Kyla Mitsunaga is the kind of guest who can wear an emotional support headband, talk about death, dementia, money, shame, sensuality, and family systems, and somehow make the whole room feel lighter, and she did exactly that on DWYP. A Harvard-trained, award-winning former professor, Kyla is also a third culture kid born and raised in Hong Kong, and she knows what it feels like to not belong. She was bullied as a child, bullied as an adult, and raised with a mother whose criticism became a voice she had to learn how to stop carrying.

But instead of letting shame define her, Kyla turned toward it, witnessed it, acknowledged it, and made not belonging her medicine. We dive into family constellations, belonging, dementia, death, money, pleasure, and what it means to stop carrying definitions that were never yours to begin with. Kyla shares how her mother’s early onset dementia led her into a deep depression, then into the healing work that became the Mitsunaga Method, a path back to the light no matter how dark it gets.

This episode is for you if:

• You have ever felt like you did not belong.
• You have carried shame that was never yours.
• You have been the one holding too much for your family.
• You are watching someone you love change through illness, dementia, or decline.
• You want a new relationship with death, money, sensuality, or your own body.
• You are ready to stop living inside definitions handed to you by family, culture, or society.
• You believe healing can be deep, sacred, hilarious, and a little bit fucking fun.

Kyla is currently enrolling the next July cohort of BAM, Our Business And Money mastermind, beginning end of July 2026:

https://www.kylamitsunaga.com/bam.html

You can also find Kyla’s free and paid Family Constellations events on her Luma calendar:

https://luma.com/familyconstellationswithkyla

Some people grow up comfortable with death, darkness, and the parts of life most families keep locked in a back room. Derek Peterson grew up mowing cemeteries, lowering caskets, and sitting in mausoleums in winter.

No secrets. No shame. Just life and death, held together. That ease with the hard stuff became the foundation for 30 years of international work with children carrying stories far too heavy for childhood. But the question this conversation keeps opening is not only what Derek built. It is what made it possible.

What happens when a person learns early that the hard parts of life do not have to be hidden? This conversation is about what happens when pain finds a purpose instead of an exit, when community becomes the technology that makes flourishing possible, and when the world you create for others is built directly from the darkness you refused to run from.

This episode is for you if:

• You have ever felt abandoned.

• You have survived a divorce and had to rebuild a life you did not expect.

• You have felt the pull to leave the safety of a job to follow the truth of your heart.

• The pain ever felt too heavy to carry.

• You reached a place where you wondered whether you still wanted to be here.

• You are learning that suffering becomes even heavier when it has no witness.

• You are beginning to understand that support is not weakness, it is part of how we heal.

Find out more about Derek at:

icar-us.com and kaloseidosfoundation.org

Mai's story holds the kind of pain that teaches a child to go quiet, a stranger who turned her trust against her, the year of silence that almost broke her, the parents who loved her but could not give her what she needed, and the inheritance of a family that crossed an ocean to be safe.

But this conversation is not only about what was done to her.

It is about what we reach for when the people who love us cannot give us what we need, what silence does to a body holding a truth it is not allowed to say, and how a person keeps choosing to live, to trust, and to build something out of what was meant to break them.

This episode is for anyone who has ever:

• Stayed silent because speaking felt impossible
• Loved people who loved you but could not give you what you needed
• Carried shame that was never yours to carry
• Had to reach outside your family to find safety, truth, or support
• Lived between two cultures

This is a conversation about abuse, silence, generational trauma, belonging, justice, and motherhood, and the slow, brave, unfinished work of finding your own voice.

Connect with Mai: https://www.instagram.com/p/C9-YRBbq7tg/

Meenakshi’s story moves through the kind of pain most people never imagine surviving, the murder of her father and grandfather in a terrorist attack, the silence that can surround grief, the pressure to keep going when everything has fallen apart, and the ache of growing up in a culture that told her darker skin made her less worthy.

But this conversation is not only about what happened to her.

It is about what happens inside a person when the world tries to break them, shame them, silence them, or make them disappear, and somehow they keep choosing life.

In this episode, we talk about:

• What survival really costs, and what it can quietly build

• The grief people carry when a culture teaches them not to cry

• The pain of being told your skin, body, or identity makes you less worthy

• What happens when shame gets passed down, and someone finally decides to stop it

• How loss, prejudice, and silence can shape a life, but do not have to own it

• Why the thing that broke you may also become the thing that builds you

• How resilience is not always loud, polished, or pretty, sometimes it is just getting up again

This is a conversation about terrorism, colorism, grief, resilience, motherhood, identity, and the ordinary, brutal, beautiful work of becoming whole.

He was thirteen years old, dying of cancer, and he turned down the pain medication so he could stay awake with the people he loved. That is not a metaphor. That is what Carson Sipe actually did. His mother, Carrie, tells it straight — the knee removal, the infection, the hospice bed wheeled into the living room that Carson refused to sit in because, as he put it, why can't I just die on the couch. She describes the grief that starts the second a doctor says there is no cure, the siblings fractured and slowly knitting themselves back together, and the Imperial Death March playing as his casket rolled out of the church. Carson was funny, fierce, and constitutionally incapable of leaving a room without making sure everyone in it felt loved. This is the episode that named this podcast. Carrie Sipe is the woman who said, in our family we don't waste our pain — we use it. Carry that out with you.

• The reality of anticipatory mourning and how grief begins the exact minute a terminal diagnosis is delivered
• Why a thirteen-year-old boy consciously chose physical agony over medication, enduring a failing body just to remain awake for his final moments with his family.
• The disruption of expected grief through dark humor, including the decision to play the Imperial Death March as a child's casket leaves the church
• Why life and death are not separate, isolated states, but an absolute continuum that we all inhabit
• How pain serves as the ultimate connective tissue between humans, creating a shared understanding that bypasses superficial interactions

Don't Waste Your Pain is a movement disguised as a podcast. The world lacks places to tell the truth about pain, so this show addresses realities like rape, murder, illness, and loss without flinching or sensationalizing. Hosted by JT Trepanier, the conversations anchor on four core pillars: death, illness, sensuality, and mothering.

This is not a self-help podcast offering fixes or five-step plans. Here, devastation and delight sit side by side, allowing forgiveness, humor, eros, and joy to coexist with grief. The famous and the incarcerated sit in the same chair because wisdom comes from lived truth rather than titles. Pain is treated as a portal to wisdom rather than a problem to solve.