Latest / Radically Genuine / 120. Back from the borderline w/ Mollie Adler
Transcript
- Welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. I am Dr. Roger McFillin. Sean, I wanna start out with a few quotes. Felt inspired to share them before today's podcast. Two of them are from Carl Jung. We start first. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being. His second quote, even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness. and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. Just speaks a little bit to the role of emotions and struggle that exists in this human experience. The last one I want to share is from Marianne Williamson. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light. not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others. I believe humanity is in a period of rapid transformation. a great awakening where expansion of human consciousness is revealing how many of our ideas and once trusted institutions are both corrupt and harmful. The very foundations that have long shaped our collective human experience are now being vigorously challenged and reclaimed. While the psychiatric industrial complex thrives financially, Sean (02:19.243) Fueled by generations entrenched in a cult of mental illness labels and pharmaceutical dependence, a rebellion is brewing. Those wounded by the system are embarking on a spiritual journey, a radical spiritual journey, reclaiming their divine nature and transcending the emotional torment and trauma of their past. This resurrection brings forth new ideas. Sean (02:47.771) and unprecedented opportunities for healing. Podcasters and alternative media are flourishing as we awaken from the mass conditioning that has kept us sick and dependent. Some of the spiritual and mystical experiences that have inspired my own personal transformation, my clinical work, and the radically genuine podcasts are being reported around the world. Which brings us today's guest. Her podcast, as I've mentioned previously leading up to this, is rapidly becoming my favorite podcast. One day prior to meditating, I prayed for continued guidance and wisdom, and then I meditated on that, and I went deep into meditation. And when I'm able to do that, the answers always come or a sign comes. And what came out of that one? is after I regrounded myself, I think I went right back to work and I got exposed to the work of Dr. Lisa Miller from Columbia University. And she is the founder and director of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute. She's a psychologist, which immediately directed me to today's guest because she released a podcast with Dr. Miller on my birthday. And I listened to it. I went outside, went for a walk, listened to the entire thing start to finish. And then I started like scrolling through her other episodes. And I was like, what the fuck? I need to listen to this because it was titled Back From the Borderline, right? And I hate the term borderline, I really do. But one of my areas of expertise is in the treatment of people who collectively adhere, identify with that label or the struggles that are within it. And then I began to just kind of get hooked because I start listening to her healing and transformation being broadcast in real time. Her topics and choice of guests are just of great interest to me personally and professionally. I honestly, with all my heart believe that Sean (05:12.563) mental health professionals can probably learn a lot more from the stories and the transformational experiences from people who've kind of been in this system, who've gone through dark times, who've abandoned it and have healed themselves instead of this dogma from academic training programs that just continues to hurt so many people. Her willingness and openness to venture into topic areas that are taboo or withheld from mainstream academic circles, the ones in which I have been exposed to as a clinical psychologist, it continues to advance my own understanding of the human experience. And I'm really grateful and blessed that she's doing this work. I wanna introduce Molly Adler to the Radically Genuine podcast. She is the producer and host of the Back From the Borderline. podcast, which since its inception in 2021, it's rapidly ascended the podcasting charts. And if you listen, you'll know exactly why. It's landed in the top 1% of most downloaded podcasts on Apple top 1% most followed on Spotify as early as 2022. I went into the listen notes, it's top 0.05% globally. And this growth It just fueled hundreds of voicemails and emails from listeners who've resonated with her experience. It's that genuineness that a lot of people can connect to. She's very critical of the usefulness as we are and the accuracy of psychiatric labels for disorders or dysfunctions, including of course the DSM. After realizing her alignment with traits commonly associated with that diagnosis, borderline She began her own journey of healing and recovery. And as I mentioned earlier, this willingness to share it on the podcast. And you can see her growth with her guests and the different areas that she's going into. She has a deep passion for depth psychology, philosophy, mythology, mysticism. She strives to provide like validation, peer support to our listeners. She believes as do I, that we have to abandon this idea of disordered or dysfunctional. Sean (07:35.527) And I can't wait to get into some of these discussions with her, just actually talk about how all this can serve our growth, our evolution, creating a life worth living when that's of value. Molly Adler, I want to welcome you to the Radically Genuine Podcast. Mollie (07:50.768) Wow, what an amazing introduction. That was very, very touching and I'm very honored. Thank you. Sean (07:59.251) You know what attracted me to her podcast? The artwork on her podcast. It's an acorn, a caterpillar, and then a human. Three things that transform into something beautiful. And I thought that was, I looked at that and I was like, what are we showing here? And I was like, Oh, I get it. And I knew right away. Well, have you gone to her Instagram and all her memes? Yes, a little bit. Yep. She, she is, and the sub stack. She is. Yeah, she's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Molly, I have to learn. Mollie (08:14.62) Hmm. Mollie (08:24.098) Yeah, memeing my way into success. What can I say? My little sister actually made that cover art and that's why it's so brilliant is because she gets it and I didn't even give her any direction. She just kind of made that and it's just so perfect, you know? So yeah. Sean (08:29.996) Hahaha Sean (08:43.495) It is perfect. Yeah. I've mentioned on here previously in social media how artistic and sensitive people are more likely to be misunderstood and mislabeled in the system. You have a history, Molly. Maybe what you can do is kind of just start a little bit about kind of going back to where this transformation began for you that got to the point where you started this brilliant podcast. Mollie (09:13.684) Whew, what a journey. Well, I think it'll probably help your listeners place me if I kind of share. So I'm 34 years old. I was born in 1989 and I grew up in a small town in Wyoming. And so I grew up in middle America. Both my parents were school teachers. So, and my father's family actually is like. from North Carolina, grew up in abject poverty. Both my parents were really struggling financially when I was born. I was born, the first home that I was brought to was a double-wide trailer in a really, really small town in Wyoming, like Torrington, Wyoming, when I say it's the tiniest little town. And then I grew up in Casper, Wyoming, in just a small town, small house, like with my family, I have two sisters. And ever since I was really little, I had a lot of big questions, a lot of big feelings, and that's just always who I've been. And my... Dad was my mom or my here we go. My mom was my dad's second marriage. And so my mom was Catholic. And my dad was raised kind of like Baptist Christian but wasn't super religious. So bringing in the spiritual aspect. I went to Catholic church with my mom and my grandma, but my dad never went to church with us. And I always asked my mom like, why? And obviously it's really hard to explain to a little girl that you're basically a bastard child and your parents never got, your dad never got an annulment. So understandably, my dad's like, I'm not going to this church if they think that I have to like pay money to the church to be recognized. Like my dad wouldn't be able to take communion and all these things. And so Mollie (11:01.428) I was a very spiritually curious child from a very young age. I remember just being blown away by the beauty of the Catholic Church. I loved going to church, even though I found it very boring. But I had questions I wanted to know, was Father Gary God? Like why are we drinking this wine? Why are we eating this wafer? What is God? And what happens after we die? What happens before I was born? And a lot of the adults that I was asking these questions to, they were like, why the fuck are you asking this? Like... And that was literally the response I would get is like, don't think about that, you know? And I was just going, well, why? It seems like the most important thing to possibly ask. And so I just remember being very struck by the hypocrisy of it all very early on, because I was just going, why is asking these very meaningful questions something that like the adults don't wanna ask and yet they want me to go to church? And so I would lay awake and I was... a little bit of a weirdo in school. I was constantly checking out books on Egypt for some reason. I was obsessed with ancient Egyptian mythology and mummies. And there was this one book that I kept checking out that my librarian actually made me stop checking it out because other kids needed a turn. But I would go to bed at night, like looking at these mummies, both fascinated and horrified. And my entire childhood, I struggled with really bad insomnia. because I was so scared about dying ever since I was really little, like, like petrified. And that pretty much colored my whole childhood. And so my only soothing thing was I listened to the Harry Potter narrated audio books on tape and then CD. And like, I literally only, I had to listen to stories to like not listen to my thoughts because my thoughts really scared me. I see you Roger, maybe you wanna hop in, go ahead. Sean (12:52.911) Yeah, just curious. Do you look back at that time? Do you see it any differently now through a different lens that kind of obsessed obsession with that period? Mollie (13:01.872) Absolutely. I mean, I'm working with a spiritual director now and she works for something called the Center for Sacred Studies. And I had, and this is like a non-denominational, it works with like indigenous elders from all over the world. And I'm actually, she's a Jungian analyst. She went to the Zurich Young Institute and I'm starting work with her very soon. And I'm so excited because my dream has been to work with like a proper analyst to like talk about my dreams and all this stuff. And my intro call with her is she said, if you were born into like an indigenous culture, you would have been seen as like a little mystic and you would have been put with like the medicine woman as a child and they would have seen that these questions that you had indicated that you had a deep interest in these spiritual questions. And, but instead it was kind of like pathologized and more, and because I was so sensitive as a child, And I know now with all the knowledge that I have about psychologies, we are wired to want acceptance from our tribe, right? And I saw that when I was expressing these deep questions to the people that I depended upon for survival, they were viscerally reacting. And I don't blame them at all. It's because my parents have their own things with religious trauma and it's generational. I went through a parent blaming phase, don't get me wrong, but I'm out of that now. But at the time, I was intuitive enough to know, okay, you need to stop talking about this because it's going to get you rejected by your tribe, right? And so then by rejecting that, I think it created these splits in my psyche. Sean (14:38.475) Can I share a story? Mollie (14:39.544) Absolutely. Yeah. Sean (14:41.395) So, I guess it was probably about a year and a half ago, I saw a woman who actually sought me out, sought my practice out. She was about an hour, lived about an hour, hour and a half away. And she was sex trafficked. She experienced the most horrific trauma. She was like held in captivity, treated like an animal. And all this was documented in court documents. And... I imagine that when I would meet with her, I would be working with somebody who is severely traumatized and really, really struggling. She was interested in entering into our DBT program. When I met with her, it was anything but the case. She was one of the most wise, centered people I've ever met in my entire life. I did meet with her for a little while. just to make sure and assess that they're, you know, the experience of post-traumatic stress wasn't really profound and she wasn't really struggling or suffering in the ways that, you know, I would have imagined with someone who went through what she went through. Mollie (15:52.54) Because people like that can be good at masking too. So yeah, I'm sure you had to kind of talk to make sure. Sean (15:55.272) Right. Sean (15:58.867) And then it became very, very clear to me that she wasn't there for me. Uh, or I was, I wasn't really in a position that she needed the help, but she did need to communicate certain things to me. And she shared that when she was experiencing that trauma, that she like disassociated experienced God in a different way where everything was turned back into love. And she doesn't experience trauma symptoms because she was allowed to see the pain of her attackers, the history of her attackers, and experience it from a completely different perspective. So she was what the mental health system would say she would she had a psychotic break. She was actually hospitalized for talking about it to a mental health professional. And that kind of drove the steps in the mental health system that brought her to me. Mollie (16:42.137) Wow. Sean (16:58.783) But eventually we made the decision together that she didn't really need any therapy. We agreed. And she handed a book to me and said, I am a messenger for you and I need to give this to you. And it was a book by Brian Weiss, Many Lives, Many Masters. And it was my first exposure to past life regression and really looking into past lives. I mean, obviously I'm aware of the concept and the idea, but the book in itself brought me to other books, which generally was the case. And I now, yeah, many lives, many masters, Brian Weiss, who was a psychiatrist who learned how to do past life regression therapy. I think that book might've been around 1980. And Mollie (17:37.58) I just like Googled it so I can buy it. Sean (17:51.707) I was, it opened up a new world, including the work that of the psychologist that came on to your podcast from that I mentioned to start from Columbia and I always start to, when I hear someone talk about being kind of obsessed with a certain time period, I ultimately open up a wonder if that was an experience in a past life. I know I'm personally obsessed with world war two and that era and the Mollie (18:01.116) Mm-hmm. Yep. Sean (18:21.919) Revolutionary War. I have dreams about it. I want to have the opportunity to watch anything on it. That's like what I'm going to download even documentaries, I can get really obsessed about it. But this idea that we are so limited in our understanding about mental health or well being, there's so much we don't know that's outside of our understanding or purview. So I just wondered if that if you ever looked back at that kind of obsessive obsessions that you were having as some reflection of a past experience or past life that you might have had. Mollie (18:25.084) fascinating. Mollie (18:32.531) Mm-hmm. Mollie (18:39.482) Yeah. Mollie (18:51.708) Oh yeah, definitely. I'm also fascinated with like NDE stuff. And I'm not sure if you've ever dived into the work of Dr. Diana Pasulka. And then as soon as I had my experiences with Chris Blood, so these, but again, that's a whole nother rabbit hole. Very quickly. I started, as soon as I started having kind of my own mystical experiences, I similarly to you, Roger, like I already knew I was very drawn to and obsessed with ancient Egypt. But in addition to that, weirdly, I also was like... so nichely, that's not a word, autistically probably, if I even wanted to seek a diagnosis, obsessed with the Tudor England time period, so much so that when I was even, again, pretty young, I was obsessively reading about King Henry VIII and all of his wives and all of that time period, still obsessed, so much so that I have Anne Boleyn tattooed on my arm here, and it's because also she's a figure that is very... inspiring to me because she was misunderstood. She was, that's why I also love Mary Magdalene. I love women that were kind of seen as these like scarlet women, but in reality, they were just misunderstood and actually quite mystical. And interestingly, Anne Boleyn, it's written about quite prominently before her death, because she was obviously beheaded for adultery, which arguably never even happened. It was just that King Henry VIII really needed a son and she wasn't able to do that, but she did produce like, England's best monarch ever. So, but anyway, before she died, there was about, she was in the Tower of London for a long, quite a bit before she was actually eventually executed. She thought, I think it was like four or five times that she thought that she was going to be beheaded. And so can you imagine waiting and thinking, okay, today's the day. And then they would come in and say, okay, nevermind, he's decided to wait another day. Like just the most torturous experience. And she was Mollie (20:51.196) part of the Reformation. And interestingly, there's a lot of conspiracy theories that she was actually quite a mystical person and worshiping Mary Magdalene and doing all these things. But long story short, understanding mysticism and what was the Reformation? It was essentially saying that we should have direct experience with the divine. And obviously their understanding of all this stuff was limited then, but they knew that the Catholic Church was saying you can only experience God through the priest, right? And, but long story short, Anne Boleyn experienced probably what Eastern mystics would call like Samadhi. They said that before she died, she like was like, she walked to get her head chopped off with the most grace with like completely at peace with, with the reality that was awaiting her and said the most graceful things like she forgave a King Henry VIII like made the most beautiful elegant speech and she was a mystic, you know. And I believe that she experienced these mystical states. And there's just so many people. And then once I just started reading about that, I was obsessed with her before I knew any of this. Then when I started having my own experiences, I read about that and I'm going, there's a reason why I'm so drawn to all of this and always have been. And then I started reading, I think I can't remember the psychologist, but it's not this book, but I read another psychologist who writes a lot about NDEs. And then when I started getting into non-human intelligence and the work of Dr. Diana Pasolka, and then I don't know if you've ever heard of, the movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once, it's like the most amazing movie, beautiful depiction of like mommy issues and generational trauma that was just like stab in the heart watching that movie for me, it was really rough. I ugly cried, thank God I watched it alone, but it really... There's a lot coming out now and it's ironic that mystics have been saying this for thousands of years. But now quantum physics is proving, you know, that what is time is the past is happening at the same time as the future is Dr. Diana Pasulka and her brand new book encounters interviews this anonymous. woman who is deep into AI right now saying that she believes like AI is us in the future right and I know all of this sounds it might sound crazy but. Mollie (23:11.516) I just, as soon as I stopped thinking anything was crazy, like that's when I actually started feeling the least crazy, if that makes sense. Sean (23:20.928) Yeah, the same has happened to me. Once I learned that all experiences are happening for us and not to us, it was certainly a perspective shift that altered my consciousness. I'm interested in understanding your story, what brought you to Los Angeles and some of the things that you went through there. Mollie (23:33.968) Brilliantly put. Mollie (23:41.209) Yeah. Mollie (23:44.812) Yeah, so as I mentioned, it's probably helpful to kind of realize how I got to Los Angeles. And so I told you I grew up in Wyoming. Ever since, I has always been just an extra, I'm the classic person that probably would end up with a BPD label, like, which I never did by the way, and that's a whole nother story, but I identified with those characteristics. I was always too much, too emotional, too loud. Look at me, look at me, like a little kid, and always pointing out the dysfunctional. shit going on in my family. Whereas, you know, I had a mom and a sister that kind of took the understandable and very adaptable approach of kind of just like, not saying anything. My dad was, when I say that my dad went through like, a child called it level of abuse, like my grandfather, again, Appalachia family in the South, okay? And my grandfather, they were so poor that... like couldn't afford shoes, eating potatoes every single day. My grandpa was drinking cologne to get drunk, right? And so killed my dad's dogs. Like my dad went through hell growing up. And so my dad being the dad he was, it's actually amazing that he was the dad he was able to be given what he went through and had no therapy. But my dad had a lot, had his emotions ruled our house. You know, his... his anger ruled our house. And my dad and I have experienced great healing over the last few years. And he's really mellowed out in his older age. But when he was in his thirties, you know, like he was at his peak of just rage and he never put his hands on any of us. But people that grew up with like walking on eggshells of like the explosive emotions of a parent know that can be just, I've had relationships where I did get physically abused. So I know that emotional abuse and that can be just as psychologically damaging as physical. Sean (25:46.131) Yeah, and it kind of gets into a greater discussion about the function of emotions as being necessary gifts. Like imagine being in that type of environment. I mean, it really does provide you extreme value to be on edge and to be sensitively and acutely aware of any shifts in your father's tone of voice or his body language that could anticipate that he's angry or that he'll be physical. Mollie (26:04.464) That's right. Mollie (26:09.817) Yep. Sean (26:14.311) or violent with his words or anything. So you kind of grow up and you become shaped that there's danger around here and I have to be really, really sensitive to it. And what that does to the nervous system and how it can just affect you eternally and it can be very difficult to kind of manage that internal energy because of that threat. How... Mollie (26:16.578) Yeah. Mollie (26:19.877) Mm-hmm. Mollie (26:34.556) That's right. And you know, sorry, Roger, I'm like, I'm curious actually to know your point, like your thoughts on this too, because I didn't do myself any favors. Like I told you, my little sister who has her own, and I don't like to talk, I don't even really talked about her a lot on the podcast because her journey is her own. She's my best friend in the entire world. I have a half sister, but she was nine years older than me. And so she moved out at 16, like she was gone. And... Her home was actually my sanctuary. I would go stay at my big sister's. She got married at 18, and I would go stay with my sister and brother-in-law on the weekends sometimes. And their home was so safe for me. And again, not that my home wasn't safe, but it was just like the moods were a lot. But my sister, my little sister, she just went inward completely and became super vigilant. She would just go in her room to escape. I picked the hardest route. If my dad was saying something or acting a certain way, I would say something. I'd be like, that's not how a dad's supposed to be. You know, da da, and I'm telling you, that's how, like, and we'll get to my LA experience where like a woman when I was in sex work said, you gotta get out of this because you're gonna be the bitch that gets killed. Like, because you can't shut up. You can't close your mouth. And I've always been the person, when I worked in tech, you know, like I will always speak out against the guy that's the sexual harassing CEO or the guy that's treating people like crap. Sean (27:48.381) Mm. Mollie (28:02.264) and that started, everyone would always say I had an issue with authority. And in reality, I had an issue with abuse of power and adults who claimed to be adults, but were just acting like really destructive big babies. And so I did not pick a very easy route. I could have probably made my life a lot easier by just like shutting up sometimes, but no matter what. I could not shut up. I wanted to talk about how screwed up it was. And we only went to family therapy one time. And we went to family when I was probably 15. And we went to family therapy. And we only lasted one session because I started talking to the family therapist who was acting, asking very good questions. And I just said, I was telling them what the home life was like. And as soon as they started talking to my dad, you know, we got in that car and we never went back to therapy. Right? Like we didn't make it past one family therapy session. Sean (29:02.471) It's so easy, Molly, for you to become the symptom bearer in the family environment. The scapegoat, classic scapegoat. And my understanding would be that you never really had a choice. Like if we look at your soul, your personality, it was nothing ever that you could tolerate being quiet. You had to speak up. You had to challenge illegitimate authority. And Mollie (29:06.296) Yep, scapegoat classic. Mollie (29:20.921) Yeah. Sean (29:26.587) I think those when we see those in personalities, I tend to work best with people who have that personality. My brother knows me quite well. So he knows that some of the things you just discussed were similar attributes to me and in areas of my life, I can't tell you how many people, you know, said, you know, you just got to learn to shut your mouth. And it was never something I believe to be a to be a choice. But it's, it's certainly if you look at, at your life as a, as a whole right now, and you're still in that journey, of course, it was Mollie (29:46.541) Yeah. Mollie (29:54.204) Oh, now I've found a healthy way to challenge authority, right? Like I've found a healthy way to challenge systems. Because look, even now looking back, right? Like, because for a while my dad was the enemy and then my mom was also the enemy because my mom looked the other way. My mom would just say, why do you always have to have the last word with your dad? Right? Like, just don't say anything. And and look, she was trying to protect me in her own way, how she was protecting herself. And my dad was hurting. Sean (29:57.582) But. Mollie (30:22.924) And my mom was hurting. My mom came from like the most emotionally constipated home where like my grandpa, I never saw my grandpa say, I love you once, right? Like, and so then my dad arguably came from like the opposite which was like super emotionally volatile. So there was always gonna be this, it was gonna be a shit show. And I don't blame them at all for this. And now I realized, and I realized this now very deeply, that's why I don't say. psychiatrists are the problem, or my dad's the problem, or my boss is the problem, or the guys that we're seeing sex workers are the problem. It's the incentive models. It's the unaddressed emotional shit, you know? It's all of it. It's the systems. And so now I take aim at those, which is a much healthier way to go about things. Sean (31:12.447) true as an adult. I mean, but you were disrupting an ecosystem, right? So everyone in there is trying to survive. And I've always said on this podcast, one of the things that both fascinates me and scares the hell out of me is the human capacity to deny reality. And that capacity to deny reality in a system like that, where you're someone who was forcing the reality back onto everybody is such an invalid, called an invalidating environment. And that's what we see with the diagnosis of BPD about this condition. Mollie (31:14.17) Yeah. Yeah. Mollie (31:27.172) Ain't that the truth? Sean (31:42.339) The way that Marshall Linehan talks about it is from a biosocial perspective, where there's a biological, oh, I don't like to use the word vulnerability, but you experience your emotions intensely, as you mentioned, experience big emotions, big feelings, right, big ideas, big questions, right. And if you're in the wrong environment, that can get punished. And when you act on what you're experiencing in an authentic, genuine way, and Mollie (31:57.104) Yep. Sean (32:09.339) and someone tells you you're crazy or to shut your mouth, or you know, you're the problem, you're too much. What do you learn? You learn that your experiences are not valid ones, that there's something broken that exists within you. And from a perspective like learning how to manage your emotions in a way that directs it into something effective or positively, I mean, it makes it nearly impossible when you can't even trust your own emotional experiences. And I'm sure... Mollie (32:36.252) That's right. Sean (32:37.095) Just from listening to your podcast is what you've certainly been able to learn is to trust your wisdom, your intuitive nature, and to look at and understand your emotions as guides or gifts that are provided to you. Mollie (32:52.6) Yeah. And I mean, I always kind of felt I felt like I was a victim to my emotions. And I talk a lot about this on the podcast is like, and obviously cursing is fine on here, but it's just like, I felt like my emotions were just like making me their little bitch for the longest time because I was just like, I felt like I was just a walking reaction, you know, like, and just to circle back and answer how I kind of got to LA. Ever since I was young, I just didn't feel like I, Wyoming is the most beautiful place and I can actually really appreciate it now, like going back to it, having lived in, I lived in London, I lived in LA, I lived in Denver, right? Like I was the classic, like try to get away by moving places and changing myself, but everywhere you go, there you are, they say, and that is one of, I think, the most truest statements. But ever since I was in Wyoming, I just knew, I was like, I don't belong here. I wanted out. I wanted... I saw all the people I grew up with basically just like staying the same. I didn't see a lot of evolution. I didn't see a lot of diversity. I wanted to learn about the world. And I just, I had this weird feeling like I always wanted to live in London. And so I ended up moving to London. I got, and that's one thing that's always been on me. If I want to do something, like I will do it. Like I'll figure out a way to make it happen. Yeah. Sean (34:14.719) How old were you when you went to London? Mollie (34:16.872) Um, so I applied for a study abroad program and I did that when I was, I think I was about 20. And um, I, when I was there, I was there for just about, I think it was like a four month thing. And right at the end, I met a guy there who I absolutely just fell in love with, you know, some might say trauma bond, but at the time you were not going to tell me that I fell in love with him. I came back to the States and we were long distance for about a year and we talked every single day and he came and visited me. We visited each other every three months. I ended up moving to London to go and I went to, I finished my degree there and we got married. Three months after we got married, he cheated on me and it was the worst thing ever. You know? I, my whole reality fell apart. I thought, okay, I've got this fairy tale. I moved to London. I have the handsome, you know, gorgeous British husband and it all fell apart. And now looking back yet again, I spent a long time blaming him. He had infidelity in his family and he didn't really know how to process his emotions. I was not a fun person to date then. I can look back and know. I, that's when I realized that like my relationship with my sexuality was really messed up. You know, like I felt like I could be a sexual person when I wanted to get someone. And then the moment that I was in a safe relationship with someone, it's almost like I became like celibate. Like I felt like I immediately developed this sexual repulsion the moment that I was in a relationship because I never had intercourse or sex to... enjoy it. I did it because I felt like it was something that I had to do to get someone to love me. Sean (36:14.235) Use the word trauma bond. Can you explain what that means to you and how it played itself out in that relationship? Mollie (36:16.186) Yeah. Mollie (36:22.268) I think that I can't speak for him, right? Because I don't know what was going on with him. And interestingly, I haven't really spoken to him since we left. When I say I classic, like, split on that, the biggest thing I miss is his mom. His mom was like the most amazing person and she did so much for me. But after that happened, like, I had to just like cut everyone out because it was too heartbreaking and painful for me to deal with. But for me, the trauma bond was like, okay, look, wow. There were so many red flags, right? Like when we first started dating, early on, I saw that he was kind of in like talking to someone else and he told me he wasn't talking to her anymore. I saw some evidence and he said, no, it's not anymore. That was like, and my intuition is very good. Like I knew it, but I didn't wanna believe it because I had this beautiful vision of what my life could be with him. And so it's like, I wanted to turn off all of those things and go full steam ahead. And don't get me wrong, he was a funny guy. We had so many great, we had a great connection with each other. And I still like, we grew up together. Like we, we went through so many good experiences together, but I wanted what I thought our life could look like a lot more than what the reality was in my face. Sean (37:42.491) So was the idea of him created in your mind more than what was actually experienced? Mollie (37:47.648) Oh, absolutely. Like I said, though, he's such a nice person. I still wish him well. I didn't at the time, but I can definitely say that I do now. And his family was lovely and literally took such good care of me when I was there. I'll be forever grateful to them. But it was hard, you know? And so when that all fell apart, I tried my best. So because I have a renewed appreciation for what it is to be like an illegal immigrant in a country because I was there. I went through all the visas. I had student visa, fiance visa, marriage visa. And then when I was so close to being able to get my indefinite leave to remain, so I could have just stayed, all my friends were in London at this time. I'd been there for like five years. You know, like some of the best friends you make are in university. And like I made the best group of girlfriends in college and I had just, I had amazing connections and I love London. Sean (38:41.675) So, Molly, I actually feel like I'm in session right now. And I- That's why I'm not talking. I actually want to bring you back to some things that are really relevant. You drop those bombs that are really important, and then you kind of tangentially went into another direction. So I want to bring it back. So I think that's an important piece, because what you said is very familiar to me in my work with clients. And you talked about the struggles with your own sexuality. Like using sex. Mollie (38:45.09) Yeah, me up. Mollie (38:51.58) sure. Yeah. Mollie (38:57.817) Classic. Mollie (39:09.615) Yeah. Sean (39:11.199) as a means of creating a bond or creating a connection. And then actually once you have it, that you now develop, you know, you talked about almost like a repulsion to sex. It can be very upsetting and distressing to the person, but it externally has in my experience extended beyond that. Sometimes it's the ick or having such an aversive reaction to their partner after their partner loves them. Mollie (39:14.827) Yep. Mollie (39:19.92) The ick. Yeah. Mollie (39:40.5) Yeah, yep. That's definitely a thing. And it's really weird, like even still, like now I'm starting to heal from that. And now I'm actually starting to understand what like a healthy relationship actually looks like. Like a healthy relationship is security, right? And a lot of people that grew up in a traumatic environment, when we, I was the classic person of saying, oh, if there's no passion, then I don't want it, you know? When in reality, it's just that people like me are not used to feeling safe, are not used to feeling secure. And so you feel like almost then you sabotage a good thing, you know, by, and that absolutely happened to me. And we obviously can get into it, you know, from about age of 14 online, I experienced a lot of... sexual abuse and grooming at the hands of older men. When I was about 14, I was just like any other millennial girl on AOL Instant Messenger at the age of as early as 11 and 12 with my friends playing on AOL Instant Messenger. Our parents had no idea because nobody did. It was the Wild West of the internet. And of course, in these chat rooms, they're like anonymous chat rooms. And of course, we're talking to probably like 60, 50-year-old dudes, and they knew how old we were. come into the picture of my space where you could put pictures of yourself up. And I had a small town and I had guys that were in there, you know, like 20 in between the ages of like 25 to probably in their early forties, talking to me when I was between the ages of 14 and 17. Some of that was just online, exchanging like pictures and messages, but a lot of it graduated to them like picking me up. And like, taking me around and the guy that I lost my virginity to was like a 29 year old guy when I was 17 years old. Sean (41:39.359) Do you remember what that felt like to be a teenage girl and to kind of get that type of attention? Mollie (41:45.264) Oh, I was flattered. That's the thing. And that's why it kills me to see people, you see it all the time and it actually, it fills me with a lot of like rage when I see people saying, oh, it's been 25 years and you're just now coming out saying that you were like sexually abused. And that I was like, yes, I can understand. Because the first time I realized that I was a victim was probably. a year and a half ago and I'm 34, okay? I didn't realize the depth of this. This happened even after my podcast. I was sitting, one of my best friends was my ex-manager at my job, her name's Tara, and she lives here. She has a beautiful family. She has two young sons, but her son is everything. It's crazy being friends with someone who has a son. When I first met Tara, her son was I think like 12. And now he's like almost 14 and just the changes that happen to like a young man in those ages. And I remember I was at their house for dinner and Tara said like that her son like has a little crush on me. And I was just like, that's so cute. But I would never say anything about it, you know, because I don't want to mortify him. But I remember like looking at this young boy and number one, he's just so handsome. He's getting all the attention from the girls at school. But I looked at him. And like, I just thought. men that were my age were looking at this boy, like at his age, and seeing it like in a sexual way and how easy it would be for me to manipulate this boy. And he would think it was the best thing in the world probably, you know? And that I felt sick. I actually had to go to the bathroom and like have like a deep breathing session with myself. And it was like, hit me like a brick wall of saying, I was victimized, you know, and this, the whole Me Too movement happened and I've had experiences of actual rape. So I was sexually assaulted once when I was drunk at a party by a guy that I was dating and his brother, which was a horrible experience. And then I was sexually assaulted again by a person that I was dating. But I never connect. So that I knew. I knew that those were instances of rape. But Mollie (44:00.324) when you realize that like a whole nother level of abuse that you hadn't even connected happened, and like that's like years later, decades later, it just filled me with such a sense of disgust because to answer your question, I would never, I would have laughed in your face if you would have told me you're being abused, don't do that. No one would have been able to convince me otherwise because I thought I was a willing participant in this. I was so flattered and I was having a great time. Sean (44:27.005) Yeah. Mollie (44:29.08) These guys were treating me well. Like, they were really nice to me. Sean (44:33.396) These are the challenges that we actually see in clinical practice is, you know, you'll ask for trauma history, you'll explore that in initial evaluations and many people will not necessarily view that from a lens of that they were victimized. And you know, and if they don't see it as something that is traumatic, then you know, that's fine. That's their experience. Mollie (44:50.767) Yeah. Mollie (44:59.388) course. Sean (44:59.755) However, there's so much shame and there's so much underlying shame and disgust and they don't understand why they feel it. And they blame themselves for putting themselves in that position. It's very confusing because they were excited by it. That's why I asked you the question, how did you feel as a teenage girl? Not in a way to put any blame on you, but to talk about how natural it is to have somebody give you that type of attention and be attracted to you. But the... Mollie (45:06.2) Yep. Sean (45:28.595) The difference is that, you know, developmentally, there's such a diverse shift in, you know, your child. And you know, a just society, a loving society, compassionate society, takes care of the most vulnerable. And children are vulnerable, especially adolescent. Mollie (45:37.945) Yeah. Mollie (45:45.648) That's right. And you don't feel like a child when you are a teenage girl. That's the thing, because you want to be an adult so fucking bad. And I'll tell you a story that will probably make you just so disgusted. Like, I was a singer. I love singing. I've always loved songwriting. And there was, I just feel like music producers, that archetype, no offense to music producers out there who are just genuinely good people. But I think that like, this archetype of creepy dude sometimes is gravitated towards the role of music producer and especially music producer in small town Wyoming where he's like, yeah, little girls come sing in my microphone, like gross. Well, there was this guy in our town who was the boyfriend that I had that was the sweetest person in the world, actually my age. He was also a singer. But there was this guy who we would go to his house because he actually had a music setup. So we would all like record there. And of course, I'm sure he loved it because like it was all just like a bunch of like underage girls. We were like, he was in his 30s and we were all like, you know, between 15 to 18 years old. And this guy would literally ask me as a joke, he'd be like, so I have my calendar the day when Molly turns 18, right? Like he would be saying like, when are you legal? And that was such a thing. Like when we look back on when I grew up, that was the time of like Nickelback videos and like video vixens, right? it was so glorified to be so hyper sexualized. It was like, girls gone wild, the archetype that I was fed. And I always still wonder what would I have been like if I would have watched other depictions of women on screen? What would I have wanted to become? What if I would have seen like more Stevie Nicks, more Joni Mitchell, more, you know what I mean? But I was fed this archetype of what I had to be. And I talk about it all the time on the podcast and I received Mollie (47:42.672) hundreds of emails about this, because I say I shoved myself into what I call the hot girl box. Like I saw what I had to be, and I shaped my identity around that. But I was actually just like a little book nerd, you know? Like I was trying to be something I wasn't. Sean (47:59.323) We were speaking a little bit about social contagion before we got on, started recording. And it just speaks to how important a culture is, an environment is in shaping identity, because that, no, no. It becomes your idea of what is a woman and how do I feel good about who I am? And if I feel good based on my body, my sexuality, or the attention that I get from men, imagine what that begins to shape for you. Mollie (48:02.84) Yeah. Mollie (48:08.748) Yes. And we can't blame the parents all on that, right? Like... Mollie (48:15.803) Yes. Sean (48:29.455) in how you approach adulthood. I mean, you feel good by seeking out and gaining that attention. And often I would imagine there's a lot of unwanted attention. Mollie (48:31.344) That's right. Mollie (48:40.896) Yeah, and I don't think that's spoken about enough because there is a guy who I feel like you guys should have him on your podcast. His name is Daniel Mackler. He's a fellow radical therapist. Bruce Levine knows him personally, by the way, and has his email contact. Apparently, he's pretty hard to get a hold of because he's just off. He quit being a therapist and now he's like backpacking in Africa and doing all these things. He's so, so cool. But he did this episode all about pretty privilege, you know, the concept of pretty privilege. And I thought it was the most incredible in-depth explanation of this. And when you are just like a conventionally attractive girl and you start getting, because I'd like to make very clear, you could put me in some countries and I would not fit the beauty standard. People might think, wow, she's hideous, but you put me in the right place where I meet the beauty standard. And I'm in the United States, especially when I was growing up, it was... white girl, blue eyes, long shiny blonde hair, and trauma fucked up. And so I wanted a bunch of attention. I was like a magnet to these guys, right? And so I started getting that attention from a young age and I just wanted to be seen. I just wanted to feel seen and these guys were hot. They were nice. They were not creepy pedo in the van asking me to pet their puppy. They were like hot dudes. And so I loved it. As soon as I started real, and the first time that I was intimate with somebody, I mean, my husband and I talked about it. He was actually one of the people that really helped me understand this. Cause finally with him, I've had like a safe space to like work through some of this sexual stuff and God bless him because he's been through it with me, you know, and I was even celibate for a while in our relationship because I just needed a break. Like I needed to figure out who I was and he's just like, take all the time you need. Like my husband is a saint and He also has an understanding of like, that's not what relationship is about. We're gonna be together forever, right? And we might have periods of illness where that's not even possible. If you're with someone just because you wanna have sex with them, what even is your relationship? Or if you're like, feed me, I have needs. That is the opposite of this guy and thank God. But he just said to me, you know, Mollie (50:57.572) He was with me that night when I had that realization about what had happened to me and I talked to him about it. He said, Molly, like, he's like, when I had sex for the first time, it was like, I think he was like, I don't wanna give away too much of his information, but he was old enough to hold that experience. He was a consensual participant. And he was like, and I had sex for the first time with someone of my own age. where we were going, oh my God, what's happening? We were laughing, this is awkward. You know, like, he's like, we were experiencing it in a place where we were both like, what the fuck is going on in kind of like a funny way. And he said, and so I always look back on my first time as kind of funny and awkward. And he goes, and even since then, I've always been intimate with people that were around my same age. And he goes, so I never really experienced trauma like that around it. But he's like, Molly, you literally never got to experience that. You never got to have. intimacy with someone where you kind of were safe and were learning alongside. You were kind of, and that is true. I had to feel like I was performing what I thought a woman would do. And this gets into a whole thing of porn. I was seeing porn online. The first time I ever saw porn online was at school. There was no firewall. I was 10 years old and I see what a woman should do in porn, right? And that is not what sex is like and nor should it be that way. Sean (51:58.439) Yeah. Sean (52:09.457) Mm. Mollie (52:17.664) I was performing my whole life. I was performing sexuality. I was performing what womanhood should be. And then it's like, I got slapped in the face with it at 29 when I was like suicidal and my life was falling apart. And I realized like, I've let society build me, you know? I've never built myself. What would that look like? And so... My whole podcast journey, it has been real time if you start from the beginning. And like some of the listeners that come when I see on my Patreon, they're like, some people are going, what episode should I start with? And everyone always says, start from the beginning because, and I can imagine it's pretty eye-opening. If you start from episode one and listen to like, now I'm like, it's almost like a spirituality podcast at this point. Like when you started episode one, then you see me get red-pilled of critical psychology, gray psychiatry. And then I go into spirituality and I'm doing like non-human intelligence. Sean (53:02.676) Yes. Mollie (53:12.108) It's watching me turn into myself in real time. I'm building myself. Sean (53:18.203) Molly, can I ask you about your first experience into the mental health system and how you were labeled conceptualized? Mollie (53:22.221) Yeah. Mollie (53:25.76) Yeah, so that actually brings me to the point of, you know, the LA, because it was in LA. Well, interestingly, and I have a pretty cool experience because not many people that are American can say they also had an experience with the NHS in England. So after my divorce, obviously, I was fucking devastated. I got cheated on three months after my wedding. My husband, like, was like fucking a dental hygienist on Tinder three months after everyone flew to Wyoming for our wedding. who wouldn't be devastated, right? Like who wouldn't? And I was alone, no support system, right? Cause it was all his family that were my support system. So I was all by myself and I was in another relationship like where I got immediately into another relationship after, before I had even moved out with my husband, I was dating another guy from work who ended up being really physically abusive. And so I ended up in the office of a GP, you know, general practitioner. And I was telling them, I'm so depressed. I had to get time off work. And in England, by the way, you can get pretty generous time off work for mental health. That's a really good thing about their system. When I tell you, in a 10-minute appointment, I was put on Citalopram, 10 minutes. And I had told them what happened to me. Never once did I get any other. And of course, I took it. I just wanted to feel better. But they didn't say, how long I needed to be on this, what would happen if I didn't take it anymore, but I was given an antidepressant right away. Nothing, nothing. And she was just a general practitioner, full of compassion, by the way. Sean (54:55.903) Didn't tell you about the risks of it? Yeah. So, so no one, no one just sits with you and says, Molly, this is exactly how you should feel given the events that you're experiencing. No, they just view it as here's the, this is depression here. Take this pill. Mollie (55:09.528) Yeah, no. Mollie (55:14.328) Yeah. And so that's what happened. And then I found myself like, I went to therapy, but I only did like two sessions because I have to say, like, some therapists suck. And I went into the office of this therapist in London and it's just like, there's only so much you can talk about, you know, hence why I really liked up psychology and stuff. Because when you can talk about your dreams, when you can talk about some of these things, it gives you more meat. And also I'm a deep thinker. Like, There's only so far I can get with something like CBT, you know? And so... Sean (55:46.499) Well, Molly, I mean, just having you on the podcast for about 55 minutes, I think there's a lot we could talk about. You got quite a history and then and there's a there's a story. You know, there's a story of your life. Mollie (55:53.532) Yeah. And that's what that's right. And the thing that I've gotten my good friend Donna like, she's amazing. I worked with her, but she was an early supporter of my podcast like when I first started it. And when I would tell her things, she's like, Holy shit, you did that too. She's like, you've lived like five lifetimes. She's in her 50s. And I was just like, I really have because I've, I've done so much. and partly because I was just like running from myself. So I was just like doing a million different things, but now I understand that it was all part of what I was supposed to do. So in London, I got on my first SSRI. I was trying so hard to stay in the country that I got like, I got sponsored by this financial recruitment company. You have to get sponsored to work there and like live legally in the country because my marriage dissolved. I begged my husband. I was like, can we please just stay legally married for one more year so that I can get my permanent residency? And when I say I think that was really fucked up, I think he should have done that for me. Like it was the one thing he could have just done for me so that I could not have had my whole life uprooted, but his dad stepped in and said, absolutely not. And so we got divorced, which means I had to find sponsorship quick. Otherwise I was gonna. Sean (57:05.139) M-Molly, did he want the divorce? Mollie (57:08.156) But we tried to make it work for like six months after and it's just once that I just couldn't do it. Like we both, it was just too, if you can do that three months after our wedding, like it's just, it's not like we had kids and you know, it was, it was on Tinder for God's sake, you know, three months after our wedding. Some people, I don't think infidelity is black and white. I think some people, if you have a house and... three kids and you make a mistake and if you can work through that, okay. But like it was so early on and even me, I just knew this is not what I want. And so we decided to part ways and I, and I, and honestly, if I was his dad, I probably would have given him that same advice is like, you guys need to part ways. I just really wish that I could have just gotten that permanent residency because I had been there and I'd built a life there. But it is what it is. I got sponsored by this financial recruitment company. Long story short, I left there because on my boss's computer, he set me up on his computer, and I saw some Skype, Skype was used back then, I'm aging myself, I saw some Skype messages, and when I say they were talking about him, he and my manager were talking about me in the most derogatory sexual terms. I was so fucking disgusted and also terrified, because do you know how that feels, to feel like they're sponsoring me, and one of the message said like, basically, she better not put a toe out of line because we're sponsoring her. Basically, we have control over her. She can leave the country. So it's like, ha ha, she's fucked kind of thing. That was the vibe. When I saw those messages, it was like a stab in my heart because working in financial recruitment in London, this was a boys club. The amount of disgusting comments that I just had to laugh off, and every woman will understand this. You just have to pick your battles. And I laughed off so much disgusting stuff. And I printed off those Skype messages. And I went to a lawyer in London, and I ended up trying to fight this case. But let's just say when you're an immigrant, like you're fucked. Like there's just no winning. But it was so traumatizing when I tell you they retaliated against me. They had like five people in the office make statements against me saying I was a bad worker. And it was the most. Mollie (59:25.316) So not only was I anti-depressants, had like that horrible marriage, then the guy I was dating at the time ended up like beating me up. And I just said, I'm done, I'm moving back. Like I can't stay here anymore. I don't wanna be having jobs based upon who will sponsor me. So with my tail between my legs, I moved back and I was in my childhood home at 25 years old in Wyoming again, going, what the fuck is my next move? I ended up moving to Denver and I'm going to fast forward really quick. I worked in tech in London. I was working in tech for a while. I worked at Groupon, which was a great experience because I made a lot of really good people. Loved working in tech at the time. But then I moved back, got a job at a tech startup in Denver. But I've always been really into music and I was actually making headway in my music career in London while I was working. I was working with some producers I really liked. I was working with this amazing producer. I don't know if you guys know the band, the Sneaker Pimps, but they were a 90s band. So the keyboardist from that is an amazing producer in London. He's worked with Lana Del Rey and stuff. And I was working with him. And that's another reason why I just wanted to stay. I was telling my husband, I'm like, I'm finally doing this songwriting thing, please. And so that was devastating. I had to leave everything I had built. And so I'm in Denver, my music career is on pause. I end up at this producer I was working with virtually. Sean (01:00:25.8) Mm-hmm. Mollie (01:00:52.408) said, hey, like you need to come to LA. Like what the fuck are you doing in Denver? Come to LA. This guy, and he will remain nameless, but he is tied to a very prominent music producer who is getting a lot of shit in the media right now. And his name starts with D. And he was connected to him. And I get a call from this guy and he said, I've heard your music. I love it. I think your writing is really good. you need to move here. Like, let me fly you out here. Let's take a couple of meetings. I'll introduce you to some producers here." And I just said, like, what the fuck do I have to lose? And I'm no stranger to uprooting my life and moving. So I was like, and I was so stable then I'd finally gotten like a house, a studio apartment, a really cute studio apartment in Denver. Great job that I really liked. I was making good money. But... I uprooted my life and I moved to LA and I moved into a house that I was sharing with a couple of girls and I started really hitting this music career stuff hard. And I got another job at a tech startup though. So I was doing tech and then at nighttime going to the studio. Long story short, this music producer guy was cool. My manager, he hooked me up with a lawyer that was really good. And I was going every night, spending nights at the studio, writing all my own music and working with this producer. It was great. And this guy, this guy that was my manager had a wife, kids. Like I was like, finally, it's like a non creepy situation. Right. Wrong. So one night I'm at Soho house in LA and I'm meeting with my manager and I just knew the vibes were off and I was like, huh. And so we finished, he's having a meeting, right. Like talking about my career. And then we get into the elevator and he was basically like, so. The vibe was, do you kind of want to like come to come with me? And I was like, in my mind, and again, every woman knows this, you're kind of going, OK, what the fuck do I do? What the fuck do I do? Like my whole career flashed before my eyes in that moment. Like, I'm like, how do I like, ha ha, giggle my way out of this one? Like, I can't. I'm in the elevator and he's like making a proposition. But in my mind, like it just hit me. I'm like, no, I'm not I'm not fucking doing this. Like, I am not doing this. And so. Mollie (01:03:09.964) I giggled my way out of it. I like basically, I think I said I was on my period or something and I was feeling bad. And I was like, haha, no, gotta go home. And I went home and I just started crying. Like I was just like, what do I do? Like finally, I'm so close to having, I had a project that was almost finished. I was like, I was finally working with someone who had real connections. And I called this woman that he worked with, like, and she had been kind of like a. like an adoptive mom to me, because she was helping me with all my photo shoots. She was kind of like his assistant. She was in her 40s. And I called her and I just told her what happened. And she was dead silent on the other side of the phone. And she said, Molly, don't say anything. And I was like, but, but like, what? This is so fucked up. And she goes, this man and the people he's connected to could make you disappear, period. Sean (01:04:02.9) Mm. Mollie (01:04:05.356) And I went, what? Like, are you actually serious? And she said, and when my heart, I still get chills thinking about it. She said, please believe me. She's like, I know. She goes, yes, it's fucked up. And in my mind, I don't know, like, why do you work for him? And cause this, the, her vibe was, this was not the first time she's had this conversation with a girl, okay? And, and she just said, you will be bye-bye. And this is the kind of money and power you're dealing with. You need. to just let this go. And I just said, well, I can't work with them. And so the next morning, I email my lawyer. And I didn't even say anything. I just said, hey, I'm just inquiring about what my options are to get out of this management contract. Sean (01:04:51.935) And this lawyer is connected to your manager. Like that was the referral of it. Okay, yeah. Yeah. Mollie (01:04:55.868) Yeah, that's the problem. And so, but I didn't say anything. I just said, hey, I just need to know what my options are to get out of this management deal. I don't know if there's like, I just don't think that there were some Pataco anymore, right? Like I think maybe I want to go off and do my own thing. No response. Two days later, I get an email from my lawyer saying he's dropping me and my manager's dropping me. And then I get an email from the producer where when I say that I've been working for, I've been working in Santa Monica. I was living in North Hollywood. I was working from I was up at 6 a.m., back at my home at 7 p.m., and in the studio till 2 a.m. So when I'm telling you that I was killing myself to get this project out, it was still the best work I've ever done. And my producer emailed me and said, I'm done. And I'm like, what about my masters? And he's like, they're not yours. So for all I know, my song could be playing in Estonia nightclubs right now, and I don't even fucking know. So I... went into the worst mental health spiral that I ever have been in. I couldn't go to work, so I quit my job. Then I found myself on a sugar baby website because the thing is, is that I thought I had a good friend who worked in bottle service and she said, Molly, you know that you could just be making so much money if you just did this. And I was like, but I don't want to have sex with old creepy rich dudes. Like, and she goes, Oh, you can do it without having to have sex with them. You can just like go to dinner with them and just kind of like, you know, giggle your way out of that. I'm like, well, I've done that my whole life for free. So why don't I just fucking make some money doing that? So I signed up on that platform and I started getting messages. It was the most disgusting experience of my life because most of them are just the most I just feel like I'm throwing up in my mouth just thinking about it because you get horrible messages. Sean (01:06:47.615) How are you not just completely disgusted by men at this point, given your experience with them? Mollie (01:06:52.96) Trust me, I was. And I think that, I think that also, I turned, you hear like a lot of red pill incel type guys say like women hate men. And I'm like, some of women hate men for a reason. Okay, because they've been through shit like I've been through. And it really is not all men, because you want to know how many nice, funny guys I just never gave the time of day, because they were just like, there wasn't any passion. In other words, they like weren't an asshole to me, you know? And that just breaks my heart looking back on it now because I could have, there were so many times where I know the universe put like this sweet, smart, funny, like guy in my face and I almost, and I almost did it. I almost sabotaged my relationship with my husband like that. He is and I almost sabotaged it. And then my best friend at the time literally told me, bitch, what are you doing? Like, don't fuck this up. Sean (01:07:38.08) Your husband seems like he's that type of guy. Mollie (01:07:48.44) Like, because I told her, I don't know. He just doesn't have good taste in memes. And she's like, are you OK? I'm going to slap the shit out of you. And she told, I was about to ghost him. And she said, go and have, go and do this face to face. She's like, go and tell him face to face that you don't want to see him again. And so I did that. And I tried. And when I told him, I just said, I don't think if this is going to work out. And you'd want to know what his response was. He said, Well, can we still be friends? Because LA is a wasteland and I haven't met anybody here. And I still really just want to hang out with you. And I went, what? You still want to be with me? Mind you, bless his heart. The first time I met him, I said, number one, I'm celibate and bipolar. Are you scared yet? And he was like, he is. No, trust me, he actually would be a really good guess. But. Sean (01:08:34.408) Boy, he is a saint. We have to do a podcast with him. Mollie (01:08:40.02) I, the reason why is because I had just emerged from this sex work period in my life where that's a whole, like I really want to finish that because, and, but Zaz's response, yeah, yeah. Sean (01:08:49.659) Can I ask you a question? Can I ask you a question first? I'm interested to know how you made sense of pushing him away. Now you have this really nice guy who just seems like a saint and you're finding ways, you used the word sabotage, you're finding a way to just push him away. How do you make sense of that for yourself? Mollie (01:09:05.7) because I think genuinely that part of me thought I was gonna push him away anyway, so I might as well be in control of that. I would rather me say no than him get to know this broken, fucked up person that I believe myself to be and have to deal with the rejection, which I had never dealt, and that leads me to how the rejection, the only one time I've ever been rejected in my life was to set me into a suicidal spiral. So, I was doing the sugar baby thing and I realized very quickly I could not get away with this without being intimate with these people. And so let's just say to spare you, I could do a whole episode on the traumatic experiences that I went through in that. But I ended up in wine country in San Francisco with this guy and I had convinced one of my best friends to come with me because I didn't want to go alone. And I found myself in bed with this dude. and he was starting to like touch me and I went, oh no, like now I'm gonna have to like do this, right? And I couldn't, he was coked out, so drunk and I just went, oh my God. And it was 3 a.m., I got up and I went and tapped and I, and again, like I was really drunk, like and my friend B was a little bit drunk too and I went and tapped her and woke her up, she was sleeping on the couch, I said, we have to get out of here right now. It was 3 a.m. It was, and again, we were. I do not advise this because she was not sober. I was not sober. Thankfully, she was better than me. I said, we have to get the fuck out of here right now. Like he started falling asleep and I'm like, we have to leave. Like I can't do this, please. And she's like, are you kidding me? Like at 3 AM. And so we drove away and we drove back to her apartment in San Francisco and thank God we got there safely. But I just didn't know what would happen to me. And I knew I just couldn't go through with this. We got back, he stalked me and harassed me for probably like three weeks after that. And then my other friend, I still was broke and I still needed a job. And mind you, I'm depressed as hell this entire time. Like I'm just barely getting by drinking smoothies because I'm too depressed to even eat. And the only way I'm dragging myself out of bed is to go on dates with these dudes. And I find myself, my friend goes, well, like I'm working these underground poker rooms in LA. And basically what you do is Mollie (01:11:26.3) because there's guys that are really rich, and again, I saw many celebrities that I could name, but I won't. And I work these underground poker rooms in LA. The idea is that obviously it's not legal. And so they go and meet up at these like skeezy ass places and it's really late at night and all the guys are playing poker and they hire girls to like serve drinks and be harassed quite frankly. And there's like a woman who ran kind of like the money at those places, which she kind of like, it was big madam energy. She was like so stereotypical. She was like Eastern European and like she'd seen it all. And she like kind of took care of the girls and we would ask her advice for things or whatever. And she's the one who like told me. So I was starting those, and I was a hit at those because the thing is, is that I wasn't dumb. Like, and I mean, telling you, bless the women in LA. Some girls just... there were just some girls that just like couldn't have conversation. And so I could have really good banter with some of these guys. And honestly, I met a couple of really cool guys that just like had really good conversation with me. And they were clearly there. Some of those guys were legitimately there because they wanted to play fucking poker. I will give them that. And they were not creeps. They just wanted to play poker and probably had a gambling problem, but not a creepy, abusive man problem. And so, but some of the guys, well, the majority of them were just disgusting. And they thought... of you as just an object that like, if you didn't do or go along with what they wanted. And I snapped back and it was funny for a while. But then one night the woman pulled me aside, like the Eastern European mommy lady. And she was like, I need you to know that. And yet again, this is the second time I'm being told that like, you're going to get disappeared by one of these dudes if you don't like fucking tone it down. And she's just like, look. there's a reason why some of these girls take the dumb, bimbo, haha approach because it's actually the safer way to go about it and they're not dumb. They're actually just like protecting themselves. So like fucking get it together or else you're gonna get bye-bye'd. And I was like, ooh. And so again, I'm just going like, what am I doing? And this whole time I was doing it, I never, I was the whole time every night I went home, I'm like, what are you doing? This is not what you're supposed to be doing. I hated it. Sean (01:13:26.748) Mm. Mollie (01:13:43.) I was full of shame and depression. It was making me hate men more by the day. Like I was despising men. And so I was that girl that was posting on my Instagram, by the way, had 10,000 followers on Instagram from my music career. All of my pictures were like so sexy, like showing off my body. And there's nothing wrong with that as long as you're doing it from a psychologically integrated place. But I was not posting that I had on my Instagram. It looked like I was living the life in LA. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, I'm suicidal, drinking smoothies for dinner, living with three girls, and doing sex work, basically. And so I ended up getting on this dating app called Raya, and I'm not sure if you've ever heard of it. It's a dating app that you have to – you basically get approved and there's like all these different celebrities on it. They'll approve girls, basically, if you have a certain Instagram follower. I got approved. I started – I went on a date with this guy. Again, will not name. But he's a… successful actor and I started dating him. And again, it happened with what I did with the London guy. He took me to his house in Silver Lake. He was really nice, really funny, older, probably in his 40s at the time. I was like 25, 26. And I'm like, this is it. If I can lock this guy down, my life is set. Yeah, like, because I was a mess. I could barely work. I didn't want to do what I was doing anymore. Oh yeah. Sean (01:15:07.251) Is that how you viewed it? That finding the right guy to kind of save you. And so you're still in this, you know, going back to what we talked about earlier and what you learned as a young girl and what you were exposed to, you're still viewing your life in a similar way. Mollie (01:15:11.9) 100%. Mollie (01:15:17.37) Yeah. Mollie (01:15:21.804) And I'm only saying this, like hearing even myself say this, it makes me sad for that girl, you know, because I have so much to offer now. I'm smart. Like, obviously, like, if you would have told that girl what I'd be doing now, she wouldn't believe you, right? But I was just trying to get by. And I literally thought, like, I liked what that vision looked like. I liked, because again, I'd be living in LA, dating successful actor. moving into his beautiful fancy house and everything would be fine, right? But in reality, this guy had a coke problem. We'd go to dinner and he'd be like going to the bathroom every five minutes and girls top tip if the guy you're dating is going to the bathroom every five minutes, it's probably not because he has a bladder issue. So guaranteed he definitely had a coke problem. And again, there were red flags. There were distinct red flags, but he was Sean (01:16:04.848) Hehe Mollie (01:16:15.332) fun, we had a good time. They weren't like as major, but it was just like, clearly he wasn't the right fit for me. I was like so set on this working out. Fast forward like three weeks, we'd been dating for like three months. And to give this guy credit, I get a call in the middle of the day and I'm thinking we're going on a date that night. I was so excited, right? Because I'm living for that. I'm like putting my whole identity into this. And he calls me and has the most respectful kind. talked to me and basically just said like, hey, cause he had just gotten out of a really serious relationship, like an engagement and stuff. And he said, look, I've realized like, I'm just not ready to jump into, and he could probably sense that I was like fucking attaching myself to him, like a parasite. And like in retrospect, but he was just like, this isn't, this isn't working out. I think that it's not fair of me to like lead you on when I'm not ready for something serious. And then that was that. And I just remember like hanging up that phone call. and like my whole world fell apart. And it wasn't because of him, but I realized this was my grandma had just died and then my grandfather immediately after that had committed suicide. And so like all this is going on, yeah? Like everything I've told you, and I'm 26 years old and I'm in LA and I have no one and I don't wanna fucking do sex work anymore. I have nothing. And I just was like, okay. And by the way, at the same time, this is this cherry on top irony of it all. I had applied for a master's program to start going to school to be a therapist. The LOL, okay. And then because I knew that if I got stu- I was living off the student loans, but I will tell you, I was a year into that master's program, got straight A's, because I love psychology. But the irony of me going to school to be a therapist when I was the hottest mess that's ever existed. So Sean (01:17:46.601) Mm-hmm. Mollie (01:18:05.748) I was in this master's program and that's when I became suicidal. Like I wanted to die. It was the worst it's ever been. I was having, and that's when the panic attacks started. Like I would have full on panic attacks and I didn't have health insurance because I had quit my job. And so I called my mom and I told my mom and dad that I'd been doing sex work and they were devastated, obviously. But again, still like didn't even have like the emotional capacity to like say, hey, you're better than that. Like, you know, like we love you. Where it was just like, don't want to talk about it. And I said, I'm suicidal. I need to go to the psychiatrist. Like, and I do not have insurance and I also don't have enough money. And my parents said, we'll pay for you to go, like just make an appointment and we will end it. And that is, I thought again, this psychiatrist in my mind became person who's going to save me. instantly. Like I was like, this is all I need to do. I just need to go to the psychiatrist. Sean (01:19:05.152) What did you believe was wrong with you? Mollie (01:19:08.056) Well, I wanted to die. I was having multiple panic attacks a day. I could not get out of bed. I was just in my people that have not been at that. People that have not been that depressed do not fucking understand. I could not leave my bed. Yes. Sean (01:19:23.559) Yeah, so Molly, I want to... Yeah, so that's how you were feeling. Um, like that, I want to know why you believe, like what you believed might be wrong with you that you would experience all those things. Mollie (01:19:34.604) You know, I'm going to have to email you guys this video because I played it on the podcast before I took a video of myself. It was like very quickly before I went to the psychiatrist or maybe afterwards. It was from my depression bed in LA. It makes me cry every time I watch it. It makes me cry thinking about it. But I basically was saying like, and I never even posted that video and I don't even know why I took it. It was just like almost like part of me wanted to document that, like, you know. And in the video, I look... horrible. Like I'm like swollen. I was in my lip injection phase, which like I was getting so many injections. I looked like a hot mess. And in the video, I just said like, I can't do this anymore. Like I'm so depressed. What is wrong with me? That's what I just kept repeating. So like to answer your question, I don't think I could have told you. Like I just said, I know that human being, I see everyone else like functioning in their life. Like why can't I function? You know, like Why can't I just do life? Why do I feel like I wanna die? Why does it always feel like, why have I been raped multiple times? Like, what is it about me that is like a target for horrible experiences? You know, like I think I just really thought that I, there was something fundamentally wrong with me as a person. Sean (01:20:54.055) And, you know, we've been listening to your story and, and thank you for being so candid and open about what you've, what you've been going through. And if I was in a therapy session, I would probably say to you, Molly, I, I know a lot of things that you've done, or I know a lot of things that have happened to you, but I still don't know you. I don't know who you are. And it seems like this is kind of like a rock bottom. It crashes for you because you don't know who you are. Mollie (01:20:58.932) Yeah, of course. Mollie (01:21:21.692) That's right. Sean (01:21:22.379) Your life is almost like this manic jump from relationship to new job, to new exciting experience, to new possibilities, and it doesn't seem like there's a lot of slowing down for you. And you're just kind of trying to feed this ego that you've viewed yourself as. It's like, I am, you know, my success, who I am as a person, who I am as a human being is really based on, you know, other people's reaction to me, how they feel about me. Mollie (01:21:48.508) That's right. Yeah, it makes me very emotional because also, no one ever said that to me. And I think that would have helped me a lot. And I found myself in that psychiatrist's office. And this is what I do. I think I do what a lot of people do. And I had many of my listeners have emailed me about this. You find yourself online, Googling, what's wrong with me, and of course, what popped up, borderline personality disorder. And when I read all of the symptoms and signs like chronic feelings of emptiness, you know, suicidal ideation, splitting, all these things, which arguably we could say society is struggling with it en masse right now. But I thought that's it. That's what's wrong with me. And I grabbed onto that label so fucking hard. And I, yeah. Sean (01:22:38.303) Can I just for our listening audience, if I can just kind of go over some of the other criteria that is used for this diagnosis, kind of chaotic interpersonal relationships, unstable interpersonal relationships, identity disturbance, chronic feelings of emptiness are a big one. And I can just see what you're trying to fill that void with attention or, you know, Mollie (01:22:43.427) Yes. Mollie (01:22:50.844) Check. Mollie (01:23:02.917) That's right. Sean (01:23:05.731) The lip injections are one of those things that just kind of stands out. Like I need to change how I look. And that is my value. Mollie (01:23:14.508) Yes, that's what it was. And now, and that's a whole other thing, but the spiritual starvation, right? Because I didn't have a sense of meaning. I didn't have a sense of being what I say on the podcast of being part of this fabric of something bigger than me. I didn't have that. And I think that was a huge part of my suffering because if I would have had the sense of spiritual, integral spirituality that I do now, I wouldn't have been feeling that way, nor would I have a gone down any of the paths that I did, but now I understand the purpose of that. So when I found myself in that psychiatrist's office, I mean, I look like I do now. Again, I can present myself well when I need to. And so I, but I was goblin girl behind the scenes, which I like to say, like I was just like looking awful, like crying in my bed half the time. But when you go out, you know, you get yourself together. I mean, I was found myself in that psychiatrist's office and I told him, you know, of course he's like, so what brings you here today. I told him about what was going on, what had happened in my life as much as you can in a 15 minute fucking psychiatrist appointment, which is all you get. And he was, again, outwardly very sweet, very nice, you know? And I said, I told him, I know that I have, I have, which I don't even use that phrase anymore, I have BPD. I looked it up. I have all the criteria. Sean (01:24:20.564) Jesus. Mollie (01:24:40.572) printed shit out because that's who I am. I've always been a homework doer. I printed it out and I was like, look, this is it. Like, this is me. And he said, yeah. Sean (01:24:48.338) And what did that mean to you? Was that like an identity then at that point? Like, this is who I am, I was born this way? Mollie (01:24:51.292) 100%. Well, I don't even know if I even got that far. All I knew is that I just wanted an answer to why I was so fucked up in my mind. Like I just wanted, if I find out what's wrong, I can get a medication for this and I can like get out of here and start being normal. Like that's all, I couldn't even think about it that far. And that's why I'm gonna send you both this video because you're gonna like get a kick out of it because just. my limited understanding for psychology, you know, like it's just, it's just blows my mind. Like I just didn't know. And that's the average everyday person because we go to these people. Yes. Sean (01:25:27.931) Yeah, and you're just ripe to be taken advantage of and an identity becomes shaped through this. I have borderline personality disorder. I am BPD. Mollie (01:25:33.456) That's right. Mollie (01:25:37.816) Yes. And so this guy looks at me and he goes, you don't have BPD. Trust me. You do not want borderline personality disorder because it's incurable. And in my mind, I went, what? And now I know that there's so many bullshittery of that we could unpack for a whole episode. But he said, it's incurable. And I'm like, he goes, I think more what you have, like what you're showing traits of is, oh, and he said, You're too high functioning to have BPD. And in my mind, I'm like, bro, I am not functioning. Sean (01:26:09.259) What? So let me get, let me guess the diagnosis. Bipolar 2. Yeah. That's what, that's what they're going to sign to anyone who's experiencing high levels of emotion dysregulation, regardless of context. Mollie (01:26:18.532) Precisely. Good job, doctor. Yeah, he said. Mollie (01:26:28.788) Yep. He said, not only do you not have BPD because you're too high functioning, it's incurable. We're going to treat you for bipolar too, because it's very treatable with mood stabilizers. And you want to know what I felt in that moment? Oh, thank god. First, thank god I don't have this incurable personality disorder. And two, thank god there's this medication that can fix me. So he put me on Lamictal. Sean (01:26:47.625) Yeah. Mollie (01:26:53.068) Okay. And you probably know about Lymictal and you know, if you are someone who's taken Lymictal that they, there is this reaction that you can get from Lymictal that is very scary and dangerous, but it's very, it's rare, but you can get like, if the doctor basically told me or that he's not a doctor, let's just make that very clear. But again, a whole nother episode, the psychiatrist told me, um, be careful, be on the lookout for this itching or skin reactions because if so, then we need to immediately get you blood work and make sure that your liver enzymes aren't elevated because if they are, we need to take you off of it immediately. But don't worry, there's lots of other medications we can try. And so I started getting the rash and of course, immediately I'm like, holy shit. I go to my doctor at UCLA. He does blood work. And my doctor, by the way, was the sweetest person. And he is the only person that I met with that basically... was kind of, now looking back, he was going, why are you on this? Like, he asked me what happened to me and he kind of alluded to like, hey, you've been through a lot, are you okay? Like, but he told me like, you need to immediately get off this because it's dangerous for your, like you're having this reaction, it could threaten your life, where you need to take, stop taking this now. Went back to my psychiatrist, let's just say that from, I got another job. So I was able to have health insurance. So I was able to go see the psychiatrist more regularly. And I, by the time I was done, I was on Vyvanse, BuSpar, another SSRI, Xanax, and Seroquel. They were like anti-psychotic. So I'm saying like I went through like five different medications. Sean (01:28:33.447) Yeah, unfortunately this is way too typical. So, you know, it's new drug, up the dose, reaction, new drug, add on this, give this for the side effects of this drug. Oh wait, now you have ADHD, let me just keep adding diagnoses until you are in absolute hell. Mollie (01:28:39.536) That's right. Mollie (01:28:44.523) Yep. Mollie (01:28:50.34) Yep. And he gave me Xanax. Okay. Because I was, and I will say Xanax stopped my panic attacks. Like thank God for it because actually like I needed it for a little bit. I thought at the time, like, because I didn't have any other supports, you know, I didn't have any, no one was giving me any other like breathing techniques or anything like that. So Xanax, when I took it, stopped my panic attacks, but my doctor never told me about the proper use of Xanax. So I was splitting them in half. I was taking one every like five hours. And so the next time that I went back to my psychiatrist, I was like, I need a refill of Xanax. And he goes, why do you need a fucking refill of Xanax? I was like, well, because how often have you been taking it? And I went, well, like every five hours. He's like, uh, don't do that. I'm like, you didn't tell me not to do that. You said to take it as needed. And I, he goes, only when you're panicking, I'm like, I'm always panicking. Sean (01:29:42.18) Yeah, I mean, it doesn't the whole idea doesn't even necessarily make sense because first of all, that drug is going to create dependence when you start taking it for a week or two, like automatically now you have a new problem. Now you Mollie (01:29:49.828) Yes, and I found out. Fuck around and find out as they say, I sure did. Sean (01:29:55.247) Yeah, you're dependent on a benzodiazepine. And so the idea of panic is different for you, right? A panic attack, you feel like you're dying, a lot of people go to the hospital, and then there's high level emotional intensity, which isn't necessarily panic, but in our, we label it that way, I'm panicking, I'm really anxious, I'm really upset, and let me go take a Xanax, and now you're learning that whenever I feel an emotion that is uncomfortable and that's distressing or where I feel overwhelmed, I can turn to this. Mollie (01:30:04.599) Yes. Right. Yes. Mollie (01:30:15.397) Yep. Mollie (01:30:23.18) I need to eliminate it. Yep. Sean (01:30:24.331) powerful drug and it is very powerful. Benzodiazepines are very powerful. It'll calm you down immediately until you need more, right? Once two weeks go, you're going to need a little bit more to get the same result and now you are dependent. And you know, we've had so many podcasts on the hell of benzodiazepine dependence. Mollie (01:30:32.357) Yep. Mollie (01:30:39.708) That's right. Mollie (01:30:44.66) I mean, it was brutal. And you know, this is so cool because we've kind of come full circle because it was at this time that I was just in all these different drugs. And I had so many side effects. Like I was struggling. And, but it was around this time that I met my husband now and, you know, tried to sabotage that. As soon as he said, can we just be friends? I was like, record scratch. And then I went. Nevermind, I think I actually want to date you, okay. Um, because I, but, on, and you know what? He doesn't have it in him. And so, and in the, in the best possible way, he's the least manipulative. He, yes, he really meant that. And so immediately something in my mind said, don't fuck this up. This is like the first safe person. And so, Sean (01:31:16.667) He's just really smart he played it that way. Sean (01:31:24.127) Probably why you trust him. Yeah, he's genuine. Mollie (01:31:34.532) We started, we moved in together pretty quick because LA, like he was like staying with me. And I think a lot of people that live in big cities know that sometimes you just end up living together way faster because rent is nuts, okay? And so we moved in together, yeah, we moved in together way sooner than we probably should have. And it was a crash course. And he quickly saw like all these little orange containers and there were like five of them at a time. Sean (01:31:48.095) Sean's from LA. Yeah. Mollie (01:32:03.096) And he wasn't the type, like he just, and that's the beauty of Zaz. He always has kind of like let me figure things out on my own. He's not the type saying, I don't think you should do this. He's like, let's, his favorite statement is like, let's see how this plays out. And so, please. Yeah. Sean (01:32:15.72) So, Molly, I do have some questions about Sass, right? So, I mean, you do everything you possibly can to scare him away, right? I mean, you... Why doesn't he get scared off? Mollie (01:32:25.08) Yeah, oh yeah. Oh, and boy did I. I did. Mollie (01:32:31.02) I think because he has his own trauma history, his mom had a really traumatic upbringing. And so Zaz likes to say that he knows crazy women and just like in a funny way, right? Like he has a history, his family side is Polish. And so he goes, I'm no used to like, I'm used to dramatic Eastern European women of, and his grandmother was very emotional. And, but an interesting part is Zaz grew up in a home where His grandparents had Tibetan monks staying at their house. They were very deep into spirituality. His grandmother had esoteric books, was deep into esoteric Buddhism, all these things. They traveled around the world. They had the most amazing experience. Zaz is very naturally a spiritually inclined person, but so spiritually inclined that he was never attracted to any religion because he's just a mystic in his mind. He sees it as all the same. And so, Zaz has this like inner center and he always said, and I'm trying to think of the best way, now in retrospect, he said, I knew who you were and I could clearly see what was the trauma and what was the you. And I thought like, let's just wait this out because I actually, let's see how this plays out. Like I think that she's gonna figure this out. Sean (01:33:40.805) Yeah. Sean (01:33:45.547) That... Yeah, so you labeled yourself as crazy, but that's not how he sees you. He observes you for you, right? He sees you who you are outside of your reactions. Mollie (01:33:52.79) No. Yes. Mollie (01:33:59.072) Yes, and Zaz is an interesting person because he watched my, I hate the phrase spiritual awakening because I think it's been co-opted and turned into this like new age nonsense, but I, and it's a shame, but Zaz witnessed my spiritual awakening. It is kind of like, so he said one day all these pills, he's just like, Molly, look, I support you no matter what, but he's like, when I look in our fridge and I see, because we had a tiny studio apartment, I just shoved all my meds in the fridge. And he is like, every time I open the fridge, like I see these orange bottles and I think you are not crazy. You do not need to be on all of these fucking medications. And he also goes, is there a point where you won't be on them? Are you gonna be on them your whole life? And that, and I really wanna say, because for your listeners, it's not like he was controlling me. It's not like there was a care there. And he goes, look, I support you, do what you need to do. But when I see this, it makes me concerned, you know? And I... I hadn't thought that far ahead. I wasn't very good at thinking ahead at this time. But immediately I thought, oh, yeah, am I really going to be on these forever? Then the universe made the decision for me. I lost my job. I found myself at the pharmacy. I found out that the meds that I was paying only $4 for, I was going to have to have, the bill was $800 something for my refill. And I thought, and it was right there to them. I looked at the person and I said, well, I guess I'm not getting them today. And I left and I went off cold turkey. And I love how psychiatrists say, never go off cold turkey. Well, what if you don't have a fucking choice, right? Like I didn't have a choice. And I tell all my listeners, if you can, do not do what I did because it was horrible. I worked at a drug and alcohol rehab center in my other life, not in a real other life. When I was 19, it's what I did when I was in college. And I watched people come off of meth. you know, oxycodone, all these things like alcohol, which is like one of the hardest detoxes that I witnessed. And I felt like my clients, like I was going, what's the difference between someone coming off street drugs and coming off of what I'm coming off of? I felt like I was dying. And I tried everything that I could. I was having the brain zaps. I was having it. It's like, it's like Sean (01:36:13.364) health. Mollie (01:36:24.12) It's like a flu, you know, like you feel dead, you don't feel good. And then your depression gets even worse. The suicidal feelings came back stronger than ever before, even though I was in a really safe relationship. That's the thing, it didn't make sense. I was safe, everything was fine. I was with a really good person and I like wanted to die again and I was going, oh my God. And if I had the option, I probably would have gone back on the meds and then I found myself like breaking them in half and like taking a little bit. And then like, you know what I mean? Cause I had some that I could like ration out and I thought, what the fuck? I'm like a drug addict. Like I'm like, let me just get a little bit like to make myself feel better. And that's when I started getting angry. I'm like, why did no one tell me about this? I didn't know when tell me I would feel like this. And so I found myself, I got like a colonic. I went to like a saunas, like infrared saunas. That's one of the things that helped me actually the most. The colonic was horrible. I like I got so sick after that. I was vomiting for days, but I will say that. So don't recommend that to anyone, but I do recommend like the infrared sauna helped me so much during that time. I went every single day and then just like drinking and you actually just, I was white knuckle in it. That's what they say. And I think I was not back to feeling myself for six months. And honestly, I think I'm lucky that it was that short, you know? Yeah. Sean (01:37:52.263) Yeah, you are lucky. You're one of the lucky ones. I mean, it's really important. We, we'd let everybody know that you never cold turkey those drugs. They're serious mood and mind altering drugs that are acting on the brain and cold turkey, cold turkey, those drugs, or even tapering too fast can be potentially fatal and it is, and it has been so yet certainly you're, you know, you are, you are blessed just to be able to kind of get through this experience and not be back on those, those drugs. What happens to you when you begin to recover from that? Mollie (01:37:58.592) Never. Mollie (01:38:12.035) Yes. Mollie (01:38:15.8) Yes. So again, enter my spiritual awakening TM, but like we're not, not the cheesy kind. Like that's why I talk about what I talk about on my podcast, because I think people need to understand what it actually looks like. This isn't crystals. This isn't shiny, happy times. This is like the dark night of the soul. This is going through the underworld. That's why these And what I talk about on my podcast, I deeply believe that we are missing like initiatory experiences in our society. And part of those like ancient cultures would teach their young people about going through the underworld and understanding the dark times. And I went through this. And that's why I say Zaz is amazing because thank God he was there because I had someone to talk about. And we laugh about this now, but it's actually, I think this is a beautiful example of what like a- a very real practical example of someone going through a spiritual awakening. So I was on, I will say that I was self-medicating. Thank God I was in California because I replaced, like I was vaping weed quite a bit at this time. And I will say, I'm not saying someone should use weed, but wow, did it help me? I wasn't abusing it. I did use it a little bit and it did help me because I was feeling a lot of nausea around that and it was legal use. Okay. Um, now I'm, I'm not utilizing that anymore. Um, but I did at the time and so I was, that was helping me. The infrared sauna was helping me. I was, you know, cause I would use it when I would start feeling really sick, like really bad, but one day I was laying in bed and I came across this article and it was this article about like how some people don't have an inner monologue. And I'm sure you've heard of this, right? Like there's this thing where some people don't have. like thoughts in their mind. They actually kind of think more conceptually. They might like visualize things. I'm not a neuroscientist so I'm gonna fuck this up. But I was fascinated by this article and I went, wait, some people do not have what's going on. My inner monologue is a mean bitch. I was like, I have so many horrible thoughts going on at all times. I cannot sleep because I am just constantly thinking, thinking. Sean (01:40:26.598) Yeah. Mollie (01:40:37.432) And because I hadn't done any mystical studies, now it's like I'm a whole different person. But I identified with that inner narrator. So that was me. These were all my thoughts. And Zaz and I, it's our biggest inside joke, because he'll laugh now. I was sitting there and I said, Zaz, do you think thoughts in your mind? And he's sitting there on his computer, and he was like, what the fuck are you talking about? Sean (01:41:04.783) I'm sorry. Mollie (01:41:05.208) He was like, of course I think my thoughts. What in the fuck are you talking about? And I was like, wait, I'm reading this. So I told him the article, cause it was just out of nowhere. And he's like, how stoned are you? Are you okay? And I was like, no, seriously, I'm reading this article. Some people don't have an inner monologue. And he was like, oh yeah, I've read about that. Is that, it's not aphantasia. Is that what it is? I don't know. But anyway, he was like, yeah, I've heard of that. He goes, oh, okay. Like maybe you're not as crazy as I thought. You're reading this article. Okay, I'm with you now. Sean (01:41:24.636) I don't know the exact term. Mollie (01:41:33.528) And he goes, yeah, of course, I think thoughts, but those thoughts aren't me. And I went, what, what are you talking about? They aren't you. What are you then? Okay. This is, this is spiritual awakening. People don't want to talk about this. That's what it is. Okay. And, and I was like, all of this stuff is as said, but like, he still laughs about my face. He was like, Sean (01:41:47.103) Yes. Mollie (01:41:57.264) He's like, we have an inside joke of saying you're piecing it together. He's like, are you piecing it together right now? I was like, yes, I'm piecing so much stuff together. And so in that, I sat there silent for probably like 30 minutes. And I was like, what, what does he mean? And then I, so I said, what do you mean that you're not your thoughts? Like, please explain this to me. He's like, we need to watch the matrix. I've never seen the matrix before either. So then Zaz and I watched the matrix. I'd never watched the matrix. Sean (01:42:19.051) Ha ha ha. Mollie (01:42:26.152) And that's embarrassing for me to admit now. So after we watched the matrix, like Zaz was like, okay, it's time to go to bed. I could not let Zaz go to sleep. I was like, wait, so what about this? I was like asking him all these questions and I was waking up. Like I was going, oh my God, you know, like maybe I'm not my thoughts. Then I started just going down that rabbit hole. And then I started, then I had my first mystical experience which... I've talked about on the podcast before, and this was one night where, and I was going through it. I was so depressed. I was still experiencing like these weaning off side effects, and I was laying in bed one night and I was closing my eyes. And it was after I, this is when I was really starting to try to search for some spiritual stuff. I was thinking about trauma, right? I was starting to read things and I did this meditation and this meditation asked you to imagine being back in your mother's womb. I did it and I found myself just sobbing profoundly. And the person that was narrating the meditation basically said like, you're either gonna feel really happy about this and safe, or maybe you're gonna feel anxious. And I just felt like terrified and sad. And I was just sobbing uncontrollably. I went to bed and I closed my eyes and I had not prayed probably since I was like. a little tiny kid because I used to pray but like neurotically pray because I was told to pray. Like and I thought I would go to hell if I didn't pray. So I used to like I think every kid knows what it feels like to have this like little neurotic robotic prayer that you do at night so that you go to heaven. But I hadn't done that for years. And I would think I before that I would have considered myself agnostic. Like I loved when I would see people that were very spiritual because I thought I wanted that, but I didn't feel that. And I had never experienced anything that would make me feel like there was anything out there. So I think I would have just said I was agnostic. Never was I atheist because I wanted so badly to believe. And I didn't dedicate any time to reading about it. So I'm laying there after this meditation. I was so sad. And I just like closed my eyes and I finally didn't like listen to a podcast or anything. I just sat there. Mollie (01:44:39.968) And then all of a sudden, I like, it's, uh, I didn't hear a voice. People are probably going to think you're nuts, but this happened to me. I didn't hear a voice, but I had a knowing of a voice. So it's just, I, I heard the words without hearing the words and people that have been through this will immediately understand this. So I heard the words. You are mother. I am mother. We all are mother. And I had what I now know. And immediately I felt so calm. and I felt like I had the answer, but only for a second. And I felt so peaceful, and I felt like something was there with me, and I felt so calm. And after you've been so depressed for so long, and you feel a moment of relief like that, it's something that really changes you. And ever since I had that time, I have been on a spiritual rabbit hole. I found the right books, the right people have come into my life. I was seeing so many synchronicities. to the point where it's like you said, Roger, you know, you're like, you had experiences that are hard to, I can't even explain them, but I am where I am now because of that moment, you know? Like I had, when I came up with the idea for the podcast, in my mind, it says, you need to start a podcast and you need to call it back from the borderline. That's how instant that came to me. It came in my mind and Zaz can be on record. I went up to his studio and I said, Zaz. I'm going to start a podcast and I'm going to call it back from the borderline. It was that instant and I started it that next day. And my first episode said, like, I don't know if anyone's going to be listening to this and sure as shit, I guess they're listening. But yeah, and ever since then, I'm just down the spiritual rabbit hole. And I particularly am drawn to like Western esotericism. I love that stuff. But I study all different types, but it's mostly rooted in mysticism and it's connect this kind of oneness because that's the first message I received in like deep meditation. And so I've been in pursuit of people that feel that way. And my favorite mystic is Jiddu Krishnamurti. And I'm not sure if you've ever come across him, but he's just the most amazing person. And yeah, that's the rabbit hole. I'll pause there. Oh, yeah. Yes. Sean (01:46:58.175) Have you read, have you read Ram Dass, Be Here Now? Yeah. So I love this word that you use, spiritual starvation. Looking back at you in your 20s and some of the things you've gone through, do you identify a spiritual starvation that existed in your life and that you are trying to really feed yourself or feed the ego with these external means? Mollie (01:47:27.9) Absolutely. I was trying to find myself in people, places, and things, you know, and that absolutely was spiritual starvation. And my spiritual director, you know, Joy T, she helped me understand that too. She was just like from a very young age, you were screaming out for that. And it just wasn't met with the answer that it needed to be met with. And she's, like I said, in the very beginning of this podcast, if you were in a different culture in a different time. that would have been immediately identified by your family and you would have been put with the medicine woman or with someone that would have nurtured these feelings and helped you answer these unanswerable questions. And I think that seeking and me kind of being pushed away from that, it led to these splits in my psyche where then it was just, these big feelings had nowhere else to go. And I think it just led to just what we described in this episode. Sean (01:48:30.539) If I throw two words at you, I just want to get a sense of what they mean to you. Resurrection, alchemy. Mollie (01:48:37.68) I mean, I say in my podcast every intro, you know, the podcast is emotional alchemy because my favorite alchemical phrase is solve et coagula, which in Latin means like dissolve and coagulate, which means essentially like falling apart and coming back together. And as I mentioned, I truly believe that today we are collectively missing this initiatory experience. And we are also... we have fallen into this belief that, especially Christianity, that it is literal, right? That Jesus literally, you know, that all these things are literal. And who knows? I'm not saying they're not, but we're missing the allegory. Jesus preached in allegory. He taught in these stories, which by the way, there's a lot of different other examples of Christ-like figures that died and then came back, Osiris being one of them. And it is not. missed to me that one of the first things I wrote when I was seven was like a retelling of the tale of Osiris and Isis. Like, are you fucking kidding me? When I was six, I was drawn to that myth, which is a tale of resurrection. And yet what happens to Osiris? His body is split into a million different parts and it's hidden everywhere. And Isis goes and puts him back together and he comes back to life. We have to fall apart to come back together into something new. Right? It's the same reason why I love Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey of going on a quest. I love Virgil, the different circles of hell, the tale of Odysseus. History is so rich with these stories of needing to go into suffering, finding people that help you along the way, falling apart, coming back together, and then coming back home to yourself. It's not something to be pathologized. It's something to be felt, moved through, and then... validated and then, you know, then come back and find your strength and then use those lessons that you've learned to help other people who are absolutely going to go through that because it's part of the human experience. Sean (01:50:41.087) which is the tragedy of our modern culture. It's a tragedy of our modern healthcare system is we don't have these stories that are passed down from generation to generation to help us understand the emotional pain and suffering that we need to go through in order to evolve spiritually. And I, when I read the Bible, I think of Christ consciousness that is within all of us and the continued growing and expansion of that consciousness. Mollie (01:51:03.854) Yes. Mollie (01:51:10.04) And Jesus didn't want us to idolize him, okay? If Jesus, the person, could come back, he would be like, bro, you guys got this all wrong. No, he said the kingdom of God is within you, right? You can find this for yourself. He didn't want to be idolized. He would be horrified by what some of the churches, the mick churches, as I call them, are doing in his name. He would... Sean (01:51:23.144) Yes. Mollie (01:51:35.524) We horrified to see Starbucks in some of these churches or some of these preachers that are making millions of dollars, right? He preached against that. I mean, look at the Pharisees and how he felt about them, right? You only have to go back and research this stuff to know. It baffles me that we don't speak about this more. Sean (01:51:53.579) Have you ever heard of or read the book of miracles? Mollie (01:51:56.514) No. Sean (01:51:58.163) Well, it would take you, I mean, I'm a year and a half into it. I'm sorry. It's a course of a course in miracles. I'm so sorry. Yeah. Mollie (01:52:03.06) Oh, A Course in Miracles. Yeah, no wonder. And you read of Marianne Williamson, quote, and she's a big fan of A Course in Miracles. My really good friend Bob, who I had on my podcast, he wrote this book called Original Sin is a Lie. And he is a huge fan. And I have it right here, actually, on my shelf behind me. And I haven't gotten, I have not gotten into it too far, because it's hefty. But I have it. And sometimes I'll flip it open to a page and read something, because it's really beautiful. So yeah, I'm familiar with it. Sean (01:52:32.531) Yeah, so of course in miracles, I think I'm about a year and a half into it, I slowly go through it, there's daily lessons. And what I've always asked for in meditation, and with some of my experiences is wisdom, please give me the next lesson, you know, I view it that way. And it's just, it's amazing how the lessons are provided to me at the right time. Course in miracles was channeled. Mollie (01:52:37.024) Yeah. Yep. Mollie (01:52:47.545) Yep. Sean (01:52:56.831) to a woman in the 1970s. I can't remember her name. It took seven years for her to write. She was an atheist and she worked, I think it was a professor at NYU. But anyway, it is the most incredible wisdom in the depth to it. You have to slowly digest it. It feels very supernatural. But once the lessons start coming together, you understand things from completely different perspective. It is an expansion of consciousness. And I've been turned on to other channelers lately, like the book I'm reading right now is the wisdom of the of the council. And we see that there are there are these amazing people who've been provided these gifts, where they can actually channel these guides who are really there to serve us. I mean, they're they just they love us so much. And they care about raising our consciousness and transcending through the suffering that we all create. And some of the lessons that are certainly, you know, really focused on is, you know, how internally we, you know, we create our own existence. We do create the lives in which we are living. Not to say that the events themselves don't exist in the manner in which they exist, but our consciousness, our understanding of them gets extremely limited by the ego-based mind. And Mollie (01:54:08.187) No. Mollie (01:54:15.652) It's such a shame that stuff like that also has become so like, again, the kind of like spirituality, pop, like pop psychology, pop spirituality stuff of like the secret, right? Manifest, manifest your own reality. It's like, no, no. And that's again, that's why it makes me devastated because yes, I just did a three part series on something called like the trauma worlds. And it's basically like. Sean (01:54:28.423) Yeah, like manifesting abundance. Yeah. Mollie (01:54:42.156) I call it paranoid Gollum energy. Like that's like how I felt, like that I was approaching the world, like just constantly thinking that the world is a bad place full of bad people that wanna do horrible things to you. Cause guess what? That's what my experience was. But then the problem is, is that when you finally find yourself in a safe environment with a safe person and you're still living through paranoid Gollum energy through the trauma world, you are manifesting your reality. You're going to sabotage those good things. You're going, but it's not. Oh, manifesting abundance. It's no, you're manifesting a fucking shit show. And it doesn't mean that I'm, by the way, and that also does not mean that I'm manifesting my rape or I am manifesting my sexual assault because I did not. You know, and that's where I think a lot of people out there are doing some really fucked up stuff in psychology. There are some people right now that are creators online that are saying, you're just not doing the work right. You're just manifesting all in this into your life. And I'm going, look, people need to feel safe. They need to understand what happened to them. They need to go through the grieving process to be able to even hold some of these spiritual truths and to be told that you are manifesting trauma in your life. I can't think of anything worse to tell someone, you know. Sean (01:55:59.731) Yeah, I'm looking at things at a different way. So when you started your podcast, it was a creation. There's an idea in your mind about what you want to create. And the manifestation of that is your action. It is your choice. And you can be inspired and you can be connected to a Holy Spirit or Christ Mollie (01:56:03.168) Yeah. And I know you are, by the way. Mollie (01:56:11.141) Yes. Sean (01:56:29.703) you have this willingness and ability to create. For clients who might've gone through some horrific traumas as you did, we're also creating an idea around it, right? It happened, it happened for a reason. We can create an understanding of who we are. I'm broken, this happened because of me and the choices I made, and that can create so much toxic shame. And that toxic shame is what then continues to manifest or create itself in other relationships, the people that you choose, the choices that you make, the risks that you take and don't take, until there's a way that you can resolve that for yourself and you can expand your consciousness around it, you can see it differently. Maybe Molly looks at some of the trauma that existed in your life as a necessary process for your soul's evolution, right? And that's... Mollie (01:56:58.812) That's right. Mollie (01:57:03.492) Mm-hmm. Mollie (01:57:10.66) Mm-hmm. Mollie (01:57:24.548) Absolutely. Sean (01:57:25.255) That's a different way of understanding our lives because if we see ourselves as eternal souls then our experiences in this physical plane, in this human body, in this time are quite short, right? You know, when you think about it internally, in fact, it's really snapping of the finger. Mollie (01:57:37.754) Yeah. Mollie (01:57:42.332) But the important part there is, is that I had to understand that myself. No one could tell me that. And if they did, it's almost like if you tell someone, when I worked in that drug rehab center, you could tell the people that came there because they said, okay, I'm sick enough of my own shit. I'm ready to come do this. And guess what? It was a big difference between that and the people that came there. Cause their family said, we're done with you. If you don't go to rehab, you know, those are the, be the people that you'd see them back again and again and again, or maybe God forbid we'd get a call. and say they weren't with us anymore. And that's just like my experience. No one could have sat there and told me any of the things that we're talking about. I had to come to that understanding for myself. Like you have to have the realization. And once you have that, you're never going back. And that's when I get a lot of voicemails from my listeners that say, you know, Oh no, it's happening again. I'm so scared I'm going to lose all the progress I've made. Right? That's such a common thing. And I tell them, you're never going back to that unawakened version of yourself ever again. OK? Like, you can never be that person because you are completely unconscious. And it's a lot more painful. I'll say it was a lot easier when I was just a bull in a china shop just fucking up my own life, being horrible to other people because I wasn't conscious. When you start recovering and you start going, you accidentally explode on someone that you love and you're going, oh shit, I did that again. That's the painful part. That's the most painful part because you're going, wait, I thought I knew better than that. It's like, no, then you start realizing that's all the programming, right? You have to de-program that, but just the fact that you're conscious of it now is like sets you apart so much from the neurotypicals out there that are so emotionally constipated that they're going to just one day it like explode when they're 50 or something and like cheat on their wife and like their whole life falls apart, right? It's better that you rip your own life apart, fall apart consciously and then build yourself up. So yeah. Sean (01:59:54.407) I'm aware of the time we've had you for two hours and I want to conclude on some concepts. So one of the things you mentioned in the beginning was just how our science is starting to evolve with our spirituality and our understandings and things that have been written for centuries when you start thinking about quantum physics and time and space. The idea of energy is something that is really new to me to kind of view ourselves as energetic beings with... Mollie (01:59:55.905) Yeah, yeah. Sean (02:00:21.527) with frequency and like a vibration that exists. And that's the kind of that feeling of like, you get vibes, right? Like when you talked about being around the music producer, like you got the vibes right away, right? That we are all connected. We are one, we are one universe, we are connected. And I do think part of our human evolution and the evolution that is going to exist in mental health. is to understand ourselves as interconnected. And I've started, I'm working with this thing called heart math right now. Heart math is a heart coherence technology that is, you know, targets heart rate variability, but it's meditative practices and visualizations and connecting with your heart energy. And when I do it, I can feel the energy through my body. It's like this weird buzzing in my body. And I've been, in my sessions, I've kind of transformed from being this Mollie (02:00:57.147) Mm. Mollie (02:01:04.887) Mm-hmm. Sean (02:01:18.603) therapist who's very intellectual in his head and sometimes just moving to actually just sitting and like praying for the person in front of me or connecting with that heart rhythm and expressing silently even a love for that person. And I've mentioned this on the podcast before about how that can affect the person's emotions and how they can self-regulate. Since I work with people who are trauma victims, they might come into the session knowing they're going to be talking about things that are quite painful. Mollie (02:01:27.291) Mm. Mollie (02:01:34.234) Yeah. Sean (02:01:48.083) and they can be very on guard and very anxious. And just doing some of these exercises or just slowing down in my mind can create the space and affect the person in front of me. I think there's all these opportunities for us to understand how we could heal ourselves, how we can heal each other with kind of understanding the mind body experience, energy connection, purpose around each other. There's just so much there that when we say stuck in this biomedical model, this labeling, this judging, Mollie (02:02:07.095) Yeah. Sean (02:02:17.819) everything that kind of goes on with the medical system and its drugging of the human experience, we are self-limiting. And everyone has so many capacities. We've like talked about this just from the beginning, we were talking about Mary Ann Williams about how I think people are afraid of their light. They're afraid of the power and sometimes drawn to the darkness. Mollie (02:02:33.252) Very much. Well, because then you realize how much control you actually have to have. It's your free will. And that's scary. To realize that no one's coming to save you is very scary. Yeah. Sean (02:02:46.251) And necessary. And that's the beauty of your podcast is I think you're stepping into areas or arenas around this, you know, how can we advance human understanding and consciousness to heal ourselves? Um, one of the things that listening to some of these channels in these books are going to be day, we're going to be able to telepathically communicate. It sounds crazy. Yeah. It sounds crazy right now with what we know, but go down, you know, four centuries back. Mollie (02:03:08.656) I have no doubt. Yeah. Sean (02:03:15.443) and talk about AI and computers and the internet and all those things. And I think we're crazy then too, right? Mollie (02:03:19.928) Read Diana Pasulka's book, Encounters. I'm telling you, you guys both have to read it. She talks all about this as well. And Chris Bledsoe, the experiencer I interviewed, he said like all the information he gets is, it's channeled, but it's like, he knows it. It's the same experience. And when I talked to him, he's the first person, he was like, yeah, I get it. When I told him about my mystical experience, I was like, look, I don't hear voices. It's like, I know it. Like, it's a knowing. Sean (02:03:46.835) It's a knowing. Mollie (02:03:48.956) And my favorite mystical text is called The Cloud of Unknowing. And if anyone is like just wanting to, there's an amazing translation of this mystical text. It's from the Middle Ages and it's from a monk who is an anonymous author, by the way. And that's how you know it's a real mystic too, because he didn't even want to be recognized for who he was. And Evelyn Underhill does the translation of this. And I got it on Audible. And that's it. That's mysticism in a phrase, like the cloud of unknowing, right? It's like we're not comfortable with not knowing. We want to say, this is the label. This is how it is. This is reality. What I can see, taste, touch, and this is how it's going to be. We have to embrace. The best thing I tell my listeners, the best you can do, is embrace, I don't know. Work on your critical thinking skills and just realize that we don't know. You don't know. Anything is possible. You think people will tell you that the more you lean into that, the crazier you will be. But in reality, you actually become more truly who you are. Sean (02:04:56.887) And speaking to when I quiet my mind, I'll write a substack in like an hour, uh, in the morning that I need to publish it. You know, I've kind of set these rules for myself. That's going to be published every Thursday and I might not have anything and I'll just sit and kind of quiet meditation and I just ask for it. Right. And then I just write. So like the one that's coming out on Thursday is on forgiveness. Um, and, and I was, you know, that just came through me on how important Mollie (02:05:01.542) Yeah. Mollie (02:05:09.992) Oh, God bless you. I need to be more diligent with my sub stack. Yeah. Mollie (02:05:20.421) Hmm Sean (02:05:26.611) forgiveness of self and forgiveness of others as a form of healing and resilience. And that idea, the things we don't talk about enough in, in mental health, but I just think we're on the verge of humanity's expansion of consciousness. And these, it is. Mollie (02:05:28.127) Mm-hmm. Mollie (02:05:42.392) It's an exciting time to be alive right now. And I think there's a lot of doomsday people. There's a lot of lizard person discourse around, you know. But why not? And think about it. From time immemorial, it's always been, this is the end. You know, like I went through the Y2K times. Always there's gonna be people that saying, this is the end of the world. This is the worst it's ever been. And I'm not saying there aren't bad things, but we are in a really exciting time right now. Like, amazing things are happening and if you just tune into that and start working on your own like sense of integration, leaning into some of these things that we're talking about here on the podcast, you'll start realizing that like you can lean into your own healing and all that noise is going to keep on happening outside but it's a lot easier to create that center inside yourself. Sean (02:06:35.559) Well said. Yeah. And that's good to end on right there. Molly, where can people find your work? How can they get in touch with you? Mollie (02:06:43.932) Back from the borderline.com, you can find everything there. That website redirects right to my link tree where you can listen to my podcast on any streaming site. You can read my sub stack. You can listen to the dog next door barking to me. That's really annoying. You can, but you can find me there. And I don't think you necessarily have to start at the first episode actually, because especially your listeners, if you start at my very first episode, you're gonna hear Molly just waking up. But you can start at any episode that catches your eye. I actually recommend that approach. Just scroll through and see what calls to you. And I would love to welcome your listeners into my podcast world. So please join us. Sean (02:07:30.047) Can we get a night bitch before we go? Mollie (02:07:33.292) Oh my God. Yeah. You can also find my other podcast, Night Bitch. I started that podcast by the way, because I was actually kind of scared to go too spiritual on Back From the Borderline and I needed like an outlet to start reading some of these mystical texts that I was reading. And so what I did was I started Night Bitch because I wanted like a cheeky little name. And then I read some like texts and I put solfeggio frequencies behind them. And it's just like a nice podcast to fall because it actually is like a love letter to my little self because you know, I told you that I couldn't fall asleep without like storybooks and I wish that when I was little, I could have had those things read to me. And so I imagined the girl who was like suicidal in her room. And if she hears like an episode of night, night bitch, like one of these texts, maybe it could help her, you know? So I started that just as like a. passion project. But it kind of gave me the courage to start being more open about spirituality on Back From the Borderline too. But at the end of each episode, I say night bitch. So that's what I say. Yeah. Sean (02:08:37.14) So little story, little story, Sean. My wife, my wife and my daughter, Alexa, and they don't know that I've been listening to your podcast and everything. And just like one night, Alexa was like, good night. And I just went, night night, bitch. And she's like, what? Dad, what are you? And I was just in my like, and Tracy was just and I had to explain to them, because I love the voice too. Mollie (02:08:52.506) Amazing! Amazing! Dad's been awakened. Mollie (02:09:05.368) I definitely put on my more like calming, like I have a very calming voice that I can do on Night Bitch and then there's like what I'm doing to talk to you guys, you know? So yeah. Sean (02:09:05.721) Yeah. There it is. Sean (02:09:13.607) Yeah. Molly really appreciative of the openness and the candor and telling your story today. I think it really set the stage for understanding your podcast and where you are in your life. I mean, it was truly a radically genuine conversation. Mollie (02:09:23.268) Yeah. Mollie (02:09:29.016) I appreciate that. Thank you guys. And Sean, for being like, grade A best listener ever. I mean, amazing listening skills, because I have such a hard time, like, like not jumping in sometimes. And so it's like, that is a skill on its own. And thank you, Roger, because even just talking to you, you know, having someone just some of the things you said to me, it made me realize even more. That's the beauty of all this stuff of it's why Sean (02:09:34.643) That was my role in this one. Sean (02:09:40.919) Thanks. Mollie (02:09:58.008) I pinch myself and just I'm so grateful I get to do what I do because it allows me to talk to amazing people and these conversations, they're healing for me too. So my hope is that someone that can relate to my story out there could also feel seen and heard as well. And you're not alone and you're not broken and you can come back from the borderline