Toxic leadership stems from the burdens of unresolved trauma and difficult life experiences. 

When you don’t do the work to regulate your nervous system, the parts of you that protect you through mico-managing, shaming, blaming, not trusting anyone, or worse will eventually wreak havoc on your career, those you lead, and your own capacity for discomfort.

So, what does it look like for you to commit to doing the work?

Maybe you go to therapy or coaching, or adopt practices to deepen your self-awareness and reflection. The trouble is, “doing the work” can easily turn into navel-gazing or intellectualizing. The same tools that might help you unburden can also be used to numb out. We so often are sold the idea that we will overcome and be done with it that we bypass doing the real, deep, lifelong work.

Today’s guest illustrates–literally–what it looks and feels like to commit to doing powerful work. Her gorgeous new graphic novel, Past Tense, shares her windy and beautiful journey of doing the work through the lens of Internal Family Systems.

Sacha Mardou was born in Macclesfield in 1975 and grew up in Manchester, England. She began making comics after getting her BA in English Literature from the University of Wales, Lampeter. Her critically acclaimed graphic novel series, Sky in Stereo, was named an outstanding comic of 2015 by the Village Voice and shortlisted for the 2016 Slate Studio Prize.

Since 2019 she has been making comics about therapy and healing. Her graphic memoir Past Tense: Facing Family Secrets and Finding Myself in Therapy is out now. Since 2005 she has lived in St Louis, Missouri with her cartoonist husband Ted May, their daughter and two disruptive cats.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How going to therapy for what she thought was just anxiety became a journey of unpacking her past 
• How her therapist helped her “correct the picture” she’d been holding of people and events of her childhood
• How Sacha adapted her private sketched therapy notes into the comics she shares publicly
• How working with IFS to process her childhood has impacted her present-day relationships
• How the IFS process has helped Sacha recast her difficult experiences as gifts and strengths and her story as valuable
• How Sacha approached writing her book wholeheartedly, while still protecting her boundaries

Learn more about Sacha Mardou:

• Website
• Past Tense: Facing Family Secrets and Finding Myself in Therapy
• Instagram: @mardou_draws
• Facebook: @sachamardou

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

Resources:

• Family Secrets with Dani Shapiro
• EP 72: Identifying and Addressing the Burdens of Individualism with Deran Young & Dick Schwartz
• EP 101: Transforming the Legacy Burdens from Relational Trauma with Deran Young
• Compassion Prison Project
• Cece Sykes LCSW
• Ralph De La Rosa, LCSW
• Doris Lessing
• Eric Maisel
• Elizabeth Gilbert
• Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, Rebekah Taussig
• Love Is a Burning Thing, Nina St. Pierre
• Teenage Fanclub - Mellow Doubt
• The Franchise
• The Office