don't know our inner voice, we're in trouble. So let's learn how to get grounded to know our own voice. Because we might be battling some other things there too. But if the inner voice is saying there's something more, I really am drawn to this particular thing. This I keep having this tug towards something in my life that I feel like something's gonna shift, but it's beyond me. That is the meeting place of God. If it is rightly ordered and it's rooted in something good and holy, obviously, if it's evil, it's and it's wicked, then no, it's not the meeting place of God. Yeah. But even under that, it's the meeting place of God. Like our desires, our longings, they come from somewhere in us. And if God made us, he actually made us for himself. So if you read the Bible, you learn that it's a love story. If you go to the middle of the Bible, it's the song of songs, it's a love story for the for the bride and the bridegroom. Like the church is longing, the bride is longing for her lover of Christ, of the of the bridegroom. And that can make some people uncomfortable. And Christopher West talks about it too. And you can go on to his YouTube page. God wants to marry us, he wants us all to himself, and he loves us so much that he made us for himself. And so we can co-create with him. We can be fertile, not just in the flesh, but in spirit. And we see that through the immaculate witness of our lady. In humility, she knew, held humility and courage so perfectly. She said, you know, they will call me blessed in the annunciation. Many will call me blessed for generations to come. She knew her calling in God, and she had this immaculate obedience to him in a way that I think a lot of us long to have. Um, but we can look at her as our model of really opening the ache because um she had to lay a lot down, right? But but her desire was to worship God and she did in her body. And but first she gave her yes spiritually before she consented to the yes in the flesh. And so for us, we can co-create with God. We can be fertile in spirit and give him these longings and say, What do you want me to do with them? And that's where we find fulfillment. That's where our desires are met. And that's a really hard lesson. Many of us have to fall and stumble a thousand times and learn all of the things that we didn't know until we know, until the spirit comes and reveals to us the truth. He says, you know, I'm the way, the truth, and the life. And anyone who comes to me shall have life, right? And we know that the truth sets us free. And literally we experience deeper freedom when we open these longings and the aches and the aches to him. We reorient our desires from trying to serve ourselves as our own God. And we try now say, God, I want to serve you. I want to serve you. And in that, awaken in me, help me become who you made me to be. And don't be afraid. And if there's fear there, press into that. There's probably something you need to work through that's under the surface that that can't be ignored. So you name it to tame it, you name the fear, and you move forward anyways. And you can rebuke the fear. You can work with somebody to help you too, but you can ask the Lord to reveal to you what is in this fear. Is it that I'll be exposed? Is it that I'll feel vulnerable? Well, what are we afraid of with vulnerability? If we look at the word vulnerable, literally means in the etymology of it, it means woundable. Yeah. So when we're vulnerable, we're exposed, we're woundable. Let's go back to our Christian identity. Christ Himself shows us every time we look at a crucifixion where he's dead on the cross, he says, if I did it, you can do it too. If I was exposed and vulnerable and I rose from the dead, do you think I'll keep you from that? He wants to set you free. He wants you to live the life he made you to live. Satan wants you to not, so he's going to do everything to take something good and holy and twist and contort it. He can't use his own clay. I'm sure you've heard that before. He can only distort what God made good and holy. And so if you're experiencing some sort of distortion of the enemy, let the Lord unwind that and reorient that and rightly order that so that you can have the eyes to see that what you're experiencing is actually rooted in something good and holy and that we aren't as bad as we think we are, right? Oftentimes shame is the biggest barrier to us living the life we desire. Fear is the biggest barrier. And so when we walk with individuals, we accompany them through those places of fear or shame, um, just to kind of help them get through these impediments in their life that are keeping them from the full freedom they're made for. And we feel that intuitively. Like if we're really honest with ourselves and we really sit long enough in the silence, which is really hard. I'm there with you. It's really hard. If we sit long enough in the silence, we get a little uncomfortable. And if we if we allow ourselves to be uncomfortable, there's something there. It's the revealing of the inner mystery of the inner self, right? Absolutely. It's too good, Carrie. There's so much here.

SPEAKER_01 52:31

Ah I know, I know. We both do Catholic coaching, and and I will say the whole mediocrity thing, that's one thing my coach really helped me break free from because I was living a very mediocre life. And God doesn't want us to live that way. And there's another way. And when we do the coaching with him, I mean, so many things, so many things can come forward. We we realize the thinking that's that's that's tied to the mediocrity or the fear or the doubt or the being visible or the being vulnerable, and we really get a chance similar to therapy, but different from therapy, and that we become aware, but we learn how, okay, this is where I am now, not in therapy, this is where I'm stuck in the past, but with coaching, it's like this is where I am now. So I want to move forward in my life, but I'm stuck right where I am now. So I think the combination of things like therapy and coaching and inner healing ministries and like what you do with couples mentorships and programs, I mean, there's just so much available to us as Catholics. And there's no excuse anymore. There's no excuse. And you know, we live a very different life when we decide who we are in our Catholic identity rather than living the life maybe that somebody else thought was good for us. Or when we move out of these developmental stages, because if truly you don't heal things from your childhood or your adolescence, you'll be a sixty-year-old person in a five-year-old's body, right? It doesn't matter if you get older, you're if you don't heal that wounding, you're still gonna live that way.

SPEAKER_00 54:04

Yeah, you're sitting in the child seat or the adolescent seat. You're not functioning out of the adult self. And often there's disassociative patterns or people. I mean, psychosis is a big word for it, but there's there's parts of self, right? Like the internal family systems we have. We have parts of ourselves where we were unable to process something and we carry that inability with us into the future. We have these protective parts in us that keep us from feeling, right? Like it was actually a protective part. Thank you, Jesus, for these protective parts. Thank you, God, for protecting us from the times when we couldn't process it. But guess what? There are people out there now who can help you process it. And if you're an adult listening, there's somebody who can walk with you. If you're questioning things now, going, Wow, whoa, what is all this language? I've never heard anyone talk like this before. I remember that feeling. I remember being like, this is a whole new reality. And it's freaky. You're like, whoa, everything's shifting. It's kind of too much, right? But but God's grace is present and it holds us up in that and he sustains us in all things and he works all things for our good. And we have to trust that when we truly want to enter into the deep with him, we're gonna find some hidden treasures we didn't even know existed. And that's that's where the world's not going. When you were talking earlier, what came to mind too is people idolizing, like, I need organic, I need, I mean, I do the same thing. I'm not idolizing it, but because we want to care for our bodies. We we want to feed ourselves something good and whole, whole foods, right? We're we're taking such good care of ourselves, maybe, or maybe we're not, but for people in the world and the culture where there's a whole movement of, you know, like the whole 30 or the pale or whatever. But spiritually, we should be really alarmed at what we're feeding our minds and our spirits. And so when you were talking earlier, Carrie, I was thinking about when you're talking about mediocrity and like believing the lies, like, where are we being fed? Who's feeding us? Who are we spending time with that's feeding us junk or fast food or things in our spirit, like the media? Turn off the TV. Start watching some stories of the saints. My husband and I, we are very cautious about what we bring into our home. We've blessed our home. We have a whole ebook on building a domestic church. You can go and download on our website. We have resources and a story in there as well. Um, we also have a podcast episode about it too. And really, we have to be intentional about how we're living our life and what we're feeding our spirits, not just our bodies. And I think we get so caught up in this. I think it's mechanism. I think that's the right word for it. We get caught up in like spirit bad or ignore spirit, body, good, body, body, body. You know, we can't. We have to tend to the spirit, confession, adoration, make time, carve out time. It's gonna be uncomfortable. It's gonna feel weird if you haven't been prioritizing your spirit and allowing yourself to have this renewal of the mind, which is a process, it's a journey to really become more self-aware, to stay curious about ourselves. There's nothing wrong with media, there's nothing wrong with entertainment, there's nothing wrong with a good baseball game or whatever. But it's when we start going to that to feed us and fuel us, that shouldn't be our fuel. Our fuel should be from God. He should be the only thing that keeps us going every day. Because if we're letting something else fuel us, we're just chipping ourselves of the true treasures of the true goodness that we're made for. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 57:16

And it's forming us too, who we surround ourselves with, like you said, the media we consume. It's forming our identity and kind of goes back to what we started with in the beginning is yeah, soul ties. Oh my gosh. That's a whole episode on its own. But yeah, that's part of being intentional is taking an an account of or an audit, so to speak, of your life and seeing what are you turning to. And is this bringing me closer to God or is it bringing me further away from God?

SPEAKER_00 57:45

Yeah. So I had to learn the hard lesson of boundaries in a lot of my healing because on the outside it looks not very charitable to set boundaries to say, hey, I have these limitations and I can't keep living like this. I need this space to heal. And the only reason why I healed so much was because I set boundaries and I had somebody holding me accountable in those. Um, and they were very difficult. And on the outside, a lot of people didn't understand, but a lot of people didn't know what I knew, what I came from and the kind of abuse I endured. And the longer I pretended, the harder it was for me to live in my world and be the mother I was made to be and the wife I was made to be. And um, I mean, I'm still always learning. I'm I'm a weak person. I'm very weak. So the Lord is always like, fall flat on my face. I gotta go to confession all the time. But in that I learned that He is a God of boundaries. And if you are somebody who easily gets pushed around or you don't know how to say no, that's a good place to just look at right there and begin and go, what's going on? Am I idolizing uh the need for approval? You know, who or do we have attachment disorders? Like I was so codependent to a point where it was keeping me from sitting in the vehicle of the motherhood that I was made to sit in because I didn't know how, I didn't know who to be myself. Like I didn't even know who I was. I literally had no identity or no um understanding of self. And so a lot of my journey was just learning to sit in my body and be present in who I am and be okay with that. And obviously that's pretty extreme and severe because a lot of my story is more severe in that sense. But I think a lot of the work we do, Anthony and I, like a lot of people carry similar things. I mean, one in four women are sexually abused, and the stats, those are just the ones that are are told about and are in the statistics. You have 50% divorce rate, like our world is not doing well. The anecdote to that, like I was talking about earlier, theology of the body, and becoming who God made you to be. Yes. If you want to see justice reign, if you want to see order in the world, you begin with yourself, not in a selfish way, but in the way God says, love one another as I have loved you. How are you loving yourself? How are you receiving his love? If we're blocking out the love of the Father, there's some things to look at there. But I over the years in my healing, I have learned I have struggled to receive love because it was foreign to me. Like that level of intimacy or like acknowledgement makes me tense. So I have to sit in that and go, why am I responding this way? Like, this is really interesting. I'm noticing this about myself. And when you come in non-judgmentally, you're literally inviting Christ in his love because he is love himself. He is love. Like this whole movement of love is love is love is love. Like, mm-mm, Jesus is Jesus is Jesus is Jesus. Like love heals, love. Dr. Bob Schutz says that love heals, love heals, love heals, love heals. Jesus is the healer, he's the restorer. He comes in when we welcome his love into our lives, nothing will ever, ever be the same. And I know, Carrie, you know that intimately and personally, like he transforms everything. Will it come without a cost? Absolutely not. In the mystery of our faith, absolutely not. There are plenty of other people who can hold that space for you. It's just learning to reach out, which is one of the most vulnerable steps, reaching out. Yes. But I I love the image of Peter walking on the water, right? Because the waves are always gonna be there. And Christ is calling us out of the boat and into something unimaginable. None of us can walk on water, but God's asking us to walk on water spiritually with Him, to enter into the deep, or even the image of the apostles after the resurrection. I think that was the reading today, actually. When you know they're they're throwing their nets out, they're trying to get their food, they're trying to get their fill. They've been working all night, they're they're throwing out the nets to get fish, right? And they're getting nothing. Isn't this not our story? Like, is this not the story of humanity of our life? Throw out the nets, nothing. And then Jesus comes. So often he'll he'll pull us into aloneness with him in the desert, or he'll he'll come to us. If we're so ignorant to invite him, he'll come to us. So we have to be careful because sometimes he awakens us because he loves us so much in his mercy. Speaking of divine mercy and his mercy, he comes in so many ways. He stops us in our tracks. So here you have the apostles fishing, they're getting nothing. And he says, Put your nets out into the deep. And what do they do? In the deep, they pull more than they could even handle. Where like boat almost collapses, right? And they have their fill and it fills the boat, they have an abundance. Yes. Abundance again, right? They have an overflow. But they didn't go in the shallow. God calls us out of the shallow, he doesn't want us to live on the surface anymore. He doesn't want us to live in the ordinary, he wants us to live an extraordinary life because we are made in his image and likeness, and we are made for supernatural abundance in the spirit as people, as Christians, as humans. Satan wants to keep us like we watch all these Marvel movies. They're fun, they're cool, but we are the ones who actually have the superpowers. We're the ones who have the superhuman strength, we're the ones who can live in the spirit and use these gifts that the spirit infused in us, these God-given gifts from the Holy Spirit that are literally divine. And Satan is so jealous because he's been condemned. He's a fallen angel of light, so he's intelligent. We have to be very careful in the times we're living in, on who we're giving our time to and whose voice we're listening to and where we're going. People are going to chat GTP to discern their vocations, to ask questions. It's okay to ask questions to Google and whatever, but we have to be careful where we're going for this kind of deep interior discernment of self. Go to God. Don't be afraid. If you're afraid of God, there's something there that you need to work on, right? And so there's so much here, Carrie. Do you have any more questions for me? Because I want to, I want to also offer a testimony too for anyone listening. And I can give resources to that towards the end. But um, you know, my husband's story is very unique as well. And so our marriage story is just really beautiful for anyone listening, they can find it on our website. But we'll link some of that on the show notes too.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:56

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, the only other thing that was really coming forward for me when you were talking about boundaries was if we don't have boundaries, one, we don't know who we are. And the definition of boundary is where we begin and where someone else ends. So when we're younger and we're, you know, in our families, there can be enmeshment that can happen and you don't know where you start and your mother ends or whoever it is in your family. And I think one of the things that shows up a lot with people I work with is people pleasing. And I think that's a result of not setting boundaries, and and people are afraid to rock the boat. And I think when you are not living a mediocre life, you're gonna rock the boat, you're gonna ruffle feathers, you're gonna be seen, you're gonna be vulnerable. And it's a choice, you know, because everybody has opinions. We have opinions and then other opinions. Everybody has opinions, and you know what? If someone's opinion does not match yours, that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:52

That is okay. And I think the journey with Christ is learning to let go of the expectations that other people have for us, yes, and learning to really embrace the journey of what God has for us and how that's actually holy, that's actually charitable. And this false charity plaguing the culture of like just do it because it's kind. God doesn't call us to be nice, right? He doesn't call us to be peacekeepers. He says, be a peacemaker. Blessed are the peacemakers, right? Yours is the kingdom of God. And making peace doesn't mean letting people steal your peace or giving your peep peace away or becoming a doormat, right? Like true charity might look harsh on the outside. It might look like I love myself enough to recognize I can't keep in this relationship the way it is. Like, if you come to a place where you're willing to look at what I'm experiencing and you want to talk about it, then maybe we could have that conversation. But for now, it's a hard stop until we can get to a place where we can kind of meet. I mean, you talk about ameshment, that's a really good word. We talk about that a lot. It's a lot of my journey, actually. And then there's Also, attachment disorders because we're made for attachment. We're made for a level of codependency that's healthy, right? Like as children, we need to be, we're codependent on our parents. That's actually rightly ordered. It's when the parents become codependent on the children because maybe their marriage isn't very healthy and they're not able to properly attach to their spouse because of infidelity or mediocracy, right? Or idolizing finances or addictions in there, whatever it is. If you look at an addiction, it's really somebody's attached to an item that they think is going to fill them because there's a void they're trying to fill. And when you're married, this is Anthony and I's story. When you're married, you're made to attach to each other. I actually am made for my husband and he's made for me. We just had this conversation the other night and a very difficult conversation again in our marriage, because marriage is hard. It's not easy. And there's the cross of marriage or there's the cross of divorce. Like it doesn't matter, right? We're all going to carry across because we're all unique people. And God calls us outside of ourselves to become a gift of self to another. But we can't become a gift if we don't recognize our value. If we don't honor who we are and we don't come to know the treasure in the gift, if you read the Song of Songs, he talks about his bride being adorned with jewels, right? We are his most prized possession. And if we're not looking at ourselves that way, there's likely something keeping us from knowing that. And that took me years, Carrie, years. I still struggle. It depends on what seat I'm sitting in. If I'm super tired, I'm probably gonna fall back into the part of me that's a little bit more grumpy and jaded and critical of myself, right? That is reality. We're not perfect. God doesn't want us to be perfect, He wants us to be in need. I love Terez's little way. And when I was talking about it in the beginning about being the littlest, I've really Terez found me. I like to say, like the saints choose you, they find you. So she's my confirmation saint. Mine too. Oh my gosh, how sweet. I love it. She's always connecting me with people. So she's my confirmation saint, and her little way has really spoken to me because number one, she was a young girl when she died at like 24, I think, and she's a doctor of the church. Okay, come on, feminist movement. Like, look at the Catholic church. She's right here. Sure, she was like a nun and stuff, and maybe that's boring, but guess what? She knew her value and she knew her God, and she touched millions of lives and still is. Like her legacy is beyond our it's eternal. You can't beat it, right? We ought to be inspiring for such things. We ought to be inspiring to be great saints. And the only way we do that is by living wholeheartedly for God, right? Which I know is your mission, right? Um, yeah, it's so good. But yeah, so Saint Therese in her little way, I've just always really found her story to be inspiring because we don't have to do great things and big things. We just begin by saying yes in the littlest way. We begin by little small steps forward. And that's how we can be set free ultimately. That's where we find Christ. And look at how he rewarded Therese. She was so rewarded for her fidelity to him. And really, we're all called to the same, the same life and the same reward. And God just moves beyond our understanding and beyond He wants to give us so much more pack down, overflowing, a good measure of so many good things. Amen.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:13

Well, Melissa, this has been such an amazing conversation. So many things we covered. I really appreciate you being on and for the work that you're doing with The Abundant Catholic. I will link your Instagram and your website and some of the theology of the body things on on here as well. But is there anything else you wanted me to include or share?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:34

Oh, I'll share our testimony. Um, I'll we'll link the ebook that we have of our testimony. If anyone's looking to read a hopeful marital testimony for people who are struggling in a marriage or if there was addiction in a marriage, my husband and I both come from homes where we had some places that we had to heal from, and it affected how we were relating to each other and the communication barriers we had. We were in crisis, we almost divorced. And look, we have five children now. By the grace of God, we've made it through. We overcame a lot. We did a lot of hard, hard work. And so we're here to share the fruits of our work with you. Um, so you can check us out at theabundantcatholic.com. You can go to our resource tab. We have a bunch of free resources. Like I said, the ebook on the domestic living, how to build your domestic church and integrate faith into everyday life. And we also have a bi-weekly newsletter you can join. Um, and we have a podcast as well. But this has just been a pleasure, Carrie. You're a gem and I love the work that you're doing. So I'm a huge supporter here, and I just really appreciate you having me on.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:30

Oh, thank you, Melissa. And I will say, Melissa's podcast is awesome. Please check it out. I will include it in the show notes. Melissa, I would love for you to close us in a prayer. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:42

All right, let's just take a deep breath. So much covered today, Lord. So much covered. And God, we just invite you into our hearts at this moment in time. We just invite you into this space. As we're listening to this episode, maybe some things came to light in our mind's eye, in our interior self. Maybe we felt it in our bodies with like a knot in our stomach or a frog in our throat, whatever it is, Lord. Let us just sit and bring that to you. Let us open up what was revealed to us while listening to this podcast to you. We give all things to you and we stay attentive to ourselves. Teach us your ways, Lord. Help us to gain self-awareness and understanding so that we can release things that are in our bodies and in our spirits that were never meant to be stored in there, Lord. You call us to full freedom. You call us to abundant living. You call us to living wholeheartedly for you. Help us to know how to do that and take the next right step, even if it's little, even if it's seemingly insignificant, Lord. We give it to you. Reveal the way, even if it's narrow and constricting, we know it leads to life. This is your promise. So come, Holy Spirit, in your most precious and holy name. We bind all of this to the foot of the cross. Amen.

unknown 1:12:09

Amen.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:12

Thank you, Carrie. Bless you all. And um, I look forward to uh anyone who reaches out, you're welcome to at any time. DM us on Instagram, check out our website. And if you're looking to support us, shoot us an email. We'd love to hear from you. Bye. God bless. God bless.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:36

Welcome to the Living Whole and Holy podcast, where the Catholic faith and intentional living come together. I'm your host, Carrie Jane, a recent Catholic convert and Catholic coach, here to guide you toward a life that's rooted in Christ, centered in his love, and aligned with God's call. Whether you're a convert, revert, cradle Catholic, or simply exploring the faith, you're in the right place. Join me each week to hear inspiring conversations including conversion and reversion stories, timeless wisdom from the church, and practical Catholic coaching tools that help you deepen your faith and intimacy with Christ, cultivate Christ-centered habits, and be transformed through the renewing of your mind. If you're ready to discover and align to the beauty and richness of a fully integrated Catholic life, you've found your home.