Latest / The Voice: Breaking, Believing, Becoming / Season 2 Episode 3 The Women Inside Us

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Season 2 Episode 3 The Women Inside Us · The Voice: Breaking, Believing, Becoming

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Welcome to The Voice, where breaking, believing, and becoming finally have somewhere to be heard.
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I'm Kim Munoz, and we are on the verge of Halloween,
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which means I have an incredible luncheon for tomorrow, the Friday before the
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holiday, with an amazing group of women that are in my life.
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And so today, I wanted to talk about a witchy movie that I saw.
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There's movies that we watch when we're younger because we love the story.
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And then movies, sorry, we discover later in life.
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And we think, how did I miss this one?
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Practical Magic was one of those for me.
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I actually missed it the first time around. Came out in 98. At that point,
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I was in the middle of my first divorce and still going through a custody battle.
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So let's just say keeping up
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with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman was pretty low on my priority list.
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I had enough drama happening in
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my own life. I didn't need to buy a movie ticket to see somebody else's.
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But I finally watched it. And watching it now, from this stage of my life,
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I see so much more in it than a movie about witches and magic.
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If you've never seen it, the basic story follows two sisters,
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Sally and Jillian Owens, played by Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman,
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who come from a long line of women who happen to be witches.
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And because apparently being a woman isn't complicated enough,
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the Owens women also have a family curse. Any man they truly love is destined to die.
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And now that I think about it, maybe that explains some of my relationship history.
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Maybe I'm the witch I've been accused of being. So there's that.
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On the surface, Sally and Jillian couldn't seem more different.
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Sally's responsible, careful. She wants stability. She wants a husband and children
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and a home and a life that feels normal.
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She doesn't particularly want anything to do with the magic she inherited because
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she associates it with everything that makes her different.
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Jillian, she's almost the complete opposite.
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She's adventurous, sexual, impulsive, restless. She wants passion and excitement and freedom.
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While Sally's trying to build a life that feels safe, Jillian is basically running
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toward whatever makes her feel alive.
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I think the easiest way to watch the movie is to see them as exactly that,
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two sisters who represent two completely different kinds of women,
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Sally or Jillian, safe or adventurous, responsible or impulsive, roots or wings.
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But watching it at this stage of my life, I see something entirely different.
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I don't think they represent two different kinds of women at all.
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I think they represent one woman.
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Sally and Jillian represent the different parts of ourselves that we spend much
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of our lives trying to reconcile.
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I don't know many women who are completely Sally or completely Jillian in character.
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I certainly haven't been.
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I think most of us have been a little of both at different times.
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There's been seasons when we've desperately wanted safety and then seasons when
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we've wanted to throw caution to the wind.
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There's been times when we've built the life and seasons when we've wanted to run from it.
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There's been times we've been responsible for everyone and everything around
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us, and then times when we've wondered, all right, what about me?
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And maybe the goal isn't choosing which one gets to stay. Maybe the deeper work
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is understanding what each one is looking for.
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Because underneath Sally's need for control might be a very legitimate desire
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for security, and Jillian's desire for freedom might be a very legitimate desire to feel alive.
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But underneath both of those things can also be fear. That's where the movie
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started becoming a completely different conversation for me.
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Because becoming isn't simply about accepting every part of ourselves.
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It's learning to discern what's actually driving them.
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There's a Sally inside so many of us. She's the part that wants things to make sense.
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She's responsible. She makes the plans, remembers the appointments,
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worries about everybody, Sally thinks ahead.
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She wants the people she loves to be okay, and somewhere along the way,
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she may begin believing that if she can just control enough of the variables,
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she can somehow guarantee that they will be.
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Sally wants safety. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting safety.
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Sometimes what looks like responsibility on the outside is actually fear underneath, though.
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If I make the right choices, maybe nothing bad will happen. If I choose the
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right person, maybe I won't get hurt. If I keep everybody happy,
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maybe nobody will leave.
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If I plan enough, prepare enough, pray enough, anticipate enough,
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maybe I can protect myself from loss.
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Life eventually teaches us the very inconvenient truth that we can't.
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Sally learns that in one of the hardest ways possible, she falls in love,
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she creates the family, builds the life she thought she wanted,
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and she still experiences loss.
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There's something about that part of Sally that feels incredibly familiar to
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me, especially when I think about who I was when I got married for the first time at 23.
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I believed in the whole thing, the romance, the marriage, the family, the fairy tale.
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And I don't say that now to make fun of myself, because there was something
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really beautiful about how wholeheartedly I believed in people and in love.
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But I also believed, without realizing I believed it, that if I did my part
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well enough, I had some control over how the story would turn out.
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If I loved well, I'd be loved well. If I was a good wife, we would have a good marriage.
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If we built the family and the home and did all the things we were supposed
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to do, then surely the life we were building would be safe.
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There is such innocence in that. Maybe that's one of the harder parts of growing up.
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Realizing you can do everything you know how to do and still not control another person's choices.
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You can make good choices and still have your heart broken.
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You can love somebody wholeheartedly and discover that love doesn't guarantee
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how they will love you back.
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You can do everything you know how to do and still end up standing in the middle
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of a life you never planned for.
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That's what my first divorce did to me. It didn't just end my marriage,
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it came crashing through an entire illusion I had about how life worked.
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There was the obvious heartbreak of losing the marriage itself,
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but there was also the loss of something much harder to explain,
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the innocence with which I had believed in other people.
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Before that, I think there was a part of me that believed if someone said they
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loved you, they loved you.
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If someone made a promise, they meant it. If two people stood in front of God
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and everyone they loved, and promised forever, and forever was what you were building.
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Suddenly, I had to reconcile the fact that what I believed about my life and
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what was actually happening in my life were two very different things.
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And that's a different kind of breaking.
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Because sometimes what breaks isn't only the relationship, sometimes it's the
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way you understood the world.
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And then you're left with the question, who am I when the life I thought I was
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building is no longer the life I'm living?
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Looking back now, I think there was another question underneath that one that
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I couldn't have articulated at 23 or 30 or probably even 40 years old.
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Did I actually trust God or did I trust the life I had built?
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Those aren't necessarily the same thing. because it's easy to call something
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faith when everything is going according to plan.
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It's much harder when the plan disappears.
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I think there have been seasons of my life when I prayed to God while still
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quietly trying to control the outcome myself.
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I trusted him as long as he and I seemed to be working from roughly the same blueprint.
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Then life has a way of taking your blueprint, crumpling it up,
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and saying, all right, now what do you believe?
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I don't think God caused the choices other people made, and I don't think faith
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means pretending painful things were somehow good because something good eventually came from them.
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But I do believe God met me in what happened.
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Maybe that is where my understanding of safety began to change,
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because faith has never promised me a life where nothing breaks.
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It's just taught me that when something does, God is still there.
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Real security was never knowing what was going to happen next.
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It was knowing who would still be there when it did.
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Jillian doesn't try to control life. She runs towards it.
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She wants the excitement and passion and adventure. She's spontaneous,
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sensual. She doesn't want the predictable life Sally wants.
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And there's something incredibly appealing about her.
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Because I think Jillian represents that part of a woman who gets tired of always being sensible.
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The part that occasionally just wants to say, you know what? Screw it.
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Get on the plane, wear the dress, kiss the man, change careers,
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move somewhere new, stay out too late, order another margarita.
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But Jillian's freedom has another side to it. Sometimes what feels like freedom
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is actually another kind of running, and intensity can feel a whole lot like
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intimacy when we haven't learned the difference yet.
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And hello, second marriage.
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Looking back, I can see how easy it was for me to believe that the intensity,
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the attention, the grand gestures, all of it, meant I had finally found the real thing.
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It felt so different from my first marriage, and at that point in my life,
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different felt significant.
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I had already lived through one version of love that hadn't turned out the way
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I believed it would, so when something came along that felt this completely
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different, more intense, more passionate, more consuming.
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It was easy to believe, well, this must be it, my soulmate.
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And that's the thing about hindsight. We can look backward with information
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we didn't have when we were living forward and wonder how we didn't see what seemed so obvious now.
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But hindsight has information she didn't have.
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I didn't understand then the difference between intensity and intimacy.
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I didn't understand that being pursued intensely isn't necessarily the same
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thing as being known deeply.
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And I certainly didn't understand how easy it can be to mistake someone's performance
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of love for their capacity to actually sustain it.
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That's where Jillian's story hits a little differently for me.
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Jillian runs toward passion, but eventually she finds herself in a relationship
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with a dangerous man. Go figure.
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And there's something important there that has nothing to do with blaming her for what happens to her.
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Someone else's harmful behavior is their responsibility, but looking at our
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own stories doesn't require us to take responsibility for someone else's choices.
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It means becoming curious about our own.
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Like, what had I learned to recognize as love? What felt exciting to me? What felt safe?
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What felt familiar even when I couldn't explain why?
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And what made my entire body light up and say, there it is?
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And is there it is always something we should follow?
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Because now I think about freedom differently too.
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I probably would have defined freedom as being able to do what I wanted.
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Go where I wanted, love who I wanted, start over if I wanted.
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And there's certainly freedom in having choices. But I think spiritual freedom is something deeper.
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Maybe freedom is when your wounds aren't making your choices for you anymore.
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When you're not choosing someone because you desperately need to be chosen,
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when you're not running because staying still makes you uncomfortable,
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and when you're not chasing intensity because peace feels unfamiliar.
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Or when you're not saying yes because you're afraid someone will leave if you
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say no, and you're not saying no simply because somebody once hurt you when you said yes.
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That's a different kind of freedom, and this is where discernment comes in.
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Because not every desire inside us is something we need to suppress,
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but not every desire needs to be followed either.
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Sometimes the Holy Spirit may be leading us somewhere that scares us,
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And sometimes our own wounds may be leading us somewhere that excites us.
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Those can feel remarkably similar in the moment.
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So the question isn't simply, what do I want? Maybe it's what's underneath what I want.
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Is this freedom or is this escape?
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Is this wisdom or is this fear? Is it peace or have I simply become so accustomed
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to chaos that peace feels boring?
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And, am I willing to get quiet enough with God to know the difference?
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Suddenly, Sally and Jillian don't seem like opposites at all.
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They're both trying to find something. One tries to find security by controlling
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life, and the other tries to find freedom by running towards it.
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Different response, same wound.
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Maybe neither control nor escape is actually what we're looking for.
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Or maybe we're looking for, is peace.
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That's the part of practical magic I can't stop thinking about.
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When I look back over my own life, I can find both women everywhere.
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I've been Sally, I've been Jillian, I've been the wife and the divorced woman twice.
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I've been the mother raising three boys, and now I'm the mother of three grown
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men, learning what motherhood looks like when your children don't actually need
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you to run their lives anymore.
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And as it turns out, would strongly prefer that you don't.
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I've been the ICU nurse who thought that was what I would do forever.
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And I've been the woman who left that career and started a Pilates business
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without really knowing what I was getting myself into.
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I've been the woman who stayed and the woman who left.
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The woman who trusted easily and the woman who became afraid to trust at all.
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And when I line all those women up, some of them almost seem contradictory.
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But they're not, because they're me.
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I don't need to romanticize every decision these women made.
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I don't need to pretend every version of me was healthy.
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And I don't need to turn mistakes into something noble just because I've forgiven myself for making them.
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Grace doesn't require dishonesty, but neither does growth require shame.
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I can look at the woman I was and say, I understand why you did that now.
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Maybe she was afraid or she was hoping. She wanted desperately to keep a family together.
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Maybe she wanted to be loved, or she genuinely believed that someone was telling her.
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Maybe she hadn't learned yet what I know now. Understanding her doesn't mean
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she gets to keep making my decisions. It just means I can finally stop judging
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her with information she didn't have.
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You don't have to hate who you were in order to love who you're becoming.
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Becoming also doesn't mean every version of you gets to lead.
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I think that's where God enters this conversation in a way I didn't understand when I was younger.
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The goal isn't simply accepting all the women inside me. Maybe it's bringing all of them to Him.
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Then we have the Owens family curse. Obviously, most of us aren't walking around
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worried that a centuries-old spell is going to kill anyone we fall in love with. Hopefully.
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But we talked on this podcast before about what families hand down without ever
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consciously deciding to hand it down.
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The relationships we normalize.
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Things we absorb simply because that's what love or marriage,
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conflict, motherhood, or family look like around us.
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So I don't want to have that same conversation, but I do think practical magic
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raises the question that comes after we recognize that pattern. Now what?
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Once you know where something came from, how do you decide whether it gets to
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stay? Because awareness isn't the same thing as transformations.
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I can understand exactly why I react a certain way and continue reacting that
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way for the next 20 years.
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I can know where my fear came from and still let fear run my life.
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I can identify a family pattern, give it a name, talk about it in therapy,
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journal about it, pray about it, and still repeat it.
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At some point, knowing has to become choosing.
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And for me, faith changes that choice because I don't believe everything handed
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down to me was mine to carry forever.
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But I also don't believe everything handed down to me was bad.
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There is love in our inheritance too. There is resilience. There is humor. There is faith.
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There's traditions and stories and strength and things people before us fought very hard to give us.
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Maybe the question isn't how do I break everything that came before me.
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Maybe it's, God, give me the wisdom to know what to carry forward and the courage
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to let the rest end with me.
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And here's something that makes this whole conversation even more interesting.
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28 years after the original movie, Sally and Jillian are back.
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Practical Magic 2 brings them back as the Owen sisters, and this time Sally's
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daughters are grown women themselves.
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So now the story stretches into another generation of the Owens family.
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Don't worry, I'm not going to spoil it for you. In fact, if you haven't seen it yet, go see it.
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But I love the idea that we're meeting these women again almost three decades
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later, because they're not the same women they were in 1998.
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And neither are we. Think about that.
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The women who watched Practical Magic when it first came out have lived almost
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30 years of life since then.
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We've gotten married, divorced, raised children, changed careers, lost people.
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We thought we'd have forever fallen in love, had our hearts broken,
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started over, watched our children become adults, buried parents,
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made mistakes, forgiven people, hopefully forgiven ourselves.
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And now Sally and Jillian are older too. Only this time, the story isn't just
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about what they inherited. There's another generation behind them.
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And isn't that what eventually happens to all of us? At some point,
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we stop asking only, what did my family hand down to me? And we have to start
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asking, what am I handing down?
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That question lands very differently for me now as a mother of adult children,
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because I can't go back and parent perfectly.
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I can't undo every mistake. I can't guarantee my children won't have things
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from their childhood that they have to work through.
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I'm pretty sure that's part of the job description for being a mother.
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But I can still decide what they see in me now. They can see a mother who can apologize.
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A woman who can change her mind, whose faith continues to grow.
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Who can admit when she got something wrong. or a woman who doesn't have to pretend
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she has it all figured out just because she's their mother.
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Maybe that's the part of what we hand down too, not perfection,
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permission to keep becoming.
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Maybe that's another kind of practical magic, not spells or potions or dancing
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around the kitchen with midnight margaritas, although frankly,
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I'm not opposed to that part.
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Maybe the real magic is becoming conscious enough to recognize what was handed
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to us, courageous enough to change what needs changing, and wise enough to keep
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the beautiful parts too.
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Because not everything we inherit needs to be broken. Some things deserve to be carried forward.
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What I love about the ending of Practical Magic is that the curse isn't broken
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because one perfect romantic relationship comes along and fixes everything.
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Sally finally realizes she can't do it alone.
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Women come together. Something that has been hidden gets brought into the light,
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and there's something about that image that feels surprisingly spiritual to me.
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Because darkness thrives in hiding. Shame thrives in hiding.
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Fear gets very loud when we're alone with it.
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But healing so often begins when something is finally brought into the light.
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Maybe that's saying it to God. Maybe it's saying it to a therapist.
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Maybe it's saying it to a sister, a friend, a pastor, someone you trust.
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Maybe it's finally just saying it to yourself.
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This is what happened. This is what I've been carrying. This is what I'm afraid
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of. This is where I need help.
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There's humility in that, and I think there's faith in it too.
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Because asking for help requires admitting that maybe we're not supposed to save ourselves.
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And I've spent a fair amount of my life trying to do exactly that,
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fix it, manage it, understand it, work harder, hold everybody together,
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figure out what the lesson is.
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And sometimes faith is much less impressive than all of that.
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Faith sounds like, God, I don't know what to do with this. I need you. That's it.
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No grand revelation, no perfectly tied bow, just surrender.
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And maybe surrender is the opposite of both Sally and Jillian.
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Sally wants to control, Jillian wants to run.
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Faith sometimes asks us to do neither. Stay, be still, listen, and trust.
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And maybe this is where my faith changes the way I understand this whole idea of becoming.
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I don't think becoming means discovering some perfect, authentic version of
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myself buried underneath everything else and finally setting her free.
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I think becoming, for me, has looked much more like surrender.
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It's bringing all of those women before God, Sally's need for control,
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Jillian's need for freedom, the young woman who believed love would protect her,
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the woman who learned that it couldn't, the woman who ran towards things,
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and the woman who ran away from things, the woman I was, the woman I am,
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and saying, okay, God, here she is, all of her.
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Show me what stays, show me what needs healing, show me what needs forgiving,
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and show me what I've been calling wisdom that's really fear.
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Show me what I've been calling freedom that's really escape.
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Show me what I've inherited that you never intended for me to carry,
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and show me the parts of myself I've spent years trying to get rid of that you
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actually put there for a reason.
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Because maybe becoming whole doesn't mean every part of me gets to lead.
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Maybe it means every part of me gets brought into the light,
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and then I trust God with what he does with her.
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Maybe that's the kind of magic I'm interested in these days.
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Although, I will still take the midnight margarita.
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Before we go, I want you to think about the different women inside you.
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Not because you need to choose one and not because every one of them gets to
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run your life but because maybe there's something underneath each of them worth listening to.
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What does your Sally want? What does she think she can control that maybe it's time to surrender?
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What does your Jillian want? Is she looking for freedom or is she running from something?
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What have you been calling wisdom that might actually be fear?
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What have you been calling freedom that might actually be escaped?
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What part of yourself have you
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spent years apologizing for that maybe God never asked you to get rid of?
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And what part have you been defending that He's quietly asking you to surrender?
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Maybe those are questions worth sitting with. Because I don't think God wastes
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any version of us—not the woman who got it right, or the woman who got it spectacularly
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wrong—not Sally, not Jillian, not you.
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Maybe becoming isn't choosing which version of yourself gets to stay.
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It's having the courage to bring all of her into the light and say,
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God, show me who you're asking me to become, and then trusting him enough to listen for the answer.
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If you're in a season of breaking. Please hang on and keep believing.
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And becoming? Well, it's already happening.