The Strong-but-Struggling Podcast

You were the good girl. The one who held everything together, took care of everyone else, and never asked for help. For a long time, that’s exactly what got you praised.

But underneath the colour-coded planners and the showing up, your nervous system was on fire. And nobody named it, because from the outside you had it together.

In this episode, Alyssa sits down with her friend and fellow therapist Ludi Acevedo, a licensed marriage and family therapist and founder of Heal and Bloom Family Therapy. Ludi lived this pipeline herself. They talk about how good girl conditioning starts in childhood, gets reinforced by family and religious environments, and ends in burnout. For many women, there’s another layer nobody checked for: a brain that was never wired the way they were told it should be.

In this episode:

• How perfectionism, people pleasing, and overfunctioning connect to burnout
• Why ADHD in women gets missed for decades, and how trauma and anxiety can mask it
• What Ludi’s burnout looked like, and the moment with her sister that changed everything
• The question to ask yourself: are you working for your systems, or are your systems working for you?
• Rejection sensitivity, and reclaiming your smallest preferences (yes, even tomatoes)
• Why joy, play, and community are part of the healing, not a reward for it
• What an ADHD assessment looks like, and why a checklist alone misses so much

The takeaway: Start with the smallest thing. What do you want to eat? What do you want to wear? What music do you actually want to listen to? Trust yourself in one small moment, then do it again.

Chapters

00:03 Introducing Ludi Acevedo

02:58 How good girl conditioning started

11:06 Burnout and the crash out

18:31 Are your systems working for you?

27:34 Religious conditioning and self-abandonment

36:29 Rejection sensitivity and people pleasing

43:06 Joy and play as healing

51:30 What an ADHD assessment looks like

01:06:43 What Ludi would tell her younger self

Connect with Ludi Acevedo

Website: healbloomtherapy.com

Instagram: @ludi_acevedo

Facebook: Heal and Bloom Therapy

Substack: Ludivina Acevedo

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You’ve heard the question in the context of other people. When I need you, are you there? That’s the foundation of secure attachment.

But what happens when you turn that question on yourself?

In this episode, Alyssa sits down with Dr. Danica Harris — somatic experiencing practitioner, complex trauma expert, and co-owner of Empowered Healing Dallas — for a conversation about the attachment style nobody talks about enough: the one you have with yourself. Not just whether you trust other people to show up, but whether you trust you.

This isn’t a recap of the attachment quiz you took on Instagram. This is the deeper layer — what it actually looks like to build a secure relationship with yourself, why so many high-functioning women are running on self-rejection without even realising it, and what it looks like to slowly, gently start showing up for yourself in the moments that count.

Alyssa also shares how attending Danica’s somatic retreat in 2023 — and intentionally missing her son’s soccer game to do it — became one of the most pivotal moments in her own healing.

In this episode:

• What secure attachment with yourself actually looks like — and why it’s not about endless self-care breaks or zero accountability
• How insecure attachment shows up in places you’d never expect — like how you negotiate a salary or whether you say yes to a Friday night out
• Why so many of us became unofficial therapists for everyone around us and forgot to tend to ourselves
• Danica’s real-life example: how she nearly said no to a friend, caught herself, and what the internal negotiation actually sounded like
• The difference between trying harder and trying softer — and which one is keeping you stuck
• Why the missing piece for most strong but struggling women isn’t more effort — it’s gentleness

The takeaway: Pick one moment today where you can show up for yourself — not in a grand gesture way, but in a quiet I-heard-you way. Drink the water. Go to the bathroom. Wear something you actually like. Ask yourself what you have capacity for right now. That attunement, practiced over and over, is how secure attachment with yourself actually gets built.

Chapters

00:10 Introducing Dr. Danica Harris

03:40 What attachment actually is — “when I need you, are you there?”

05:19 Turning that question on yourself

06:35 Danica’s journey from relentless self-criticism to self-trust

08:20 The moment at 30 when everything shifted

09:34 Alyssa’s parallel story — codependency and choosing herself

13:07 The conditioning that teaches women to care for others first

18:57 What each attachment style looks like with yourself

21:21 Finding where security already exists before trying to build more

24:30 Attachment styles in a job interview — a real-world example

33:39 Alyssa at Danica’s retreat — and missing the soccer game on purpose

40:47 The comedy show, the Friday night, and the internal negotiation

48:59 Micro moments vs. grand gestures

50:34 Where survival mode still shows up for Danica

52:32 The one thing every strong but struggling woman needs to hear

Connect with Dr. Danica Harris:

Instagram: @theempoweredtherapist

Website: empoweredhealingdallas.com

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Join Her Steady Circle Membership — first week free

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Day one of your new regulation routine: you crush it. Gratitude list, meditation, the works.

Day three: your kid wakes up at 5:30 with a fever. The routine goes out the window. Five days later you’re sleep deprived, behind on work, and the other kid is sniffling. And your brain doesn’t say “that’s just life.” It says: it’s ruined. I can’t do this.

So you skip everything for two weeks. And then you start over from day one.

That’s not a willpower problem. That’s the go-go-go crash cycle. And it’s exactly what happens when we turn regulation into a project.

In this final episode of the Q&A series, Alyssa answers the question: is there actually a sustainable way to regulate? Her honest answer — yes, but not the way most people are trying to do it. She shares what she’s done differently over the last few years that has actually stuck, including the moment in 2023 when she went to her husband completely burned out and he said “I thought you liked doing it all” — and what clicked for her in that moment.

In this episode:

• Why you cannot regulate your nervous system using the same tools that are keeping you stuck — perfectionism, colour coding, and doing the most included
• What regulation actually means — and why it has nothing to do with being cool, calm, and collected
• Why frequency beats intensity — and how a 60-second pause does more than a 30-minute meditation you never actually do
• How to stack regulation onto things you already do instead of building a whole new routine
• Why sometimes the most regulating thing you can do is take something off the list
• Alyssa’s real-life examples: Animal Crossing, walks, overnights with friends, and how her husband has cooked dinner almost every night for two years
• Why one time is enough — and why doing it once on purpose is actually the whole practice

The takeaway: Find one small thing this week that makes you feel more like yourself. Something fun, something creative, something that has no purpose other than the fact that you enjoy it. Do it once. That’s it. Not every day. Once. And let that be enough — because letting one time be enough is the practice.

Chapters

00:08 The regulation routine that fell apart on day three

01:39 The go-go-go crash cycle — and why it keeps repeating

03:05 The question: is there actually a sustainable way to regulate?

05:30 Why turning regulation into a project is the problem

06:23 What regulation actually means

08:37 The car pickup line moment — and why deep breaths aren’t always the answer

15:17 Regulation is not managing yourself every second of the day

15:51 Frequency beats intensity

17:28 Stack it onto what you already do

19:31 What to actually check in on — energy, capacity, vulnerabilities

21:48 Regulation can look like blasting your playlist in the car

22:30 Start with the bar — not 250 pounds

25:10 Sometimes regulation means taking something off the list

27:08 Alyssa’s 2023 crash out — “I thought you liked doing it all”

30:24 How dinner hasn’t been her problem for two years

32:16 Making time for friends — two overnights in one year

34:01 Hobbies, Animal Crossing, coloring books, and walks

36:40 Therapy, support groups, and asking for help

42:03 Your homework: one small thing, one time this week

43:18 Regulation means choosing yourself in small ways, consistently

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Remember those quizzes in the back of Seventeen magazine? Take ten questions, get your answer, done. A lot of us have done the same thing with attachment styles. You get your label — anxious, avoidant, secure, or the one nobody wants — and you think, okay, that's me.

And then you notice you're completely avoidant with your mom but spiraling over a text from someone you're dating. Totally secure with your best friend. And you think — wait, which one am I actually?

All of them. Depending on the person, the history, and how safe you've actually felt there.

In this episode, Alyssa breaks down attachment styles the way they actually work — not the quiz version. The one that accounts for the fact that your nervous system is reading every relationship through the lens of what it's been taught to expect. And those lessons aren't the same for every person in your life.

She also gets personal about her two kids and why she attaches to them differently. Why she swore she'd never miss a soccer game, what was really underneath that promise, and what it took to realize her son didn't even remember the games she missed. It was never about him. It was about her wounds.

In this episode:

• Why you can get a completely different attachment style result depending on which relationship you're thinking about — and why that's not a flaw, it's the whole point
• A real breakdown of all four attachment styles — what they look like, where they come from, what's happening in the body
• Why anxious and avoidant people so often end up together — and how each person's survival mode triggers the other's
• How attachment shifts with stress — you might be secure on a normal Tuesday and anxiously attached when you're running on no sleep and your partner wants to go play golf
• Why secure attachment doesn't mean perfect — it means reliable enough and repaired when it breaks
• What to actually try this week instead of taking another quiz

The takeaway: Pick two or three people in your life and ask — what happens in my body when this person goes distant? Do I reach? Do I pull away? Do I feel steady? Don't answer with how you think you should feel. Just notice what your body actually does. That's your attachment pattern. And that's the beginning of understanding it.

Chapters

00:01 The magazine quiz — and why attachment quizzes have the same problem

01:42 You can get a different result with different people — that's the point

05:07 Three scenarios: anxious with a partner, avoidant with a mom, secure with a best friend

10:40 Alyssa on her two kids — why she attaches to them differently

13:40 The soccer games she missed — and what was really underneath the guilt

21:32 Her oldest doesn't remember the games she missed. It was never about him.

23:25 Where attachment research actually started

25:40 Secure attachment: what it looks and feels like

27:53 Anxious attachment: when distance feels like danger

30:31 Avoidant attachment: when closeness feels like a threat

31:44 Disorganized attachment: wanting closeness and fearing it at the same time

33:06 What causes each attachment style

37:36 Why anxious and avoidant people keep finding each other

40:10 How attachment shifts with stress

42:30 Your practice for this week

44:54 How attachment actually changes — through felt experiences, not insight alone

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You're dating someone new. Things are going well — he's attentive, he texts good morning, everything seems fine. But then he cancels plans twice. Both times with a real reason. And something in you goes quiet.

And then he's sweet again and you feel the pull back in.

So you say it out loud to your friend: isn't this a red flag? And you hear yourself answer: no, it's fine. I think I just have trust issues. Maybe I'm being too sensitive. Maybe I'm the problem.

And just like that, you override everything your body was trying to tell you.

Or you go the other way — you spiral. Is this my gut? Is this anxiety? Is this trauma? Am I missing something? And you can't make a decision because you don't trust yourself enough to know which one is which.

In this episode, Alyssa answers one of the most common questions she gets: what is the difference between intuition and a trauma response — and how do you actually tell them apart?

She gets honest about the time she went back to her ex-husband after leaving, how she talked herself into it, and what she was actually being driven by in that moment. She also shares the story of the business coach she hired early on — when she knew it wasn't right, said so out loud, got convinced otherwise, and turned out to be completely correct. Two very different situations. The same pattern underneath.

In this episode:

• Why trauma and intuition can feel identical in the body — and what actually separates them
• How complex trauma (not one big moment, but years of stacked smaller ones) drives decisions you don't even realize you're making
• The steps Alyssa uses with clients to start telling the difference — starting with knowing what safety actually feels like in your body
• Why you need to look at the pattern, not just the moment
• The difference between overcontrolled and undercontrolled nervous systems — and why the same crowd can look like a party to one person and a mob to another
• When the loop of "is this my gut or my anxiety?" is actually fear of making the wrong choice wearing the costume of intuition
• The one thing real intuition will never lead you toward

The takeaway: Next time you feel that knot in your stomach or sense that something is off, don't spiral into which is right or wrong. Just ask: does this feel familiar in a way that's triggering danger? Does that danger actually fit the facts in front of me right now? Is this happening with everyone, or with this specific person in this specific pattern? You don't need the full answer yet. You just need to ask.

Chapters

00:01 Picking up where last week left off — codependency and going back

01:12 This week's question: gut vs. trauma, intuition vs. anxiety

03:34 The dating example — and the moment you override what your body is saying

08:29 Alyssa's story: everything her body was telling her — and why she ignored it

10:07 Going back — and the betrayal that wasn't his, it was hers

11:09 Complex trauma: how stacked smaller moments drove the decision

16:37 How do you actually tell the difference? Step one: know what safety feels like

18:38 Step two: does this feel familiar in a way that's triggering danger?

19:44 Step three: look at the pattern, not just the moment

22:05 When excitement and anxiety feel identical in your body

23:38 The party vs. mob story — same crowd, completely different meaning

24:05 Overcontrolled vs. undercontrolled nervous systems

30:02 When the "is this my gut?" loop is really fear of being wrong

32:15 When shame is wearing the costume of intuition

34:20 What trusting your gut has felt like when it turned out to be right

37:33 The one hill Alyssa will die on: real intuition never leads you toward self-abandonment

40:21 Self-trust isn't always making the right decision

Apply for Reclaim Your Steady — fall 2026 group starting now, waitlist open for January 2027

Join Her Steady Circle Membership — first week free

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You've said it. Maybe ten times. Maybe twenty. You've used your I statements, you've softened the tone, you've chosen the right moment, you've written it all down. You've even put it in a compliment sandwich.

And nothing changed.

So you start wondering — am I not saying it right? Do I need a better script? A firmer tone? A different approach?

Here's what Alyssa wants you to hear instead: what you're saying isn't the problem. The problem is that you've been giving information without a consequence. And a boundary without a consequence isn't a boundary. It's a request.

In this episode — the first of a new Q&A series — Alyssa answers the question she gets asked almost every week: what do you do when you set a boundary and someone keeps stepping over it anyway? And when does that stop being their problem and start being yours?

She shares the journal entry she found from 2015 — pages of softened, sugarcoated, carefully packaged "boundaries" written for her ex-mother-in-law. The relationship contract she made with her ex-husband so he'd stop calling her names. And the moment she realized that none of it was actually a boundary, because she never once followed through.

In this episode:

• Why people don't keep crossing your boundaries because they didn't hear you — they cross them because they don't believe you
• The difference between a request and a boundary — and why most of what we call boundaries are actually just lists of expectations
• Alyssa's own story: the relationship contract, the journal entry, the ex-in-laws — and what finally changed
• When does someone overstepping stop being their problem and start being yours?
• Why boundaries don't stick — and what's actually underneath people pleasing that nobody talks about
• Why you don't have to set the biggest, most intense boundary right now — and what one small action step actually looks like
• How following through on your own word builds self-trust over time — and why that's the real point of all of this

The takeaway: Think about the one boundary you've stated over and over to the same person with nothing changing. Instead of thinking about how to say it better next time — decide what you will actually do. Not a script. An action. Something within your control that doesn't depend on them hearing you, agreeing with you, or changing. You don't even have to implement it yet. Just decide. That's where it starts.

Chapters

00:38 The bedtime analogy — and what it has to do with the adults in your life

01:41 Welcome to season three: a Q&A series

03:46 This week's question: what do you do when someone keeps crossing your boundary?

04:43 You give an inch, they take a mile — and how you got here

06:29 They hear you. They just don't believe you.

08:11 The relationship contract with her ex-husband — and what happened next

13:34 A request tells someone what you want. A boundary tells them what you'll do.

14:22 The one boundary she finally said — and actually stuck with

16:04 Why leaving once wasn't the end — and what codependency actually looked like

18:53 When does it stop being their problem and start being yours?

21:46 The 2015 journal entry — pages of softened, sugarcoated "boundaries" for her ex-mother-in-law

29:23 The moment she finally stopped relying on them for childcare

31:40 A boundary isn't a sentence you say. It's what you're actually willing to do.

32:37 What's really underneath people pleasing — and why self-trust is the missing piece

35:20 Where have you been giving more information instead of a consequence?

38:08 The way to keep a boundary is with action, not more words

44:03 Your practice this week

47:15 When you can't set the boundary you want — and what to do instead

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You've made it through an entire season on emotions. You know there's no such thing as a bad feeling. You know your feelings are information. You know you've been suppressing things for years.

Now what?

In this season finale, Alyssa gets practical. No more theory — just the four-step process she uses with her clients every single day to help you actually feel what you're feeling without it becoming a beach ball to the face.

She also walks through a story that will sound uncomfortably familiar. Monday's dishes that didn't get done. Tuesday's meeting where someone took credit for your work. Wednesday's meltdown in the pickup line. Thursday's 4am wake-up. And then on Thursday evening, your husband innocently asks if you can make spaghetti for dinner — and you absolutely lose it.

The explosion was never about spaghetti. It was everything that stacked up all week while you kept pushing through, ignoring the signals, and telling yourself it wasn't a big deal.

Your body was talking to you all week long. You just weren't taught to listen.

In this episode:

• The four-step process to feel your feelings without getting overwhelmed — and why going slow is the actual strategy
• Why "where do you feel it in your body?" can be premature if you've been disconnected from your body for decades — and where to actually start
• External vs. internal body sensations — a full breakdown of what your body does when it's trying to get your attention
• The SUDS scale — why most of us don't catch our emotions until we're already at an 8, 9, or 10, and how to start catching them at a 4
• The spaghetti story — and what Monday through Thursday actually looked like underneath the explosion
• Why validation is often the only thing that's needed — and why it's almost always the thing we skip
• What "the next best thing" actually means — and why it has nothing to do with a grand gesture or a complete overhaul
• Why you don't have to go from a six to a zero — just noticeably different is enough

The takeaway: Notice one body sensation today. That's it. You don't have to know what it means yet. You don't have to fix it or trace it back to childhood. You just notice it. That is the beginning of all of this. And if that feels like too much, go to the bathroom. Drink some water. Put on house shoes. Get under a soft blanket. One small thing that makes you feel just noticeably different. That's the healing.

Chapters

00:04 Wrapping up season two — and getting practical

00:38 The four-step process to feel your feelings without overwhelm

01:13 Why going slow is the actual strategy

02:31 What to do if "where do you feel it?" makes no sense to you

06:55 Step one: notice body sensations — where to start

11:32 External sensations — the things others can see

14:04 Internal sensations — the things only you feel

19:24 The SUDS scale — catching emotions before they hit a 10

22:23 The spaghetti story — Monday through Thursday

30:20 Every signal you missed all week

34:09 Step three: validate

34:57 How we constantly invalidate ourselves — and what to say instead

40:12 Step four: do the next best thing for yourself

41:23 What to do when you don't even know what you need

42:50 It doesn't have to be a grand gesture — just noticeably different

44:42 Circle back: notice how you feel after

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There's that feeling when something really good happens. Your whole body lights up. Your chest feels open instead of tight. Your shoulders drop. There's an ease to it.

And then — almost immediately — something else shows up.

This is too good to be true. There must be a catch. Things have been going well for too long.

And just like that, the joy is gone.

In this final episode of the emotions series, Alyssa makes the case that joy is one of the hardest emotions to fully experience — not because it's painful, but because for so many of us, our nervous system learned a long time ago that good things come with fine print. She opens with the story of a man at the San Antonio Zoo who told her family they'd won a free vacation. Spoiler: it was a timeshare pitch. And the exact radar that protects you from getting scammed? That same radar is what's cutting your joy short every single time.

She also gets honest about what happened the day she became a business owner — how the excitement lasted maybe a few hours before the doubt crept in, and why she never really gave herself full permission to just sit in that moment.

In this episode:

• Why joy made the difficult emotions list — and what makes it harder to stay in than almost anything else
• Where the "this is too good to be true" belief actually comes from
• How you learned to shrink your wins, quiet your excitement, and keep your joy small so it wouldn't inconvenience anyone
• The difference between borrowed joy and joy that actually belongs to you
• Why preemptively robbing yourself of joy — being mentally back home before the vacation is even over — is more common than anyone admits
• The secondary emotions that show up right behind joy: anxiety, guilt, and the bracing for the shoe to drop
• Why excitement and anxiety feel almost identical in the body — and one small reframe that changes how your nervous system processes it
• What to do when someone asks what brings you joy and your honest answer is silence

The takeaway: This week, find one small moment of joy that is just yours. Don't wait for it to show up — be proactive. Ask yourself what feels fun, what brings you actual joy, not what makes your kids happy or your house feel manageable. And if nothing comes to mind, start with laughter. Find something genuinely funny and let yourself actually laugh. Notice how your body feels after. That's joy. And you're allowed to stay there.

Chapters

00:08 What joy actually feels like — and how long you get to stay there

01:14 The timeshare at the zoo and the radar that cuts joy short

06:49 Why joy is on the difficult emotions list

08:00 Becoming a business owner — and what happened to the joy almost immediately

13:03 Where the suspicion of joy comes from

15:10 When childhood joy was told to knock it off

15:43 Pride and the humble pie that taught you to shrink your wins

18:55 What actually brings you joy? Why so many women go quiet at that question

21:38 Borrowed joy vs. joy that belongs to you

28:06 Preemptively robbing yourself — being back home before the trip is over

34:26 Secondary emotions behind joy: anxiety, guilt, hypervigilance

35:14 Your joy is not a betrayal of someone else's pain

37:35 Excitement vs. anxiety — and why your body can't always tell the difference

42:20 Your practice for this week

45:23 Joy isn't the reward for surviving. It's part of the healing.

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There's no meal train. No condolence card. No casseroles. No flowers.

Because the thing that died wasn't a person. It was a version of your life. A version of yourself. Time you didn't get back. Things you yearned for that will never come to be.

And because it didn't come with a funeral, you probably never let yourself call it grief.

In this episode, Alyssa goes into the kind of loss that doesn't get acknowledged — the chapter of your life you never got to have, the relationship that turned out to be something completely different than what you were promised, the version of yourself that existed before the trauma. She shares her own grief around her early twenties — getting pregnant at 21, skipping an entire chapter of life that most people get, and now at 37, doing the self-discovery work she never got to do back then. And she's very clear: loving her son and grieving that lost chapter are not competing emotions. Both can be true at the same time.

She also gets into loneliness — not just the obvious kind, but the kind that makes no sense because you're surrounded by people who love you and still feel completely unseen. And the third kind almost nobody names: the disconnection from yourself.

In this episode:

• Why the five stages of grief were never the full picture — and what grief actually looks like when it's all over the place at once
• The grief that doesn't require death to be real — and why you've probably been calling it something else
• Secondary losses: the things you lose that are attached to the main loss that blindside you months later when you thought you were already over it
• Alyssa's personal grief: the loss of her early twenties and the version of herself she never got to become
• Why gratitude and grief don't cancel each other out — and how forcing the silver lining too early just shoves the feeling back down
• The three types of loneliness — and why the most common one makes no sense on paper
• How grief and loneliness show up in your body when you've never had language for them

The takeaway: This week, name one loss that you've never let yourself call grief because it wasn't a death. Say it out loud or write it down. Notice what happens in your body when you actually call it what it is. And if you want to go further, name one of the secondary losses that came with it — the thing that snuck up on you later, the thing nobody thought to acknowledge. It doesn't need to be the worst thing that ever happened to you to be real. If it mattered and now it's gone, it counts.

Chapters

00:07 The grief that doesn't come with a funeral

02:34 The losses that don't get a casserole — and why we don't call them grief

05:15 The five stages of grief — and what we know now that changes everything

09:30 Alyssa's grief: spending most of her life being who other people needed her to be

11:18 The loss of her early twenties — and why loving her son and grieving that chapter aren't opposites

13:11 Gratitude and grief can exist at the same time

16:03 How grief shows up as a complex web of emotions at once

22:30 Secondary loss — everything you lose that's attached to the main loss

25:29 Why grief hits in waves — and why "I should be over this by now" is never true

30:11 Loneliness and grief — why they almost always arrive together

31:40 The three types of loneliness

34:35 Examples of grief that don't look like grief

41:08 None of these have to be the worst thing that's ever happened to you to be valid

41:59 Your practice for this week

44:03 You don't have to make it mean something yet

46:30 It's not letting the loss get the final word

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When you think of jealousy, you probably picture her. The one checking the phone, going quiet, then going crazy, then freaking out every time another woman walks in the room. And everyone around her has already reached the same conclusion — she's crazy, she's insecure, she needs to get a grip.

But here's what nobody says about her.

Underneath every single one of those behaviors, there's a part of her that is genuinely afraid. And she's doing the only thing she knows how to do to manage that fear — trying to control the outcome.

In this episode, Alyssa makes the case that jealousy and envy are two of the most misunderstood emotions we have. Not character flaws. Not evidence that you're petty or ungrateful or a bad friend. A map — back to the things you want, the things you're afraid of losing, and the things you never had in the first place.

She shares her own experience going through infertility during COVID while it felt like literally everyone around her — friends, clients, neighbors, and yes, even her neighbor's dog — was getting pregnant. What it felt like to genuinely want her best friend's pregnancy announcement to be hers. And how she learned that you can be happy for someone and heartbroken for yourself at exactly the same time.

In this episode:

• The difference between jealousy and envy — they come from the same family but have completely different jobs
• Why the jealous girlfriend's behavior actually makes complete sense when you know what's underneath it
• How envy points directly to the thing you want that you haven't let yourself fully go after yet
• Why comparison isn't always the thief of joy — and how envy is actually the reason Alyssa finally started this podcast
• The guilt that shows up immediately after jealousy or envy — and why that guilt is just shame doing what shame does
• How to tell the difference between a fear that's inherited from past experiences and a threat that actually needs your attention
• The envy that comes from relationships you never got — and why that one is really grief in disguise

The takeaway: This week, notice a moment of jealousy or envy without judging yourself for it. Then ask: what does this point to that I really want? What am I afraid of losing? What have I never fully let myself name out loud? Finish this sentence: my jealousy makes sense because ___. My envy makes sense because ___. These emotions aren't evidence that something is wrong with you. They're information about what matters most.

Chapters

00:04 The jealous girlfriend — and what nobody says about her

02:08 What jealousy actually is — and why it's fear-based, not flaw-based

04:15 Jealousy vs. envy: the distinction that matters

08:42 Alyssa's story: infertility during COVID when everyone around her was pregnant

13:11 Being happy for someone and heartbroken for yourself at the same time

16:38 The "at least you already have a baby" invalidation — and why it didn't make the want go away

17:35 The beliefs we attach to the thing we want — and how that keeps us stuck

26:55 Noticing what you say to yourself the moment jealousy or envy shows up

31:07 The guilt that arrives right behind the envy

33:20 What jealousy feels like when your best friend gets a new best friend

35:02 Envy as a map to what you want — and haven't let yourself go after

41:11 When comparison is actually useful — and when it isn't

43:22 The reason Alyssa finally started this podcast (envy)

45:38 What jealousy and envy feel like in the body

48:38 Your practice for this week

50:27 The envy that's really grief — relationships you never got

52:37 What to ask yourself instead of "what's wrong with me"

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