Acquainted with Grief

When I was seven, I watched my biological father take my sister from our car while I stood in a gas station parking lot screaming for someone to help. In this episode, I explore how that moment shaped my need for control, why uncertainty can feel so dangerous after trauma, and what I’m learning now about choosing agency, peace, and acceptance instead of constantly trying to prove, fix, or prevent what I cannot control.

In this episode, I share the events that led to that unexpected reunion and explore how trauma, coercive control, and years of survival can slowly separate us from ourselves. Sometimes healing isn’t about becoming someone new. Sometimes it’s about reconnecting with the parts of ourselves that were never truly lost.

Maybe peace isn’t the absence of trouble.

Maybe it’s the moment our inner compass finally has room to point us home.

For a long time, I mistook being chosen for being loved.

Today I think love looks a lot more like showing up.

In this episode, I share a childhood memory that shaped the way I listened to the world for decades. What began as a story about popsicles and hunger became a lesson in fear, guilt, and carrying burdens that never belonged to me.

In this bonus episode, I share what it feels like to stand in the uncomfortable space between the life you’ve left and the life you haven’t built yet. We talk about divorce, grief, anxiety, and the complicated reality of losing someone who was both your greatest comfort and your greatest source of pain.

The hardest part to admit sometimes…

Not that someone hurt you.

But how much of yourself you gave away trying to be loved by them.

I think there comes a moment in healing where you look back and realize the pain wasn’t just in what happened… it was in what you convinced yourself was normal.

I thought I had already survived the hardest parts of my life. But this year forced me to realize I was still living in survival mode.

In this episode, I talk about emotional flooding, nervous system exhaustion, childhood wounds carried into adulthood, and the realization that survival and safety are not the same thing.

Sometimes the dam breaks because your body can no longer live without emotional safety.

A late-night phone call changed something in me forever. In this first episode, I share the moment I realized I had spent most of my life living in fear—and what happened when safety entered my body for the first time.