Even Tacos Fall Apart

This one's for anyone who's dealt with addiction up close, loves someone who has, or just wants a real, unfiltered take on mental health from someone who's lived it and helps others through it too.

More info, resources & ways to connect - https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/the-cynical-therapist

This episode of Even Tacos Fall Apart brings on Elle, known online as The Cynical Therapist, for a raw and unfiltered conversation about addiction and mental health. Elle is a licensed marriage and family therapist and licensed advanced alcohol and drug counselor who calls herself an "anti-therapist," ditching the stiff, clinical energy of traditional therapy for something warmer, funnier, and a lot more honest. She talks openly about her own recovery from alcoholism, including getting sober after her third DUI, relapsing after a decade, and rebuilding her sobriety from the ground up.

The conversation covers a lot of ground. Elle breaks down what AA is like from the inside, the good and the cultish, and why it saved her life even when parts of it made her uncomfortable. She talks about the real reasons people turn to substances, including pain, boredom, and emptiness, and how cultural environment shapes what "normal" drinking or using even looks like growing up. She also digs into the dangerous myths around addiction, like the idea that it only touches certain kinds of people, when in reality it cuts across every background, income level, and profession.

There's a frank breakdown of what treatment actually looks like, from medically supervised detox for alcohol and benzo withdrawal to the wild cost differences between inpatient programs, outpatient options, and everything in between. Elle and MommaFoxFire don't hold back on the state of the American healthcare system either, calling out insurance companies, reimbursement rates, and the absurd gap between what treatment costs and what people can actually afford.

The two also get into conditions that often show up alongside addiction, like OCD and eating disorders, and talk through the difference between self-harm and addictive behavior. Elle shares her take on stages of change, why willpower alone rarely fixes anything, and why she believes therapy should be seen as strength building instead of a sign something is broken.

Toward the end, the conversation shifts into practical territory. Elle offers real talk on building a well-being routine that actually holds up, including setting achievable goals, creating structure without rigidity, limiting news and social media intake, and making space for people who make you laugh. It's grounded advice from someone who has lived through the hard stuff herself and works with people navigating it every single day.

This episode is for anyone who wants a therapist's perspective without the sterile, buttoned up delivery. Elle brings humor, bluntness, and genuine compassion to topics that usually get talked about in hushed, careful tones. Whether you're in recovery, love someone who is, or just want a smarter and more human take on addiction and mental health, this conversation delivers.

Even Tacos Fall Apart is a podcast about real conversations with real people, mental health, personal growth, and the messy stuff nobody else wants to talk about out loud.

This one's for anyone who's ever gone quiet about a problem instead of talking about it, and for the partner on the other side wondering why the distance keeps growing.

More info, resources & ways to connect - https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/gaylen-wilson

Gaylen Wilson almost died three times before his heart finally gave out for good, and then a stranger's heart gave him twenty more years.

In 2014 a virus attacked his heart while he was on the road doing computer field service work with his wife Heather. A physician's assistant misdiagnosed it as pneumonia without ever ordering a chest x-ray. Gaylen kept working. Weeks later, in a clinic in Corpus Christi, doctors told him he didn't have pneumonia at all. He had congestive heart failure, and it had been quietly destroying his heart the entire time he thought he was recovering. His ejection fraction, the measure of how much blood his heart could actually pump, had dropped to five percent. A healthy heart runs fifty to sixty.

What followed was three and a half years of end stage heart failure. A defibrillator implant. A night when it fired and shocked him back into rhythm while Heather lay next to him, unaware how close she'd come to losing him in his sleep. Half an hour after he finally told her he probably had two to three months left, the hospital called. A heart was available. He went into surgery at four in the morning and came out with a thirty eight year old heart in his sixty one year old body.

That transplant is the reason Gaylen exists in the online world he built. He calls it his insane need to pay the blessing forward, and it shows up in everything from the free dating site he runs to the dozens of books he's written to the erectile dysfunction support communities he now leads.

Gaylen had developed ED at forty four, long before his heart failed, and he watched it wreck marriage after marriage in the groups he moderates. What he found wasn't a bedroom problem. It was men going silent, pulling away from the women who loved them, convinced that losing their ability to perform meant losing their worth. He doesn't buy the idea that this is a character flaw. He calls it a nervous system in fight or flight, a primal fear of losing the relationship that ends up sabotaging the relationship instead.

That's the same insight behind the Monument Method, the coaching framework he and Heather built together after nearly two and a half decades of marriage, including the hardest years of his life. It leans on attachment theory, the idea that most fights between partners have nothing to do with what's actually being said and everything to do with a threat the nervous system thinks it's under. Gaylen and Heather built a set of tools around that, including a shared word they use to stop a fight cold and turn back toward each other instead of away.

This conversation covers survival, misdiagnosis, shame, sex after sixty, why silence is the real enemy for men dealing with ED, and what it actually takes for a marriage to become a refuge instead of a battlefield. If you've ever watched someone you love go quiet on you, or gone quiet yourself, this one is worth your time.

This one's for anyone who's mastered the art of looking fine while quietly falling apart behind the scenes.

More info, resources & ways to connect - https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/lisa-lacy

Lisa Lacy spent three decades in corporate education and healthcare consulting before she started writing about the things most people keep locked away: addiction, psychosis, trauma and what she calls identity masking, the gap between who you actually are and who you become just to get through the day. She's also written her debut memoir, Notes from a Certified Mad Woman, along with a companion guide, and she joined MommaFoxFire on Even Tacos Fall Apart to talk about performing fine and what it actually costs.

This episode digs into the difference between adapting to a room and disappearing inside a mask. Lisa is clear that we all shift a little depending on where we are. You don't bring the same energy to a board meeting that you bring home to your partner. That's normal. The dangerous mask is the polished one, the six figures and the perfect blended family on social media while you're falling apart behind the scenes in total silence.

Lisa and MommaFoxFire talk about why high functioning people often get checked on the least. When you're the one who gets everything done, everyone assumes you're fine, so nobody asks. Lisa breaks down why shame keeps people quiet even when they know something is wrong, and she gives real language for closing that gap: acknowledgement, awareness and observation. She makes the case that just noticing the pattern is most of the work.

They cover how to support a high functioning person in your life without making things worse, starting with asking permission before you share an observation instead of walking in with unsolicited advice. Lisa also lays out what actually makes someone a safe person to open up to, someone with a track record of lifting you up instead of draining you or judging you.

Lisa gets honest about her own ten year recovery journey, starting inpatient rehab at forty, and she talks through psychosis from the inside, what it's like to live inside another reality that felt completely real while it was happening. She pushes back on the idea that mental health struggles make someone defective or that struggling is some kind of moral failure. It's real. It exists. That's it.

There's a lot of practical stuff in here too. Lisa is a martial artist with belts in three disciplines and she connects that training to staying regulated instead of reactive. She talks about the power of a long exhale when anxiety hits, why building your coping toolbox before you hit a low matters more than scrambling for it in the moment, and why she believes emotional intelligence, especially willingness and curiosity, matters more for a good life than IQ ever will.

This one hits close to home for anyone who has ever looked completely fine on the outside while quietly falling apart on the inside. Lisa's bottom line carries the whole episode: always one more day, always one more try. Today is not the day to give up.

This one's for anyone who's tired of being handed a diagnosis instead of a real conversation.

More info, resources & ways to connect - https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/dr-fred-moss

Dr. Fred Moss spent over forty years in psychiatry and worked with more than thirty thousand patients before he started asking the question that changed everything for him: what actually heals people? That search led him to build Welcome to Humanity, a movement built on the idea that connection, creativity and honest communication are the real medicine, not a diagnosis and a prescription pad.

On this episode of Even Tacos Fall Apart, Dr. Fred joins host MommaFoxFire for a conversation that goes straight at the heart of how we talk about mental health and why so much of it misses the mark. Dr. Fred shares the story of growing up as the family communicator, getting bored out of his mind in a school system built for compliance instead of curiosity, and stumbling into psychiatry almost by accident while working a child care job at a state hospital. What he found there set the course for the rest of his career.

He talks openly about the years he spent doing work he didn't believe in, prescribing medications and handing out diagnoses because that's what the industry wanted, even while he suspected those tools were doing more harm than good. In 2006 he tested that suspicion by taking willing patients off their medications and watching many of them get better, not worse. That moment reshaped how he practiced and eventually led him to close his practice and travel the world researching what people actually need to heal.

The conversation covers a lot of ground. Dr. Fred and MommaFoxFire dig into the difference between a label that validates someone's experience and a label that boxes them in, using MommaFoxFire's own family and her son's Tourette syndrome diagnosis as a real world example of how labels can cut both ways. Dr. Fred pushes back hard on the idea that psychiatric conditions are fixed or permanent, and he makes the case that connection and honest communication do more for a person's wellbeing than most people expect.

They also get into creativity as a form of healing, why so many of the best poems are actually songs, and what Dr. Fred has learned about taking care of his own mental health after four decades of sitting across from other people's pain. He talks about his upcoming book, Welcome to Humanity: A Psychiatrist's Case Against the Mental Health System, and shares the one piece of advice he'd give someone who feels like traditional therapy or medication just hasn't reached them yet.

This episode is a reminder that healing doesn't always start with a prescription. Sometimes it starts with a creative outlet. Sometimes it starts with reaching out to another person and being brave enough to say something true out loud.

Tune in for a conversation about creative expression, connection and what it really means to be human, straight from a psychiatrist who has seen it all and isn't afraid to challenge the system he spent his career inside of.

Somatic therapist Melanie Smithson joined ETFA to talk about why your shoulders, your gut and your jaw remember things your brain would rather forget.

More info, resources & ways to connect - https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/melanie-smithson

Melanie Smithson has spent thirty years as a somatic psychotherapist, and she opened this episode with a truth most of us avoid: your body remembers everything your mind tries to forget. Stress, grief and old wounds don't just live in your head, they lodge in your shoulders, your gut and your jaw. And according to Melanie, the way out isn't more thinking. It's movement.

Melanie is the award winning author of two books, Stress Free in Thirty Seconds and her newest release Shake Yourself Free, and she sits on the board of NAMI New Mexico. Her whole approach centers on one idea: letting go is a skill we were all born with and most of us lost somewhere along the way.

We got into practical stuff fast. Melanie broke down small, doable somatic practices anyone can use at a desk, in a chair or stuck in a rut of apathy. Throw your arms in the air. Shake your body loose for thirty seconds. Bounce in your seat. Even groaning counts, and she's working on a new book about exactly that. The goal isn't to look graceful. It's to remind your nervous system that you're not stuck, even when your mind insists you are.

We also talked about anger, and Melanie gave one of the most useful distinctions of the whole conversation: the difference between expressing a feeling and raging at someone. It comes down to checking in with your body first and doing an honest inventory before you ever open your mouth. She walked through how she handles it in her own marriage, and it's a practice worth stealing.

Grief got its own space too. Melanie explained why grief isn't one feeling but a whole cluster of them, sadness, anger, despair, stuck-ness, and why figuring out which one you're actually sitting with changes everything about how you move through it.

One of the most striking parts of our conversation was Melanie's point about why physical illness gets accepted in our culture while mental struggle still carries shame. Her answer wasn't what I expected, and it reframed the whole stigma conversation for me.

We closed on letting go itself. How do you know when something is actually released instead of just shoved back down? Melanie's answer comes back to the body every time. She also shared a line that stuck with me long after we stopped recording: you cannot let go of who you are, only what you've accumulated. The more you release, the closer you get to yourself.

This episode is full of small, real, actually usable tools, not vague advice to just relax. If you carry tension in your body, if you've been told to calm down without anyone telling you how, or if you're ready to stop pushing feelings back down just to have them resurface later, this conversation will give you somewhere to start.

This one's for anyone who's ever felt like they had to prove they were struggling before someone would finally believe them.

More info, resources & ways to connect - https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/loot-the-body

This time on Even Tacos Fall Apart I sat down with Loot the Body, a Twitch streamer, homeschool mom of seven, and mental health advocate who turns face painting into a way to open up hard conversations. She streams as Mental Health and Makeup, and her whole mission comes down to one line she lives by: your worth isn't something you earn, you already have it.

Loot lives with bipolar disorder, and she walked us through what that actually looks like day to day, not the neat two month manic and two month depressive cycle people picture, but mood shifts that can hit four times in a two week stretch. During manic phases she'd chase validation in ways that hurt her marriage. During depressive ones sleep became her only escape from feeling like a failure. She talked openly about passive suicidal ideation, the kind where you're not trying to end your life but you catch yourself hoping you just don't wake up, and why that still counts as an emergency worth calling for help over.

We got into her two week inpatient stay, the structure that helped her steady out, and the moment a doctor finally listened close enough to catch what years of misdiagnosis had missed. Getting the right diagnosis, she said, was one of the biggest steps toward learning to manage her illness instead of just surviving it.

Loot also opened up about miscarriage, the ignorant comments she heard from people who meant well but had no idea what to say, and the one sentence that actually helped: it's okay to grieve. She talked about Poland syndrome, a condition she was born with that wasn't fully visible until puberty, and how she learned to stop apologizing for a body that didn't match anyone else's.

Underneath all of it is a woman who homeschools seven kids, still finds time to crochet through her manic energy, and built a community on Twitch that gave her somewhere to land when her dad passed away suddenly. She's honest with her kids about what she's going through because bipolar disorder runs in her family and she wants them to see that naming a struggle out loud takes away its power, not adds to it.

If you've ever felt like admitting you're struggling makes you weak, this conversation is going to hit different. Loot reminds us that one in two people will deal with a mental illness at some point in their life, so the odds are good that whoever you're talking to gets it more than you think. Self care isn't selfish, asking for help isn't failure, and feeling unheard by the people meant to help you is one of the hardest parts of getting better.

Grab a taco, settle in, and listen to a conversation about bipolar disorder, mental health advocacy, and what it actually takes to keep showing up for yourself and your family when your brain is working against you.

This episode is for anyone whose nervous system never got the memo that the war, the trauma or the crisis is over.

More info, resources & ways to connect - https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/bee-doyle

Brandi "Bee" Doyle came home from combat in Afghanistan at 25 years old carrying PTSD, alcohol dependency and a loss of purpose so deep it led to a suicide attempt. On this episode of Even Tacos Fall Apart she talks about what it actually took to come back from that, and what she has learned since becoming a nurse practitioner, intuitive healer and spiritual teacher who blends medicine, astrology, ancestral wisdom and nervous system work.

Bee gets honest about the moment things shifted for her. It wasn't a single breakthrough. It was finding out she was pregnant with her son and realizing she could not pass her pain down the way it had been passed down to her. She talks about tracing that pattern back to her grandfather, a WWII POW whose untreated trauma shaped her mother's childhood and eventually her own, and how epigenetics is starting to back up what trauma survivors have known for generations.

We get into the Western medicine model and where it falls short for people dealing with complex trauma, plus the alternative practices that actually moved the needle for her, starting with an acupuncture session that knocked her out cold and cracked the door open to everything else she tried after. She talks about her own version of the squirrel phase, grabbing at every possible tool before figuring out what actually resonated, and why something not working for you doesn't mean it doesn't work at all.

Bee doesn't shy away from where the research is headed either. She digs into what she's seeing with psychedelic medicine, including ibogaine treatment for opioid dependence and her own clinical work with ketamine, and makes the case for why this conversation needs to happen without panic and without judgment.

For anyone who hears "spiritual" or "energy work" and immediately checks out, Bee has an answer for that too. She was that skeptic. Her military background trained her to distrust anything that wasn't black and white. What changed her mind wasn't a leap of faith, it was reaching a point where she had nothing left to lose.

We close out talking about the small daily habits that keep her regulated now, gratitude first thing in the morning, breath work, a slow ritual cup of cacao instead of coffee, and why healing doesn't have to come with a price tag. Free breath work channels, time outside, even a houseplant can be a starting point if a $200 an hour practitioner isn't in the budget right now.

If you or someone you love is carrying trauma that logic alone hasn't been able to fix, this conversation is full of permission to try something different and proof that healing is possible no matter how far down you've been.

This episode is for anyone who's ever been told they're "so strong" and just wanted to scream instead.

More info, resources & ways to connect - https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/rob-rene

Rob Rene has been near death four separate times, including one moment on the operating table where his heart stopped completely. On this episode of Even Tacos Fall Apart, he sat down to talk about the mental and emotional effort of healing after trauma, and what it actually takes to come back from a body and mind that have both hit rock bottom.

Rob spent 25 years in corporate tech, traveling the country selling enterprise software and putting his health dead last on the priority list. A stage three melanoma diagnosis changed that. So did a heart that quietly failed for years without him knowing, until it gave out completely during surgery. He talks openly about what it felt like to be revived, and how that experience rewired what mattered to him.

But this conversation goes deeper than medical drama. Rob gets honest about being a highly functional alcoholic for years, using it to numb problems he wasn't ready to face, and the mental fog that came with it. He talks about the eight years since he got sober and what that process actually cost him emotionally. He also opens up about a stretch where chronic swelling left his leg twice the size of the other, forced him onto a scooter, and pulled him into some genuinely dark mental territory about whether he'd ever walk normally again.

That's where this episode earns its topic. Healing from trauma isn't a straight line and it isn't just physical. Rob talks about the grief that comes with chronic pain, the moments where hope feels impossible to hold onto, and why he believes losing hope is often what stops people from healing at all. He shares how small mental shifts, choosing gratitude over dread, choosing to expect good instead of bracing for bad, changed the trajectory of his recovery in ways he didn't expect.

Faith plays a major role in how Rob rebuilt his life, and he explains it in a way that doesn't require you to share his beliefs to get something out of it. He walks through how he moved from being a Christian in name only to building what he calls a relationship instead of a religion, and why he thinks that shift matters for anyone working through their own healing, spiritual or not.

Rob is now a faith based wellness advocate, host of the Biohackingville podcast, and founder of Exodus Strong. He's also working on a book called Light Code, built around what he's learned about the mind, body and spirit connection through his own recovery.

This conversation offers a real look at what the emotional side of healing actually demands, whether you're working through your own health crisis or standing next to someone who is. It's not polished and it's not simple. It's honest about how hard the climb back can be, and why hope is worth holding onto even when it feels thin.

This one's for anyone who's tired of blaming themselves for a wandering mind and ready to learn what's actually going on up there.

More info, resources & ways to connect - https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/david-mckee

Attention spans have gotten shorter and there is a reason for that. On this episode of Even Tacos Fall Apart, MommaFoxFire sits down with David McKee, founder of Another Angle Consulting and author of the upcoming book Navigate the Noise, to talk about why our brains are struggling to focus and what we can actually do about it.

David built his career on a hard truth. His father, a Methodist minister, was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and made choices that fractured the family when David was young. That experience became the foundation for how David now coaches creatives, executives and young adults through mental and emotional barriers, because he learned firsthand what it looks like when someone is running on stress, cortisol and no sleep.

The conversation covers a lot of ground. David breaks down the science of anger, explaining that a spike of emotion only lasts 75 to 90 seconds before anything beyond that becomes baggage we choose to carry. He talks about neuroplasticity and how something as small as brushing your teeth with your opposite hand can start rewiring the brain toward more flexible thinking. He explains why social media rewired attention spans for an entire generation and compares it to soda, fine in moderation but a problem when it becomes the only thing we consume.

David also gets personal about therapy, music and grief. He shares how he resisted therapy after a back injury forced him into treatment, and how that experience ended up changing his life. He talks about losing his mother in 2014 and the wrong way he handled it at first, pretending she was simply away instead of processing what actually happened. And he opens up about his ADHD diagnosis and a genetic test that revealed his body was only absorbing a fraction of the vitamin B12 he needed, a small discovery that explained years of exhaustion.

Throughout the episode, David keeps circling back to one idea. Mindset beats talent more often than people want to admit, and the people at the very top of their fields, from Michael Jordan to Michael Phelps, got there in part because they trained their minds the same way they trained their bodies. He gives practical, low lift tools listeners can start using immediately, from setting a timer on anger to simply changing your daily route to work.

This is a conversation about attention, but really it is about control. How much of our day do we actually run, and how much of it runs us. David and MommaFoxFire dig into generational differences in how we talk about mental health, why kids today are more open about therapy than previous generations ever were, and what it means to raise a generation that grew up with a phone in their hand.

If you have ever felt like your attention span is shorter than it used to be, or you are raising kids in a world that is constantly pulling their focus in ten directions, this episode is worth your time.

This one's for anyone who's been so busy holding someone else together that they forgot to check on themselves.

More info, resources & ways to connect - https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/yvette-murray

Caregiving doesn't always look like what you think it looks like. It's not just the adult child managing a parent's dementia or the spouse driving someone to chemo. It's the partner absorbing someone else's mental health crisis. It's the coworker who ends up being the person everyone vents to. It's the parent walking on eggshells around a kid's big emotions. On this episode of Even Tacos Fall Apart, MommaFoxFire sits down with Yvette Murray, registered psychotherapist, mental health first aid facilitator, body language expert and author of The Mental Health Contagion, to talk about what happens when the people doing the supporting forget they need support too.

Yvette grew up watching her mom navigate bipolar disorder while also becoming one of the country's leading voices in mental health advocacy. That mix gave her an early education in what caregiving actually costs a person, and it shapes everything she teaches now. She and MommaFoxFire dig into the real warning signs that a caregiver is running on empty: emotional inflammation, irritability, isolating from friends and family, feeling numb or apathetic, even something as small as brushing your teeth turning into the biggest event of the day.

They talk honestly about boundaries, including the messy, guilt soaked kind. Yvette breaks down the difference between guilt and shame, why resentment does more damage than guilt ever will, and how loving someone doesn't mean absorbing every consequence of what they're going through. She shares real stories, including one about a man who had to ask his brother to move out of his basement after years of enabling, and what it took for both of them to come out the other side better off.

There's a lot of practical stuff here too. Yvette talks about her own toolbox for burnout, things like quiet time, walks in nature and calling her dad, and why building that list before you're in crisis matters so much. She and MommaFoxFire get into the physical toll of caregiving, the habit of one upping other people's pain instead of sitting with your own, and why a good cry might be one of the most underrated tools you have. Yvette says giving herself permission to really cry, no holding back, is still her favorite life hack.

They also cover body language, why crossed arms or a fidgeting habit doesn't always mean what you think it means, and how asking someone what a gesture means to them beats guessing every time. And they close on something every caregiver needs to hear: you don't have to earn your own self care by being useful to someone else first. You're worthy of it just because you're human.