Latest / No Shrinking Violets Podcast for Women / Emotional Regulation Doesn't Mean "Calm": The Path through Burnout, Anxiety and Shame

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Emotional Regulation Doesn't Mean "Calm": The Path through Burnout, Anxiety and Shame · No Shrinking Violets Podcast for Women

• 0:00
  Felicia: Emotional regulation is being able to handle a wide, vast diversity of emotions while still feeling connected to your body and in control of yourself.
• 0:18
  Mary: For centuries, the phrase shrinking violet was used to diminish women, to suggest we were meant to be small and meek.
• 0:25
  Mary: But in nature, violets are anything but weak.
• 0:28
  Mary: They're resilient, beautiful, and essential to the ecosystem.
• 0:32
  Mary: Hi, I'm Mary Rothwell, licensed therapist, and each week I sit down with women who remind us that being compared to a violet isn't an insult.
• 0:40
  Mary: It's a testament to strength, endurance, and the power of taking up space and living by your true nature.
• 0:46
  Mary: If you're ready to stop shrinking and start thriving, you're in the right place.
• 0:51
  Mary: Hey Violets, welcome to the show.
• 0:54
  Mary: The minute I read my guest's bio, I felt her experience in my gut.
• 0:59
  Mary: I started my career in public education as she did, although I'm a bit older than she is.
• 1:04
  Mary: A couple decades ago, I started to see the changes that cell phones, then social media, created in the lives of young people.
• 1:12
  Mary: And subsequently, the changes in anxiety levels even before COVID upped the ante.
• 1:18
  Mary: During COVID, I was working at the college level, so I experienced the going remote issue a bit differently than if I were still working in a high school.
• 1:26
  Mary: But I also saw the struggles of faculty, both on my campus and in the world of my friends who still worked in public schools, to try to bridge the gap between classroom learning and delivering an education to dozens or hundreds of young people in every imaginable home environment.
• 1:43
  Mary: The ramp up in social anxiety in students post-COVID was not surprising.
• 1:48
  Mary: Yet our just reopened classrooms and faculty, many of whom were navigating their own anxious transitions and that of their own children, were still not prepared to support students in the best ways.
• 2:00
  Mary: While some faculty felt called to do more, others withdrew and perhaps by necessity went into survival mode themselves and did not offer the additional supports that some students needed.
• 2:10
  Mary: I mean, we all had our shit to handle, to be honest.
• 2:14
  Mary: Which makes the decision of my guest even more humbling and amazing.
• 2:18
  Mary: Witnessing the dramatic increase in mental health struggles among young people from the impact of the pandemic, she ultimately decided to pursue a second master's degree in counseling so she could support people on a deeper level.
• 2:31
  Mary: At the same time, her personal life transformed dramatically when she adopted three children with complex PTSD.
• 2:38
  Mary: My guest today is Felicia Brown.
• 2:40
  Mary: She is a trauma-informed speaker, therapist, emotional regulation coach, and self-trust expert who helps high-achieving women break free from burnout, overthinking, and productivity-based self-worth.
• 2:53
  Mary: Welcome to No Shrinking Violets, Felicia.
• 2:56
  Felicia: Thank you for having me.
• 2:57
  Felicia: I'm excited to have this conversation.
• 3:00
  Mary: So we have so much we can dig into because I I've said this before on this show.
• 3:05
  Mary: I love talking to fellow therapists because we sort of have shared, you know, language.
• 3:09
  Mary: And but I want to start with having you describe your transition after COVID.
• 3:15
  Mary: So you went deeper at a time when other people, I think, were feeling exhausted and burnout.
• 3:21
  Mary: So what was the catalyst for your decision to become a therapist and to adopt your children?
• 3:29
  Felicia: So the adoption happened right as the world shut down.
• 3:33
  Felicia: I often joke that the world shut down in March and we went from being a couple to being parents of three and like having an insta family overnight.
• 3:43
  Felicia: And then because the world was shut down, all five of us were quarantined, locked down, however you want to put it, for the next several months.
• 3:50
  Felicia: And there was a lot of blessing in that because we didn't have kind of the pressure to be involved in all of the things.
• 3:59
  Felicia: There was nothing we could do but be together, which was a really nice time for us to bond.
• 4:05
  Felicia: Um, but also we, being my husband and I, recognized that there were some things that we knew we were going to need help navigating to help our children heal.
• 4:18
  Felicia: And so we found some really great people that were trained in um complex trauma, PTSD, specifically working with children, and saw the difference it made as our kiddos got the help that they needed.
• 4:34
  Felicia: And then I started to see a lot of similarities between the things that my kids were doing or how they were acting to now what kids in the classroom were doing, to where previously they had not done that.
• 4:49
  Felicia: And the idea of experiencing trauma, trauma-informed care, even knowing how that impacts learning wasn't really talked about pre-COVID.
• 5:02
  Felicia: And then after COVID, I feel like things were so politicized that the idea of mental health struggles because of this pandemic were really frowned upon and almost like, well, you're just making an excuse for these kids.
• 5:20
  Felicia: And so, because of that, especially being in a rural area where we don't have a lot of resources, there was nowhere for these kiddos to turn.
• 5:29
  Felicia: And so I saw how devastating it was, how hard it was for some kids to come back to school after they had been off for about two years doing remote work, and then how other kids were excited to be back, but yet couldn't manage the classroom environment.
• 5:45
  Felicia: And so knowing how much therapy and trauma-informed care changed the lives and the trajectory of my kids' lives, I knew that that's what so many kiddos needed.
• 5:57
  Felicia: And yet I knew there was no one else that could give that to them in our area currently because we just don't have anybody.
• 6:05
  Felicia: And so it was kind of both of those things that really came to together.
• 6:09
  Felicia: And knowing that as a teacher, I loved working with kids.
• 6:15
  Felicia: And I always said, if I could just come in and teach, it would be fine.
• 6:19
  Felicia: But you can't do that anymore as a teacher.
• 6:23
  Felicia: You have to do so many more things, you have to be so many more things.
• 6:27
  Felicia: And I couldn't justify cramming curriculum down a kid's throat, knowing that they are just trying to stop themselves from having an anxiety attack sitting in my classroom.
• 6:41
  Felicia: And it was through that, through those things all combined, that really um inspired me to go back to school and to get the second master's um in counseling.
• 6:54
  Mary: Well, that is amazing on many levels.
• 6:57
  Mary: Um, so the one thing that I wanted to ask you about before we kind of dive into some of the topics that I want us to talk about is you work with high-achieving women.
• 7:06
  Mary: So I think what women tend to do is they see a need and they go right toward it.
• 7:12
  Mary: But I'm thinking about for you.
• 7:14
  Mary: So you went through COVID too.
• 7:16
  Mary: You have these children that need, you know, deeper care.
• 7:21
  Mary: It's not something where you, I'm guessing, especially meaning, even as coming out of COVID, and I'm sure it wasn't something where you and your husband could be like, oh, let's just call a babysitter and it'll be fine, or we're gonna take a weekend away.
• 7:35
  Mary: You know, this is an intense need to be present for them.
• 7:40
  Mary: So how did you manage your energy?
• 7:43
  Mary: I mean, were there times where you were thinking, what have I done?
• 7:47
  Mary: You know, what was some of that like?
• 7:50
  Felicia: Yeah.
• 7:50
  Felicia: I mean, of course, all of that, right?
• 7:53
  Felicia: Raising three kids, I think, for anyone is a lot.
• 7:57
  Felicia: Even if you gave birth to them and they haven't had traumatic experiences, I think three kids is a lot.
• 8:03
  Felicia: Going from having no kids to three kids who have intense needs, there was a transition period there.
• 8:11
  Felicia: There was my own work that had to be done, my own supports.
• 8:14
  Felicia: Um, and and for my husband too, of like, how does this look?
• 8:19
  Felicia: Our idea of what parenting should be, our idea of how children should behave versus the reality of what parenting needed to be, and understanding that some behaviors are not worth having kind of the argument over with the child that sometimes that's really just indicating that something else is going on.
• 8:46
  Felicia: So there was a lot of self-reflection and self-work that had to be done there.
• 8:51
  Felicia: Add to that um kind of the again, the political environment at the time, but also the racial tension.
• 8:59
  Felicia: My children are black and we are both white.
• 9:02
  Felicia: And so that adds another layer of complexity to our journey.
• 9:07
  Felicia: And our children, even to this day, will say to us, I just really wish you were black, mom.
• 9:14
  Felicia: And I get that 100%.
• 9:16
  Felicia: I wish I was too for you, sweetie.
• 9:20
  Felicia: Like I that would make their lives easier, right?
• 9:25
  Felicia: If we all matched.
• 9:26
  Felicia: Oftentimes they feel like when we go out places, people are looking at us or, you know, know that they're adopted or something like that.
• 9:35
  Felicia: And so there was a lot of reading, a lot of researching, a lot of learning.
• 9:40
  Felicia: I remember attending a lot of because it COVID online type webinars and classes with black women particularly, so that I could learn and understand things and this idea of decentering myself.
• 9:59
  Felicia: So there was a lot of personal growth.
• 10:03
  Felicia: And I attended my own therapy during that time too.
• 10:07
  Felicia: And so, and I think one of the reasons that I really love working with high-achieving women is because it's often very similar to myself.
• 10:20
  Felicia: And having been through all of this, a lot of those lessons that I learned that I don't have to do it all all the time.
• 10:31
  Felicia: And that if I'm feeling overwhelmed, that doesn't mean that I'm not successful or that I'm not doing well, or that I'm not following the path I'm supposed to follow.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 10:42
  Felicia: And so I think so many times we get so down on ourselves or so hard on ourselves.
• 10:47
  Felicia: Like, well, I should just be able to handle it.
• 10:50
  Felicia: I shouldn't need help.
• 10:51
  Felicia: I shouldn't need to, you know, ask for somebody to help me with the kids.
• 10:56
  Felicia: I should be able to get the homework done and the work done and all of it.
• 10:59
  Felicia: And that's just not reality, nor were we designed to live in isolation.
• 11:05
  Felicia: We need a community, which is why COVID was so hard because it forced everyone to isolate.
• 11:11
  Felicia: And I still feel like for a lot of the world in the American society, we're still kind of isolated.
• 11:18
  Felicia: And the idea of community hasn't really come back.
• 11:22
  Felicia: And so that's foreign for a lot of people.
• 11:25
  Felicia: So there was a lot of relearning.
• 11:27
  Felicia: There was a lot of my own research and adjusting my own expectations in order to kind of get to the point that I got to.
• 11:38
  Mary: Well, and I think it's important to make sure that we talk about all of that because you brought up a good point that I think women can observe someone else.
• 11:46
  Mary: And, you know, I think there's already people listening thinking, I would never go there.
• 11:52
  Mary: I would never do that thing.
• 11:53
  Mary: But I think we can also make the mistake that you decided, and then it was this linear path that you just made the decision and then everything fell into place because of love, or you know, how whatever these narratives are that we tell ourselves.
• 12:08
  Mary: And so I think it's important to understand that every woman struggles with whatever decisions are happening, whatever she decides to do.
• 12:17
  Mary: And it's if you could mean zoom in and out off of, you know, into whatever the last six or seven years of your life, I'm sure if we randomly zoomed into certain moments, it would not be this person sitting in front of me who, you know, I'm thinking you're in your therapy office right now, is that right?
• 12:39
  Mary: So, you know, you you're doing this work that helps so many people.
• 12:44
  Mary: And you did such an intense, you know, reaching into the lives of these kids and you know, changing everything, but it was a struggle.
• 12:55
  Mary: And so I think that part is important for people to understand.
• 12:58
  Felicia: Absolutely.
• 12:59
  Felicia: And there, you're right, especially around adoption.
• 13:02
  Felicia: There's this narrative of like, oh, well, once you adopt kids and you just love them, then like, you know, their life is so much better.
• 13:09
  Felicia: And so that's great.
• 13:10
  Felicia: And I always say there multiple things can be true.
• 13:14
  Felicia: I can love my children deeply.
• 13:17
  Felicia: My children can understand that they are safer now than before they lived with me, and there's intense trauma from not being with your family of origin and from the things they experienced.
• 13:34
  Felicia: And that impacts them.
• 13:36
  Felicia: And it's not that they aren't grateful or that they don't love us or that they aren't happy, but all of those things can and do coexist at the same time.
• 13:47
  Felicia: And that gets messy, especially when you're asking children to be able to verbalize that and understand that when cognitively their brain isn't even there yet.
• 14:01
  Felicia: Right.
• 14:02
  Felicia: And so you're right, when you zoom in and zoom out, there would be plenty of times you could zoom in and it would be very, very ugly moments.
• 14:10
  Felicia: And there would be times that you would zoom in and it would be beautiful, happy, fun loving moments.
• 14:17
  Felicia: And sometimes those would be in the same day or in the same hour.
• 14:23
  Felicia: 100%, yes.
• 14:25
  Felicia: And do I think that things are better now for my kiddos?
• 14:31
  Felicia: Yes.
• 14:32
  Felicia: And we're now heading into our teenage years, which bring up a whole other realm of issues.
• 14:40
  Felicia: So both things can be true.
• 14:44
  Felicia: And I never want somebody to have this idea that when I have it all together, I don't, I still don't, that parenting is easy, it's absolutely not, that love fixes everything.
• 14:59
  Felicia: That would be great, but it's just not the case.
• 15:02
  Felicia: And that the truth of life is messy and it's not pretty.
• 15:06
  Felicia: And there are plenty of tears from myself, my husband, the kids, because that is what life looks like when you are living in the trenches with kiddos that have experienced unspeakable things.
• 15:24
  Mary: Yeah.
• 15:25
  Mary: Yeah.
• 15:26
  Mary: So now I want to take sort of the the next road on this and start to talk specifically about what things mean.
• 15:34
  Mary: And so, for example, what does trauma-informed mean?
• 15:38
  Mary: I think what's happening again with TikTok, Instagram, we're starting to get these, you know, labels or jargon or whatever we're calling, you know, the flavored du jour of therapy and psychology.
• 15:52
  Mary: And I think sometimes it's misunderstood, misrepresented.
• 15:56
  Mary: So when you say trauma-informed, tell tell us what you mean by that.
• 16:01
  Felicia: Yeah.
• 16:01
  Felicia: So in my world, coming at it from a clinical licensure standpoint, and like you said, not the kind of influencer culture, in my world, when you understand trauma, and I'm truly trauma-informed, you understand what trauma is, how it impacts and changes the way that the brain and the nervous system operate, and how events that happened during a very crucial developmental time still are impacting a person, even when everything around them is now safe, normal, controlled, et cetera.
• 16:39
  Felicia: And also in working with adults, understanding how different childhood experiences have impacted them throughout their entire lives and have really formed the like the lens, the viewfinder for how they view the world as a whole.
• 16:58
  Felicia: And what, you know, one of the things with trauma is like, oh, I'm triggered.
• 17:02
  Felicia: And that is that word is being used a lot.
• 17:05
  Felicia: And the way I explain it to a lot of my clients is you are absolutely allowed to get upset at whatever you want, it's your feelings.
• 17:15
  Felicia: But there is a difference between being upset by something and being triggered by it in the trauma sense.
• 17:23
  Felicia: And when we're talking about true triggers, it is when your body reacts to something without your brain's permission.
• 17:33
  Felicia: And what I mean by that is you can be totally fine walking down the road, having a conversation with someone, and then an ambulance goes by with sirens, and all of a sudden you're like ducking and hiding under an awning in a business, and you don't know how you got there.
• 17:52
  Felicia: And that is that nervous system trigger.
• 17:55
  Felicia: So when I'm talking about it, I'm really talking about kind of the both the top down of like the brain and the cognitive and the bottom up of how the body and the um nervous system react.
• 18:06
  Mary: Yeah.
• 18:07
  Mary: And it can feel very out of control.
• 18:09
  Mary: And I think women especially feel a lot of shame when these things happen.
• 18:15
  Mary: And it can you can make you feel powerless.
• 18:17
  Mary: But I like to frame it in, you know, our amygdala protects us.
• 18:22
  Mary: Like it's wired, that part of our limbic system, our emotional system, and our brain, it's wired to scan.
• 18:29
  Mary: And so it's very quick to react because I I often talk about it like the smoke detector when it's just the toast burning, it's still screaming.
• 18:39
  Mary: And so I think that understanding to help provide that for your client is really important, that it was a survival, like you learned to survive this, but now it's sort of on autopilot, and we have to kind of readjust it.
• 18:56
  Mary: So you talk about um behavioral rewiring.
• 19:02
  unknown: Yeah.
• 19:03
  Mary: Talk a little about that.
• 19:04
  Mary: So if you have someone, let's say maybe it's what you describe like you're walking down the street and something, a siren or a car backfiring, and you just bodily react.
• 19:15
  Mary: Is behavioral rewiring, is that part of what you might strive for?
• 19:20
  Felicia: Yes.
• 19:21
  Felicia: But we don't start there, right?
• 19:23
  Felicia: Like that's kind of going to be the outcome that we want.
• 19:26
  Felicia: We start honestly with creating a therapeutic relationship between the client and myself, so that because they are constantly scanning, as you said, so that their nervous system starts to believe that at least in this space, or when I'm talking to this person, I don't have to be in that hyper scanning mode.
• 19:52
  Felicia: Right.
• 19:53
  Felicia: And once I can get a person feeling comfortable with me, then we start to talk about what are some things that you wish weren't happening.
• 20:03
  Felicia: Right.
• 20:04
  Felicia: And once we have that, when do you remember that happening for the first time?
• 20:11
  Felicia: What was going on during that time?
• 20:14
  Felicia: And a lot of women particularly want me to fix them.
• 20:19
  Felicia: Tell me what I need to do, and I will do the thing.
• 20:21
  Felicia: Fix me.
• 20:22
  Felicia: Oh yeah.
• 20:23
  Felicia: But they aren't the problem.
• 20:25
  Felicia: And that's also really important for the people that I work with to understand is that the problem is the problem, and that is separate from you.
• 20:34
  Felicia: You are not the problem.
• 20:36
  Felicia: So helping them understand that and then really helping them kind of move from the brain only, all in our head, overthinking, overanalyzing, and really sinking into their body of what do I feel in everyday moments?
• 20:54
  Felicia: Sitting in my office, what do you feel right now?
• 20:57
  Felicia: Any tension, any tightness?
• 21:00
  Felicia: Are you anxious because you're curious what we're gonna talk about?
• 21:04
  Felicia: Where does that come up in your body?
• 21:06
  Felicia: And really starting to connect them with things that are very surface level in a safe space to get them comfortable and increase what we would call the distress tolerance, right?
• 21:21
  Felicia: Can I handle a little bit of that distress of like, oh yeah, my my shoulders are kind of tight, or I do need to drop those?
• 21:28
  Felicia: Because so many people who have experienced trauma live in the head and don't feel in the body because again, that protection mechanism.
• 21:43
  Felicia: And so I always say to people as well you are a survivor and you have survived so many things, and now that survival mode is no longer.
• 21:59
  Felicia: Needed to keep you safe, but it doesn't know how to shut off and it's causing some problems.
• 22:06
  Felicia: So we need to work that you know how to feel safe in those things.
• 22:10
  Felicia: And so really we start off very small.
• 22:13
  Felicia: And for some women, it's like, can you tolerate just sitting and scanning over your body for a couple minutes?
• 22:20
  Felicia: We have to start small because to do a whole thing or like exposure type therapy, they would not be able to handle that.
• 22:28
  Felicia: And that would cause intense anxiety, which has the opposite effect of what we're trying to do.
• 22:34
  Felicia: And so it's all about creating a space where they first feel comfortable enough to just take a chance on something as small as doing a body scan, feeling their body.
• 22:47
  Felicia: And then through that building up to where they truly trust themselves, they can understand what signals their body is giving them because they've ignored those for so long.
• 23:00
  Felicia: And then through that understanding and through building that trust, then those big triggers become less triggering.
• 23:10
  Mary: Yes.
• 23:11
  Mary: And I think that body part is important because we don't often recognize what we're carrying, the tension, because a lot of times, depending on what the experience or experiences were, we are on guard physically with, like you're talking, the shoulder tension.
• 23:31
  Mary: We're waiting for the next shoe to drop.
• 23:34
  Mary: And sometimes being able to access that body feeling can also create more anxiety.
• 23:42
  Mary: I mean, I'm I'm always surprised, or initially I was, when I would talk about deep breathing, and I would have clients say to me, I can't do that, because it that quietness, that like you know, sort of paying attention to what's happening internally creates such discomfort because you're letting your guard down.
• 24:04
  Felicia: Yeah.
• 24:05
  Felicia: And that's why I will challenge women.
• 24:07
  Felicia: Can you can you do this for three minutes?
• 24:09
  Felicia: And if you get to 60 seconds and you're like, that's it, then there's no shame.
• 24:13
  Felicia: You did it for 60 seconds.
• 24:15
  Felicia: And that's where we have to start.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 24:19
  Felicia: Because busyness is another way that women tend to cope.
• 24:23
  Felicia: As long as I'm busy and I'm moving, then I don't have to think and I don't have to feel.
• 24:27
  Felicia: And when you do ask someone to sit and do deep breathing, then all of those thoughts and feelings can come in.
• 24:32
  Felicia: And they don't have the capacity in that moment to handle it.
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 24:37
  Felicia: That's why I think, like you said, the body part is so important and really starting in small increments, which again, for women that tend to be really high achievers, is also hard because they want the roadmap and they just want to complete it and be done.
• 24:52
  Felicia: But it doesn't work that way.
• 24:55
  Felicia: When we're trying to retrain the nervous system to come from running at a mile a minute to being able to rest and not feel upset about that.
• 25:06
  Mary: Yeah.
• 25:07
  Mary: And then often when you're focusing on finding times to rest, then the guilt comes in for women.
• 25:14
  Mary: 100%.
• 25:15
  Mary: Yeah, where do you think that comes from?
• 25:17
  Felicia: What's your theory on that?
• 25:19
  Felicia: My truly my theory is uh the society that we live in, and that women have been conditioned to work and achieve as if their career is the most important thing, but then also to be a housewife or a mother as if that is the most important thing.
• 25:36
  Felicia: And that if you're not doing both of those things absolutely perfectly, then there's something wrong with you and you're failing because of course you should be able to do all of that.
• 25:44
  Felicia: And if you're resting, but there's still dishes that need to be done, then you don't deserve to rest because you didn't get the dishes done.
• 25:50
  Felicia: And then your house isn't perfect.
• 25:53
  Felicia: And we've really tied morality to housework, even though dirty dishes are moral neutral, right?
• 26:02
  Felicia: But so many women will tell me, like, no, I'm bad because I have laundry or dishes or things like that.
• 26:09
  Felicia: And it's really this American society that you must have it all and be able to do it all without any help, if you are to be considered good as a career woman, good as a mom, good as a wife.
• 26:24
  Felicia: Not even great, not excellent.
• 26:26
  Felicia: Right.
• 26:27
  Felicia: Good.
• 26:28
  Mary: Adequate.
• 26:28
  Mary: Yes, adequate.
• 26:30
  Mary: Yeah.
• 26:31
  Mary: And, you know, I talk so much about narratives, and I think that's one of the best summing up, summings up that I've ever had a guest do about what is this narrative of rest in women?
• 26:43
  Mary: So I think sometimes we can get confused because, you know, you're you mentioned you talk, you work with high achieving women.
• 26:52
  Mary: So I can hear women saying, well, what's wrong with being high achieving?
• 26:57
  Mary: What's wrong with having ambition?
• 26:59
  Mary: So, how does someone know whether it's healthy ambition or it's sort of this trauma-driven overachieving, I have to get to the next achievement?
• 27:12
  Felicia: One of the easiest ways that I tell clients to help them figure it out is at the end of the day, when you're laying down and you're going to bed, are you content with what you achieved that day?
• 27:24
  Felicia: Are you happy with how things went?
• 27:27
  Felicia: Sure, there's more to do tomorrow.
• 27:30
  Felicia: Sure, there might be some interactions that you're like, I could have handled that a little differently.
• 27:35
  Felicia: But at the end of the day, are you okay and happy and content with everything that you achieved?
• 27:40
  Felicia: Or are you laying there at night beating yourself up?
• 27:44
  Felicia: I should have done this, I should have gotten this done.
• 27:45
  Felicia: Oh, I forgot to do this.
• 27:46
  Felicia: You know what?
• 27:47
  Felicia: I really needed to get all of these things done.
• 27:49
  Felicia: Why am I not working harder?
• 27:51
  Felicia: Why aren't I further along in my career, et cetera?
• 27:55
  Felicia: And that's a kind of a simplified way.
• 27:57
  Felicia: But you're right, there is nothing wrong with being ambitious.
• 28:00
  Felicia: There's nothing wrong with having goals.
• 28:02
  Felicia: There's nothing wrong with being a hard worker and dreaming big.
• 28:06
  Felicia: And I love that for women.
• 28:08
  Felicia: What I want to do is create a sustainable way to have those dreams and those goals so that as you're working towards them, you're feeling content in every step and you're not constantly using negative self-talk, shame, and blame because you think you should be farther or you think you should do a better job.
• 28:28
  Felicia: The other thing that I like to tell people, and well, I like to ask them this, and most people like cringe and pull away, is you can tell if it's trauma-driven versus ambition.
• 28:41
  Felicia: If I told you that I could see the future and you never accomplish anything ever again, would you be happy with yourself?
• 28:49
  Felicia: Would you be content with your life, knowing that your family's healthy, you're healthy, living your life as it is, but you never achieve a big goal or get an advancement.
• 28:59
  Felicia: Could you be happy?
• 29:01
  Felicia: And most of the time, it's not like, well, I'd probably be disappointed, but yeah, I'd be okay.
• 29:07
  Felicia: Most of the time it's like, no, I have things I need to do, right?
• 29:12
  Felicia: And like physically pulling away sometimes, like, no.
• 29:16
  Felicia: And that's another way that we know that so much of our worth to ourselves is wrapped up in what we do or achieve, versus being completely comfortable, being happy with ourselves as we are.
• 29:35
  Felicia: And so those are some of the ways that I differentiate that with people.
• 29:39
  Mary: Yeah.
• 29:39
  Mary: And I think that idea of self-worth is so key because it's this idea of I have to earn, even like you said, I have to earn the ability to sit down and watch Netflix, or we can literally feel exhausted and sit there and just want to binge watch.
• 29:58
  Mary: And sometimes that is okay, but the guilt of we don't even enjoy it when we are doing it.
• 30:04
  Mary: So yeah, I think this idea of worth that our worth is only elevated if we've done, been, said, achieved, fill in the blank.
• 30:14
  Mary: And we're really, we're okay just as we are.
• 30:17
  Mary: Yeah.
• 30:19
  Felicia: Absolutely.
• 30:19
  Felicia: Yeah, it's really important.
• 30:21
  Felicia: But regardless of what you achieve, your worth doesn't change.
• 30:26
  Mary: Right.
• 30:26
  Mary: Right.
• 30:27
  Mary: So one of the things I see, I worked a lot with women in midlife.
• 30:32
  Mary: And so my theory of this, which seems to bear out, is that when you experience trauma early in life that's unprocessed, you put it, you have to put it somewhere.
• 30:43
  Mary: So you raise kids, you have a career, you struggle through whatever the relationship, the partnership, ending, maybe not ending, but you're doing all of the quote life things.
• 30:54
  Mary: Then you launch your kids, you're nearing the end of your career, and all of a sudden, a lot of the women that I see that are, let's say, approaching 50 through maybe 65, they feel adrift, their cortisol is through the roof.
• 31:11
  Mary: And it's, I think it's this accumulation, first of all, of doing, doing, doing, doing, and having these unprocessed things that we continually just shove it, it's like shoving it back under the water.
• 31:25
  Mary: Keep shoving it back and it'll bob up again.
• 31:27
  Mary: It's like, oh, I don't want to deal with that.
• 31:29
  Mary: And so when there aren't, you talked about this busyness, when there aren't these things, I have to take care of the kids and I have to get to work.
• 31:36
  Mary: And even I'm my tone, and I'm just speeding up even as I'm talking, but we hit midlife and things just slow down.
• 31:44
  Mary: We stop ovulating, like all of the things in our body slows down.
• 31:48
  Mary: And I feel like all of a sudden it all bobs to the surface, and there's nothing there to push it down.
• 31:55
  Felicia: And then women say, What's wrong with me?
• 31:57
  Felicia: I've never had this problem before.
• 31:59
  Felicia: I've always been able to handle this.
• 32:01
  Felicia: I nothing major has shifted that I shouldn't be able to handle all of the things.
• 32:06
  Felicia: And again, frame themselves as if there's something wrong with them and they just want to be fixed.
• 32:15
  Mary: Yeah.
• 32:16
  Mary: And also I think they don't really know what they want because they were doing for so many other people.
• 32:21
  Mary: I mean, like you're saying, give me the steps.
• 32:24
  Mary: Just give me the steps.
• 32:25
  Mary: I'm gonna go through them and I'm gonna emerge on the other side.
• 32:28
  Mary: When you're raising kids or you're, you know, you have to make dinner and you're there's sort of there's not a playbook, but you know what I mean.
• 32:34
  Mary: Like you know what the goal is really, your kids are healthy or whatever.
• 32:39
  Mary: Then when there's not somebody to take care of and there's just you, it can be like, wait, I don't even know what I want.
• 32:47
  Mary: And then the guilt, the re-engagement of the guilt in a different way because now you do get to decide, and that is really hard.
• 32:58
  Felicia: And then I think there's also sometimes some regret that pops up too of I'm this age and I don't know who I am, or I don't know what I want, or I figured it out, and I how am I gonna get that?
• 33:16
  Felicia: Because my whole life was designed to fit around this type of living, and actually that's not the life that I desire.
• 33:25
  Felicia: Yeah, and that can be really overwhelming for women, especially women, like you said, that kind of have always had a plan.
• 33:33
  Felicia: And now the plan is you get to do whatever you want, which should sound great.
• 33:40
  Felicia: And if you're a mom of littles and you're listening, you're like, oh, I'd kill for an hour to do whatever I wanted, right?
• 33:46
  Felicia: But what's my purpose?
• 33:50
  Felicia: Because I've put my self-worth and my identity and my purpose into my career, my children, my relationship.
• 33:59
  Felicia: And now, as those things are shifting, I don't know who I am, and that's scary.
• 34:06
  Mary: Yeah, so there's one more thing I kind of want to tease apart because I think the idea of burnout, I think people have different ideas.
• 34:14
  Mary: So when you are seeing burnout in one of your clients, what is that?
• 34:20
  Mary: I know there's I don't like to say typical, but what would you maybe be seeing that you would start to think, oh, there's some burnout happening here?
• 34:29
  Felicia: I think it's when for women, I have no more motivation to do this, I have no inspiration.
• 34:38
  Felicia: I used to be so creative.
• 34:40
  Felicia: I I am not, I'm not getting joy out of the things that I was getting joy out of.
• 34:46
  Felicia: Like there's nothing necessarily wrong with my job, it's just not bringing me fulfillment.
• 34:52
  Felicia: Or there's nothing wrong in my family, but things just seem off.
• 35:00
  Felicia: And they don't know why.
• 35:05
  Felicia: Some of women, some of these women have even like gone to the doctor and had all their blood work done, thinking like, oh, I must have low this or something must be off.
• 35:13
  Felicia: And I will say to them, I think what's happening is that for so long you've pushed through all of the uncomfortable negative feelings as a way to cope that your body has been whispering to you and then talking to you, and is now to the point where it is screaming at you, but it needs a break.
• 35:36
  Felicia: It something is off, something is not going right.
• 35:39
  Felicia: And the only way it's finally getting your attention is that you're kind of in a collapse mode where just getting out of bed and getting through the basic day-to-day stuff is exhausting.
• 35:54
  Felicia: Your body is forcing you to sit.
• 35:57
  Felicia: And I will say it's not that you're lazy, it's not that you've lost your creativity, or it's not that you are bad at your job.
• 36:06
  Felicia: It's that you are deeply physically, mentally, emotionally exhausted to the point that a good night's sleep isn't fixing that.
• 36:16
  Felicia: And I will also ask women to tell me a little bit about the systems that they live in or work in, because I will say to people often, you cannot self-care your way out of a broken system.
• 36:32
  Felicia: Self-care is great and we need to do it, and we need to take time for ourselves.
• 36:39
  Felicia: But if the systems that you are operating in are truly broken or were designed to keep you less than or down, you can do the most self-care.
• 36:52
  Felicia: And you might feel better for a little bit, but that's not going to fix the system as a whole.
• 36:59
  Felicia: And so we start looking at some of those things as well.
• 37:02
  Felicia: And what can they control versus what they can't control?
• 37:05
  Felicia: And how do we navigate the things?
• 37:09
  Felicia: Is it to a point where we have the ability to maybe create emotional or mental distance from those things if physical distance isn't possible?
• 37:18
  Felicia: And really looking at all these different aspects while understanding that the problem is the problem and you yourself are not the problem.
• 37:29
  Mary: I love that you brought up environment because I tend to talk about plants, believe it or not, and nature as informing us what we need because plants will just naturally do, they naturally rest, they naturally create boundaries.
• 37:42
  Mary: And so I talk a lot about what is in your soil, what are your nutrients?
• 37:47
  Mary: Are you getting enough light?
• 37:48
  Mary: Are you because if a plant struggles, we don't say, oh my God, what a lazy plant.
• 37:52
  Mary: I can't believe it's not trying harder.
• 37:54
  Mary: And so it makes me think about too this idea of a car came to mind as you were talking, because if we keep doing what we're trying to do, we're supposed to break down.
• 38:05
  Mary: I mean, I think nobody has a car and thinks I can drive across the desert and not stop for gas and never change the tires.
• 38:14
  Mary: And we expect machines to need maintenance.
• 38:17
  Mary: And we are so much more complex than machines.
• 38:19
  Mary: So I think that idea of shame just for being a human being, this breakdown is your built-in safety net.
• 38:27
  Mary: It's that check engine light for real.
• 38:29
  Mary: And I think when those things happen, that's normal.
• 38:34
  Mary: And it's, I like that you bring up too that it's not just, oh, I just need to learn to sleep better.
• 38:40
  Mary: It is a whole person approach because I think that's another thing women in midlife struggle with sleep because hormonal changes.
• 38:48
  Mary: And so I've had them say, okay, I did all this work, I changed my diet, and I'm getting better sleep.
• 38:53
  Mary: Why do I still feel so exhausted or so keyed up?
• 38:58
  Mary: And so you bring it back to that body thing, right?
• 39:01
  Mary: Like emotionally regulating and working on the nervous system.
• 39:06
  Felicia: Yeah.
• 39:06
  Felicia: And I always tell people that emotional regulation does not mean calm, no emotional experience.
• 39:18
  Felicia: That is not emotional regulation, that's numbness.
• 39:21
  Felicia: And that's not what I want for people either.
• 39:23
  Felicia: Emotional regulation is being able to handle a wide, vast diversity of emotions while still feeling connected to your body and in control of yourself.
• 39:40
  Felicia: That's true emotional regulation.
• 39:42
  Felicia: Feeling angry, feeling sad, grief, happiness, joy, melancholy, being able to feel them all and knowing that emotions are fluid and we need all of them and they are all important.
• 39:57
  Felicia: And yet we cannot let any one emotion drive the ship.
• 40:03
  Felicia: Yes.
• 40:04
  Felicia: So we are in control of that while also being able to feel all of the emotions without losing control.
• 40:12
  Felicia: And that is true emotional regulation.
• 40:15
  Mary: Yes, that capacity and tolerance for things not going okay.
• 40:20
  Mary: And we're still, I think you said it.
• 40:22
  Mary: I think I read somewhere in something you wrote that you can do hard things and still not lose yourself.
• 40:29
  Felicia: Yes.
• 40:30
  Mary: Very important.
• 40:31
  Mary: That's very important.
• 40:33
  Felicia: We often say that to kids, right?
• 40:34
  Felicia: Like you can do hard things, you can do this, and yet sometimes as adults, we don't kind of remind us, remind ourselves of that.
• 40:43
  Felicia: Like I can do this, and it's uncomfortable, and I'm not enjoying it.
• 40:49
  Felicia: Right.
• 40:51
  Mary: And it's not perfect.
• 40:52
  Felicia: Yes, but I can handle it.
• 40:54
  Mary: Yeah.
• 40:55
  Mary: So that use of and I think is important.
• 40:57
  Mary: Um, okay, so somebody's listening and they're realizing, okay, I think I might have some burnout here, or this sounds like me.
• 41:04
  Mary: What is a simple place you would tell them to start?
• 41:09
  Felicia: Honestly, I would tell them to find very small pockets within their day.
• 41:14
  Felicia: I'm talking a couple minutes, and do some deep breathing, some gentle movement, some positive affirmations.
• 41:25
  Felicia: One of the things I will tell people is can we have it stacked?
• 41:28
  Felicia: So, like every time you get up and go to the bathroom, on your walk there, can you do some deep breathing?
• 41:35
  Felicia: On your walk back, can you move your muscles, lower your shoulders, scan over your body and what you're feeling?
• 41:43
  Felicia: Right.
• 41:43
  Felicia: It doesn't have to be hours and hours and hours to start.
• 41:47
  Felicia: It can be really tiny pockets that allow us to realize that the job is the job and we are not our job.
• 41:59
  Felicia: We are a whole person outside of that.
• 42:02
  Felicia: Another thing that I will tell people, especially in high stress jobs, is to remind yourself that this job, and maybe it is something you love, but it is not who you are, and you do not need to sacrifice your well-being for the project, for the presentation, for whatever it is that you're working on.
• 42:28
  Felicia: You as a person are more important than any of that.
• 42:33
  Felicia: And this also sounds very sad, but I will often tell people if you were to quit, your job's gonna replace you.
• 42:41
  Felicia: If something were to happen to you, your job is gonna replace you.
• 42:44
  Felicia: But you're working so hard that you don't have anything left to give to your family and your friends.
• 42:51
  Felicia: And that's not okay because those are the people that are there for you and would miss you.
• 42:57
  Felicia: And so we really kind of have our priorities upside down where we give a thousand percent to our job.
• 43:04
  Felicia: And then when we get home at night, we have nothing left to give.
• 43:07
  Felicia: And so we're irritable and we're yelling at kids and we're just like, Can't you just do your homework or can't you just behave, or why is this house a mess?
• 43:14
  Felicia: Right.
• 43:14
  Felicia: Because we've put all of our mental effort in.
• 43:17
  Felicia: And so kind of checking in with yourself, where am I at?
• 43:20
  Felicia: Like, what do I have in the tank?
• 43:21
  Felicia: And for a lot of women, I'll say, what would it look like if you were to do 20% less during your work day?
• 43:28
  Felicia: 20% less.
• 43:29
  Felicia: And most of them are like, what?
• 43:31
  Felicia: I'm like, well, your a hundred percent is somebody else's like 10,000 percent, right?
• 43:41
  Felicia: So if you're working at 80, that's still higher than most people that you work with.
• 43:48
  Felicia: And most women will be like, yeah, I did that 20% less thing, and nobody noticed it at all.
• 43:53
  Felicia: But I felt better.
• 43:54
  Felicia: Like, exactly.
• 43:56
  Felicia: Because we push ourselves to the point of no return.
• 44:00
  Felicia: And when we can really start to take a step back and realize this isn't something I have to do, or I don't have to do that today, or the deadline is in three weeks, but I'm gonna make myself do it now.
• 44:10
  Felicia: No, it can wait until the deadline so that you have some in reserve for when you get home at night to your family and friends.
• 44:20
  Mary: Yes.
• 44:20
  Mary: And to yourself.
• 44:22
  Mary: Have some love for yourself.
• 44:23
  Mary: Yeah.
• 44:24
  Mary: All of this has been so important.
• 44:26
  Mary: There's so many important things here that I think women need to hear.
• 44:29
  Mary: And we need to hear it, you know, repeatedly because, you know, sometimes we can't access it all or we forget, you know, we lose our way.
• 44:37
  Mary: So, Felicia, thank you very much for a really important conversation.
• 44:41
  Mary: Can you tell us where people can find you if they want to seek you out?
• 44:47
  unknown: Yeah.
• 44:48
  Felicia: So you can find me on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
• 44:52
  Felicia: And it's all the same handle, Felicia Brown L P C.
• 44:56
  Felicia: And if you are interested in working with me, you can contact me on there, or you can also email me and I will give you the email for the show notes.
• 45:05
  Felicia: But it's my name, Felicia at mcccounseling.com.
• 45:09
  Mary: Okay.
• 45:09
  Mary: I will put that in the show notes.
• 45:11
  Mary: And just to clarify, so do you do coaching and counseling or are you okay?
• 45:15
  Mary: So you're licensed as a therapist in Illinois.
• 45:18
  Mary: Correct.
• 45:19
  Mary: Correct.
• 45:19
  Felicia: In Illinois only, yeah.
• 45:20
  Felicia: But with the coaching side of things, what's really nice is you get my clinical expertise in a more defined program specifically for high achieving women that feel like they're burned out, that feel like they're out of control or that their nervous system is dysregulated.
• 45:38
  Felicia: Yeah.
• 45:39
  Mary: Yeah.
• 45:39
  Mary: And we talk a lot on this show because I'm an LPC, but I'm also a coach.
• 45:43
  Mary: So we we actually talk about that a lot because I want people to understand the difference and that ethically, we still really wear the ethics of a therapist.
• 45:53
  Mary: So you sort of get that extra kind of, you know, confidentiality and privacy, but it's a very different role and defining it clearly is important.
• 46:02
  Mary: But, you know, sometimes people need coaching as a way to move through.
• 46:09
  Mary: And that is, you know, that's really the best path for them.
• 46:13
  Mary: So yeah, absolutely.
• 46:14
  Mary: So I will link that all in the show notes.
• 46:16
  Mary: Thank you again for being here.
• 46:18
  Mary: I really loved our conversation.
• 46:20
  Felicia: Thank you.
• 46:20
  Mary: I enjoyed it as well.
• 46:22
  Mary: And I want to thank everyone for listening.
• 46:24
  Mary: If you enjoyed this episode or you are a frequent listener, your support means a lot.
• 46:29
  Mary: Y'all might know that we just got a new puppy.
• 46:31
  Mary: His name is Alfie in late June, and I'm a bit short on sleep right now.
• 46:35
  Mary: So if you want to buy me a coffee or add to Alfie's treat supply, just click the link in the show notes to donate.
• 46:41
  Mary: And until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.