What if you grew up believing that most of the people you loved were destined for hell?

Casey Rae Nunn was born into what she believed was simply a devoted Christian community in rural Manitoba. From an early age, she was taught there was one right way to live, one right way to believe, and one path to salvation. As she met children outside her community at school, she was told by the adults in her life that anyone who wasn't part of their faith would spend eternity in hell.

But even as a child, Casey sensed something wasn't quite right. She remembers wondering, What do you mean all of my friends are going to hell? She was naturally curious and quietly questioned the messages she was being taught, even if she didn't yet have the words, or the freedom, to challenge them.

It wasn't until she left home to attend university that her world began to expand. In her twenties, Casey started to wonder whether the community she had grown up in was not simply a strict Christian sect, but a cult.

One of the most fascinating parts of Casey's story is the contrast between the world that shaped her and the woman she is today. A vibrant, creative, artistic, and deeply thoughtful person, Casey grew up in an environment that saw life in stark black and white. Her journey has been one of reclaiming curiosity, embracing nuance, and redefining who she is on her own terms.

In this episode, we talk about growing up in a high control religious community, questioning everything you thought you knew, untangling identity from indoctrination, and finding the courage to build a life that feels authentically your own, while still loving family members who remain part of that world.

This wasn't an easy story for Casey to tell. Following public scandals involving the group she grew up in, she has chosen to share her experience because it is an important part of who she is and because she knows others may recognize pieces of their own story in hers.

This conversation is about faith, identity, belonging, courage, and what happens when you finally give yourself permission to ask the questions you've carried your whole life.

If you want to learn more about 2 X 2

Trust Me: Cults, Extreme Belief, and the Abuse of Power Hosted by Lola Blanc and Meagan Elizabeth (an ex-2x2)

- "Kyle & Kari, Part 1 – Deconstructing the 2x2s" (August 16, 2023) – Apple | Spotify - "Kyle & Kari, Part 2 – Uncovering Widespread Sexual Abuse" (August 23, 2023) – Apple | Spotify - "Mike & Abbi Prussack, Part 1: A Church with No Name, Isolated Childhoods, and Doomsday Fear" (November 12, 2023) – Apple | Spotify - "Mike & Abbi Prussack, Part 2: Predators in Power, Institutional Denial, and the Fight to Expose It" (November 19, 2025) – Apple | Spotify

Let's Talk About Sects

- "Two by Twos / The Truth" (October 13, 2020) – featuring Laura McConnell, an ex-2x2 from Australia – Apple | Spotify - "Interview Episode: Two By Two Update" (February 6, 2025) – featuring Abbi and Mike Prussack – Apple | Spotify

The Mass Exodus

- "Anguish, Abuse, and Ankle Length Dresses: Growing Up in a Nameless Cult" (March 29, 2022) – featuring Kristin Warnaca – Apple | Spotify

What happens when your greatest fear becomes your reality?

For Melanie Roy, the fear of abandonment wasn't just something she worried about, it became the defining circumstance of her life. Over the years, she experienced the unimaginable loss of every member of her immediate family, forcing her to navigate profound grief, heartbreak, and loneliness long before most people ever face those challenges.

But this is not a story about loss.

It's a story about resilience.

In this deeply moving conversation, Melanie shares what it was like to carry grief through every season of her life, how she learned to keep moving forward when the people she loved most were gone, and why she refused to let tragedy define who she would become.

Today, Melanie has transformed her pain into purpose. She has dedicated her life to caring for some of the most vulnerable people in our communities, individuals who are often overlooked, forgotten, or left behind. Her story is a powerful reminder that while we cannot always choose what happens to us, we can choose what we do with it.

This episode is about loss, healing, courage, and the extraordinary strength of the human spirit. Most of all, it's about discovering that sometimes our greatest wounds can become our greatest gifts.

What if the darkest moments of your month weren't simply PMS, but a serious and treatable medical condition?

In this powerful and deeply personal conversation, Christine shares her experience living with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), a severe and often misunderstood condition that affects millions of women yet remains significantly underdiagnosed.

For years, Christine found herself trapped in a cycle of emotional and psychological symptoms that seemed to take over her life. During certain phases of her menstrual cycle, she experienced intense shifts in mood, thinking, and emotional regulation that left her feeling as though she had lost access to mental facilities. As she describes it, it felt like her mind was in a cage.

Because PMDD symptoms can closely resemble anxiety, depression, and other mental health conditions, many women spend years searching for answers without realizing that their symptoms may be linked to their hormonal cycle. Despite its prevalence, awareness of PMDD remains surprisingly low, leaving countless women struggling in silence.

Christine shares her journey to diagnosis, the challenges of navigating a condition she didn't understand, and the relief that came with finally finding the right support, treatment, and medication. Today, she is living well and using her story to help others recognize the signs, ask questions, and seek the care they deserve.

Whether you've heard of PMDD before or are learning about it for the first time, this conversation offers hope, validation, and a deeper understanding of a condition that deserves far more awareness.

If this conversation resonates with you, please share it with someone who may need to hear it. Greater awareness can help more women find answers, support, and hope.

christine-guenette.com

At just 28 years old, a week after getting engaged, Lisa Braidwood was diagnosed with stage 3C breast cancer and was forced to confront an uncertain future at the very moment her life was just beginning.

Twenty-one years later, she is living proof that the story doesn't always end where it's predicted to.

In this episode, Lisa shares the raw, unfiltered reality of her diagnosis, treatment, but this is not just a cancer story. It's a story about what happens after: the unexpected paths, the identity shifts, the resilience built over time, and the deep gratitude that comes from simply being alive.

Lisa's perspective is grounded, powerful, and deeply human. She doesn't sugarcoat what she went through, but she also doesn't live there. Instead, she brings us into how she learned to move with life rather than resist it, and how overcoming cancer shaped her into someone who meets every chapter with presence, grace, and acceptance.

A story of living, but more importantly, a story of becoming.

What happens when the life you've been told to want isn't the life you actually want?

In this episode, Cindy sits down with Erin Marguerite to talk about choosing an unconventional path long before it became trendy to do so.

Growing up as the oldest of four children, Erin learned early that her role was to help. She describes feeling "shrink-wrapped" by family expectations, often putting her own needs aside while caring for her younger siblings and becoming the dependable people-pleaser everyone counted on.

Like many of us, Erin followed the path that seemed laid out for her. She went to university with plans of becoming a teacher, but quickly realized that a traditional career and a 9-to-5 life didn't fit who she was. Sitting behind a desk and following a prescribed path felt disconnected from the freedom and creativity she craved.

Rather than continuing to live according to other people's expectations, Erin began creating a life that reflected her own values. Over the years, she has continually reinvented herself, giving herself permission to evolve, explore new possibilities, and choose herself again and again.

Now, as she steps into her next chapter, Erin is helping other women break free from the roles they've outgrown and build lives that feel authentic, expansive, and fully their own.

This conversation is about people-pleasing, identity, self-trust, belonging and the courage it takes to create a life that looks different from what others imagined for you.

Erin's podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/own-your-wild/id1518657803

Erin's website

https://www.erinmarguerite.com/

Erin Book: BOOK LINK

Amy Miller spent most of her life wondering why she felt different.

Growing up, humour wasn't just entertainment, it was survival. Amy learned early on to use comedy as a way to navigate life's challenges, mask her struggles, and find connection in a world where she never quite felt like she belonged. She talks openly about feeling out of step with others, speaking too fast, thinking too fast, and constantly questioning her place.

When the most important person in her life, her mother and lifelong map, died, Amy found herself navigating a world she no longer knew how to move through. After years of trying to reinvent herself and understand who she was, she continued searching for answers.

It wasn't until perimenopause amplified symptoms she had unknowingly lived with for decades that Amy was finally diagnosed with ADHD in her 40s. Suddenly, a lifetime of experiences began to make sense.

In this candid conversation, Amy shares how ADHD shaped her identity, and how understanding her neurodivergence changed the way she sees herself and her past. Today, she is passionate about helping others who have spent their lives feeling different, misunderstood, or like they never quite fit into the boxes the world created for them.

This is a conversation about identity, belonging, resilience, and what happens when the missing piece finally falls into place.

Kat was so focused on the pregnancy and delivery that she never stopped to think about what would come after. Postpartum depression wasn't on her radar.

Her story begins when her new baby arrived and the joy she had been promised didn't.

Instead, there was a darkness she didn't recognize. Thoughts that didn't feel like her own. A disconnection from her newborn that left her completely lost during what was supposed to be the most beautiful time in her life. Despite being a Coach, Yoga and mindfulness teacher, none of her tools were working.

One of the scariest parts, Kat says, is that many women don't even realize it's happening to them. Shame keeps so many mothers silent. They're afraid to say the thoughts out loud, afraid of what it means if they don't feel the connection everyone tells them they're supposed to feel.

She tells her story softly, but you can feel how fresh the scars still are. Honest, raw, and deeply grounded, Kat reflects on her experience and turns it outward, because more than anything, she wants other women to know they don't have to figure it out alone and that there are many paths to freedom.

Let's be very clear; postpartum depression is not the baby blues. It is a debilitating mental health condition, and too many women are suffering in silence because the people around them don't know what to look for or how to recognize the signs.

This episode is for new moms and the people who love them. Women need the people closest to them to recognize when something is wrong.

This is one woman's real and honest truth about one of society's biggest shames. Let's break the cycle.

The conversation wasn't finished. So we went back in.

Following the powerful episode 3, Cindy Schwartz and Melanie Richards sit back down, this time with Robin Glance, Montreal-based registered Anti-diet dietitian, Health at Every Size advocate, and the woman who will quietly change the way you think about food, your body, and what healthy actually means.

Robin doesn't do diets. She doesn't weigh her clients. She doesn't count calories or sell quick fixes. What she does is help people rebuild their relationship with food, gently, honestly, and without judgment.

In this special episode, Robin brings us the science behind dieting, and talks about what the research actually says about weight and health, how diet culture has been lying to us, and what it really means to nourish our bodies from a place of love rather than control.

This is the episode brings us the science and roots behind Melanie's Fuck skinny culture revolution.

We debunk myths you may have believed as truth your whole life.

Tune in and learn the truth to reclaim your own body sovereignty

Robin's website: https://robinglancenutrition.com/about/

Melanie's website: https://happytreeyoga.com/

The Anti Diet https://christyharrison.com/foodpsych

Fearing the black body; the racial origins of fat phobia https://a.co/d/0iGbhpMS

Intuitive eating: https://a.co/d/0cJgK181

Ayurvedic doshas: https://kripalu.org/living-kripalu/ayurvedic-doshas

The Association for Size Diversity https://asdah.org/

When Mariana's world was shaken by three unexpected words from her husband, her first instinct was to do what she'd always done, give more, try harder, hold on tighter.

What she didn't yet know was that her anxious attachment style had been quietly writing the rules of her relationships her whole life, tracing all the way back to her childhood.

It wasn't until she stopped trying to fix everything around her and turned inward that everything began to shift and along the way, she shared the secrets that helped her find peace and leave old patterns behind for good.

Mariana's story is one of radical honesty, hard-won self-awareness, and a transformation that can only come when you're finally brave enough to look at yourself clearly.

Attachment theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_in_adults?wprov=sfti1

Marianna's LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariannaguenette?utm_source=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=member_ios

Lana Burton is an educator, a mom of two, wife and rugby referee & one of the most fiercely honest, unflinchingly real voices you'll hear this season.

She joins Cindy to talk about what happens when you want something with every fiber of your being, but your body betrays you, and no one can tell you why.

Her epic quest to become a mother was fraught with more than a dozen failed rounds of IVF, and then eventually into forced menopause. Lana details very honestly not just the physical but the emotional cost that no one warned her about.

There is a persistent grief she carried in moving through a world that never learned how to hold space for women trying to make a family at any cost.

Lana is unfiltered and unapologetic, but more than anything, she's generous. She's sharing her story because she wished someone had when she needed it most.

You'll feel her frustration and her relief, sometimes in the same breath.

This one is for you if you have ever felt invisible in your pain.

Lana's kids Book

Cindy's website: www.becoached.ca