Beneath the Scars with Zoe

Content Warning: This episode explores historical violence, death, blood, sacrifice, sexuality, religious beliefs, witch trials, childhood death and darker themes. Some of the material may be confronting or triggering, so please take care of yourself while listening.

Welcome back to Beneath the Scars with Zoe. In this episode, we’re going somewhere a little darker. We’re going beneath the stories of vampires, witches, fairies, curses, blood, sacrifice, sexuality and soul ties, and asking what these ancient beliefs might tell us about ourselves. Because sometimes healing isn’t about turning away from the darkness. Sometimes it’s about having the courage to look directly at it, understand where it came from, and decide whether we still want to carry it. So come with me as we explore The Dark Side of Healing.

In this episode, we’re going a little deeper. We’re talking about what it really means to become whole—not by becoming perfect, but by learning to trust yourself again.

We’ll explore the inner child, mothering and fathering the parts of ourselves that still need love, creating boundaries instead of walls, allowing ourselves to play, finding strength in solitude, listening to our bodies, and understanding why sometimes healing needs to come before change.

Because becoming whole isn’t about becoming someone new.

It’s about coming home to yourself.

So take a breath, settle in, and let’s begin.

This is Episode 17: The Practice of Becoming Whole.

gentle content note: This episode explores difficult experiences and themes that may feel heavy for some listeners. Please take care of yourself and listen when you feel ready.

Why do we stay? Why do we go back? And what happens inside the person who hurts us?

In Part 2 of Why Do We Stay?, we go deeper than the relationship itself. We explore the science behind anger, rage, emotional regulation, trauma, brain injury and mental health, and ask a difficult question: can someone genuinely be sorry for hurting you and still be unable to change?

Then we take that conversation into the reality of surviving abuse—where fear, love, isolation, hope and survival can become impossible to separate. Zoe shares a deeply personal part of her own story, including leaving an abusive relationship, becoming pregnant, experiencing profound loss, and the grief and rage that followed.

But this episode isn’t about staying stuck in the past. It’s about what happens when the healing begins.

We talk about the layers of trauma, why familiar doesn’t always mean safe, recognising red flags, learning the difference between boundaries and walls, and finding the healing approaches that work for you. Most importantly, we talk about the truth that every survivor needs to hear: you are not alone, you are not what happened to you, and your story is not over.

Because sometimes the deepest investigation isn’t about why we stayed.

It’s about discovering who we become when we finally realise we don’t have to stay.

Come with me into the deep dive.

This is Beneath the Scars with Zoe and I’m happy your here

Coming Soon!!!

Welcome back to Beneath the Scars with Zoe.

Well, I thought I was done with this particular rabbit hole. I really did. I thought we’d explored BDSM, power, control, submission, surrender, trust and consent, and that I’d probably leave it there for a while.

But then I started looking deeper.

And somehow, I’ve ended up talking about blood, vampires, Black Swans, bloodletting, self-injury, pain, release, the nervous system and the very strange ways that human beings sometimes experience their own bodies.

And the more I looked, the more I realised that this wasn’t really about sex at all. At least, not necessarily.

It was about something much deeper.

It’s about why somebody might deliberately choose pain. Why surrender can sometimes feel like freedom. Why the experience of being hurt can, for some people, be followed by a feeling of release. Why blood has carried such powerful meanings throughout human history. And why, for thousands of years, people actually believed that removing blood from the body could heal it.

So now I’m asking a completely different question.

What if we’re looking at the physical act and missing what’s happening underneath it?

What if the pain isn’t always the point?

What if the blood isn’t always the point?

What if, sometimes, what somebody is really searching for is release, connection, trust, surrender, or simply the ability to feel something when they’ve spent far too long feeling nothing?

I don’t have all the answers. I’m not here to tell you what’s right or wrong, and I’m certainly not here to tell anybody to go out and try any of this.

I’m curious.

And you know me by now. When something makes me curious, I investigate the hell out of it.

So, this is where the rabbit hole takes us next.

This is The Dark Side of Healing: Surrender, Pain & The Need to Feel.

First Audible Book — Coming Soon

There comes a moment in a woman’s life when she can no longer pretend that surviving is the same thing as living. A moment when everything she has endured, everything she has lost, and everything she has spent years protecting herself from rises to the surface and asks one impossible question: What if there is more?

More than the love she has known. More than the relationships that taught her to doubt herself. More than the endings that left her believing she was destined to walk through life alone.

Sometimes love does not arrive gently. Sometimes it arrives like a reckoning, like a storm that knows exactly which doors you have kept locked. It finds the places you buried beneath survival, grief, anger, disappointment, and every promise you made to yourself that you would never need anyone again. Somehow, without asking permission, it begins to open them.

The Lifetime Between Us was born in that space—not from a love I have already lived, but from a love I believe exists. A love that lives somewhere between faith and knowing, between imagination and memory, and between the life I have lived and the life I believe may still be waiting for me.

I have spent enough of my life learning what love is not. I know what betrayal can do, what abandonment leaves behind, and how grief can change the architecture of a heart. But I also know that healing changes us. There comes a time when the woman who once begged to be chosen finally understands that she must choose herself first.

And perhaps that is where this story truly begins.

What if, after all the lessons, the endings, and the shadows, there is a love that does not come to save her because she does not need saving? What if it comes to meet her? What if it recognizes the woman she has fought so hard to become and stands beside her, never asking her to become smaller so that love can fit?

That is the love I wanted to explore in this story—a soul bond, a recognition that feels older than memory, where two people carrying their own wounds, shadows, and unfinished stories somehow find one another and discover that love does not erase the darkness. Instead, it gives them somewhere safe enough to face it.

This is a story about being truly seen. About the difference between being wanted and being recognized. About choosing someone without abandoning yourself in the process. And most of all, it is about coming home—not to another person, but first to yourself.

These pages are my imagining of that possibility. A love I have not lived yet, but one I believe is out there. Maybe you believe it too. Maybe you have felt it in a dream you could not explain, in a stranger’s eyes that somehow felt familiar, or in that quiet knowing that somewhere, somehow, there is a person whose soul will recognize yours.

Because perhaps the greatest love story is not the one where someone arrives and completes you. Perhaps it is the one where you become whole enough to recognize love when it finds you.

And sometimes, after everything we have survived, everything we have lost, and everything we have spent years searching for, love finally finds its way home.

This is The Lifetime Between Us.

My first Audible book. Coming soon.

What actually happens in the body when we slow down enough to truly feel? In this episode, I am diving into the fascinating—and sometimes bloody complicated—relationship between touch, trauma, trust, consent and the nervous system.

From tantric bodywork and therapeutic touch to pain, dissociation, body memory and the ways we can lose connection with ourselves, I am exploring what happens when we stop trying to force the body to surrender and start listening to what it’s trying to tell us.

Because maybe healing isn’t about pushing harder, tolerating more pain or fixing what’s “wrong” with us. Maybe sometimes it’s about safety, choice, boundaries and learning that this is your body—and you get to decide what happens to it.

So… WTF happens when we feel? 

What did you mistake for love? That’s the question I want to start with today.

Because sometimes we spend years asking the wrong questions. Why did I stay? Why did they treat me that way? Why didn’t I leave sooner? Why does she keep going back? Why would anyone put up with that? We can be so quick to judge someone’s choices without ever stopping to wonder what happened underneath them.

This episode comes from Chapter Three of my new book, The Great Investigation, a book built around one simple idea: what if we learned to ask ourselves better questions?

Because our brains can be incredibly quick to judge. We see someone struggling, behaving differently, staying in a relationship that hurts them, repeating a pattern, or making choices we don’t understand, and almost instantly, we create a story about who they are. But where did we learn to do that? Who taught you to judge?

So much of what we carry is learned. Racism is learned. Shame is learned. Prejudice is learned. The language we use is learned. The beliefs we form about ourselves and other people are often handed to us long before we’re old enough to question them. And sometimes, we don’t even realise we’re carrying someone else’s beliefs.

So what happens when we finally stop and investigate?

Instead of asking, “Why did I stay?” we can ask, “What did I mistake for love?” Instead of asking, “Why didn’t my intuition make me leave?” perhaps we ask, “Why did I stay when something inside me was telling me to go?” And instead of looking back at every relationship and deciding whether it was a success or a failure, we can ask, “What did each relationship teach me?”

Because perhaps the people who hurt us aren’t simply chapters we’d like to erase. Perhaps they’re clues. Perhaps the patterns we keep repeating aren’t proof that something is wrong with us. Perhaps they’re invitations to investigate what we were taught, what we believed, what we tolerated, and what we confused with love.

And maybe this isn’t just about the people we’ve loved. Maybe it’s about the way we’ve learned to see ourselves, too.

So today, we’re going to look at the mirrors we’ve been handed, the mirrors we’ve chosen, and the reflections we’ve spent years believing were actually us.

This is The Great Investigation.

And the first question is a simple one—but it might change the way you look at your entire history:

What did you mistake for love?

Welcome back to Scars Beneath the Scars. This is Episode 13, and this one might make some of you stop, some of you think, and maybe even question what you thought you understood about power, control, dominance and submission.

Because what if surrender isn’t weakness? What if dominance isn’t about anger or control? And what if the difference between abuse and surrender isn’t what it looks like from the outside, but whether there was a choice?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I’ve had to really look at my own assumptions, especially when you bring trauma, trust, sexuality and healing into the conversation. And what I discovered surprised me.

So before we judge the whip, the word “Daddy,” the dominant, the submissive, or the people who choose to explore this world, let’s take a step back and ask a different question: what happens when somebody finally feels safe enough to surrender?

This is Episode 13: The Difference Between Power, Control and Surrender.

What does “ride or die” really mean when we take away the fantasy?

In this episode of Beneath the Scars with Zoe, we dive into the deeper meaning of loyalty, trust, friendship, protection, passion and choosing someone—not because you need them, but because life feels better with them beside you.

We hear the phrase “ride or die” everywhere: in music, movies, friendships, romantic relationships and even throughout some of the most complicated stories in history. But somewhere along the way, we’ve confused loyalty with blind devotion and staying with someone no matter what they do. Zoe explores why that isn’t real loyalty at all, and why betrayal can be the very thing that destroys the foundation a ride-or-die relationship is supposed to be built upon.

Drawing from her own experiences with love, heartbreak, betrayal, vulnerability and the walls she’s learned to build when someone breaks her trust, Zoe explores what it actually means to be safe with another person. She talks about the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation, protection and possession, intensity and intimacy, and why your lover should also be someone you genuinely like—your friend, your confidant and the person you can laugh with when life gets ridiculous.

This isn’t about finding a perfect relationship. It’s about finding something real.

It’s about having someone who knows you deeply, makes you laugh, can handle your intensity without trying to tame you, and never asks you to become smaller to make them comfortable. Someone who can hold your vulnerability without weaponizing it. Someone who can be passionate with you, peaceful with you, honest with you and still choose you when life isn’t easy.

Because maybe being someone’s ride or die was never really about asking, “Would you die for me?”

Maybe the better question is:

“Would you live beside me?”

Join Zoe as she explores the kind of love where loyalty isn’t blind, passion isn’t chaos, protection isn’t possession, and commitment doesn’t mean losing yourself.

A love where two whole people choose each other.

My ride or die. My lover. My best friend. My safe place.

Welcome back to Beneath the Scars with Zoe. Today we’re going somewhere a little more intimate, a little more uncomfortable, and hopefully somewhere that makes you question some of the things you’ve been taught about sex, pleasure, your body and intimacy.

We’re going to talk about the complicated relationship so many of us have with our sexuality and the way we see ourselves. We’re going to talk about insecurity, body image, shame, desire, sexual tension, pleasure, trust and what happens when the experiences we’ve had with other people follow us into the bedroom. Because sometimes the person standing in front of us isn’t the person we’re reacting to. Sometimes we’re reacting to somebody from our past, to something somebody said, something they did, or something they made us believe about ourselves.

We’re going to talk about why some of us struggle to let go and simply experience pleasure, why our minds can suddenly take over when our bodies are trying to feel, and why we can find ourselves watching ourselves from the outside instead of actually being present inside our own bodies. We’re going to explore the difference between sexual release and intimacy, between performance and sensation, and why trust can completely change the way we experience touch.

And we’re going to talk about tantric sex, because I think there is a lot of mystery and misunderstanding around that word. What actually is tantric sex? Why is slowing down so different from simply rushing toward an orgasm? What happens when we stop treating sex as an act and start experiencing it as sensation, anticipation, connection and trust? And could some of those principles help us reconnect with parts of ourselves that have become disconnected through insecurity, shame or past experiences?

We’re also going to have a conversation about sexual exploration. Because I genuinely don’t believe there is anything wrong with being curious about your own body, learning what feels good to you, or exploring different ways of experiencing pleasure. But exploration should never mean ignoring your own boundaries or somebody else’s. Who you’re exploring with matters. Your body needs to feel safe with that person. You need to be able to communicate, slow down, stop, change your mind and know that you will be respected.

And if this is something you’ve been curious about but you’ve never really known where to start, stay with me until the end. I’m going to include a simple tantric massage guide for those who are interested in exploring. It isn’t about giving you a rigid set of instructions that you have to follow. It’s about giving you some understanding of the principles behind it, how to approach it, how to create the right environment, how to use touch with awareness, and how to pay attention to the responses of the person you’re with.

Because this isn’t about performance. It’s not about proving how good you are at sex or trying to achieve some particular outcome. It’s about learning to slow down, communicate, listen and actually experience what is happening.

And perhaps that’s the biggest message I want to leave with you throughout this episode: there is absolutely nothing wrong with exploring your sexuality and learning about your own pleasure. But explore with curiosity, explore with consent, and most importantly, explore with somebody your body feels safe with.

Because sometimes our minds can say, “I’m fine,” while our bodies are telling us something completely different.

And that’s what we’re going to get into today.

The scars we take to bed, the stories we carry into intimacy, the things that can get in the way of pleasure, and whether learning to feel safe enough to experience our bodies again can change the way we experience sex, intimacy and ultimately ourselves.