For years, Emily Depauw knew, deep down, that something was wrong. She just stopped trusting her gut.

Then her body started to realign. And her whole personal life turned chaotic right along with it. Truths surfaced in her closest relationships, with her parents, with her romantic partner, truths that had been sitting there the whole time, waiting for her to stop overriding herself. She describes it like a snow globe getting shaken: everything she'd buried came loose at once, and it all finally made sense.

This is what happens when your body and your life are running the same compensation pattern. You don't get to fix one without the other coming loose too.

If you've ever wondered why your whole life seemed to unravel the moment you finally started taking care of yourself, this is why.

Once things settled, Emily says her inner world only kept getting better. She left the company that gave her her start and built her own.

Here's what surfaced once her body stopped compensating:

🔹 What she compares to shaking a snow globe, and what came loose when she did

Whatever's twisted in your body is twisted in your life. Hers came loose at the same time.

About Emily:

Emily is an Alignment and Performance Coach and founder of Unleashed Movement. She is sought after by high-achieving creatives, performers, athletes, and C-Suite executives looking to upgrade their physical performance and resolve chronic pain, prevent injury, expedite recovery, and break through limitations.

Upon graduating from Loyola Marymount University with a BA in Dance and English, Emily knew that movement - in whatever form - was her calling. Emily has worked as a choreographer, dance coach,personal trainer, and a certified Postural Alignment Specialist. Throughout her career, she has helped thousands (literally) of people overcome chronic pain and uplevel their craft through corrective exercise.

Connect with Emily:

Website https://unleashedmovement.com/ 

Instagram handle @unleashed.movement 

Free Gift Link https://unleashedmovement.myflodesk.com/a8nqzn8lij 

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She gave that teacher exactly what she wanted. The grade came back an A, and something in her body clicked into place. Safe. Correct. Good job.

This is what happens when a nervous system spends childhood in survival mode. It stops looking for the right choice and starts hunting for the choice that produces a hit of relief. That hit has a name. It is dopamine, and it is not a reward for doing well. It is a signal that danger has passed, for now.

Genea spent years mistaking that signal for the truth, until she built something actually right for her, and felt nothing when it worked.

Here's the part almost nobody catches in themselves:

🔹 The exact classroom trick that stopped working the moment the room got bigger

If success has ever felt flatter than it should, you have not failed. You have just never been taught what safe actually feels like.

About Genea

Genea Barnes is a mentor, coach, and speaker whose early life was rooted in deep trauma and neglect. To stay safe, she learned to make everyone else feel good and put their needs first.

It worked to survive, but it came with a cost. She lost her ability to discern what was truly right for her. And getting what she wanted came with the anxiety that it would be lost or taken away. 

She was great at making other people’s dreams come true, but when it came to what she truly wanted, she self-sabotaged and procrastinated … always putting something else first. 

She spent decades exploring and studying every modality under the sun to break free from those patterns and create a life that felt like joy, ease, and freedom. 

Today, she empowers people to move away from and resolve conflict rooted in trauma, generational trauma, and sacrifice of self … so they can create the life they crave and access greater peace and freedom in all areas of their life. 

This gives them access to loving, authentic relationships, consistent healthy habits, and success in business, finance, and career that feels like fulfilment and freedom. 

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Angie Knierim was not having a breakdown on that waiting room floor. She was finally telling the truth.

For thirteen years, doctors told her she was fine. Her body sent a different message. Migraines. Chest pain. A cough that never left. She smiled through all of it, because smiling through it was the only skill anyone ever rewarded her for.

Then a scheduling mistake cracked open something that had been sealed since childhood. What came out of her on that floor was not weakness. It was the part of her that had never been allowed to advocate for herself, finally breaking the lock she built to survive.

If you have spent your life managing everyone's comfort but your own, this episode is going to name something you have never said out loud.

Here's what happens when the truth finally gets louder than the performance.

🔹 The three months she carried a secret that nearly cost her everything, and told no one 

🔹 Why "your tests are normal" was the most dangerous sentence a doctor ever told her 

🔹 The moment on a waiting room floor that was not a breakdown, it was a door 

🔹 What she had to let back into her life, because keeping it out was killing her

If you have never let yourself fall apart in front of another human being, ask yourself what you're actually protecting.

About Angie:

Angie Knierim is an engineer by day, an advocate by calling, and a novelist deep in the editing cave on her first fantasy fiction book, though it's been shelved for about a year while life got loud.

By trade, she brings 25+ years of experience in engineering and program management within medical device and life sciences, and continues to pursue senior roles in that space.

She founded The Empowering Women in Midlife Community after living through her own confusing, under-supported peri/menopause, tired of feeling dismissed by doctors and unable to find real answers or community for what she was going through.

EWM is the resource she wished existed: expert-led education, clinical navigation, and a space where women don't have to white-knuckle their way through this alone.

She's also active in advocacy work pushing for federal menopause legislation and is on a mission to close the gap between what women experience in midlife and what their doctors actually recognize.

If anything in this conversation resonated with you, you don't have to figure this out alone.

Empowering Women in Midlife is a community built for real conversations, honest talk, and women connecting over what we're actually going through—not just the highlight reel. Inside, you'll also find free tools to help you get started: a symptom tracker (electronic and printable), a resource library packed with expert sessions and guidance, and a list of clinicians who actually prescribe HRT, all available at JoinEWM.com.

If you're also interested in the advocacy side of menopause care, including federal legislation, check out Women's Health Advocates at womenshealthadvocates.org.

And if you or someone you know is looking for program management, PMO, Chief of Staff, or strategic operations talent, feel free to reach out to Angie directly at [email protected].

Connect with Angie:

Website www.joinewm.com 

Instagram handle https://www.instagram.com/angieknierim/ 

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/angieknierim/ 

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The sacrifice wasn't a choice. It was a survival strategy. And it has been running your life for a very long time.

Genea Barnes doesn't talk around the hard stuff. In this episode, she goes straight to the root of one of the most painful patterns she sees in high-achieving, emotionally intelligent people … the ones who give everything, hold everyone together, and quietly wonder why they feel so far from the life they were supposed to be living.

She traces her own sacrifice through every area of her life. The jobs she bent herself inside out for. The relationships she worked two jobs to support. The body she managed to keep everyone else comfortable. The business she almost destroyed by saying what she thought her coaches wanted to hear instead of what was actually true. And the moment … broke, maxed out, in full meltdown — when she finally stopped.

This isn't an episode about being nicer to yourself. It's not a self-care conversation. It's the deeper one. The one about the parts of you that learned, early and completely, that love and safety came with a price tag. And you've been paying it ever since.

The stories inside this episode go places most podcasts won't:

🔹 Why the sacrifice showed up in her relationship, her job, her body, and her business … all at once, all from the same wound

🔹 The forbidden part of herself she had buried since childhood, and what welcoming it back made possible in her life and business

🔹 How she kept attracting incompetent bosses, a failing business, and partners who left … and what it all had in common

🔹 What it felt like to let things crumble … and why that crumbling was the only path back to herself

You are not broken. You are not too much. You learned to survive in a world that didn't always make it safe to exist fully. This episode is the beginning of something different. Come listen.

About Genea

Genea Barnes is a mentor, coach, and speaker whose early life was rooted in deep trauma and neglect. To stay safe, she learned to make everyone else feel good and put their needs first.

It worked to survive, but it came with a cost. She lost her ability to discern what was truly right for her. And getting what she wanted came with the anxiety that it would be lost or taken away. 

She was great at making other people’s dreams come true, but when it came to what she truly wanted, she self-sabotaged and procrastinated … always putting something else first. 

She spent decades exploring and studying every modality under the sun to break free from those patterns and create a life that felt like joy, ease, and freedom. 

Today, she empowers people to move away from and resolve conflict rooted in trauma, generational trauma, and sacrifice of self … so they can create the life they crave and access greater peace and freedom in all areas of their life. 

This gives them access to loving, authentic relationships, consistent healthy habits, and success in business, finance, and career that feels like fulfilment and freedom. 

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There's a version of disappearing that nobody talks about.

It doesn't look like falling apart. It looks like getting it all done.

The matching sweatsuit at preschool drop-off. The perfectly managed household. The birthday party with the Etsy decorations. Eva Angeloff looked like a woman who had it together. And she did. She had everything managed.

Everything except herself.

Her husband finally said it out loud. "Do you think we'll ever be intimate again?"

She didn't see it coming. Because she hadn't meant to close the door on him. On her body. On any of it. It had just happened. Slowly. The way these things always do. One disowned need at a time.

What followed was one of the most honest conversations about desire, control, and reclamation you'll hear anywhere. Eva is the founder of Women's Lib … a brand centered on women's vitality and sexuality. But before she could build it, she had to become the woman her brand is about.

Here's what cracked open in this conversation:

🔹 The therapy session where three words — "you have a control problem" — sent her to the floor and changed everything she thought she knew about herself

🔹 Why her need for clean countertops and her loss of intimacy were rooted in exactly the same wound

🔹 How the woman who manages everything is often the woman who has disappeared the most — and what it looks like when she finally comes home

🔹 The generational pattern behind people-pleasing, lost desire, and why you can't think your way out of programming that lives in your body

If you've been managing your life beautifully but feeling flat... this episode was made for you.

If any part of this felt familiar... you already know what to do.

About Eva:

Eva Angeloff is the founder of Women’s Lib, a women’s wellness brand created to bring desire, pleasure, vitality, and sexual well-being into the center of the wellness conversation.

A wife, mother of three, and lifelong believer in embodiment, Eva built Women’s Lib after recognizing how many women quietly lose access to parts of themselves while being responsible, capable, useful, and “good.” For Eva, Being the Wolf means reclaiming the wild connection to Self - the part of a woman that wants, feels, desires, questions, and refuses to disappear.

Her work centers on one belief: pleasure is not frivolous. It is part of being fully well.

Connect with Eva:

Website:  www.womens-lib.com 

Instagram handle:  womenslibco 

Promotional Link: https://womens-lib.com/discount/IMAWOLF20 

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/eva-angeloff-410838353/ 

Email: [email protected] 

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The wound that's been stopping you might not have happened to you at all.

Genea Barnes has spent years doing the work. Clearing money blocks. Healing abundance patterns. Trying every approach that promised to change her relationship with finances and freedom. And underneath all of it, a fear she could never fully reach. A sensation so old, so embedded, that she had no story to put to it. Because it wasn't her story.

In this episode, Genea traces the invisible thread from her grandmother's childhood right after the Great Depression, through her mother, and into her own body. She explains why the most stubborn fears often have no lived experience to explain them, and why that's exactly what makes them so hard to shift. These are wounds that travel not just through behavior and modeling, but through the nervous system itself. From womb to womb. Generation to generation.

This episode is for anyone who has tried, again and again, to break through a ceiling that makes no logical sense. Anyone who has felt a fear far bigger than the situation in front of them. Anyone who has done everything right and still can't get free.

The reason might be simpler than you think. And older than you know.

Here's what this episode cracks open:

🔹 The science of inherited fear, what caterpillars, butterflies, and their babies reveal about the patterns running your decisions right now

🔹 The moment Genea realized her healing had been pointed at the story, not the sensation, and what finally shifted when she found the root

🔹 Why the rebel child and the controlled child are both living inside the same wound, and what the middle way actually requires

🔹 What it means to be the cycle breaker, and the real reason it feels like the world is disintegrating when you try

If that hum inside you keeps saying there is more, this episode is a place to start. Listen when you're ready.

About Genea

Genea Barnes is a mentor, coach, and speaker whose early life was rooted in deep trauma and neglect. To stay safe, she learned to make everyone else feel good and put their needs first.

It worked to survive, but it came with a cost. She lost her ability to discern what was truly right for her. And getting what she wanted came with the anxiety that it would be lost or taken away. 

She was great at making other people’s dreams come true, but when it came to what she truly wanted, she self-sabotaged and procrastinated … always putting something else first. 

She spent decades exploring and studying every modality under the sun to break free from those patterns and create a life that felt like joy, ease, and freedom. 

Today, she empowers people to move away from and resolve conflict rooted in trauma, generational trauma, and sacrifice of self … so they can create the life they crave and access greater peace and freedom in all areas of their life. 

This gives them access to loving, authentic relationships, consistent healthy habits, and success in business, finance, and career that feels like fulfilment and freedom. 

Connect with Genea

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You've built a life that looks right. So why does it feel like nothing?

You're not someone who gave up. You've worked harder on yourself than most people will in a lifetime. Therapy. Coaches. Books. Retreats. You've rebuilt yourself more than once.

And you're still here. In the gap. Between who you know you're supposed to be and where you actually are. Still waiting for it to feel the way you always knew it could.

What if the reason nothing has fully worked isn't about strategy? What if the parts of you that you learned to hide earliest in life are the exact parts your business, your relationships, and your sense of aliveness have been missing?

Genea Barnes gets into all of it in this episode. Using the story of the Yellowstone wolves and a seventh-grade classroom moment that changed the course of her life, she traces exactly what happens when the most essential parts of a person go quiet. And what becomes possible when they finally come back.

Here's what's waiting inside:

🔹 Why the life you've carefully built might belong to the version of you that learned to survive, not the one that was built to thrive

If you've been waiting for something to finally name what's been quietly wrong, this is the episode. Listen now.

About Genea

Genea Barnes is a mentor, coach, and speaker whose early life was rooted in deep trauma and neglect. To stay safe, she learned to make everyone else feel good and put their needs first.

It worked to survive, but it came with a cost. She lost her ability to discern what was truly right for her. And getting what she wanted came with the anxiety that it would be lost or taken away. 

She was great at making other people’s dreams come true, but when it came to what she truly wanted, she self-sabotaged and procrastinated … always putting something else first. 

She spent decades exploring and studying every modality under the sun to break free from those patterns and create a life that felt like joy, ease, and freedom. 

Today, she empowers people to move away from and resolve conflict rooted in trauma, generational trauma, and sacrifice of self … so they can create the life they crave and access greater peace and freedom in all areas of their life. 

This gives them access to loving, authentic relationships, consistent healthy habits, and success in business, finance, and career that feels like fulfilment and freedom. 

Connect with Genea

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She could have died. And the first thing she felt in that hospital bed was relief.

Not because she wanted to die. But because for the first time in years, no one could ask anything of her.

Erin Keating was a high-powered television executive …smart, driven, decorated …and completely running on empty. 

Her marriage was crumbling. 

Her identity was her job title. 

She worked through COVID until her lungs gave out. 

And it wasn't until everything fell apart at once … the illness, the divorce, the layoff …that she found her way back to herself.

In this conversation, Genea Barnes and Erin Keating talk about what it costs to be the woman who does everything, holds everything together, and quietly disappears in the process. 

They talk about midlife unraveling, the lie of having it all, and what it actually looks like to rebuild a life from the inside out …as a single mom, a solopreneur, and a woman finally done “being good.”

This episode holds the kind of truth most people are too polished to say out loud:

🔹 The marriage fight that happened over text as she was being discharged from the hospital …and the clarity it gave her 

🔹 Why the career that gave her everything also helped her hide from everything 

🔹 The podcast she started to find her voice back …and the business that was bubbling up from it  all along 

🔹 What it feels like when the feral, untamed version of you finally gets to lead

If you've been wondering how to get to the other side of a life that stopped fitting… start here.

About Erin:

Erin Keating is an entrepreneur and creative leader passionate about empowering women to live their best lives over forty.

Erin spent 20 years as a television and mobile content executive, producing Emmy and Peabody Award-winning series for platforms including Comedy Central, NBC, IFC TV and Snapchat before turning her attention to her own underserved demographic.  

Today, she’s the Host of the Hotter Than Ever podcast which helps women 40+ imagine a second half that is freer, happier, sexier, and more satisfying. 

She's also the co-founder of Broad Collective, a membership network for professional women building businesses in midlife.  Her mission is to help women  own their professional destinies, grow their power and influence through impactful content, and live successful lives of their own design.

Connect with Erin:

Email: [email protected]

Instagram: @broad_collective 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinkeating/ 

Hotter Than Ever podcast:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hotter-than-ever/id1680976062 

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He had the money, the girlfriend, the travel, the fancy dinners. And he felt absolutely nothing.

Ed Reay didn't know it at the time. That's the thing about building a life for everybody else … it looks like living … 

You're moving. 

You're doing. 

You're showing up. 

But there's no YOU in any of it.

And the moment the external reason disappears, you realize you have no idea what you actually want.

This conversation between Genea Barnes and Ed Reay is one of the most honest explorations of identity, meaning, and the cost of people-pleasing you'll hear anywhere. 

Ed shares how he spent years latching onto other people's certainty because he had none of his own … and what started to shift when he finally stopped performing and started listening to his body instead.

Here's what lives inside this conversation:

🔹 The girlfriend who gave his life meaning … and the identity crisis that hit when she was gone

🔹 Why making a lot of money never once made him feel like enough

🔹 The firewalk event that gave him the first "hell yes" his body had ever felt

🔹 What adventure actually is … and why most people stopped being it long before they stopped doing it

If you've ever wondered why the life you built still feels flat... this episode might be the conversation you didn't know you needed. Listen now.

Connect with Ed:

Website: https://www.edreay.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/edward.reay5477

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She got everything she worked for. Then she quietly walked away from all of it.

Genea Evola dreamed of being a news reporter from the time she was a little girl. She wanted to be seen. She wanted to tell the truth. She wanted to matter.

Then she got the job. And the first thing it asked her to do was use her voice to harm people.

That moment in a Flint, Michigan newsroom didn't just end a career. It sent a signal straight into her nervous system: being seen is dangerous. And she spent the next decade hiding behind every corporate brand she could find, executing brilliantly for everyone except herself.

In this episode of Be the Wolf, Genea Barnes sits down with Jenna Evola, founder of Evolve Systems, for a conversation that starts with AI and personal branding and goes somewhere much more honest. Because you can't talk about building an authentic brand without first asking the question nobody wants to answer: Who are you, actually? And when did you stop letting people see it?

Here's what this conversation pulls into the open:

🔹 The newsroom moment that made being seen feel like something to survive, not embrace

🔹 Why she married someone she didn't fully choose, and what that decision finally forced her to look at

🔹 How hiding behind corporate brands became the most sophisticated form of self-protection she'd ever built

🔹 What it really means to use AI without losing yourself, and why that starts long before you open any app

If you've ever built something that looks right and still feels hollow, this one was made for you. Listen now.

About Jenna:

Jenna Evola is a brand strategist and founder of Evolve Systems who helps small and mid-sized businesses build the kind of customer loyalty that survives algorithm changes, market shifts, and the rise of AI.

She brings nearly a decade of experience producing large-scale brand activations for Lincoln Motor Company and General Motors, where she designed live experiences for hundreds of product launches, auto shows, and national campaigns.

That work, spanning thousands of direct customer interactions, gave her a front-row seat to what actually drives buying behavior and brand loyalty at the human level.

Today she applies those lessons to digital brand strategy, helping business owners use AI as an operational tool without losing the human layer that makes their brand worth following.

She is also a long-time GoHighLevel power user and builds out AI-enabled marketing systems for small business clients.

Jenna speaks and consults at the intersection of brand psychology, experiential marketing, and AI-driven growth.

Connect with Jenna:

Website https://jennaevola.com/ 

Facebook link https://www.facebook.com/jenna.evola 

Instagram handle https://www.instagram.com/jenna.evola/ 

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenna-evola/ 

YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@jennaevola 

Appointment Link https://link.evolvesystems.co/widget/bookings/meet-jenna-evola

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