(00:05) so I’m calling all of my overachieving under receiving ladies who have been giving it their all girl bossing wiing mothering and somehow instead of feeling happy content fulfilled and grateful feel bitter overwhelmed numb and resentful so I’d love to give you some of my hot takes and quick tips to end this overwhelm to shift your nervous system into a state of receiving so that you can have and hold more and so that you can handle what comes at you with more grace and ease and relaxation because a relaxed woman is a powerful
(00:40) woman so I’d love to invite you to Exhale my free masterclass where I will share reframes to disrupt your burnout patterns I’ll be offering my signature solution as well as a free gift so register at Kelly brogen md.com exhale or at the linkoln show notes I’ll see you there PE [Music] I’m Dr Kelly Brogan you may know me as a New York Times bestselling author of a book with an exploding pill on the cover Renegade psychiatrist pul dancer or honorary member of the disinformation Dozen what can I say I’m a born provocator I’ve spent most of my recent
(01:25) life exposing deceptions connecting dots and discovering the secret places my inner victim is still waiting to be liberated and now I feel called to help you reclaim all of your parts your health your sexuality your power and your expression so that you can finally truly own yourself I want to ignite in you that inner knowing and the pulsing Vitality that lives beneath your disempowerment disconnection and resentment so that you can audaciously courageously and playfully alchemize your struggle into the specific pleasure
(01:59) of Who You Are this is Reclamation radio hi and welcome back to Reclamation radio I am Dr Kelly Brogan and today’s guest is Alyssa jarvey who is a longtime friend Ally and academic intellectual collaborator I have done extensive amounts of writing including published case reports and case series and books with her support expertise competence and intellectual Grandeur and she is uh somebody who has ascended to the heights of feminist promise as a career woman and who has modeled for me what it looks like to lay
(02:44) that down at the altar of motherhood and wife Dum making up that word and all of the yield the dividends and the surprising uh experiences that attend and this life as a relaxed woman so I think of her as the best example I know of the power that we have as women as mothers as wives as women in the world to transform our experiences without requiring anyone else to get on board to understand what we’re doing or to otherwise even support what it is that we are holding uh the vision for so in today’s episode you
(03:30) will learn about what to do when you earn more than your husband why a relaxed woman is a threat to Modern agendas and how to know whether you are in your red black or white phase of your journey as a woman enjoy Alyssa welcome to the show thank you I am I’ve been looking forward to this discussion chat and it’s always funny for me to to have my friends on the show because first of all it tends to be like very emotional for me and second of all it’s hard to know how to contextualize how much amazingness there
(04:08) is to Showcase in uh your life experience and also in your families and thankfully you have started to write about your experience which has helped me to feel to rest assured that people are going to know where they can go to to learn more about your your insights because I think you are uh you epitomize so much of what what is the Vanguard of Womanhood right now and uh your experience is is the best example I have in my lifescape of how a woman can change her story turn things around Humble herself and claim her Birthright
(04:51) you know of embodied femininity so I want to start uh really zooming out with something that you said to me in in a voice note that I I have loved and reiterated ever since and it has to do with the relationship between motherhood and careerism and the timing of those priorities right because a lot of what we’ll unpack today has to do with this myth that you can have it all right you can be a mother and you can be a career woman and you can be a wife and you can do it all at the same time and isn’t that amazing that we have all of these
(05:27) entitlements and all this Freedom that we get to enjoy and you said to me once that in a conversation that you were having with another friend of yours who was debating freezing her eggs I guess right so that she could focus on her career and the Fulfillment that she was you know hoping would lie there in you said you know maybe she should freeze her career and focus on her eggs and I thought that’s the summary right like that’s the summary and then I read in one of your articles this amazing quote um that I
(06:00) want to sort of tee you up with where you said I thought that a woman who was just a mother had failed in some way either she didn’t hustle enough to realize her potential or she got trapped by something and so I want to share with everyone your journey of relating to your role as mother and also high-powered career woman and intellect and academic you know how did that begin to shift like when did the Cards start to fall and like how how was it that you began to see a different perspective about your own priorities and did you
(06:43) think that those priorities were there the whole time that’s kind of the conclusion I’ve started to come to is like those were always my priorities and I’ve been gaslighting myself around the you know the priority of my career achievement success my mission even my service you know to humanity Rel to to my own family so yeah I’d love to just start there and hear a bit about your your journey with regard to Motherhood as a relates to your career wow well thank you for that amazing introduction and it’s an honor to be here and I’m
(07:14) hoping that my story can help Inspire others listen to souls Whispers they may have because I was one of those women who grew up in the age of stem where if you were doing science technology engineering math like you had the golden ticket to success and I was blessed to have that aptitude from an early age and I was fortunate to have a number of scholarships opportunities mentors that got me to a really high place in the career World very quickly and looking back I see a big part of the blessing of that was having a mother who prioritized
(07:48) motherhood even though I never believed that all she wanted to be was a mother I thought that was a cop out or a way to make me and my three younger sisters feel better like oh you’re electing to be with you’re not just putting your life on hold to get us through school and then start living your life when we’re out of the house but that’s kind of how I operated because I would see this dichotomy of career women who were out being someone and had what looked like high status High fulfillment High degrees of freedom could direct their
(08:18) lives were not subject to a husband who was earning or the whims of kids which I now having two young kids realize can be quite a roller coaster from day to day so I ended up doing a PhD in postdoc at Yale in biomedical engineering and Immunology I was working on nanoparticle vaccines before they were thing not really my plan but God’s plan there and turns out to be quite relevant years later I was a faculty member at Y in my late 20s teaching undergrads working in the hospital and trying to improve the patient experience and surgical outcomes
(08:54) a lot of interesting stories there and then was recruited to a multi-billion dollar healthcare investment firm right before I turned 30 and spent several years there in various roles and it was by all measures a dream job because we had a huge budget I was being flown places to meet with the best and brightest in science and engineering and Entrepreneurship I had a remote job mostly before that was a norm I was paid more than I thought I could make at my age and I felt that I was just lucky that along the way a courageous and
(09:28) totally unique different differentiated masculine man decided to court me and we got married around the same time I started my job in healthcare investing and I as an investor I could feel myself a little bit hardening because I started to see the realities of the business of healthcare I had seen it in Academia kind of how the research wasn’t as organic as I thought it was and that it wasn’t a totally meritocratic space and I had always felt like kind of an outsider because I did not grow up in a academic very academic family so I had
(10:04) the advantage of pattern recognition and kind of more objective observation and I would see a lot of people who had these high status markers of department heads or very highly cited author in the research Community or getting a lot of money from farmer Consulting but often their lives were a mess and they would either consciously or unconsciously signal that their lives were a mess and I’d Wonder like okay clearly like this career status thing isn’t quite working but maybe they just need more money maybe Academia is faltering because
(10:41) there’s not enough smart investors out there who are putting money in the right place to try to change the world through Healthcare Innovation and then I found myself on that side of the table with the big budgets and kind of the power position and I saw how the human experience was flattened into data points and how things like debilitating Adverse Events were just put in the table and buried in the back and it was just like all these little paper cuts on my soul as I was going so I was in the healthcare investing world for a few
(11:13) years before we had our first daughter and anyone who becomes a parent knows that everything can change in an instant both when you realize you’re pregnant and then when your baby arrives and it’s this incredible demolition of yourself and really elegant rebuilding if you let it happen and we had decided in their very logical Minds my husband and me that whoever liked their job more and made more money would continue working and whoever didn’t wasn’t there would quit their job and be the primary parent and at the time my husband had kind of
(11:49) gotten to the end of the road and his nuclear engineering job I was making more money my job was homebased so logically it just made sense that I would do maternity leave and then when I came off maternity leave I would go back to work and he would quit his job and be the primary parent and it was great for like two weeks when we did that I guess we can’t really take out the confounding factor of covid starting and the National Emergency being declared two weeks after I went back from maternity leave but we were then kind of thrown
(12:20) into this Lial space of okay our baby is well taken care of she has me most of the time like in like 30 the 60-minute stretches I can nurse I can hold her I can try to connect with her in like set intervals and my husband can take her along to Home Depot or work on his newly founded woodworking business we can put the pack in play in the basement he can take her on Hikes like this is great she has one parent 100% dedicated to her and she has like a 30% maybe 25% of a mama too and it was good but it just kind of
(12:58) started to fall apart a little bit as I got busier at work Co was quite a busy time in the healthcare investing world and there were new types of Demands new types of ethical gray areas that I found myself in and the dream job that I thought it was really lost its luster after I had the experience of being with my beautiful perfect newborn daughter and I was just trying to like get done with the work get done with the called so I could go back to her and the more work I had the harder that was and then the shorter the intervals were and then
(13:37) the more frazzled I became because when we did this whole equation of whoever is the primary parent we didn’t know that motherhood completely changes me from the inside out and I didn’t realize the toll it would take on me and my marriage to have this Arrangement which was very culturally applauded my husband was encouraged for being a progressive partner and really taking on the role of being a father and he loves being a father and he’s an excellent father but there’s something that mothers give their kids that is different and
(14:10) complimentary from fathers and I think is really critical in those first few months and first few years and fast forward a couple years my second was born a son both were born at home I think that’s important too for a woman’s empowerment and activation and after he was born it went from being like tough to work to just intolerable and that’s when I knew that I had to get out and that’s when we kind of started the conversations of what would it look like if I quit my job not in that eloquent of terms it was basically me saying like I
(14:44) can’t do this anymore we need to figure this out I need to quit and I think it’s it’s notable and why I love to Showcase your experience to my other friends and you know women that I work with even is because you are I often refer to you as being the most competent woman I know and you have been my favorite collaborator all of these years that you know we have worked together on various projects and I’ve had a very inside look into the way that you can get [ __ ] done and your capacity which I think you know Rivals
(15:26) if not surpasses mine and I get more [ __ ] done than anybody I know and so it’s like you know we are the types of of women who could continue to tell ourselves the story that it’s fine we’ve got it we’ll make it work we’ll just apply more force of will to the situation that is already declaring itself dysfunctional and eventually it’ll just work out and life is tough and you know it’s the burden of not having an extended tribe and family and Village and oh well you know but you had what I would refer to as you know that
(16:00) little no inside that said mm not for me this is not for me and you had the audacity to listen to it and I’d love for you to paint a picture of the you know the the finances of your situation if you feel if you feel down to do that because it’s really relevant uh when women are breadwinning right it’s a more extreme example of the kind of leap of faith that that can be taken uh however most of us are just co- contributing right so it’s like you know we both have a job we’re two family in what is it two income family and we need that right so
(16:41) if we were to sacrifice one of them we’re just gonna you know handicap our family in a way that feels irresponsible and Reckless but you’re actually the bread winner and have all of these credentials and accolades had built your career up to this point were being solicited actively you know for even higher paying uh more prestigious roles in the world I’m constantly asking you to help me with [ __ ] right like there’s like there is so much evidence that you you can commodify your intelligence and expertise and how could that not be in
(17:20) the interest of your family especially because you have this like loving husband right so it’s just interchangeable parents right we’re just parts and pieces that can be swapped out and you had this little no and you you decided to listen to it so I think it’s really helpful for people to know a bit about the finances because it leads us into the part of the conversation that has to do with choosing your role as wife so for you that kind of right like that happened a bit synchronously but you decided to own your choice and
(17:53) decision to be a mother a bit before I think your decision to be you know what what Laura Doyle might refer to as a surrendered wife your decision to to take on a role as wife that was not necessarily in your your comfort zone and I see a lot of it having to do with the trust-based decisions that you made around the the finances in your family and the extraordinary things that emerged from that from that leap yeah thank you there’s so many threads we could go down there first I want to say that I think this notion of earning
(18:25) potential is a real handicap to us women doing what we actually want and focusing on what we want to do in certain phases of our lives and at this point I I think it’s safe to say almost more women have higher earning potential than their Partners based on professional degrees and the amount of ourselves that we give to our employers and I think that’s kind of a misguided use of our spiritual gifts as women where we will completely devote ourselves to a newborn do whatever it takes to keep them alive and um hopefully give them delight and
(19:05) comfort and raise them right but we are have been very guided into applying those competencies to a system or an employer and when you’re deploying your spiritual gifts that way someone else is defining your worth and for me my worth was defined higher than I thought on the monetary scale and provided a very comfortable income for us to be for me essentially making 98% of the money uh my husband had a woodworking business that he started uh pretty much when Co started and was making some contributions here and there but our our
(19:44) living income was 98% my salary and again it wasn’t that difficult of a job which is another trap because from the outside it looked amazing it’s like oh I’m home why why would I quit this oh you get an auto pay like twice a month and you have excess money at at the end of the month you can do all these things and make investments and you have this great husband who is doing a fantastic job raising the kids so there were a lot of cultural pressures to just keep on keeping on and ignore this feeling that something was wrong and that I was not
(20:26) only doing a disservice to my children by not being focused on them first but also at the service to my marriage my husband and myself and the noticing the disservice to myself was the hardest for me to acknowledge but I think being on the other side I see the most transformation when I finally listened to it and started the conversation with my husband that this Arrangement isn’t working for me and in ways it wasn’t working for him either and it was kind of subtle and unspoken but I would fall into traps of superiority and felt like
(21:07) because I was the one earning the money breastfeeding the kids like running the house I had license to be a real jerk to him and be irritable and to explode and that was just my right because I’m the one in control and everyone has to fall under my tyrannical rule when I felt like a tyrant and no one could really like push back on that so I had inadvertently taken on a more masculine role in my household and when there’s someone who’s taking on more masculine then someone kind of takes on more of the feminine and then that inverted
(21:44) polarity wasn’t great for us as a marriage and from the outside like everything was fine everything was good everything was great even but there are these little subtle things that I just felt weren’t in alignment and felt that there had to be a better way if I had this longing in my heart then there’s got to be something else and money is not going to be like more money is not going to solve this because I kept getting bonuses I kept going up I kept getting recruited for other jobs where I could make a jump and make even more but
(22:16) it really wasn’t money that I was chasing or status or title I saw in Academia people chase titles and status and in Industry people chase money and I had offed out of Academia and I wanted to act opt out of the honic treadmill of money and then the other thing that I had observed so frequently was women particularly who had essentially said that they they will be that great wife they will be that great mother after I make partner after I have a million dollar exit after like it was all these career things that they felt had to
(22:51) happen before they could then focus on the relationships in their lives and as you referenced in the intro I really do think there’s an order of operations for relationships for your fertility for building your family and I had seen so many women who either didn’t have kids because they were continually chasing the rising bar of Career Success and I also saw women who had totally distant marriages divorces never got married and then would find themselves alone when their career dropped that they’ put in 30 40 years of service to something that
(23:29) didn’t love them back and they get the same two weeks notice that the intern got and I think a lot of that happened in Co so I saw it in quick succession of women who had really devoted themselves to a career and found themselves completely pushed out and then alone and regretting that they had put their career before either their husbands their children um or any sort of relationships to create a community the other thing I want to say on it is that there are different phases in our lives which is something I didn’t notice
(24:04) until I start getting older and reading more mythology there’s this amazing mythologist Dr Martin Shaw who talks about the symbology of color and how it relates to life motifs and there’s red phases there’s black phases there’s white phases in the in healthy development and red is associated with summer youth frenzy High status High possibilities it’s your teen years your 20s you’re building your career you’re traveling you don’t have responsibilities you have a ton of energy and then in a natural Arc you get
(24:37) into a black phase which is more of a descent it’s a loss of something it can be associated with lower possibilities lower status but even though things are slowing down on the outside you’re having so much Soul fortification and there’s so much work being done on the inside and you’re going into a new phase where you get to the white which is the mar of your inner polarities and that’s when many artists do their greatest works and when they when you can develop empathy and Leadership and our culture is so obsessed with red and we as women
(25:11) just keep building on the red unless we let ourselves be taken down into the underworld of motherhood or wifehood which are the most amazing initiations and Transformations if you let yourself be worked on and taken apart so you can be reconfigured in a new humbler more empathetic way I believe the recording I recommend more than any other is my victimless mothering Workshop which is the product of 14 years of motherhood where I help smoke out the reflexive control-based habits of unconscious parenting and specifically the way that conditional
(25:48) love hides in the well-meaning holistic Mama Vibes of a woman like me who is so convinced that she’s ending all the abuse of her motherline by imposing rules was meant to protect her kids against toxic food Tech and Pharma I have been humbled and I’ve seen some darkness in my own righteousness and in the holistic health mothering world so I want to open the conversation and I think it went really well so I’d love to share these recordings with you and attendee said I was pretty emotional during the call I journaled like 10
(26:23) pages afterwards my husband told me I looked happier already and I feel lighter that call with Kelly felt like 10 years of therapy in 1 hour it cut through to the core so I hope you’ll check it out and commit with me to truly ending victim Consciousness and fear-based parenting in all of the places that it hides the link is in show notes yeah I I’m so glad you brought that up because you introduced me to Martin Shaw’s work and the handless Maiden which then became a feature in the reclaim woman which you you helped
(26:56) me to edit and there is probably no better tale of the heroin’s journey and I think it’s entirely a function of the programming that we are indistinguishable from men that we might imagine that we could subsist in this red phase right like just never ending efforting driving you know achievement and goal oriented behavior when the cyclical nature of alchemy is such that uh if you resist entering you know one of these phases you don’t get the gift like you don’t get the yield you don’t get to experience the the complimentary nature
(27:36) of opposites within or or or without So speaking of without so you talked about how you were in this very relatable inverse polarity with your husband you know feeling not only that martyr energy uh but also probably you know very entrenched in the habits of I can do it better than him you know clearly look how much I’m doing and I also feel unsupported right and I feel like it’s too much so when you had this conversation in him you said that there was some part of him that also felt like H something’s not quite working here
(28:14) even though on paper even to the outside OBS Observer it might have seemed like they have a really great situation going on so when you proposed that as you know as lucrative Breadwinner you were no longer interested in you know being the career woman that you had set up your entire life to be right so so the vulnerability of that admission I think is Big it’s notable right because there’s almost the acknowledgement that what you have prioritized up until that point might have been like wrong-minded or like might have been like a mistake
(28:51) of some sort at least that’s something that I grapple with in my own life right like the idea that everything that I was working towards all these years it’s just a trap we fall into of making wrong like what we were doing when we’re ready to change right so so you get to this moment and you you tell him that it’s it’s not working for you and did you come up with a solution did you Empower him to solve the problem like what actually happened yeah so I think to the first point I don’t know if there are any mistakes that were made in
(29:29) how we live our lives because we’re doing different things in different phases and we have different needs and different levels of responsibility and those relating to us so I don’t regret the career Arc I’ve had it probably went on a little too long if I could I truncated a couple years but I feel fortunate that I truncated it when I did and I’m not saying I wish I truncated 20 years ago it’s I wish I truncated two years when you had kids maybe I wish yeah I wish once I had my first I listened to that voice saying no because
(30:06) I remember right after I had my daughter and I was about to finish maternity leave I had a call with a highlevel person in the firm and I’m watching my newborn daughter in the swing sleeping just so in love like so in her rhythms and this woman who sounded shrill after like two and a half months of just baby days was like well you know you need like to get on the partner track like transfer to this boss make sure you go to New York office twice a month Boston office twice a month fly out to San Francisco like once a month and you know
(30:36) do this this this and I was just staring at my daughter thinking no no no like thank you I agree like your advice is sound if I wanted to do this and I no longer want to do this so I wish I had the courage to have quit then but there are so many external circumstances cuz if I had quit then that would have been March 1st 2020 so it’s one of those things where you don’t know the context and the backdrop and what else is happening so I do think timing is perfect in its own ways for all the lessons and now I can look back and
(31:15) empathize with people in various stages of this but I do wish I had known more what I know on the other side which is why I’m happy we’re having this conversation so what it look like I so Arthur was a few months old my second and I was supposed to go on this work trip that I knew was totally a waste I didn’t want to see the people I didn’t want to do the project I was completely against it internally but I went and I essentially had a breakdown while I was there because I was still nursing so I was scurrying into the bathroom the pump I
(31:54) like leaked through a shirt at one point it was just a mess and I was like crying like why am I doing this so I came home from that and told my husband like I am done like you need to figure this out I am not doing this anymore you have 12 months and that was essentially how it went so at first I was still in my control mindset of I know better than him so I was like you need to close these deals for The Woodworking business you need to make this much money a month you need to do this this and this and like cajoling him to essentially make
(32:29) his woodworking business be enough to pay our bills and since we were making more money than we ever expected to make our bills had gone up and we were living a bit superfluously so it would have been more than he was making with his engineering job before so it was a pretty high Target to go from a single or low double digit thousands to like you know six figures but I was like well I’m not going to do it so you better do it and his resp response at first was not satisfactory to me because I said because he said like we can just live in
(33:03) the trailer like he’s like I don’t get like quit your job tomorrow you’re not happy I don’t care if we’re poor we both grew up without much we could grab some family land in Maine put a like grab a cabin grab a double wide and like live mortgage free which has its appeal in its own way but it’s not what I wanted to hear I wanted him to like rescue me and say like yes of course I’m going to handle this random emotional outburst and come up with an amazing plan as I’m trying to juggle our one and three or six Monon and two and a halfy old it was
(33:36) just a total random attack so I didn’t like that answer but I realized that if I just quit I had this unshakable faith that it would work out and that I would never know what he was capable of or our family was capable of if I didn’t just quit and it was right along the timeline I told him the wood business was making more money at the 12-month Mark but not enough to pay our bills but I went ahead and quit anyway and we had this really actually magical freefall of not knowing what was going to happen and I had this
(34:18) piece that I can’t explain and right after I quit it was as if Donald remembered who he was and all the strength he had and all the confidence he had because I finally stopped trying to make him do things my way and he was like oh I’ll just get a remote engineering job capitalize on my 10 years of very differentiated and valuable experience and do the woodworking on the side and as soon as he totally shifted his mindset we had never even thought of it which is kind of silly he had more offers than he could like uh he ended up taking one
(34:54) which was the highest paying it was 100% remote fast forward to when he started he loves it he’s getting promoted he’s ascending responsibility he loves his boss they love him he’s working overtime and he’s making a lot of money and it went from zero to a lot and it was because I went from a lot to zero and we pretty much switched in three months after I quit it like moves me so deeply to hear this and we’ve been talking about this for a while it’s not the first time I’ve heard this story and I need to put in in neon lights what you
(35:31) shared about that reframe of the freef fall of the uncertainty of the the trust because I also know as your friend that that was a moment in your journey where you began to connect with God on a level that blossomed like a gorgeous uh bouquet and that um opportunity that we generate for ourselves if if we miss it you know um not only do we stay in the struggle in the victim story in the stress physiology but we also we don’t get to relish like the experience of feeling held by a greater design and the remembrance that you as the wife
(36:20) afforded your husband it it feels to me like a remembrance to hear about like yes this is how it’s supposed to be he can solve this better than you can and and again I will reemphasize that you are a bad [ __ ] like you you could solve a lot of problems okay so the fact that that your husband solved this problem of providing for your family better than you could is very notable with you specifically as as an example and and I know that that led to a period that I I believe is ongoing of experimentation with the principal of a a surrendered or
(37:00) empowered however you want to phrase it wife and we’ve you know both been exploring Laura doy’s work and how it can be applied in different circumstances and you know she’s she herself is not a mother so applying this as a mother I think is a really important lens to introduce women to if they haven’t heard about this so I’d love to to share a little bit about like what you’ve been playing with since then as a wife because I think that was also the next Vista right it was like the next playground to explore like how
(37:32) could you be Alysa even more while being even less of the Alyssa you knew yourself to be right yeah I do want to back up you had mentioned getting closer to God that’s a really really important framework for basically 2023 was when this all went down in early 2020 so I told Donald in summer of 2022 like I’m done you have a year so that whole like summer 2023 was on our mind for a long time in January 20123 a friend invited me to a motherhood group at a church and I grew up kind of check the box religious Catholic tried different we tried
(38:16) different churches once we got married didn’t really find anything that stuck but I went to this motherhood group and I was just in awe of these women because first of all it was 9:30 a.m. on a Thursday so these were women who didn’t work I could do it cuz I could get my work done from like 8:00 to 9:15 go there and then rush back and continue working so there were about 50 or 60 women who were just beautiful and radiant and connecting with each other and having authentic community and their kids were being taken care of in like
(38:46) the building next door and we were just there to listen to a speaker to eat really good food and to be in book group discussions I was like what is this this is amazing it’s Freight so that was my first encounter with Christian women and seeing that they were being sustained by something that I was not familiar with and I was curious to say the least and then that same friend invited us to a church a couple months later and my husband and I both had a felt experience of feeling at home and also being very interested to continue and I don’t think
(39:21) it’s any coincidence that the week I quit I also got baptized and once I quit and got baptized it was just a recognition that I had been putting much too much pressure on my husband to save me and that’s a charge that no mortal human can endure and perform well enough to my changing standards of what I needed for a rescue and that I had to go higher than Humanity to really place my faith and when we both started putting our faith into God these ideas would just come and these opportunities would just show up the job that Donald got is
(40:00) a remote job in Alabama that’s exactly specialized for what he had been doing in Connecticut for 10 years and they were looking specifically for someone like him and how how could that happen we had no idea it existed so I think God really meets Us in the suffering and God loves it when we hand over control and we say I’ve heard your voice for so long telling me to make this change okay I’m going to make this change I don’t know where it’s going I’m terrified we might lose our house we might I don’t even know but I’m listening to that voice
(40:36) inside of me and I have this faith and peace that something’s going to emerge and as you alluded to what emerged was better than anything I could have planned and I think that’s such a testament to surrendering both to God and to one’s husband because if you married him shouldn’t you trust shouldn’t you think he’s tell her question yeah wasn’t he existing perfectly fine before you got married wasn’t he paying his bills making somewhat decent decisions living in a house that was habitable and it’s just funny how I think culturally we
(41:16) immediately downgrade our husbands like as soon as we get married and then we kind of keep doing that as we have our feminine superiority which can be Pro out in lived experiences if you’re the bread winner CU you’re like hey like why do I need him I’m making the money I’m cleaning the house I’m basically raising the kids and you can get these unconscious resentments and victim stories of you can’t do it right why does no one help me it’s like well why would he help you if you don’t think he can do anything to your standards so
(41:52) that was probably a really big moment of surrender but prior to that also around the time I met the Christian women and ended up joining the church was when I read Laura Doyle’s book and certain phrases just really stuck out to me like whatever you think when he asks something and there are times where rarely actually where he’ll be like no really I want your I want you to tell me what you think usually it’s like a me reflecting a question and him realizing that I have faith in him and since I read that book I became so hyper aware
(42:28) of how many times I told him to do something and I was wrong like even in church this last weekend I laughed because we’re always a couple minutes late so we almost always are in the front and this time we’re late and I was like can we not go in the front and he’s like all right you go find the seat and we walk in and one of the pastors is like oh hey guys you guys are always in the front so go up to the front like all right I guess we’re in the front but there was kind of like a gift hand out where it was actually advantageous to be
(42:57) in the front and I was like oh of course like here I am getting humbled telling him what to do even though he’s doing the best in the situation we’re in and it works and actually it was better that we were in the front or I’ll tell them like Park here and it’s not the right place to park but I think ultimately when I stopped trying to tell him what to do I opened myself up to be surprised and delighted and really impressed with the Creative Solutions that he would come up with and sometimes it wouldn’t be on my timeline but how often are
(43:32) things actually on our timelines and I also realized some of the things that I would say to him I would be so angry if he said to me there was an example where I would said I was going to clean the playroom and I kept saying like oh next week I’m G to clean the playroom next week he never nagged me on it and then one day I cleaned the playroom and I was like okay this took me like five weeks but I I did it and I realized all the times where he’d say like oh I need to fix that and I’d be like when are you going to fix it when are you going to
(43:59) fix it why don’t you stop doing what you’re doing fix that and I thought if he had said that about the playroom I would have been so upset and it’s really not fair and not kind and not intimate to be trying to control another person especially because I chose this person because I liked how they existed before me you might have a sense that supporting your energetic and subtle body is important but how exactly does one do that like short of scheduling regular sessions with an energy healer how do you do that most of the time I
(44:32) find that when we take supplements it’s from the energy of fixing ourselves and honestly it’s really no different than taking a medication at that point that’s why I love flow remedies and specifically my girl Katie hess’s Elixir from Lotus way the formulations that she creates are so nuanced that sometimes it feels like I wrote the descriptions myself the last one I took was designed to dissolve go go go mentality as well as as fatigue weakness apathy and resistance to self-care I have a monthly membership called flower Revolution
(45:05) where I get a new and super powerful OnPoint remedy sent to me every month and it blows my mind how resonant each one is with exactly where I am in my process I think of this as a truly feminine investment that harmonizes my process and allows me to walk talk and interact with Grace you can try it for a month or six at the link below and if you just want to dip a toe and to learn more about how flowers heal you can take their quiz did you have any experiences of you know watching him actually fail because you talk about these instances
(45:40) where he ended up being right despite your you know maybe covertly held belief that you knew better in the moment but reversing this polarity obviously can be treacherous because there’s a lot of uh reinforced superiority inferiority but also the masculine wound of being uh a failure and fundamentally like flawed and not that we don’t all have that wound but it’s right a particular flavor and expression of it is is probably really exacerbated in those vulnerable moments where you let him take the wheel you let him actually try you let him
(46:20) comeand deer and he’s feeling you watching him to see if you’re if he’s going to actually do it well I imagine that there’s you know and I’ve certainly heard that it’s it’s common that there is a lot of like you know failing especially in these transitions as they happen and that allowing your man to fail allowing him to [ __ ] up is a part of investing in the dividends that you actually want as a woman ultimately which is that he develops the esteemed confidence and your uh unwavering gaze and faith in him as as a man so did you
(46:52) experience that kind of thing or was it just pretty much an immediate transition into like you know he’s got he’s got the wheel and this is actually better for both of us yeah I think with the job thing there were ups and downs it’s been about a year so it’s a little bit hazy but there were times where the first job offer he got I kind of wanted him to take because I was like oh good this will work and he was like No it’s it’s not exactly what I want and I’m thinking like oh my gosh are you gonna hold out for this exact job that in my mind I’m
(47:20) like it probably doesn’t exist because he’s got very specific things and um he didn’t take that first job and I’m so glad he didn’t because then better ones came but it definitely I think for that wasn’t failure but a lot of holding my tongue and trying not to put time pressure on things and I think there’s like tiny instances of failure week to week but I think when you have the room to fail you can get the the beauty from it so the one I thought of was last weekend he has sold all these Cedar Cedarwood Christmas ornaments to a local
(47:57) store and he was supposed to meet the person like Saturday morning to show the ornament prototype that he had made and then Saturday morning he’s looking he can’t find it he’s like I know I made it but I can’t find it I’m holding my tongue like I’m not going to say like you should have put it here but I’m just like let him and he like couldn’t find it and I like was like oh that’s too bad and he’s like you know I’m just going to go in the basement and make it another one but I’m also going to do like three variations to see if she wants like
(48:26) other things too he’s like so I’ll just call her and tell her I’ll be a couple hours late but she’s at the store all day it’s okay but I’ll have more stuff and I’m thinking like this is a pretty good Rescue of what looks like a failure so he made them he went there and she loved all three and it’s like wow if he didn’t lose it he wouldn’t have done it and if I came down on him he probably wouldn’t have done that either it probably would have been like a adversarial thing and I think it’s just Grace that I want extended to me and
(48:57) that I try really hard to extend to my kids and other people and I think it’s the hardest to extend to yourself and your spouse so as I extend it to him I’m getting better at extending it to myself and I see the more I can separate failures and behaviors from the character of a person the less hard on myself I am too I love this H it’s just it just makes so much sense and I love to round out our discussion uh with you know sort of a treatment of this idea of a relaxed woman because you uh left me a message once and you were
(49:39) describing this moment where your daughter was riding her bike and you were outside with her and you just had nothing else to do right so you you had quit your job you were you know through this transition of your husband taking over as breadwinner you had already a totally different experience of what it was to uh relate to money right since he was the one earning it to relate to your schedule to relate to your responsibilities and you were just watching her ride her bike with absolutely nothing else pulling at you
(50:16) and your best resources were now being offered to your family to your daughter to your you know son to your husband and when I I listen to that mage I felt this like ache this like Twist of of grief you know in in my core because to this day I have never experienced uh such a moment and I you know I credit my career and the Primacy of my career to that reality even in the golden handcuffs kind of an you know extraordinary uh job and vocation that I enjoy now there is never actually that capacity to be fully
(50:56) present to what is in front of me and it’s especially painful when it’s my own kits right so like when I and and I’ve been making you know as you know this this transition over the past year myself to put my own experience of mothering first and I’ve noticed these subtle moments that that I you know I think of you because you know I’ll be doing the dishes and I used to think about the dishes as like units of productivity something to get through yeah yeah that that that well that were being like stolen from my work my you
(51:30) know something I could be doing where I could be like making more money for the family or like this is not a revenue generating activity I know right right and so you know when I decenter my career and I centralize my daughters doing the dishes becomes just part of the devotional practice of the home and caretaking them and it has an entirely different you know role in my lifescape than if it is competing with time that I would be spending doing something productive for my career so you wrote the sentence in in one of your substack
(52:07) articles where you where you say seated in our natural rules actually knowing and delighting in our children instead of seeing them as something else to manage appreciated by our husbands and booed by friendships we question more and we purchase less so you talk about how a relaxed woman is poten potentially the greatest threat and I couldn’t agree more and it’s part of the thrust of what the reclaimed woman is all about so I wonder if you could share a little bit you know for th those of us on the other side of the fence here you know about
(52:41) what that has felt like and and maybe even some of the challenges maybe even on a nervous system level of easing into this comportment towards your environment your life your relationships and and really yeah like what you’ve enjoyed as somebody who now has touched that dimension of of her femininity yeah I feel so blessed honestly to be in this place because I didn’t know if it existed I was hoping it did but wasn’t sure once I had seen it with other women and other families I felt more confident but then it’s always does this exist for
(53:19) me and that’s a question you don’t know the answer to until you take the leap and give it time because it definitely took me a few months to relax I’m still not fully relaxed that’s that’s the goal but I went from such a overstimulating environment where it’d be like a call with high stakes power plays making someone wrong so someone else could feel right it was very an emotionally charged work being an investor and then I would try to like be like sof and sof and soften I have an hour with my kids and then I’d try to
(53:55) like switch to that and then it might be a nice hour it might be an hour of food on the floor and getting hit with the plate as you’re picking it up and then it’s like ah why am I doing this I do everything for them and Martyr martyr Marr and then I try to go back and be armored up and intense and witty and I don’t know so it took probably three to five months I think to really kind of come off of all that dopamine addiction and to feel adequately stimulated by being with my kids because the pace is totally different right now they’re 2
(54:29) and 1/2 and 4 and 1/2 and slowing down being with them is definitely an off-ramp and I kind of knew that from also surrending in my marriage like At first it’s probably going to feel weird and fake but just like try to be in it and lead with how I want it to be and then it kind of follows you and becomes real and you’re not like actively trying to be a certain way anymore I think think like being able to flow with the natural rhythms of kids just reduces so much friction because I I like feel deep empathy for my friends who have to get
(55:08) their kids up before they want to wake up get them ready get them in the car drop them off here drop them off here run to work and those rushed mornings are like the worst of us that’s the high stress times that’s when we flip out because you know your 2-year-old lost his shoe and that’s a normal thing for a 2-year-old to do but when it happens on when you need to be somewhere else or you feel you need to be somewhere else it brings out these really scary parts of yourself and I wanted to change my context to stop bringing out so many
(55:41) scary parts and start bringing out more beautiful parts and it really took the macro context switching for that to happen and I think I had so much repression of my natural sensitivities from years the 20 years of hustling that they’re coming back online slowly and I’m afforded a kind of presence and gratitude and just awareness of how blessed I am and how I have this incredible husband and Incredibly stimulating children once I stop expecting them to be like the adult world and meet them in their microcosms
(56:26) of their unarmored awareness and the Abundance of Joy they have just being outside and trying to get into that role and also just an unconscious remembering of wow that’s me too like especially with a daughter I feel like it’s somewhat easier to recognize yourself in them and then maybe try to do some things differently than were done to you at that age and honor their souls and how they’re processing the world instead of trying to match them to the level that you’re at in your late 30s and having all the life experiences that I’ve had
(57:09) and I wonder if you can say a word because I alluded to it about what it feels like in this state to be provided for you know like what is the what is the money coming in feel like to you it’s really nice honestly I like just I used to like kind of religiously check the bank account and think about what I was spending and I just don’t really think about it that much anymore and when we get windfalls we’re both happy and on like a dayto day I’m really not I’m not using it as a reason to be stressed or a false idol because it’s
(57:44) not even something that’s taking too much of my attention and since I was a child I haven’t had that experience of being provided for and cared for and I can see that my husband likes that too like it’s just this great feedback loop where he’s more confident he wants to provide for us and the gift that I can give him and even that he said is for me to enjoy it yes yes yes you are such an inspiration your family is an inspiration to me and I know that you’re at the Vanguard of a movement I have felt effervescing within
(58:24) me and just haven’t had you know the the timing that you are enjoying to uh put it into practice and I’m very excited that you’re that you’re documenting your journey and your substack we’ll make sure that that’s uh linked which is also supportive of your your latest Endeavor which I’d love for you to share a word or two about and and then I’d love to ask you know like what would you whisper in the ear of a woman who is newly pregnant um starting her you know her role as mother in the world whether or not she can hear it you know like what
(59:02) do you what do you feel would be like an important thing to you know to to suggest to her invite her toward I know so many things so for the first question I think not having to work for money has afforded me the ability to hear creative impulses and then direct my competencies towards those creative impulses and I’m seeing it with a lot of other rela women that when we don’t have to hustle for an employer the things that we feel are right or we want to see in the world we can use those skills that we got out in
(59:36) the world to make those come to fruition but doing it in a non-transactional more of an offering type of context so for me personally something that I would love to see in the world and I’m taking steps to bring forward is a nature-based community center for multi-generational wisdom sharing and homeschool enrichment programs and we have a nonprofit called The River Valley Collective we have a growing group of families who are different yet overlapping in several values of cherishing childhood creating a safe space for Souls flourishing and
(1:00:16) tapping into the vast abundance of our local community and um the resources were afforded living in the Connecticut River Valley area and then what would I tell a woman about to have her first kid I think maybe that life can be simpler and a simple life is not what our culture wants us to think will be fulfilling because then we would not have to buy things and follow different authorities I would say that choosing motherhood and wifehood intentionally is humbling but in that humbling you can hear God and feel that you’re
(1:00:59) discovering new parts of yourself or parts that have been there all along and that your contentment can then be based on internal not external factors and that there will always be a time for a career and I feel that really leaning into motherhood is going is already but it’s making me a better entrepreneur because we have other Ventures some solo some with my husband makes me a better entrepreneur but also if I do decide to reenter the career world I know that I will be even more competent and more empathetic and more
(1:01:37) holistically oriented and that these crucial young years are and everyone says it you can’t get the time back but it’s true and I would rather heavily invest in my children than invest in external sources of status or perceive safety and trust that what feels right with our maternal instincts is where directing our energy will yield the greatest fruits and I’d say the last thing would be that our children give us a permission slip to opt out of what we think we’re supposed to be doing and either lean into or discover what we
(1:02:19) want to be doing and when we’re oriented in that way whatever we birth along with our children will be of more service to the world than trying to change the world with our careers well that’s a mic drop I love you women and I’m so so so excited that we put this on record instead of just in our personal voice notes and I am so here for the Ripple effects of this not only in your own sphere uh but for those families listening and I’m just very grateful thank you thank you well I love you too and thank you for this opportunity and
(1:02:55) for all your support and encouragement along the way [Music] [Music]
