Content Warning: This episode discusses anti-trans discrimination, suicide, suicide attempts, mental-health impacts of discrimination, and systemic oppression.

Who Does the Binary Really Serve?

In this solo episode of The Shadow Side with Safrianna, Safrianna Lughna explores the question: Who does the gender binary really serve?

Looking beyond the familiar categories of man and woman, Safrianna examines how rigid gender roles have been shaped by colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and systems of power and control. She reflects on the existence of gender-diverse traditions across cultures and considers what happens when humanity is reduced to two prescribed boxes.

She also addresses the real-world consequences of anti-trans legislation and misinformation, including the mental-health impacts of discrimination and the ways rigid gender expectations harm cisgender people as well as trans and non-binary people. Safrianna connects these patterns to her work as a therapist, educator, and the Queer-Spirit Guide, while reflecting on her own evolving relationship with gender and identity.

Through personal stories and reflections from two non-binary contributors, Harmony and Len, the episode ultimately turns toward authenticity, autonomy, compassion, and the freedom to become more fully ourselves.

The deeper question isn't simply whether there are two boxes or not. It's what happens when we stop believing everyone has to fit inside them.

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Gender, Transgender & Non-Binary Research

Williams Institute — U.S. Transgender Population Estimates

Williams Institute: How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States?

The Trevor Project — 2025 U.S. National Survey

Trans Legislation Tracker

World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) — Standards of Care, Version 8

Endocrine Society — Gender Dysphoria/Gender Incongruence Clinical Practice Guideline

American Psychiatric Association — Gender Dysphoria Resources

PubMed — “Two-Spirit Identity in a Time of Gender Fluidity”

“Developing Resources for American Indian/Alaska Native Transgender and Two-Spirit Youth” — National Library of Medicine

Alicia Carroll, Indiscipline: Reading Collaboratively Written Native American Autobiography

Jessica Hinchy — Gender, Family, and Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-Century North India

UNESCO — Gender Stereotypes in Education

UNESCO — Teachers' Attitudes on Gender and Student Experiences

2024 Meta-analysis of Children's Gender Stereotypes About STEM and Verbal Abilities

Organizations Mentioned in the Episode

⦁ The Trevor Project — LGBTQ+ youth crisis support, education and research.

⦁ Trans Lifeline — Peer support and resources for transgender people.

⦁ National Center for Transgender Equality — Advocacy, policy information and transgender rights resources.

⦁ Human Rights Campaign — LGBTQ+ civil rights research, advocacy and education.

⦁ GLAAD — LGBTQ+ media advocacy, education and research.

⦁ Williams Institute — Independent legal and policy research on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Connect with Shanti Joy Gold at:

https://shantijoygold.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanti-joy-gold/

https://www.instagram.com/shantijoygold

Host contact:

Website: https://Safrianna.com

Email: [email protected]

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What does it truly cost to hide parts of yourself?

In this powerful conversation, Shanti Joy Gold and I explore the emotional, relational, and professional impact of living "in the closet"—not only in the traditional sense, but in all the ways we conceal our authentic selves to gain acceptance, avoid conflict, or meet others' expectations.

Together, we discuss how fear, shame, and people-pleasing can quietly shape our lives, the hidden toll of living behind a carefully constructed identity, and what it takes to step into authenticity with courage. Shanti shares insights from her personal journey and her work helping others reconnect with who they truly are, offering practical wisdom for anyone seeking greater freedom, self-trust, and purpose.

Whether you've ever felt pressured to fit in, stay silent, or become someone you thought you had to be, this episode is an invitation to consider what authenticity can make possible when you're willing to stop hiding.

We talk about:

- The hidden cost of suppressing your authentic self

- Breaking free from fear, shame, and people-pleasing

- Building self-trust through honest self-reflection

- Authentic leadership and living with purpose

- Choosing freedom over performance

Listen in for a lovely conversation between two queer professionals, whether you're LGBTQIA+ yourself or have hidden in some other kind of closet, whether that be masking, hiding your gifts, or any place you felt you had to hide.

Guest: Jeanne Foote, Founder & Director, The Recovery Concierge

Website: https://therecoveryconcierge.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/therecoveryconcierge

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/serenity_gal/

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/jeanne_foot

Email: [email protected]

Jeanne's podcast: Naturally High

Host contact:

Website: https://Safrianna.com

Email: [email protected]

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In this episode of The Shadow Side, Safrianna Lughna sits down with Jeanne Foote — an internationally certified addiction counsellor, founder and director of The Recovery Concierge, and host of the Naturally High podcast — for a conversation about what recovery looks like when it's treated not as a return to normal, but as a full redesign of life.

Jeanne has walked her own recovery path for 35 years. She opens up about a hard truth many people in recovery know intimately: you can hit every marker of "success" — stay abstinent, look put together, keep functioning — and still be quietly unraveling underneath. For Jeanne, that meant years of feeling frozen in her own body, unable to look at herself in the mirror, while her life looked picture-perfect from the outside.

Together, Safrianna and Jeanne unpack addiction as a coping mechanism rather than a character flaw — one shaped by nervous system dysregulation, early attachment wounds, and the pressure to trade authenticity for connection. They talk about why shame so often backfires, deepening the very cycles it's meant to interrupt, and why talk therapy alone often isn't enough for those carrying complex trauma.

Listeners will also hear Jeanne's concept of "floors and ceilings" — a practical, compassionate approach to staying consistent without needing to be perfect — along with why nutrition, sleep, and somatic awareness are foundational (not optional) parts of healing.

This episode is an invitation to stop white-knuckling your way through recovery and start asking a bigger question: not just how do I stop, but what am I building instead?

Connect with Kim Romain at: https://KimRomain.com

Connect with Safrianna Lughna, LCPC, MS: https://Safrianna.com

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In Episode 28 of The Shadow Side with Safrianna, host Safrianna Lughna is joined by Kim Romain — life and business alchemist and former host of The Empowered and Embodied Show — for a candid conversation about extractive empowerment: the ways self-development and personal growth work can quietly become another form of avoidance, consumerism, or spiritual bypassing.

Together they explore what it looks like to get stuck in an endless loop of self-knowledge without integration — the Dunning-Kruger trap of mistaking cognitive insight for actual embodied change.

They unpack the difference between healing that moves us forward and healing that becomes a way to escape collective responsibility, examine "good vibes culture" and spiritual bypassing as forms of disconnection from real justice work, and name how consumerism can masquerade as empowerment when self-development starts requiring more buying rather than more integration.

The conversation also touches on core wounds, the concept of being "healed and healing" rather than fully done with our work, and the idea that true empowerment is reciprocal and collaborative rather than hierarchical or extractive. Kim and Safrianna close with a shared call to listen to your own truth, stay in real conversation with other humans, and resist the pressure to constantly chase the next goalpost of self-improvement.

Guest

Deb Porter — Founder, HOLD

Website: https://www.hearingoutlifedrama.comCollaborative

Resource

Becoming Who I Really Am — A free identity exploration guide for 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals navigating identity change. No email required.

https://www.hearingoutlifedrama.com/identity-exploration-guideHost

Safrianna Lughna, LCPC, MS — The Queer-Spirit Guide

Website: https://Safrianna.com

Email: [email protected]

Podcast hub: https://the-shadow-side-with-safrianna.captivate.fm/listen

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In this episode of The Shadow Side with Safrianna, Safrianna sits down with Deb Porter, founder of HOLD — a confidential, judgment-free listening service — to explore what it really means to become who you are.

Deb brings a unique perspective to the conversation: a former United Methodist pastor who walked away from her ministry when a family member came out, unwilling to stay in a role that would have required her to say no to love.

Together, Safrianna and Deb unpack the layered process of identity exploration, with a particular focus on 2SLGBTQIA+ experiences. They discuss the courage it takes to come out in today's world, the particular grief that can accompany later-in-life identity shifts, and the exhausting weight of masking and code-switching.

The conversation moves through what it means to truly listen — and why most of us were never actually taught how — and into the nuances of allyship: knowing when you don't have the lived experience, and going to find people who do.

Deb and Safrianna also share vulnerably from their own lives — Safrianna on coming out as polyamorous and the spectrum of family responses, Deb on challenging her own father's harmful words and the grief of a family member never feeling safe enough to bring their partner to gatherings.

The episode closes with an invitation toward permission — permission to evolve, to keep questioning, to stop explaining yourself to people who haven't done their own self-love work yet. Safrianna and Deb also introduce their collaborative free resource, Becoming Who I Really Am, an identity exploration guide created specifically for 2SLGBTQIA+ people navigating identity change.

Illness as a Portal features a conversation between Safrianna and Whitney Shook, holistic nutritionist specializing in Hashimoto's and complex chronic illness, about what it means to approach health and healing with softness rather than rigidity.

This episode explores why strict, protocol-heavy approaches to healing often backfire — creating stress, shame, and orthorexic patterns that compound the very symptoms people are trying to resolve.

Whitney and Safrianna examine the energetic and emotional roots of autoimmune disease, tracing much of it back to unmet needs for love, safety, and self-worth — while being careful not to place blame on people for conditions that often originate in childhood trauma and systemic neglect. They discuss the medical system's history of dismissing chronic illness, particularly for women and those with complex presentations, and how that dismissal mirrors earlier experiences of being unseen or unheard.

The conversation moves through the concept of illness as identity, the grief cycle that often mirrors the chronic illness experience, and the ways perfectionism around healing can become its own trap. Safrianna shares her own fibromyalgia diagnosis and her practice of reading body sensations as messages — symptoms as portals into what parts of herself need attention. Whitney introduces her "zoom in, zoom out" framework as a tool for releasing hyper-fixation and returning to a broader, more compassionate view of the healing timeline.

Both affirm that healing is non-linear, multimodal, and deeply personal — and that the most powerful shift available is turning inward with gentleness rather than chasing external fixes. Learn more about Whitney and her work at: https://www.instagram.com/whitneyshook/

In this episode of The Shadow Side with Safrianna, host Safrianna Lughna, LCPC, MS sits down with Jennifer Urezzio, intuitive strategist and soul language practitioner, to explore one of the most pervasive and culturally conditioned patterns in human behavior: the addiction to struggle.

Jennifer unpacks how many people are wired — through cultural conditioning, unresolved trauma, and Protestant work ethic — to equate struggle with progress. Together, she and Safrianna examine how struggle functions as a distraction from deeper shadow work, how it masquerades as a false zone of safety, and how the highs and lows of chronic striving become a mechanism for avoiding what actually needs attention.

The conversation weaves together Soul Language, Human Design, spiritual bypassing, and somatic awareness to offer a fuller picture of what it means to release the struggle identity.

Jennifer shares tangible tools — including how to create a conscious connection with the soul and how to use the body's "divine intelligence" to establish a new set point of safety. Safrianna reflects on her own Collaborator Soul Language and the practice of pivoting out of misalignment in real time.

The episode closes with Jennifer's reminder that returning to one's essential nature and allowing something new to be created from a place of wholeness and completion is the work.

Guest: Jennifer Urezzio — Soul Language practitioner and intuitive strategist, founder of Soul Language. https://soullanguage.us/

Guest — Dr. Matt Van Auken, MD, MPH

The Buddha's Medicine: thebuddhasmedicine.com

Living Seasons Project: thebuddhasmedicine.com/offerings-events/the-living-seasons-project

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In this episode of The Shadow Side with Safrianna, host Safrianna Lughna, LCPC, MS, welcomes back returning guest Dr. Matt Van Auken, MD, MPH — triple board-certified physician and director of The Buddha's Medicine clinic in SE Portland, Oregon, with more than 15 years of Ayurvedic study and practice — for a frank, wide-ranging conversation about the intersection of U.S. policy, environmental health, and individual wellbeing. Recorded in mid-March 2026, the episode takes a clear-eyed look at the wave of regulatory rollbacks affecting air quality, water safety, pesticide protections, and healthcare access — and asks the pointed question: what does all of this mean for our bodies?

Dr. Matt brings both clinical expertise and Ayurvedic wisdom to the conversation, grounding the discussion in the foundational importance of clean air and breath, and tracing very real health consequences — from respiratory disease to endocrine disruption — when environmental protections are stripped away. Together, Safrianna and Dr. Matt examine the impact of PFAS (forever chemicals), glyphosate and pesticide deregulation, cuts to federal health agencies, and the ongoing erosion of healthcare affordability. They also address the outsized influence of industry lobbying on public health policy and nutritional guidelines, and what it means for ordinary people when those structures operate without accountability.

The conversation doesn't stop at the problem. Safrianna and Dr. Matt close with grounded, accessible guidance for navigating these challenges: building community and mutual aid networks, eating seasonally and simply, voting with your spending, reducing plastic and chemical exposure at home, and bringing mindful, energetic intention to how we nourish ourselves. Dr. Matt also shares details about his newly launched Living Seasons Project — an Ayurvedic seasonal preventive health program available through The Buddha's Medicine. The episode ends with a call to collective resilience: we are still here, we still have each other, and that is where hope lives.

In this episode of The Shadow Side, Safrianna sits down with Adriana Keefe — the Human Design Priestess — for a rich, wide-ranging conversation about what it means to be wired for rebellion, and how the wounds that shape us can become the very source of our power.

Adriana opens up about her history of surviving sexual and physical abuse, and the long arc of her healing journey — from a young woman who kept moving forward without fully understanding why, to a mother whose daughter's birth became the catalyst for finally speaking out.

Together, Safrianna and Adriana explore how generational trauma, the wound of receiving, and disconnection from the womb and sacral center intersect with both personal healing and collective transformation.

The conversation weaves through human design — particularly the sacral center as the seat of joy, creativity, passion, and life force — and what happens when survivors are cut off from that space. Adriana speaks candidly about the layers of her own money journey, her experience as a mixed-race (half Puerto Rican) white-presenting woman navigating identity and belonging, and how she is learning to trust herself as a voice in the world — cautiously, deliberately, and authentically.

Safrianna and Adriana also reflect on the shadow side of self-development culture: the trap of constant healing work as a substitute for actually living, and the radical act of letting life be easy. The episode closes with an invitation to approach shadow work with curiosity and play rather than a fixing mindset — and a reminder that the power to rebel already lives inside you.

CONNECT WITH ADRIANA

Adriana Keefe — Website: https://adrianakeefe.com

The Magnetic Rebellion Community: https://themagneticrebellion.com

Podcast: The No BS Human Design Podcast — available on major platforms

Instagram: https://instagram.com/adrikeefe

CONNECT WITH SAFRIANNA

Website: https://Safrianna.com

Substack: https://Safrianna.substack.com

Email: [email protected]

Podcast Hub: https://the-shadow-side-with-safrianna.captivate.fm/listen

Dr. Melissa Bird — lay preacher, public speaker, author, podcaster, and congressional candidate

https://drmelissabird.com

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Season 2, Episode 1 | “Imagining Our Way Through” | Guest: Dr. Melissa Bird

In the first episode of Season 2, Safrianna Lughna welcomes back Dr. Melissa Bird — returning guest, dear friend, and fellow disruptor — for a wide-ranging conversation about imagination and creativity as radical, healing acts for turbulent times.

Drawing on Dr. Bird’s concept of the “creativity timeline” and Safrianna’s own journey toward writing her second novel, the two dig into why adults are conditioned to abandon creative play — and how that conditioning is rooted in white supremacist, patriarchal systems that reserve artistic freedom for a narrow class of people. They explore how reclaiming imagination isn’t escapism; it’s resistance. It’s alchemy. It’s what keeps us from taking our darkness out on each other.

The conversation moves through shadow work, the soul’s calling, the seduction of overconsumption, the “shitty shoulds,” self-made prisons (hello, Devil card), and the both/and nature of being human in a turbulent moment. Dr. Bird reflects on running for Congress, needle felting as stress relief, and meditating to Metallica. Safrianna reflects on unhooking from the American Dream and the urgent, tearful realization that now is the time to write.

They close with card pulls from their respective decks — Transformation (Living Altar Oracle) and the Sword of Light (Gateway of Light Activation Oracle) — both pointing toward the fire of this moment and what it’s asking of us.

A joyful, grounded, and fiercely honest Season 2 opener about why your creative expression matters — not just for you, but for the collective.