(00:00) I was a psychotherapist for 10 years. I had my license revoked by my board for stepping out of bounds with what is okay under my licensure. The narrative that was reported to my board. There were pieces that were absolutely true. There were also pieces of the narrative that were truths that were really taken out of context and there were untruths in there.
(00:33) Engaging in these licenses is a form of consent and agreement to all sorts of disempowerment. You are required to submit. It was so empowering in my system to just see reality for more of what it was. Those patterns that were keeping me from reclamation, like needing to be good, needing to be liked, it was going to take something big to really have me take a look at that and transform.
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(02:03) It’s a six-month tailored journey, all for less than $2,000, and it’s designed to be the very last selfimprovement program you ever invest in through September 27th. Join us live. Head over to kellybroenmd.com/rws. Hi, and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Broen and today I have the pleasure of speaking to a therapist by the name of Katherine who has lost her license and in many ways been persecuted for doing her very best to serve her patients and clients. This is a tale of all of the shadow of
(02:50) overgiving, of playing the rescuer, the savior role, and how it can come back to bite you in the most divine ways and also what it looks like to move from good girl living into the practice of wearing the villain crown. So, Katherine is a graduate of my programs and she models for us and expands the permission field of how it is that we can alchemize the most horrific circumstances especially when it comes to the professional witch hunt.
(03:32) I talk a little bit about my experience as well which I almost never talk about uh publicly because it’s there’s almost nothing to say right when you contract in the form of a license with these organizations and entities you enter into a field of consciousness that is predicated on victimhood.
(03:51) So, are you going to flail and protest and fight and defend yourself, or are you going to recruit these practices and step into your more beautiful life that you only can access because of the initiation offered by, you know, the rejection from this system. So, stay tuned and enjoy. Welcome, Catherine, to the show.
(04:18) Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Kelly. I’m very excited to showcase your experience for many reasons. Uh the primary one is because I find it inspirational personally and professionally to give the mic to women who are narrating very very victim-y experiences from a sovereign lens and who are practicing the alchemical opportunity that I know exists in every shitty thing that happens in every outrageous you know, experience of adversity.
(04:58) And in these um these these very sort of black and white, you know, stories where there seems so clearly to be a villain, right? And and and you seem so clearly to be the victim, right? when we model for each other what it looks like to not necessarily apply a bunch of spiritual bypass and like oh everything is how it’s meant to be and I guess everything’s a learning experience and without subtly and potentially manipulatively sharing the story from a place of poor me can’t you see how I have been taken advantage of betrayed violated don’t you
(05:37) feel bad for me kind of a loose ritual but something that feels very grounded mature and powerful that that is a whole middle path, right? It’s a whole other way of telling the story of the thing. And my sense is that that this skill, it’s a soft skill, right? And it emerges from a desire to live a beautiful story, right? to walk a path that has deep meaning and to be a woman who has not survived the shrapnel of toxic individuals but who has instead initiated herself well and your story is that story and
(06:27) you have come up uh through our community and through our programs and I’d love to learn you know what’s been useful to you. It’s always amazing to get that kind of real-time feedback. And I want to just start at the beginning of your tale of what I am framing as an initiation and we’ll be also highlighting you know probably the most common dynamic that women especially in the clinical realm find themselves in as practitioners, healers, doctors, therapists which is this effort to be the bigger savior, right? to provide profound caretaking to go above and
(07:12) beyond in the giving, right? And the shadow of that is profound. I saw this meme uh the other day. I wish I could remember exactly what it said, but it was something like, you know, the therapist is saying, you know, you really need to stop imagining that you can fix broken people. And like the therapist actually also doing that, right? So the the shadow of especially the conventional world of health and wellness and healing is something I also want to unpack in in our discussion. But what I really want to spend time on is
(07:50) also the experience of moving from good girl to bad girl and back again and back again and back again. So yeah. So, so let’s start um at the beginning of what you are comfortable sharing because there are definitely uh constraints that are real in in the narration you’re going to to share with us.
(08:17) But as I you know I reminded you before we started your story is archetypal and we will recognize especially those of us in professional caregiver roles especially those of us in the system who’ve made agreements in the conventional allopathic system to provide certain kinds of care. We will recognize the temptation that often arises to bring our soul, you know, to that work when it’s not meant to be soulful work, right? Like that’s not it’s like the, you know, psychiatry etymology is like doctor of the soul and I literally didn’t hear the word soul once in my decade long training. So, it’s not that kind of a
(08:51) not that kind of a party. So, we’ll we’ll bear that in mind, too. So, yeah, take us take us to the beginning, Katherine. Okay. Well, first I just want to thank you again for having me on because this pro the process of me getting through the experience that I’ll share and I’m getting to the point where I could follow this little yes and ask you to speak about this in my journey on the podcast is a really brave gift to myself and this huge gift you’ve given to me.
(09:22) So I’m really grateful to be here. So I’ll start with kind of reviewing the initiatory experience and then maybe go back to the beginning and talk about my patterning that got me into that um that that was revealed to me during that experience.
(09:47) So I was a psychotherapist for 10 years and really loved that work in a lot of ways. And to you know cut to the chase with the initiator experience in 2020 I had my license revoked by my board for stepping out of bounds with what is okay under my licensure. So I’ll I’ll I want to go back to to my early patterning as I then walk forward to that piece. Uh so I was a child that um really wanted to do right and really wanted to be good and did not want to be judged, wanted to be liked by everyone.
(10:32) And you know in my process of learning in this experience I saw that this is how I felt safe in the world by being right and being good. And so it was my mission as a child to find out what is good. So what is good and what is bad so I can be good and what is right and what is wrong so I can do what’s right and then I will be safe and loved and safe from judgment from others and did this quite well.
(11:04) I think this pattern worked quite well for me in general in life. You know, looking back, I was quite likable and um did well in school. All my teachers liked me, had lots of friends, right? I I played this part well. And if I were to look at that through the victim triangle that you talk about a lot, I really saw myself, you know, I put myself in that rescuer role because that is the role that felt good and right.
(11:36) I certainly did not want to see myself as the victim. That felt very very threatening and scary and I certainly didn’t want to see myself as the villain of course and so uh that rescuer role was the place where I felt safe and comfortable and honestly I even my worldview was based on this. So I I actually didn’t really see villains in the world.
(12:02) I only like I saw villains were actually victims in disguise. And if they just got the right help, which I’m sure they wanted, right? If they got the right treatment, then everyone they would be okay. We would all be okay. There would be no villains.
(12:20) And so I actually saw the world in this kind of victim rescuer dynamic. Katherine, I wonder if you agree with this that part of that lens and the nuance of it is that you personally have what is needed to help those villains, right? So, there’s there’s almost this, you know, and I relate to this, of course, like like a narcissistic inflation that happens when you’re in this psychology that says, you know, everybody is ultimately like me.
(12:49) I just have to help them be more like me. Meaning relatable, right? For sure. Absolutely. And you know, part of this protective mechanism was this like the impath pattern, right? If I could read someone else’s needs and knew what they were so that I could help them be comfortable maybe before they even knew what their needs were.
(13:09) This was all subconscious to me and then everything was okay, right? They were okay. I was okay. And in reflection, I actually see that I framed my worldview about God in this way. That God kind of being the ultimate rescuer and the people including me being like the people that were meant to be rescued if we were, you know, if we connected to God, if we asked for God’s help, right? That sort of thing.
(13:40) And so I was maybe even, you know, I’ve been a real spiritual person since my 20s. So I think I was even, you know, feeling like I was doing divine work, right, by being in this rescuer role. So then, of course, I become a therapist. I mean, what else should I do? And specialized in trauma, which makes sense, too. Like, let’s go to the hardest thing with the people that really needed help the most.
(14:08) and I got very trained in trauma and and in a lot of ways was good at that work and you know really liked that work and so that’s the patterning that led me into this initiation and I did in fact you know well let me say it this way so the narrative that was reported to my board there were pieces in that that were absolutely true and I absolutely made mistakes And I absolutely stepped out of the bounds of what a licensed therapist does.
(14:40) There were also pieces of the narrative that were truth that were really that was really taken out of context and twisted and there were untruths in there. And it’s been a really interesting part of my journey that because of the way HIPAA works and me being the therapist that despite at times really wanting to defend myself, right, I haven’t been able to.
(15:07) And and you said before we got on like I could have I could have and that could have you know led me into to legal trouble with HIPAA or something like I could have chosen that but it has really felt like part of my path that I’m not doing that that I’m really sifting through all of this and finding my sovereignty and reclaiming myself with you know um rather than well that’s not right here’s my story.
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(16:40) at checkout. Your future body will thank you. And if you don’t completely love it after 6 weeks, you can return it for a full refund, no questions asked. Enjoy. Yeah, I want to double click on this because some people listening might not know much about how this whole lensure realm works.
(17:07) So, you know, first of all, these licenses and engaging in these licenses is a form of consent and agreement to all sorts of disempowerment, right? So, that whole realm is very internally coherent. And what I mean by that is that the way that conflicts are handled is you it’s like you are you only can plea bargain right like you are required to submit and as somebody who has you know I was stripped of my license I actually don’t talk much about this if at all in New York for not wearing a mask with a patient during the pandemic and I didn’t even have a practice I didn’t even live in New York at that time like that was the allegation and Even though it’s
(17:44) fictitious in its entirety, there was no option for me to even defend myself, which feels like, talk about the victim opportunity there. Like, can you believe it? It’s probably even still in my telling of the story a little bit. And it’s fantastic in another way and through another lens because when like I could have maybe invested lots of money and time and effort in defending myself, but it wouldn’t have been fruitful and I was told as much.
(18:14) And so my only like, you know, really liberated option, right? Like the only path forward was to just say, “Okay, [ __ ] it.” And to recognize I don’t even want it. Who cares? And if I stand on principle, I’m giving my energy to a feudal effort. Right? So I’m sure you can see too in your own experience.
(18:38) It’s like the forced submission actually is probably the best and most merciful way to exit that kind of a contract. But many may not know. It only requires like one call to the Office of Professions. I don’t really need to be publicizing this, but it’s the truth. It’s like one call, right? And one it could be completely baseless accusation.
(19:05) I’m actually sort of impressed and amazed that these things don’t happen more and then you are put in the position of like basically guilty until proven innocent and it becomes almost impossible to engage that system the way that it’s set up and you could argue that this serves you know those who ultimately are in many ways like you know victimized by their practitioners and I get that and when we find ourselves on the other side it becomes an initiatory opportunity to get really clear and what our priorities are, what we actually want out of this the situation, and how much we’re
(19:36) willing to actually donate of our life force energy to the struggle of right buying eggs from the hardware store, right? It’s this kind of, you know, more bespoke clinical offering that you provided. That’s not what they’re here to protect and defend, right? The Office of Professionals. So, you probably saw all of that in um in short order.
(20:00) And I certainly went through my period of feeling very victimized by the board. The way they handled it felt very patronizing and punishing because I did, you know, and here’s my old patterning, right? Like I did all the things. I did a year of clinical supervision combing through my mistakes. I did all of this therapy.
(20:21) I did, you know, specialized trainings and specialized consultations. and they did not take my learning or growth into account. And so I I definitely felt victimized about that. And then I really got clear of, you know, if if I was expecting them to give me any sort of protection, then I had to abide by that contract of staying in the bounds. And I didn’t.
(20:45) I didn’t. And so that was really my responsibility. And you know, they’re a rule base. Like I see why they took my lessons. I get it now. And so that then did though set off, you know, you talk about in Reclaimed Woman that rupture of empathy and the big no because there was this with the narrative as it was presented.
(21:11) I felt very clearly in my own system like who I was and who I wasn’t and I was a no to you know pieces of that narrative. It doesn’t I couldn’t defend myself. I couldn’t share about that. But me just holding myself in this fierce love of I know who I am.
(21:37) I always came to my clients to hold them in unconditional positive regard and hold safe space and I always had good intentions. Did I then make mistakes? Yep. I absolutely did. And I was not going to to take on pieces of the narrative, which is funny cuz even as a even when I was little, I would remember like let’s say a friend or and I were, you know, getting in trouble in some sort of way, but I wasn’t doing anything.
(22:04) I would think, well, maybe I did do it. Maybe I did do it and I just don’t realize I did it right. It was like my second nature to take that on. And this time there was like a real clear no of like who I am and who I who I’m not. And within that you this rupture of empathy. It was really that rupture of that whole worldview of of like oh there is darkness in the world and there are people that want to do and this is not at all about any of my clients. This is about this worldview that broke open for me. there are people that want to do
(22:44) harm and don’t want to be helped and and so I feel like I swung a bit the other way of like seeing the villains for the first time and then I went down every rabbit hole you know of of the health care system and you know government and child sex trafficking like you name it I was like down the rabbit hole of the darkness of the world which sounds really horrible and it was so empowering it it was so empowering in my system to just see reality for more of what it was. And then I could make all these different choices. And this happened
(23:19) right before the COVID era. And so it feels like it was super protective for me cuz I got to see what was going on there with the deception in a way I really don’t know if I would have before. Like if the if that had happened one year earlier, like I really don’t know because playing on my compassion that really worked in the past, right? And so this world view like my whole world view shook and I was in more reality now since then in my integration I don’t just see villains and darkness everywhere that has integrated as well
(23:55) like I really and I’m I’m sure this will just unfold but feel like I’ve stepped out of that triangle in general. Yeah. But I I really worked with the shame, the shame of being punished and being bad and wrong and learning to self-husband as you say, but really hold myself in that and love myself in that. I mean, it was deep, deep shame.
(24:26) And I will say to anyone listening, like that is the gold mine of transformation. like the other side of sitting in my shame was like so much love for myself for for others really, you know, challenging and really really fruitful. And so, you know, if I were to continue with the timeline, so I did a lot of work with this and came into some of those little yeses with, you know, my family moved to Costa Rica for two years, which was this enormous gift.
(25:00) I started ecoin retreats down there was just riding horses again which was is my favorite thing to do and I hadn’t been doing being like finding myself and finding my voice as a coach. And then we moved back home to North Carolina. And what I know now is that there was a way I was still really hiding here because this is my community.
(25:27) And what I should mention is that when my license was revoked, this the narrative was shared among this therapist community and I was labeled as dangerous and bad and you know dangerous, a monster. And back then in 2020, a therapist who I’ve never met actually called my coaching, my spiritual coaching organization and told them they shouldn’t give me my certification because I was so dangerous. So that had been part of my work and I was feeling like I was on the other side of that.
(25:59) And then about six weeks ago, I put something out there. I had a friend of mine put something out on a local Sarah Coast Facebook page about a horsemanship clinic I was leading and my worst fear came true like I was completely I wasn’t on that group so I couldn’t see it all which feels like a gift but I was completely attacked for about a week with all of these therapists that I’ve never met saying I shouldn’t be coaching what a horrible monster I am and I was but I really at that point was able to reflect on what about this means that there’s something unresolved in me that this is
(26:37) coming up, right? And of course, I wanted to defend myself and share my perspective and it feels like there’s something really purposeful and divine in the fact that I I couldn’t and what it really meant. And so that was the big piece of wearing the villain crown in a way that I don’t think that I ever have.
(27:02) You have a quote I wrote down, you’re as free as your darkest secret that I was really hiding because I was afraid this if I was out there in any way, this narrative that was about me being a monster would be out there. And that fear came true. And it was another, you know, shame portal that I went into to alchemize. But on the other side, I got to a place of that that’s okay. Like it’s actually not even my business.
(27:28) These people who don’t know me or my story like believe I’m a monster. Like it’s like I can wear that crown and there are, you know, there are good parts of me and there are bad parts of me. Absolutely. And so I really, you know, practiced wearing that villain crown and knowing that that I’ve got me even if millions of people think I’m horrible for the rest of my life, which actually like before all this would have felt like dying. Like it really would have felt like death.
(28:04) And I’m okay. I’m okay. More than okay. So take us for a minute, Katherine, into the like actual moment of learning about this Facebook group and, you know, these colleagues who were witch hunting you and what tools you recruited, you know, how is it that you you were able to alchemize that? How is it that there even was an other side? And we’re not actually sitting here talking about how [ __ ] up it is that those people did that, right? And instead, we are having a conversation about, you know, the portal, right? The opportunity and the,
(28:48) you know, like I’m here to tell you about, you know, the richness of of shame, not as as a therapist or a clinician or a coach or practitioner, but as like a woman, ladies, listen up kind of a moment. So, so just take us into that and like the actual moment.
(29:10) What did you do? What tools did you recruit? How did you support yourself? How did you get yourself in that in that moment? I could feel it in my belly right now. So, I had my friend post this and then so it was a because I’m not on this group. So, I had a friend contact me and say, “So, there’s all of this chatter going on about you on this group, and I can feel it in my stomach right now of like a a a punch in the gut.
(29:38) ” And this this feeling of I’m caught. I was found out. My biggest fear come true. There’s there’s no like I need I’m going to have to go hide under a rock for the rest of my life. that’s the only option and I and the part of me that believes I am a monster um that I did something so bad and and I sat with it.
(30:06) I really I remember you know consciously bringing in my connection to divinity that self and my you know capitalist self my adult self and just let myself feel it for I mean it feels like a really long time maybe an hour with crying and letting myself feel the actual sensation of that and and the part that want that wanted to protect me was was coming in like if they just know if they just knew the whole truth, they would know you’re not a monster.
(30:39) And it was instead this like not letting that part sidetrack me and get me into that like victim story and being with the they do think I’m a monster. Am I partly a monster? Um wearing the villain crown to really feel through that. And I will say, you know, community is so important.
(31:03) Having beautiful friends that really really see me, a husband that really really sees me and is really a grounded presence was also super helpful. So I was getting that reflected at the same time which I’m I’m sure was quite vital process. So, if you’ve followed my work for a while, you know how seriously I take ingredient integrity. And that’s why I am so excited to partner with Equip because their prime protein is unlike anything else on the market. It’s made from just a handful of real food ingredients.
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(32:23) com/kellyroen to get 15% off your order. That’s equipfoods equipfoods.com/kellybrogan. If you care about real nutrition with real transparency, this is the brand to trust. I like to say that a Reclaimed Woman guards her energy fiercely, right? And she doesn’t give it away. uh in the form of blaming and fingerpointing and defending and proving, right? So, I can I can sense that in that hour and I don’t want to scare anyone cuz I like to recommend that you start with 90 seconds, but but it it can unfold, right? If if you recognize that in the first 30 seconds it’s okay to be with yourself, then you
(33:12) might open up to a whole hour of just bearing witness to and attending to with that devoted self-husbanding energy whatever the hell is roing around in your belly, in your chest, whatever is moving and just bearing witness. Right? So I can I can see how you had this you confronted this like fork in the road, right? Or you could have asked her to post, you know, this thing on your behalf and spent all this time, you know, uh, typing up exactly, you know, how you wanted to be perceived and the facts even, right, that would have exonerated and at least cast some
(33:51) more complex variables into the mix, right? You could have done that and it probably would have felt good on some level to do that, right? Certainly, it would have felt also good to have your friend protecting you and going to, you know, fend for you. And instead, what I hear you saying is that you chose to retain that locus internally, right? So you chose to say, “Nope, I’m not giving my energy to this.
(34:30) ” Which is in itself the record scratch of the overgiving that you might have engaged in as a practitioner. Right now, it’s the internalizing of focus. It’s the saying, I’m going to stay here instead of out there interacting with myself through all of those projections. I’m going to stay here. And that maturation, that initiation to this terrain over which you have dominion is something only an adult can do.
(35:00) Right? So that declaration in that little moment of upset, you know, whether it was conscious and intentional or just a readiness that surfaced was like the gift that this struggle gave you. And I’m very aware that those patterns that were keeping me from reclamation, like needing to be good, needing to be liked, it was going to take something big to really have me take a look at that and transform them.
(35:33) Like I I really cuz they worked so well in general. Like I never would have confronted that with something without it being something really big like this was where I got in really big bad trouble and was seen as really bad. And I also had a lot of neutrality for these therapists. That’s I mean if I heard what they heard I would think I was a monster too. Like I get it and I was a therapist.
(35:59) like I understand the desire to protect the client clients, right? And that was actually that showed me my my growth and all the work I’d done that I got there so quickly because of course at first I had the the anger and wanting to defend and then pretty quickly I felt understanding and neutral of where these people are probably coming from. Yeah.
(36:29) And it becomes ultimately uh impersonal, right? And again, I don’t it doesn’t work in my opinion to create more conditions for you to be the good spiritual girl, right? So, it it’s not to say that not taking it personally is just like the better thing to do. The reason not to take it personally is because then you get your energy, right? Like then you get to keep the dividends of all of that leakage that you otherwise would have contributed to defending yourself and proving and getting them to see trying to buy eggs from the damn harder or they’re not for sale. So, forget it. Just don’t. And
(36:59) there’s a there’s a yield that I want, you know, to talk about. But you ended the punishment cycle, right? Because this is how it works. We perpetrate from that victimhood and we become the villain and then, you know, we continue in this cycle of punishing and punishing and punishing and punishing.
(37:18) And it is um you can live a whole life that way. And it’s it’s no less of a life, but it’s just the life that doesn’t seem to tap into the the alchemy that’s available when you say, you know what, nope, not playing, right? Not playing. And I got better [ __ ] to do over here. Right? Like, it’s a kind of a a mischievous, at least the way I experience, like a mischievous bridge that allows you access to all different kinds of feminine archetypes, like the siren and the seductress. You get to take all of this judgment and
(37:50) criticism from others and lay with it. And it’s almost like you can know in the moment, I’m not taking the bait. I’m over here already. Like you go have your yap about about whatever is going on over there. So what do you feel like has become available to you has been born from this this choice that you made which may not have even have been a choice as much as a readiness to to play with something different.
(38:23) You know since you chose not to take the bait since you allowed people to see you as this reckless dangerous practitioner who’s not to be trusted and how dare she be you know imagining that she has anything to offer anybody. she should be locked up and you know you know thrashed or whatever.
(38:44) Like what do you think has been the yield of this new way of orienting? I feel like I’m in the middle of receiving that. I mean asking to be on this podcast is is in a way like me h coming out of hiding after this last incident, right? And um I do feel like I’ve reclaimed so much energy and there’s a sense of freedom.
(39:14) You know, you talk about existential kink in your book and I was looking at, you know, the part of me, there was the part of me that wanted to be so good and do nothing wrong. And then the part that wanted to be so bad that I was free that I did I wasn’t in that jail anymore of having to do it right to be okay. Right. And so so there is this freedom that uh has been unleashed and coming into well what what does my heart really desire? Um rather than what is right um what does my heart really desire? And you know, horses are this huge love for me. And so it’s it’s led me to not just like create the
(39:56) program that will help the people with the horses, but just like I now I just hang out with them a lot and meditate with them a lot because that’s actually what I desire and I know things will come forth from that or that’s the destination, right? Like even just hearing you say that like how how is that not the [ __ ] destination? you’ve arrived.
(40:19) Like there doesn’t need to be any more of the story than you waking up and like filling your cup in this very specific way that you do it, right? And feeling like that’s actually a priority. I mean that that harmonizes my world like that organizes my reality that you are a woman doing that now.
(40:43) Whereas, you know, your investment as a practitioner in virtue signaling that you are a good clinician, I’m not sure. I mean, maybe that contributes to the person in front of you. Maybe not because anytime you know any practitioner who’s listening, especially a woman, we have a gross tendency to exercise our shadows in this dynamic in this diad and to ignore many many a small no inside that says hm I’m going over time on this session or hm this phone call that seemed like an emergency really isn’t one or hm maybe I will take you know the discounted rate that has been requested or hm you know in in your case like
(41:29) maybe I will step a bit out of my comfort zone because this is what’s being asked of me by this client and and maybe that’s right you know we ignore that little no we overgive and it has strings attached and we meet those strings when our overgiving is not appreciated or worse when we are somehow punished for not giving in the particular way that is requested by you know a given patient.
(42:00) And so that um that cycle of generating imbalance under the guise of service always will demand correction. There will always be an opportunity to come into more coherence and order and systematized energetics. However, you know what you do with that opportunity is either going to keep you in the past, right? Or it’s going to allow you the opportunity to choose life and to orient towards your actual life, which requires that you begin to care about these little sparks, these little impulses and your desire, right? and your particular flavor of of sensual and embodied fulfillment, which I hear is
(42:46) exactly what has begun to unfold for you. Yeah, I’m so glad you said that because the reclaiming of my body wisdom has been this hu and I was a soul therapist which just makes me laugh now because I ignored so many signals of my own system for the sake of helping uh being in that rescuer role and and now I have promised myself that I won’t ignore those signals even if they make absolutely no sense to me because that’s what would happen before.
(43:25) I’d have the body signal and then my brain like rationalized it away or didn’t make sense. It, you know, my thoughts told me that well this is the right thing to do and and now I don’t care if I have a reason. I’m going to listen to that body impulse when it gives me a strong or even subtle signal about someone or about a situation. And that feels huge.
(43:53) Like just that makes the whole thing worth it, right? To be able to listen to myself in that way. And I get to teach my daughter that now, you know, I I could have maybe paid lip service to it before, but I don’t think I could have really taught her that, right? The credentials ultimately emerge from our lived experience.
(44:11) And there’s not really a way around that, right? This isn’t something that you can read in a book or hear about in somebody else’s experience and then apply. So I wonder Katherine if there’s anything that you can leave specifically a practitioner because I think this is so relevant to those of us who find ourselves in a in a seat and the seat is defined by I know better I see better and I’m here to help you right and there’s just so much woundology that can drive even assuming that position right so I often talk about how I became a doctor I I think in large part because of my intolerance somatically for human suffering like I needed to make it go
(44:52) away and the way I made it go away was by learning how to write a prescription. So so um while there may be you know agape level uh impulses at the heart of any practitioner’s drive to serve and help there is also huge shadows that may perpetuate the dynamics that you know folks come to resolve ultimately.
(45:19) So, I wonder if there’s anything that you that you’d want to share with somebody who is still in the system who is doing their very best from the deepest recesses of their heart they can access to serve their clients and and patients. you know that you can sort of like pitch up from the trenches and say like, “Hey girl, make sure to pay attention to this or listen to this or think about this or or recognize, you know, and not to prevent it, but just to maybe gain a little bit more sobriety in these moments where we become intoxicated by our own our own uh wounds.” Yeah. because I I do think there’s something really powerful about a spaceholder like cultivating
(46:01) yourself to hold space for another to be able to find their own truth. Right? So my, you know, call from the trenches would be though to to really pay attention and root out if there’s this belief that the client actually doesn’t have what it takes to find that themselves and yeah that they don’t have it in them that they they need something outside of them to find that to really pay attention if there’s even like subtle patterns in in you as the clinician that holds that because you know as safe of a
(46:40) space as I thought I held as a therapist if I’m holding that energetically even in this subtle way like that makes a difference right that that holds the client in this disempowered place so yeah that’s what I would say I love that so help from a place of your own obsolescence like help from this place where you don’t matter you don’t need to be there and it’s like really non-essential that you be the one helping.
(47:13) Right? That’s such um it’s such a beautiful invitation to come from this more balanced perspective rather than attachment to a certain kind of outcome, attachment to a certain kind of response or reaction. Uh or even, you know, being so certain, you know, that you are in a particular role and your client is in another role, right? Because do you think of horses with this? Because horses do this.
(47:40) They’re my biggest role model of this, right? They just are themselves and people have amazingly healing experiences in their presence. Um, but the horse is not doing anything, you know, in particular to cause this healing. The horse is just being authentically them and they’re seeing the person just as they are. And then this transformation happens.
(48:02) So I try to bring that into my work as much as I can. the unexpected teaching and teachers among us, right? And I I really admire and am so inspired by your walking this path and I know that you know sharing these these concrete examples of moments where it is almost irresistible to play the victim, you know, relationally. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t attend to that felt experience.
(48:33) It just means you don’t blend with the narrative and take that forward into your life because you’re interested in another way of doing it. It really expands the permission field for the rest of us to interact with those gut punch moments of adversity and villain really with a different kind of um a different kind of power.
(48:59) So, I’m very grateful for your sharing your story and for being yeah another woman on this on this path with me. Thank you, Catherine. Well, thank you so much, Kelly. And and you know, I did your reclaimed program right before this Facebook incident, which just was right on time and really hauled me and was a lighthouse in that in that passageway, right? So, so grateful to all that you do and thank you for having me on.
(49:34) [Music] I feel like I feel good.
