As someone who's walked the rocky path of trauma, I've learned the great importance of self-compassion and connection. I was inspired to do this podcast episode based on some conversations that I've been having with the women in my one-on-one and group sessions.
So many of us think that we are extra special, broken, and that if anyone finds out, we're gonna be isolated and shunned. Today, we'll talk about this and prove that we are all somehow alike and that healing emanates from acknowledging our shared experiences and allowing ourselves to feel the full range of human emotions.
Let's learn to love both the luminous and shadowy parts of ourselves because they make us who we are.
Click HERE to get the full show notes.
As someone who's walked the rocky path of trauma, I've learned the great importance of self-compassion and connection. I was inspired to do this podcast episode based on some conversations that I've been having with the women in my one-on-one and group sessions.
So many of us think that we are extra special, broken, and that if anyone finds out, we're gonna be isolated and shunned. Today, we'll talk about this and prove that we are all somehow alike and that healing emanates from acknowledging our shared experiences and allowing ourselves to feel the full range of human emotions.
Let's learn to love both the luminous and shadowy parts of ourselves because they make us who we are.
Click HERE to get the full show notes.
Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the, Your Favorite You podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains, create the life you've been dreaming of with intention.
My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend. If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.
Hi there, welcome back to Your Favorite You. I was inspired to write this podcast based on some conversations that I've been having recently with the women in my group and with the women that I have been doing consults with to join my group.
So, I want to say that none of us escapes life without some form of trauma. A lot of my clients come to me. A lot of women book consults with me or get one of my emails or read one of my social media posts, or they hear me on someone else's podcast, and they're inspired to reach out for help.
So many of them think that they are extra super special, broken, and that if anyone finds out that they have this brokenness inside of them or this dark side or these struggles or these traumas, if anyone finds out they're going to be found out.
They're going to be isolated, be shunned, be excommunicated from their community, from their friends, from their colleagues, from their family and really from anyone loving them ever. So, this is really one of the main drivers of human behavior we want people to like us so that we can be included in the crowd.
All at the same time, these women are coming to me judging themselves because, quote unquote other people have it harder or worse than they do, and what I've learned over these past several years of doing my own inner work and then helping, I don't know. I think it's hundreds of women at this point doing their own inner work. They feel like they need to somehow put their trauma, their troubles, their struggles, their brokenness into a hierarchy thinking.
Other people have it much worse than me. Who am I to be complaining about this? My life is pretty good, I have all the basic creature comforts, and there are other people who are struggling much more than me, so I don't deserve to do this work, to take this time, and a lot of them even say that it would be selfish of them to work on themselves when they don't have it “that bad”.
Let me just tell you that we or most of you listening to this podcast, because you are like me we are left-brained people living in a left-brained world, and what I mean by that is that our left brain, which we obviously need to live a full life, is its job is to try to put things into a hierarchy, trying to figure out where does my trauma fall on the spectrum. And there's nothing wrong with that. We actually want our left brain to be able to put things into hierarchy, to put things into categories.
But when you are a predominantly left-brained person living in a mostly left-brained world, you have to be very intentional about left-brain or right brain to come online and help you see how you are so much like all the other people in the world, how much connection there is between all of us, how much empathy and compassion you can have for other people, but really only after you offer that same empathy and compassion to yourself first, our left brain society doesn't want that. It wants us to see ourselves as other, as different.
What I'm trying to implore upon you in this podcast episode is that we are so much more alike than we are different. Yes, we have different life experiences. Yes, we have different circumstances, and it's true. I want us all to celebrate our differences. This is not an either-or thing. It can be and, but we all have some degree of trauma, and it doesn't have to define us.
This is not what I'm suggesting, but I think that recognizing that of course this is how we are, because we are left brain dominant people living in a left-brain dominant world and, of course, because our left-brain society does not put huge emphasis on connection and how we can see all the other people as the same as us.
It just makes perfect sense that each of us are in our own home or in our community, thinking that I must be the only one who's putting on a brave face in front of everyone else and struggling on the inside. I know I've talked a lot about it recently on podcast episodes because I'm just finishing up my first group coaching cohort in Your Favorite You. I'm launching the next one in January.
I know I've talked about it a lot recently, but this is the beauty of coaching If you're participating in a one-on-one coaching relationship, it's amazing to be able to be seen and heard and understood while at the same time, being lovingly questioned about is this really how you want to keep going in your life?
It's a different way where you could take more time to recognize all the beauty in your life while at the same time recognizing that we all have struggles and it's okay.
Life is not supposed to be without struggle. This is another bill of goods that a lot of us have bought into the idea that we're supposed to be happy all the time and that that is the goal.
My friends, believe me when I tell you the much more illustrious and beautiful and challenging and mystifying and define and the unfucked up-ness of actually feeling the whole gamut of human emotion. So, it's much more beautiful to feel all of the emotions.
And, of course, when you're talking about group coaching, it's amazing to be able to be seen by your coach and by the rest of the incredible women in your group as a human with a bright side and a dark side, being able to say in front of people who are at first strangers and then, by the end of the time, working together. They are people who know the full breadth and beauty of you.
To start many of my calls with celebrations, we get to celebrate the amazingness of life and then we get to coaching, where we talk about the struggles and get to see that in fact we are not alone.
I'll give you just some examples recently from the group, an ophthalmologist and a third-generation owner of an organic grain company, both moms, both wives, having very similar struggles, knowing the quote unquote best ways to parent or a nutrition, and a partner to consultant company with several years difference in age. Both moms, both wives, very different lives, but similar struggles in their relationships with their own parents.
An OBGYN and a life coach, one in Missouri, the other in Utah totally different lives, but similar struggles with the trauma that came from being very successful collegiate athletes.
It's so beautiful to see how me, being willing to work on my own brain and its myriad amazingness and fucked up-ness, has been able to help so many other women see their amazing brains that also have some fucked up-ness and embracing it, instead of telling ourselves that we are doing anything wrong when we figure out that the way that we have been feeling and acting isn't getting us what we want, doing the work to be able to question that and change it if we want to, that's incredible.
So, if you are in your car listening to this podcast, or you're like me, on a walk listening to the podcast, or you're folding laundry listening to this podcast, thinking I think I might be too far gone, or I'm not sure if anyone can help me, or I'm worried that if I say these words out loud to another person or to a group of people that it will make them real.
Let me just tell you that, yes, of course, initially, the struggle of whispering these things to me or to a group of women is going to be hard. Of course, it is. But what I would offer is that you being alone and thinking that you are alone and extra super special, broken, is way harder, and it's also not necessary.
There are so many people out here in the world who are like me. They have done this work on themselves, and they have realized that they can help so many other amazing people. It doesn't have to be me that you hire, for sure. I would love it if it was. I would love to be able to help every one of you listening to this podcast right now, but it doesn't have to be me.
In fact, it could be any other coach. It might be a therapist. There are people out there right now just waiting to help you. They're just a few steps ahead of you on this crazy journey in life and we and they are all looking around for people to help.
So, if this episode spoke to you at all and you have been thinking I might be extra super special, broken and Melissa might not be able to help me, I would lovingly encourage you to book a consult and talk it over with me and let's just see. I will be honest with you.
If I think I can help you, I really and truly don't want to work with anyone that I don't know for sure that I can help. If I think you would be better suited to working with a different coach, I will have no problem referring you to someone else.
If I think that the work that you need to do right now would be better suited by therapy, I will have no problem recommending that either. If I think that your ultimate benefit would come from working with both a coach and a therapist at the same time. I'll tell you that too.
Book a call so that we can figure it out together. You don't have to do this alone. We're all a little bit fucked up. Okay, see you all next week.
Hey, everybody, don't go quite yet. I want to let you know all the ways that you can work with me.
If you've been listening to this podcast, maybe especially the episodes where I interviewed my clients and you are thinking like the older woman in the diner in the classic Meg Ryan Billy Crystal film when Harry met Sally, where Sally, proving a point to Harry, is faking an orgasm while at the diner.
Sally finishes and takes a bite of her food and the older woman in the next booth says I'll have what she's having. This is your sign from the universe to schedule a consult with me.
I'm currently enrolling clients who want to work with me in a group setting. The group will start on January 10th, and we will meet every Wednesday at 1pm until July 3rd, 2024.
I'm very excited about the women who have already made the commitment to themselves and the investment in themselves to join the group and would love to have you be part of it. I also have a few spots available for one-on-one coaching with me, if that is a way that you want to work with me.
The way to contact me is to go to my website, melissaparsonscoaching.com, and either go to the group page and click Book Now or go to the work with me page and click Book Now.
That way, you can schedule a consult. I look forward to hearing from you. Let's make 2024 your favorite year ever as you become Your Favorite You.