Episode 459: Always Enough, Never Done

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No need to whine and schwiney palooza.

Have some wine and join us on the Winey Palooza Podcast with Rebecca Greene.

Welcome to the Winey Palooza Podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca Greene. I'm a wife, mother of 3, and licensed clinical social worker. I also have 3 fur babies at home too. My passion has always been to help children and their families. I always dreamed of being a wife and a mother. Parents are always learning through their struggles, failures, and successes and joys. I am no stranger to this wild ride of parenting, and I know behind every great parent lies a team of supportive friends and family. I want to be part of your support system. I want you to know that you are not alone. We are in this parenting world together. Join me every week for insightful discussions with experts on parenting and marriage, as well as other parents who have found the secret to successes in parenthood. You'll learn tips and tricks to make life with your family better than ever. I hope you will follow along with me while we dive into what it takes to achieve a happy family.

Hello everyone, this is Rebecca Greene for the Whiny Palooza podcast, and I am very excited today because I get to talk to the lovely Erica Bonham. Erica, thank you so much for doing this with me today. Thank you.

I'm so excited to be here. Just, yeah, truly honored and excited. Yeah.

You guys are gonna love her and all things Erica. I just was reading all about her and she is fabulous. She's a licensed professional counselor, certified EMDR clinician and trainer, and ketamine-assisted psychotherapist who specializes in serving the LGBTQ community. Abuse recovery, and trauma related to social and racial injustice. Her bestselling book, Always Enough, Never Done, guides readers through healing their nervous system and transforming wounds into wisdom. As a nationally sought-after speaker and course creator, Erica is passionate about helping people recognize their inherent worthiness while acknowledging the personal growth work ahead of them. So now you know why Erica is so fabulous. And I have to start with, I mean, I love the title. Can you tell us what inspired you to write Always Enough, Never Done?

Yeah. So, um, so I actually created an online course first because I wanted to kind of democratize therapy, right? I found myself saying a lot of the same things, doing a lot of the same psychoeducation, but also just wanting to offer those more somatic exercises that I found to be really helpful and just sort of get it all down on paper in book form. So once I did the course, the book just sort of, you know, naturally wanted to come, come through me. I originally wrote— so the reason it's Volume 1 is because I wrote I ended up putting it all together at the end, and I had written like a 600-page book, and nobody wants to read a 600-page book about trauma. We have to leave that.

Oh my gosh.

You know, the fiction fantasy writers, people will read a 600-page book about, you know, romantic—

Dragons.

Endeavors, but probably it's a little too much for trauma. So the second volume is really about our collective trauma, relationships, boundary setting, things like that. So I'm hoping to get that out in the world either later this year or early next year. But this book is really about our individual work, our individual nervous systems. Um, and the reason I, I wanted to keep it in one book is because those aren't mutually exclusive, right? I think of those things as an infinity sign. Um, we have to work on ourselves. We do have to become our own loving sources. And we don't exist in a vacuum, right? We, we exist within the context of relationship and community, and our individual healing impacts how we show up in relationships and in our communities. And our— obviously our relationships and our communities impact our individual work and health and all of that. So, um, yeah, it was just this way of all this stuff wanted to come through me. And I hope there's wisdom. I hope there's wisdom there.

Oh, my gosh. I have no doubt. I will tell you that from listening to you for a few minutes, my nervous system is already calming down.

Yeah. And that's why I'm not really worried about AI taking over my job, because AI will never have that attuned nervous system to offer, right? It could say the right words, but it's never gonna have that attuned human heart and that attuned human nervous system that we all need. Oh, I love—

yes, yes, we all need that. And I'm gonna tell you from the title, I wanna just start with the title cuz it says that we're always enough and we're never done. Okay. So I need to know more about the title because as a mom, we feel never done and we don't feel enough. So can you help us understand that?

So I think the, the longer title, and I, I would invite you and your listeners to just notice what happens in your body when I say these words, because this could be the full title, is You Are Always and Already, Always and Already Enough, Lovable, Worthy, and Inextricably Connected to Every Other Living Thing on This planet, full stop. So just, just notice that part of it, right? And just notice what happens in your system. And, and we all have shadow, we all have work to do, we all have wounds that likely are, you know, unaddressed. And, and even if we've walked a fairly, you know, okay life in our individual life, we're just learning about ancestral trauma and historical trauma. And, and so we're all walking around with some unhealed stuff. And when we think that we are quote unquote done, done with healing, done with growing, done with our work, that really is the moment that we cause harm. And I, I'm so aware— I'm a mom, you know, I'm so aware of that never enough, that shame-bound identity that we're, we're never enough, we're never doing enough, we're never skinny enough, we're never momming enough, we're never, etc. And I, I really, that is, I was hesitant to name it that, right? Because I don't want to fuel that, that part of it. I, that's not, that's why we have to dip our toes into the waters of you are always and already enough, lovable, worthy. And we're all— we're in a constant state of unfolding, right? We're in a constant state of growth and evolution. And if we think we're done, that's, that's where we stop, you know? That's where we— that's where we might have a veil or a blind spot where we're not quite seeing how our people-pleasing is actually causing harm or causing resentment. Or, you know, I always say, like, even the nicest, most people-pleasing, martyry person on the planet is gonna eventually cause harm because they're, they're gonna look for ways that they're, you know, not being appreciated, or they're gonna look for ways that they're being hurt, or, you know, and then they're gonna foster resentment, and then they'll say something nasty like, oh, Are you resting? How nice for you. Well, some of us don't get to rest, you know, things like that.

I'm not going to tell you I've never said that.

Me neither. Me neither. No, I mean, we all have. We all have crap, right? We all have stuff. And I think it's just, are we in a place? Can we be self-reflective without being self-shaming, self-judging, or self-critical? And it's just an opportunity to continue that process. And I talk about this in the book, like on the book is a kaleidoscope, which is sort of my favorite symbol or metaphor of our personal growth, right? So we're, we're in this iteration of our kaleidoscope and it's, it's exactly where it needs to be. It's, it's in this pattern that it's in. And then we turn and certain patterns compost or certain relationships no longer serve us. Certain people pleasing or not having enough boundaries, those start to, to compost. And we, and then we come in this, this new iteration of ourselves. And yeah, it's holding that both/and of always enough and we're always changing and growing.

I mean, I love how you look at that and how you explain it. And I am going to tell you, I hope that some of the moms listening have maybe changed their perspective a little bit from what you've said because what I'm hearing— I feel like I am constantly trying to give mothers help identifying the proof that they're enough. So, so I'm curious from you what you would say to the mom listening who still doesn't believe that they're enough.

Yeah, I would say that that is— that likely has a root in unhealed wounding. And that you— so when we believe, pick your flavor, right? Pick your flavor of shame-bound belief. Not enough. I'm bad. Piece of shit. Uh, I'm—

yes.

Yeah. I'm unlovable. I'm, I'm unworthy. You know, we all— pick your flavor, right?

Yes.

But when we have that, we likely developed those belief systems due to an unmet need, whether it's an unmet need of an attuned caregiver. Most of us, even if we don't have big T abuse, a lot of us have the missing experience of having a regulated nervous system that could just hold space when we were in, when we were feeling some kind of way, and at the same time hold us accountable and hold us hold some healthy boundaries for us without that being punitive or critical or whatever. That's a missing experience for my kids sometimes. And I know the importance of that.

And you're teaching it. Yeah, no, I relate to that. Right.

Because when we're activated, I can't show up regulated. I joke that I'm sure my kids are going to grow. I mean, they're older, they're 14 and 11, but they probably roll their eyes like that their mother wrote a book about nervous system regulation because they're like, ah, this is, you know, that's, that's cute, Mom. That's cute that you're, you're writing the book.

And I, and I wanna stop you for 2 seconds and tell you that my 12-year-old will say to me, and you're a therapist and that's how you talk to me.

Same, same, same.

So we're not perfect. We're not perfect.

Yeah, we're not human. And I always say, you know, trauma— sorry, am I allowed to cuss on your podcast?

Yes, yes, absolutely.

Um, trauma doesn't give a shit what we know. And so their vagus nerve, my vagus nerve, does— it connects the brainstem to the gut. It doesn't connect to the frontal lobe. So we can know all kinds of things. You can know that the cause of your negative belief is your, you know, a misattuned caregiver. You can know that it wasn't really your fault. You can know that whatever, but it doesn't matter what we know. We can know that our kids need us to stay calm and attuned. And when we're activated, it doesn't, it does, all of that goes right out the window. You can read all the parenting books. Which I have, and all of that shit goes right out the window when I'm activated, right? When my nervous system is organized around self-protection, or if they're throwing a tantrum about us not having blueberry cream cheese in the fridge and I go to like, I'm raising these entitled white boys, like, you know, and I lose it. Yeah.

Right.

And so it, you know, all of that regulation goes out the window, which is why we have to bring in the body. I am, I have much larger capacity if I am consistently taking care of my nervous system. Whether that be, you know, just yoga or meditation or some sort of somatic practice that actually helps tone the nervous system. So I want to come back to that original, like, how would I tell the moms that they're not enough, or that, you know, what's the evidence? One is actually to recognize that those negative beliefs help to survive, because when we are little kids, we don't have the capacity to understand that our parents might be unhealed. And so believing that it is about us If I'm bad, if I'm not enough, I can do something to change it. I'll become a therapist. I'll be really good at tracking and attuning to people what they need, and I'll give it to them. I'll learn how to, like, say yes to everything, right? If it's about us, it gives us a little bit of power, and it also allows us to maintain connection, because if it's about us, especially when we're young, we can maintain the fantasy that our caregivers and that the world is safe and unconditionally loving and predictable because we need that. We need to be, we need to be able to attach in order to survive. And so those negative beliefs become stuck in the survival part of the brain rather than, you know, they're just, they're not just choices. They're stuck in the, in the survival part. So it feels like if we stop people pleasing, or if we, you know, believe that we're worthy, that can bring up a lot of fear, um, because that's been our fuel source for power and connection and belonging. So those negative beliefs actually had adaptive qualities, and now they're no longer serving you. It, you know, there, it feels like that's the thing that's gonna keep you going. That's gonna keep you saying yes to that PTA bake sale. That's gonna keep you saying yes to relationships that no longer work. It, and that, that it's adaptive, but it's, it's no longer serving you.

That was an excellent explanation. And I think that there's probably a lot of people who feel like me, and I feel like I've done a lot of work on that to make myself feel like enough. And now I see in my daughters that I now want to work on them feeling like enough.

So, and, you know, we're all swimming in the soup here.

We're swimming in a—

we're swimming in a society that tells us that benefits us not believing that we're enough, right? We can sell it. We get to sell those wrinkle creams and sell those weight loss bullshit, you know, all that. Like, it's better. Like, we are swimming in the soup of being told that we're not enough.

So true. My friend just told me I needed to tint my eyebrows, and I'm like, my eyebrows are fine.

Fine. Good for you. Yeah, totally. Yeah, so we're— I mean, we're not robots. And you know, the other thing that I, I speak to a little bit in the book is I also— a little bit of this is self-reflection, right? A little. I don't want to be friends with somebody that doesn't have any self-reflection, right? You know, we, we want to be mindful that it's probably overdeveloped for most of your listeners, right? It's probably overdeveloped into shame and criticism and judgment. But let's not lose the ability to self-reflect, um, and to do that in a way that's a growth mindset rather than a shame-bound mindset, right? That, that gets us into defensiveness or deflection. But I don't, I don't know that I want to be friends with somebody that's like in self-love all the time. Like, you know, that's true, but I want somebody that's gone through the dark night of the soul and has some parts of them that are, you know, self-reflective or that hold a little bit of vulnerability, right? Because that's where our empathy comes in. That's where our our vulnerability comes in, right?

I like that. That's, it's an excellent way to look at it. And, and I will tell you, in a society who is unfortunately might be making, might be contributing to my daughters, you know, on social media, looking at things, you know, working on themselves, trying to feel like enough, what can we do as moms to support them to feel better about themselves?

Well, I think just naming it, right? Naming that. I, I want you to develop, honey, the critical eye, the critical, the, the, the, the critical thinking, but also the critical feeling. Who benefits from what I'm watching, right? Is this, or what am I actually consuming here? And is there's a narrative that especially, you know, young women are taught that their worth is in whether or not men find them attractive. My partner is a woman, and I still have some of that baked in, right? Like, that— it gets us in the door of power and all of that. So, like, teaching our girls especially, but also our young boys, this narrative of where, you know, what are we being indoctrinated in? What are we being programmed to believe about where our worth is, what we have to contribute, what we— you know, my, my son came home in kindergarten. This is a boy that's being raised by two moms. My sister-in-law is a chemist. And he goes— he comes home from kindergarten, he goes, yeah, but girls aren't good at science.

And I'm like, excuse me? Oh boy. What are you—

so I mean, kindergarten, right? They're picking up these messages and these, these just subtle ways.

You tell him that my daughter has 100 in chemistry.

I know. I'm like, well, yeah, obviously this is different now. This was years ago, but I was mortified. But again, it, you know, we We— this is baked in. So yeah, how do we teach them how to have a critical eye? How do we teach them how to build community? How do we teach them how to be in relationship with people that lift them up, people that want to be with them for who they are in the world, that they have a light to shine in this world that is beyond what they look like or what their bodies shape is, or, you know, whatever. Um, so I think teaching them, and you know what, the best gift that we can give to people or to our children is to deconstruct this shit in our, in our own selves, right? Because oftentimes I'll work with clients that are like, I would never want my daughter to believe this, but I believe this about myself, right? I would never want my niece to believe this, but I believe this about myself. Yourself. And so it's like, okay, that's a really good self-therapy intervention, is if you wouldn't say what you are saying to yourself, or if you wouldn't orient— not even just the words, right, but how you are attuning to yourself, how you are showing up for yourself— if you wouldn't want that for your daughter, for your son, for your child, for your niece, for younger people that you, you know, that you know, and you're showing up in a way where you— if somebody showed up in that way for your kid, you'd be like, get away from my kid, you're dangerous, right? Then how would you show up? How would you show up for your kid? Another way that I put it is like, if you were to walk into my office and I were to say the shit that you say to yourself And you would fire me? Yeah, that's a good indication, like, that maybe we need to shift that. And not just how we talk to ourselves, because that's very cognitive, that's a very top-down kind of process, but how you actually orient to yourself in terms of attunement, in terms of a felt sense, in terms of an open heart, like are you, are you an energy that you would want to be around for yourself?

Yes, and, and I couldn't agree more with everything that you said. And I want to add that our children see through the crap and we can't pretend, so we have to do it for real and believe it for real, or they won't believe it or learn it, right?

And you know what you can do is you can own Like, I say this with my son all the time. Like, honey, I'm still working on this stuff too. We're all a work in progress. And I'm deconstructing, you know, my oldest son especially was like born with perfectionism just running through his veins. And, you know, I can't just sit there and say like, you're enough for who you are. Like, you know, he's like, crap, bullshit. I don't believe you.

Yes.

And I'm like, I hear you, babe. I hear you. And you know, you come into this honestly, like, I struggle with this too. And what I, what I know to be true is, is perfectionism is paralysis. Eventually it will kill your dreams and it will kill your ability to take risks and to just love yourself. Like, it, it is shame in disguise. And so So, you know, we can just own that, honey, I struggle with this too. We're all swimming in the soup. We're all just doing the best we freaking can out here.

It's true.

Like, you know, I, I am, I, I might not have it all figured out, but I know that we are worth the work, right? I know that we are worth at least pointing our feet in the direction of wisdom. And in the direction of love and in the direction of healing, even if we don't know exactly what that path is going to look like.

Yeah, very true. Very true. I will tell you that none of us are perfect, no matter how many parenting books, trainings, et cetera.

Right. Who wants to be around that anyway? Right?

Like, I love that you say that. I love— I hate when my husband will say to me, well, aren't we perfect now?

I'm like, Mr.

Man, I never feel perfect. Totally.

It's gross.

So I want to ask you about EMDR therapy because I know that's one of your specialties, and I know that people don't know what that is. So can you teach them?

Yeah. Yeah. So I, I really wish Francine Shapiro was the founder of EMDR therapy, and I, I think she even expressed regret over what she called it. So EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It's a ridiculous acronym. I think it turns a lot of people off because it sounds so, I don't know, woo. And when I got trained in it, I was very skeptical and cynical. I was like, this woo crap, like, blah, blah, blah. But we have a lot of now neuroscience. We have a lot of brain scans before EMDR and after EMDR. And there's just a lot of evidence behind it now. And how we think it was started with moving your eyes back and forth, but a lot of people just use pulsers that kind of buzz in your hands back and forth, right, left, right, left, right, left. And we think what happens is it mimics REM sleep in, you know, when your eyes move back and forth quickly while you're sleeping, it actually helps the right and the left brain to communicate with each other and digest information. And we also— so we see a lot of— when you have unhealed trauma, that trauma literally gets stored in isolation in the brain, and it gets stored in the lower levels of the brain, and it gets stored overactively in the right side of the brain, the emotional side of the brain. And so after EMDR— and again, we see this on like PET scans before and after. Before EMDR, there's a lot of, um, um, activity in the amygdala, there's a lot of activity in the flight-or-fight centers, and there's overactivity in the right side of the brain. And then after EMDR, there's a lot more communication between the right and the left brain, there's a lot more activation there, and there's a lot more activity in the frontal lobes. There's a lot more integration between the limbic system and the lower levels of the brain, the survival part of the brain, and the frontal lobes, which is really our attuned communication, our ability to hold multiple truths, both and at the same time, the ability to calm the flight or fight response. But that's really our most human part of our brain. So, you know, EMDR can— one, you're going to start with a lot of preparation. A good EMDR therapist, a well-trained EMDR therapist, is going to give you some tools for regulating your nervous system. We're not just going to jump straight into trauma reprocessing, right? EMDR is an approach to therapy. So I always say people— to people like, I'm doing EMDR therapy with you right now. It's not just the reprocessing phases. It's really about, you know, being mindful of history taking, being mindful. I really fold in a lot of parts work. Like, what are the parts of you that hold the trauma? What are the parts of you that hold the protection, the management, and then also the numbing? You know, where— how do you numb or distract, or like, you know, addictions, things like that, right? So what are the parts of you that might not want to look at this? And we need to get consent from all of those parts. Um, and so then, you know, we'll give you lots of preparation. We want you to have some resources to be able to step into the pain without retraumatizing you, and to be able to step out of the pain at the end of session so that you feel more contained and, you know, kind of zipped up emotionally and grounded so that you're not leaving session open and raw at the end. And then when you're reprocessing, we, we kind of get a, a list of memories depending on— sometimes we go with a, a list, but sometimes we go with just really what is happening, what's the root of it right now. And then you ask a series of questions that are meant to light up how the memory is currently stored in the brain. I always like to make the distinction, we're not reliving the trauma, we're actually activating how it is currently stored in the brain, which often feels like it's happening in the present moment because trauma doesn't put together chronological time. It feels like it's happening right now. It feels like it's very close and it feels like it's happening in the, in real time. So it's, you know, what's the worst part of the memory? What's the negative belief that you have about yourself as a result of that memory? What do you want to believe about yourself instead? Um, what emotions come up? Where do you feel it in your body? And how disturbing is it? And then it's— you just kind of go, right? You— it activates, right? It's a big activation.

Yeah.

And then you hold the pulsers, or you move your eyes right and left. Um, sometimes if I'm doing telehealth, I'll just have people tap right, left, right, left on their shoulders or on their legs. Um, and it just moves. I mean, it's It's wild, but it really, really works.

I mean, I've heard so much about it, and I just think that people would love to know, how do they know that they need it?

I mean, I would say most of us are walking around with some.

I would say that too.

Right. And so EMDR is very good if you have big T trauma, right? Like abuse, or if you been in the military, or, you know, big, big T trauma, EMDR is great for. And if it's more little t trauma, like attachment work, you know, it was just sort of the water you were swimming in. Your dad was very not present, mom was misattuned, whatever, right? Or just, just sort of that seemingly innocuous strips of childhood messy divorce, or you know, whatever. Um, EMDR can still be really great for that. You're probably going to want to find a therapist that's also trained in some parts work, some attachment work, some, some body-based work, because that's just— that, that attachment wounding is much more nebulous, right? When we have a big T trauma, it's this tangible event. We can point to it. It can be like, this thing happened. But for many of us, it was just death by a thousand paper cuts, right? It was the water we were swimming in. It was just a general sense of misattunement or lack of emotional safety or lack of talking about anything, or, you know, just a general whatever, volatility or, or whatever. And so you're going to want to do more attachment work as you're doing some EMDR. So how you know you're amazing— if you have not looked at your past and you know that there's some yucky things in there, you would probably benefit from something. I don't think any— anybody that tells you this is the one thing that's going to help everybody, run in the other direction, right? Because we're all messy. Humans are messy, and what works for one person isn't going to work for another. And I've gone to EMDR therapists that are not for me. Their approach to it is not the right one for me. Right. I went to one person and I started crying, and she was like, you're really out of your window of tolerance here. And I'm like, crying? You're out of your window of tolerance. That's not me. Right.

It's really interesting because what I have found is that someone will jive with one person and not with another person. So you just gotta try on therapists.

Yeah, totally.

Right. You gotta try 'em on.

Yeah. And here's the thing, most therapists come to this work unhealed, right? Mm-hmm. We come to this work because of our own shit. And so you, you want to get a therapist that you get a felt sense that they have done some work on themselves.

Yes, yes.

I remember having therapists as a child that were that old school Freudian, very powered down, you know, you— they weren't human, they were sort of very judgmental, just yuck, right? Like, that was That was not for me. I needed somebody that had equity at the front, that it made you feel like you knew your own system, you knew your own body, that they weren't looking down on you or judging you, but they were still going to hold you accountable. Right? They were still going to not tell you that you were great and you didn't have any work to do. We don't want that either.

We don't want that either. And you know, I told you before we started, I have to ask you, about ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. What is ketamine?

Okay, so there's a, you know, there's a lot of feelings about ketamine-assisted psychotherapy these days, and, and we should be careful. And lots of psychedelics are coming on the scene now, right? Psilocybin and even MDMA therapy. And we, we do want some, some guardrails. We do want to just not throw medicine in a system and think that that's going to be the cure-all. However, when we use, um, something like ketamine, which is really the only legal, uh, and it's not really considered a classic psychedelic, but it can take on some psychedelic properties. It's considered to be a dissociative anesthetic. But what we— what, what happens neurobiologically is that those neurological connections that are so fused together. Like, maybe you've heard the phrase neurons that fire together wire together, right? The more that you are in this pattern, so whether that's practicing basketballs, which is a, you know, that's a positive neurological connection if you're getting the basket in the, or the ball in the basket. But if you're, if you're just overall, like, you know, self-critical, let's say that's your pattern, and you've practiced that over and over and over again. And those neurological connections are so fused together. Something like ketamine actually allows those neurological connections to soften. It literally pauses that default mode network, and it allows you to put a little space in between those neurons, and it creates a lot of what we call neuroplasticity, the ability for brain for our brains to create new neurological connections. And so when you're doing it, especially in the context of a therapist that you've done some work with, that you maybe have done some EMDR with, and then as you're altered, as you're on your medicine journey, you're either reprocessing, or as you come out of the medicine journey, you're reprocessing, and you're really doing a lot of intentional work Man, it really can change the neurological connections even in a deeper way than something like EMDR. EMDR is already a deep level of work, but when you add medicine to it, it really can just help those neurological connections really have the opportunity to shift.

And really interesting.

Yeah. From my own personal experience, and I see this, you know, it was so powerful for me as a clients that I went and got trained in it. Um, and I'll just share like with my personal journey. So I'm adopted, and you know, I, I— my relationship with alcohol was never to this point of passing out or like not going to work or whatever, but it was just this thing. It was like the mommy happy hour, and I— it was, it was this thing that I did a lot, right? And it it really felt connected to my attachment wounding. My mom, who was my person, she was a drinker. She was also an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Um, and so I look at my whole life now and I'm like, oh man, it makes so much sense, right? But, um, alcohol just felt like it had just too much of a hold on me. And I had done a lot of freaking therapy, a lot of EMDR, a lot of parts work. Um, and ketamine work just allowed that to, to, to soften. And I've been sober from— I mean, it sounds sort of ironic, I'm gonna go do drugs in a therapist's office to get sober, but I, I've been sober, it'll be 5 years in September from alcohol, and it just doesn't even feel like a thing for me because the root of it, I was able to really get to my baby self and like, reclaim her for my own, you know, even though I had done that in, in, on some level, it was like I couldn't quite get to her. And, you know, the medicine work really allowed me to do that. Um, and so congratulations. Yeah, thank you. I, I'm, I feel just really, it's like a liberation, and it doesn't even feel like a choice. Amazing. Just like, I don't want, you know, it's just like, it doesn't, and I don't, I, it's like, I don't hate myself. That's nice. I don't hate myself as much.

That's a good bonus. We don't want you to hate yourself.

I cognitively knew that I was not a bad person. There was just this thing that had its hold, right? That deep shame-bound identity. And, and medicine work really just allowed that to soften.

So Um, that's so amazing.

It's not a one and done. You're just gonna like put this medicine in your body and it's gonna be great. You don't wanna do that. Uh, it's really, you know, this is not doing rails of K at a rave and you're gonna be therapeutically healed. Like you need to do some work, right? You need to do some intention. You need to do some shadow work. Um, because there's a way that you can use this medicine that is obviously not therapeutic and is more of an addiction, right, rather than a therapeutic tool.

Well, thank you for explaining that. I, when I was reading about you, I was like, I am fascinated and need to know more. And I also, I can't let you go because, you know, I know that there are mothers out there and dads who, you know, wants to be supportive. Let's talk about your LGBTQ expertise because I think that's very valuable and I can't let you go without some help here. So whether your child is part of the community, not part of the community, how can we help our children? How can we be supportive? Help us be better parents.

Well, I, I think just having conversations, right, about The fact that LGBTQ people exist. We—

yeah, that helps.

We exist in the world. And, you know, like, I think again, just talking about it, like, when I, when I grew up, we didn't really talk about it. So, you know, do you— what questions do you have? Like, what has been your— you know, my son goes to school, he's in middle school, my younger son, and, you know, gay is still thrown around as an insult. All the time. And so, you know, he just has— I've— we've had to talk about like, how do you know? He, he can't be in charge of calling people out every single time that he— you know, it would be all the time. But he, he chooses when he says like, please, that, that's just lame stuff. Like, can we stop? It's 2025. Can we please just stop using that as an insult? I agree. Uh, you know, it's a really tender time right now. It's a tender time for, um, LGBTQ community, especially trans and genderqueer folks. There's a lot of collective trauma right now, and people are scared of something that they don't understand. And yeah, a lot of people just haven't had the opportunity to know somebody who's trans or genderqueer, or maybe they do know somebody that's trans and genderqueer and they just don't know it, you know. Like, there's a lot of people who have transitioned that you would never know. So you just— yeah, like, you know, we exist in the world. And if you— if you know that we exist in the world and you believe that people have the right to exist in the world and feel safe in the world, that is just as simple as a conversation as you can not, right? And so I, I think reading— but if you have very young children, you know, Todd Parr has some books of like, some, some families have two moms and some families have two dads. And, you know, some people feel like they were— they don't match the gender that their body would have them, you know, assigned to, or whatever. Some people feel like they're part girl and part boy, you know. Even scientifically, people can be born with ambiguous genitalia. 1 out of 1,000 babies are actually born some form of ambiguous genitalia or intersex. So even this idea that there's only two biological sexes is actually just scientifically wrong. And I think our own internalized stuff around sexuality, around LGBTQ stuff, around trans stuff, gets in the way of us being able to have these conversations. And maybe you can just own that with them too. Like, listen, honey, I'm stumbling through. I'm still learning. I'm still, you know, like staying humble about it. And just the internet is full of people that you can learn from for free. So true. Learn.

It's true.

Learn about another lived experience. Learn about people of color. Learn about trans folks. Like, just start following some intellectual people and start to get to know them. If you live in like a white suburban bubble, just start following some people that you will feel aligned to. Start getting, you know, wisdom of trans people, LGBTQ people, people of color in your ethos. Start, you know, desegregating your life a little bit. There's tons of information out there that you can— yeah, and here's what I often invite people to do is when you think about things like race or when you think about things like trans stuff, notice your own bracing, notice your own nervous system. And I, you know, there's like this frenzy that happens are you like, I want to do it right, or, oh, it makes me uncomfortable, or, yeah, you know, there's this, there's this trauma that comes up. And so if we can just regulate our system and really actually that always and already, you know, unconditionally loved and love— you are unconditional love, you are unconditional Um, acceptance. And that's from Dr. Amanda Kemp. I gotta give her credit for that. She, she's a racial, uh, justice person, so check her out. She's great. But, um, if we can have that unconditional love and that always and already online, then we can have some reserves to learn and to make mistakes and to to not do things perfectly when it comes to talking to our kids about race or trans stuff or LGBTQ stuff. To just say, like, you know, I was never taught this, so I don't really know how to do it perfectly. But what I do know is that people are hurting right now, and I want to be part of building a world around equity and building a world around justice and building a world where everybody feels safe. And I'd like to help you do that too, you know.

That's so well said, so well said. I'm gonna make my children listen to this episode. I don't make them listen to all of them, but this one they might have to.

So sorry, kids. Sorry, kids.

Gosh, I mean, you know that I could go on and on with questions. I'm just curious from your point of view, is there anything that you want to share that I didn't ask you?

Hmm. Well, I mean, I would love for people to check out the book, right?

Yes.

And you're welcome to work with me. I've got nervous system coaching packages and all of that good stuff. I can really help guide you through the process. Um, so there's different levels and different ways of working with me, but the book is certainly the easiest. You can get, you can get a signed copy on my website, and of course it's still, it's on Amazon as well. But if you go directly to my website, which is avoscounseling.com, you can— I still send people a signed copy if you order from the website. Um, And other than that, I don't— yeah, just give grace for yourself and know that we're always out here doing the best we can. And just the invitation to point your feet in the direction of what feels like the wise kind of heart, right? I, I don't— I try to strike the word right or good, um, but what feels like wisdom, right? What feels like the wise kind of discomfort and the wise kind of heart.

Well, I soaked up all of your wisdom today. You are just so wonderful to talk to and learn from, and I loved every minute.

I so appreciate your curious nature and your, your just your energy in general. Like, I, very sweet.

Thank you so much. This is Rebecca Greene, and I want to remind everyone to spend every day laughing, learning and loving.

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