Healing Beyond The Prescription with Dr. Christine Manukyan

One man in his 40s walks out of the hospital with more than 20 prescriptions and we can’t stop thinking about what that says about modern healthcare. We sit down with Dr. Christine, a former hospital pharmacist who made a radical career pivot from dispensing meds to practicing holistic healing, functional medicine, and nervous system work. Together, we unpack the moment an identity breaks, the fear that follows, and the freedom that comes when you finally admit, “This isn’t who I am anymore.”

We go deep on prevention and root cause healing: how stress, sleep, trauma, and trapped emotions can drive anxiety, gut issues, depression, chronic symptoms, and relapse cycles. We also name the part nobody wants to talk about in the wellness world: if your body doesn’t feel safe, even the best tools can backfire. Trauma-informed support, co-regulation, and practical nervous system regulation come first, especially for people carrying microtrauma, complex trauma, codependency patterns, or perfectionism disguised as “being fine.”

Then the conversation turns personal. We share family stories of mental illness, grief, shame, self-abandonment, and what it takes to choose boundaries without closing your heart. Forgiveness shows up as a skill, not a slogan, including the life-changing practice of making amends to yourself. If you’ve been trying to heal inside a system that never taught you how to feel safe, you’ll leave with language, perspective, and next steps you can actually use.

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Email: dr.christine.manukyan@gmail.comWebsite: https://drchristinemanukyan.com/ or https://www.xpandcapacity.com/ Join us in Bali May 24 - 30, 2026 https://drchristinemanukyan.com/bali-retreat/ 

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Transcript

A Grounding Start With Breath

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Welcome back, everybody, to the truth about addiction. Before I introduce today's guests, I just need you guys to know that the universe works in mysterious and very, very intentional ways because I was talking to this woman off-air just a moment ago. We do very similar work in the world in our own unique ways. And I've been super stressed about the grand opening of my new wellness studio. And it was going on and on. And she just held me and she said, just breathe. And don't you know this call I've been waiting on to solve this work issue just came through as I tried to make my original introduction to this episode. Because clearly the universe is like, girl, just go do what you need to do. Go be of service. Go focus on something that's much, much bigger than this small little work problem. And so the call can wait. I am here with a woman that I've met along this part of my life right now, since writing my book, and a massive identity shift and career pivot. We are both doctors of different disciplines who have realized under the umbrella that we went to school for that more is to be desired than what we were originally taught, and that we might need to actually create our own path for what health, wellness, wholeness, and healing actually looks like, not just within ourselves, but to the people that we serve and love. Dr. Christine, I'm so glad you're here. And I really want you to introduce yourself to the audience. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 1:49

Thank you, my love. It is so like an honor to be here, not only because this is going to be an epic episode, but also the energy we bring into the room. So I come in from a background of being a hospital pharmacist working at Cedar Sinai. But overnight, something you talked about identity shit, but overnight I let that old identity go. And six years ago, I let that identity go, turning my two-week notice, and I like to say I went from being a legal drug dealer to a healer because deep down I knew there's so much more, and there's so much more I can give and provide and create instead of just chasing after the big pharma, putting a patch on the symptoms we're experiencing. So I have this huge shift of tapping into this holistic healing from show medicine, spirituality, energy healing, which is so fucking amazing. Can we cuss on your show, babe?

SPEAKER_01 2:46

From Brooklyn, New York. Let's go, babe. I owe a lot of money to my son because we have an invisible swear jar that has overflowed many times. So this is why I love you.

Meeting Dr. Christine And Pivoting

SPEAKER_02 2:57

Let's go, baby. Let's go. This is the true who we are. No filters, no, like have to be a certain way. This is who we are, run, real, on camera, off camera, real life. So, yeah, so I stepped into being in this holistic healing functional medicine space. But my mission in life is that you're talking about pivot and going through the journeys. The last six years I've evolved so much and really trying to find like what is that one thing I was born to do. And it always came back to mental health, always came back to allowing others understand that your identity is shifting everything, every decision we make, every meaning we give to life, everything we do in life is tied into the identity that we are embodying and the meaning we give to that. And it all comes from having a regulated nervous system that's not affecting your mental health and something that you can carry on and just be living life in peace, not the stress, not the fear, not trying to chase after big goals. Because I've gone through that route. I got very successful in my business, but deep down I just knew like this is not fulfilling. Like, what am I chasing? What am I doing? But, anyways, we're gonna stop right there. And then this was an intro within an intro within the story, but we're gonna have this beautiful conversation because I'm gonna have the same opportunity to ask you questions, my love, because we're gonna go back and forth, you guys. This might be an episode that you're like, whoa, okay, we got to know both of the hosts in depth.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

So that's where we're taking this episode today. I am so curious, because I'm thinking about myself and the person that I was when I got into graduate school, deeply unhealed, by the way. And no surprise that one of the greatest things I've been overcoming in the 17 years I've been sober from drugs and alcohol is codependency. Because long before I was an addict, I was a codependent. I learned how to self-abandon to feel safe inside of my home and loved by my mother in particular. And so getting a really fancy degree, which was something that if I worked hard enough, there was a very clear end result that was in the form of helping you is like, well, of course that's what I chose, right? And there's the the version of me that went in, and then the version that comes out that was still early on in my personal evolution journey, but to be bombarded with the reality of trying to create wholeness inside of a broken system and how devastating that was at first, and at the same time magnificent because it prompted me to leave a clinic I was working inside of and start my own thing, which of course has evolved, as you said, so much since I have. So can you just take me back to the identity of the woman that you were when you decided to go to school to be a pharmacist and sort of the coming out and experiencing of that typical route before it collapsed and you did not fit inside of that identity anymore? And then we can move to maybe identity number two.

Leaving Big Pharma For Healing

SPEAKER_02 6:14

Yes. Oh my god, I love that. So, my identity of going into healthcare, it all started because of my dad. So um, I was born and raised in Armenia. We moved to the United States when I was 16 years old, so that's back in 1996. If you're good at math, I'll be turning 46 this year. Yes, celebrating life, as we're so grateful for. But I knew I wanted to go into healthcare, I wanted to help people that was true to my soul. This is who I am. I love to take care of, serve, and help. But I also knew that I want to have a family. And coming to America and understanding what the medical, like traditional MD route goes, I was like, do I really want that? Or is this going to be like an ego-driven job I'm gonna step into? So I started looking around and I said, it's gonna be in healthcare, but I want to do something that's has more freedom. Maybe I become a business owner one day and have my own pharmacy. And so all this option, oh, I go into academia and I get to teach and serve, or I get to work in a hospital or retail, whatever that is. I had choices and I can do whatever feels right for me. So that's how I went into in medicine in pharmacy. And knowing that I was here to do something bigger, like I've I like I felt in into that space, but there's just something really off. And this is important because I always Even as you did it, and even as I did it, because everyone who, as we're graduating pharmacy school, we all, you know, most of us went into residency, and everybody was choosing like an area they want to specialize in. Someone went into cardiology, pediatrics, oncology, right? And I'm like, I just don't want to fit into a box. Like I just knew I need to do something bigger, but I knew I wanted to take this further. So I went into a health system pharmacy administration, into a leadership route. Because deep down I was like, I don't want to be in one space because I have a bigger impact to make. So I spent an additional two years at Ohio State to learn about leadership and health system pharmacy administration and really sharpen my leadership skills when it came to like working in corporate America, right? We're going from a student to a resident, and now stepping into taking my very first job at Cedar Sina right after graduation and again stepping into a leadership role, the role that I created actually during my interview with my um with my boss, she's like, no, we're gonna give you a different job, we're gonna create a job for you because she saw the potential in me, which I'm so grateful for because I didn't even know that was a thing. You apply for a job and you just get it. But I was given that opportunity from early on in my professional career. But again, as life went on over a decade being at Cedar Sinai, I went into this like space of like you get to see the world from a different lens and you start questioning yourself, you start doubting the decisions we've made. Because deep down I knew like we can do so much more for our patients, for our healthcare system, because that shit is broken as fuck.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Is there a story that comes to mind, like when you think about a moment where there's some patient coming in, you're you're dishing out the medicine that you know big pharma says that they'll give to these people, and you're just like, this isn't it? And what if this person had access to X, Y, and Z? How much better would the quality of their life and health be? Can you take me back to something?

The Sick Care System Up Close

SPEAKER_02 9:37

Yes. So as a pharmacist, I used to work at our discharge pharmacy. So it's an inpatient-outpatient services. So we will take care of all the patients who are being discharged from the hospital. And I remember that one day I was filling and dispensing about 21 or 22 prescriptions. Wow. To a gentleman, he was in his like mid-40s, right? And I'm looking at it to one person. I was like, how do where do I even start? And I was like, we live in such a sick care environment and in acute care. This person does not even need half of this shit because again, this is when I was already in this holistic space for my own health and found like a better way, but I couldn't talk about prevention. I couldn't talk about what's truly aligned with me, right? It's like you take a pill and then you take a pill for the pill because you're having a fucking side effect to something else that you shouldn't be on. I'm like, why can we go back to prevention? Why do you even have fucking diabetes? It's lifestyle. Why do you have all these other issues like you can't sleep? Maybe it's freaking stress. Like all these pills that we give for all these different symptoms, but we forget. Now I understand better because I followed my path to explore even deeper of what I was feeling inside. I just didn't have the words to explain it. Our emotions are making us sick every single day. No questions asked. Your emotions are the number one cause of what you're feeling today. It's a symptom that comes out because it doesn't know where to go. Everything is energy, it's trapped in you, but you just don't know how to take it out. And here we have gut issues, you know, mental health issues, all this shit because it's the fucking trapped emotions that we haven't healed throughout the time. But do you think anyone wants to hear the word heal in the hospital, especially at Cedar Steinai, when you have to have this, you know, it's a different world out there. Let's just put it out there, right? But it's again like no one really gives a shit of like what's out there because their main goal is like to get you in and get you out as quick as we can. But someone who knew deep down, like, no, first of all, this person is probably gonna come back for even more complications. And why do they even take all these things? So that one experience, I was like, oh my God, in your 40s, you're taking 20 meds every single day. Imagine the fatigue they're experiencing, that the burden, right? Yeah, they're the dependent. You talked about code, like they're dependent on all those pills, thinking this is what they need to do for the rest of their life. Yeah, and a lot of people are giving up on their journey because they think this is it. Yeah, you talked about identity. Now they step into the identity of like I have this disease, yeah, versus now that I know better, like you can rewire that shit. Yeah, people who have cancer, they admit they have cancer and go down the route of like depression, the sadness, and like they don't heal. They they don't survive. But those who even like from the beginning saying, I don't have cancer, it doesn't belong in me, and they find ways and other holistic ways to like, yes, I'm not saying like not to do traditional medicine, there's need and place for it, but also there's so much space for other ways of healing your body, releasing shit that's no longer serving you emotionally, yeah, and sometimes physically. So yeah, but yeah, that was the story that I figured out. I was like, wow, like there's so much out there that we are not taught, we're not exploring the spaces, but also like we get judged, Sam. Like, I don't know about you, but like I was around a lot of again, professionals who saw me doing this holistic modalities and taking care of myself from like a different energetic space. And I was being judged because it's not true science, it's not true medicine, it's not something that's you know will last or something like that, right? And I was like, fuck you, like watch me. First, you will judge me, right? Yeah, then as you see my result and transformation, which I did accomplish, then you're gonna ask me how. But I'm so glad I didn't give up on the person as we're becoming and transforming and evolving. It's like we're kind of delusional for a lot of people in my industry. We're like, what? Like, you're doing what now? Like, yeah, you're talking about energetics, you're talking about healing, you're talking about emotions. I was like, Yeah, deep down, people who have again sickness, let's use let's say cardiac arrest, right? Someone who has heart issues, they have a broken heart. Maybe they're grieving, they've never let that go. Maybe they're living in this space of like shame, identity crisis, and they don't feel good about themselves. It's an energy that we're holding on to. And yes, the cancer can manifest in any environment. We all can do that, right? So, so yes, my love, it came in, but it took me time to understand and recognize the patterns. Yeah, it didn't happen overnight, it did not happen from one person. I was like, I saw a pattern, I was like, oh my gosh, like there is a theme in my patients as I'm doing the discharge counseling. There is a theme of like even my own beliefs. And when you recognize patterns, you can break those patterns and you can create your own patterns of like, this is how I want to leave the life, this is how I want to counsel my patients. And I don't care if I quote unquote lose my job. I'm gonna tell them about preventative. I'm gonna use this opportune because what if I'm the last person they get to hear this information from this health system, right? And I didn't want to like walk away with like knowing that I could have helped someone in a different way, but I took my job, quote unquote, too serious and I kept my mouth shut. So after this, instead I say, you know what, as much opportunity as I have, I'm gonna talk to them of like seeking out other options, listening to other things, even like listening to energetic like frequencies, you guys sound like put on Spotify. And if you are grieving, let's say, turn on the frequency of like a heart chakra and just listen to that sound that will move so much emotions through you, and your body will like, ah, I can breathe, right? We're talking about just breathe. You will feel the peace in your body because everything is frequency, everything is energy, and everything can be healed only if you give permission for you to heal yourself as you go through this journey, which is very interesting journey. I'll say it that way.

Safety First For Real Healing

SPEAKER_01 16:06

Yeah, I mean, there's like there's so much, there's so much that I want to extract from what you said. So something that just came up, right? Knowing that this it's it's interesting. I started this podcast less than a year before I lost my sister. And it was almost like having dealt with the severity of my own addiction, and then so many people, including my sister that I loved around me, suffering, I felt like I had to start speaking about it and sheddon a much wider lens than just the cycle of substance abuse. And when I reduced down, when I think all these years later in my own recovery about what has been an anchor in my healing, why the modern version of the 12 steps has been so important to me versus the traditional language, it's because it establishes a sense of safety, right? So when we're talking about letting yourself feel and breaking these cycles, and they don't have to be substance abuse cycles, stress cycles, emotional addictions, uh codependency, people pleasing, high achievement. I mean, you name it, they're everywhere. Before we can feel what needs to be felt, as somebody who avoided that, like the plague, because my feelings frightened me to death. They literally felt for so long like they were gonna kill me. I would go to the ends of the earth. I mean, so much so that I almost died from a cocaine overdose, not to sit with them, right? And so I say all this because the only way I could get to a place in my life where I could let emotions move through me, is because I had to establish a sense of safety inside. And there are plenty of people listening who have no idea how to do that. And I strongly recommend that there needs to be sometimes in the beginning, someone, some sort of trusted advisor, especially if you come from a place where I did, which was the idea of God felt suffocating and religious and terrifying. And so I for me that wasn't even an option to go to some sort of universal sense of love or loving energy. Now I can talk about it all day long. But I always think about the beginning of my story and how much pain I was in and how limited I felt in what my resources were. And for me, it was a combination of spiritual rock bottom where I knew I didn't want to die, but I couldn't go on living the way I was living, stuck in a pattern of perfectionism and performance, especially around other people, places, things, and situations. So it was no longer about me being perfect. It was I'm gonna perfect this problem so that I can be okay. And when that stopped working, which was a pattern I had used forever, I was face down in a pit of despair. And I happened to meet a woman who made me feel so safe that she presented the steps to me in a different way that that were trauma-informed. And that was the beginning of me going, maybe I can become a woman who doesn't have to be perfect and can still be loved. Maybe I can become a woman who is not the sum of her biggest mistakes, who made a thousand bad choices as an active addict, but who's actually a really good person. Maybe I can become. So I guess, you know, you and I now do a lot of work on nervous system and regulation, and it's sort of buzzy right now, which I love and I also don't, because people like to jump on these bandwagons who maybe haven't really lived it or studied it, and that's okay, right? We have what happens inside of you as I'm saying all this, right? So from the vantage point of where we sit, it's one thing to just be like, oh God, it's you know, the the idea of your energy, the idea of your mind and your belief systems and what you focus on, the idea of your spiritual fitness is at the center of your whole life's healing. All you need to do is just, you know, just let it move through you, just let it but what about the person with a ton of micro trauma or macro trauma who is wildly unsafe in their own skin? What do they do? What is their starting point? What did you have to do?

Immigration Trauma And A Father’s Collapse

SPEAKER_02 21:12

We're getting deep. Yeah, we're getting deep. We're getting deep. But I before I go there, I want to say thank you for talking about feeling safe first. Because again, a lot of people jump into this modality because maybe they saw it on TikTok or someone's going viral on social media and we live in such a buzz world world, right? People who are not even trained properly to lead others through transformation, but they might have had great marketing and now they're going viral for shit. And this industry, you guys, is not fucking regulated. That's right. It's not, which pisses me off as a practitioner. I was like, why can we regulate this shit? Because it's causing more harm for a lot of people. But that's a whole different podcast because I have a vision of creating a doctoral degree in holistic vitality. That's my big vision. I know it's gonna come one. Someday somebody's gonna be like, I know how to create something new. I have the vision, I have the content. I don't know, maybe I need a lawyer who understands how to create a brand new degree, educational space, all this stuff. I have the vision. We're meant to create this big movement, but you talked about safety. And we can't heal unless our body feels safe to heal. We can go do all these experiences, all this even retreats. People go do all this, you know, psychedelics. They go to that environment, they experience healing, they come back in the environment that they're in and they're fucking lost. Yep. Now they're even deeper shit, and now they're codependent to that one experience, and they keep going back, they keep going back, keep going back, versus finding someone who can help them and guide them to find safety in your own body at that moment. So, to answer your question, my love, it I realized throughout my entire journey and why this is my God's calling of to focus on mental health and identity shift because of my dad. So the truth is back home we were very wealthy. Very wealthy. My again, my dad had the job, identity, all those things, right? Well, my mom was, you know, you go to school to be educated, but you're not allowed to work because you're just the housewife, you take care of the kids. Interesting. That's the environment I grew up. This is, you know, this is how it was in the 80s and 90s when I'm like growing up, right? And we came to America. I was 16, my mom was 36, my dad is turning 40. So coming to a new country where you don't speak the language, you leave everything behind to escape the hardship, the war, and all those things to come here. He went into massive depression because obviously he couldn't practice medicine. This was his identity, this was his ego. The ego got into the way of taking care of his family because he's like, I'm not gonna go deliver pizza to provide. And he chose not to do that. So my mom overnight went from like never working, you know, in a professional way, now having three jobs, because I was not legally ready to work yet. I was like 15 and a half, my brother is 14, and going to school in the evening so she can learn the language, right? And my dad went into this massive depression, psychosis, bipolar, all these things on 10, 15 different antipsychotics, but I don't know shit at that moment. And he would refuse to take his meds and he will get abusive with my mom. And we never knew, like, after coming home from school, like what environment are we stepping into? Yeah, it's that fucking unknown. Like, what are we gonna see? Like, is he gonna be screaming and shouting, like, and disturbing our neighbors in our apartment? Are we gonna get kicked out because maybe he did something? We have no idea. Because I'm in school, my brother's in school, my mom is at three jobs that she's working to provide for us, right? We're living like Patrick to Patrick for like welfare, all those things just to survive. So, my nervous system from that early on associated success with survival. Because for me, it was like if you want to be successful in America, you have to like work really hard, you have to hustle. Long story short, and it's the only way you're gonna be able to do that. And that's the only way, yeah. That's right, exactly. Because again, that's how we are positioning our lives to be, right? And it came to the point that we had to make one of the hardest decisions in our family. We said, Dad, if you're gonna come with us, because we had to move apartments because we're almost got kicked out from where we're living. Um, you have to become like compliant with your medications. You have to fucking take a shower. Like, we can't live like this. And he said, No, uh, don't tell me what to do. Again, the ego took in away. Don't tell me anything. Um, he was afraid that the medications were actually poisoning him. Someone is actually, again, it's that psychosis, all this, you know, phobia was in him, the fear that his life is under danger. He didn't feel safe to feel anything else, right? And he made the choice to become homeless. And the shame I was carrying for almost 25 years because I lost contact with my dad. But the shame, the guilt that I was carrying, and all these years, I was like, oh my God, what if one day I see him on the streets? What am I gonna do? What if one day he actually finds out somehow where I work and he comes to my emergency room at Cedar Sign? I'm like, shut, what do I do? The shame, the guilt, and then again, moving out of the states, moving to different places to live. But my brother always kept in touch with him. But I just knew that he's safe, he's taken care of, at least financially, right? Even though he's on the streets, but he has resources because he chose to live on the streets. But I never wanted to face him and talk to him. I was so fucking hurt. I was so hurt, I was so hurt blaming him for you know causing all this trauma in our life. I grew up with, again, having no memories, even from my childhood, because again, my nervous system doesn't remember any good things that he had. But I'm sharing all this because there's always a gift and the misery we're going through. This is an opportunity for me that after doing a lot of this inner work to find forgiveness and compassion and love for my dad. Because I now put myself in his shoes. How would I have been moving across country in your 40s, midlife crisis, the stress, all these things? There was no resources we were giving. There's no playbook of how to survive in a new country. We didn't have, we don't have a big family, we're just us, right? And I had so much love and compassion for him, and that forgiveness set me free. That having that peace of mind, it's not like what he did to us and our family and all those things, but it was more of like it's for my own soul. I'm not admitting things that he has done. It was for my own peace, for my own frequency. And I keep, you know, repeating like dad, I love you, I forgive you. And who did you do that work with? Um, my original work started with Dr. Joe Dispensa. Okay. I I got um fortunate enough to get trained with him and his team as a healthcare practitioner. And during one of his retreats, he just cracked my fucking heart open. And I was like, oh my gosh. Oh, I just saw this whole life shifting from his perspective, from his life. He was scared, as we were scared, but I didn't understand what's going on. I didn't have words to explain what's going on, right? It was not fair, right? Yeah, the words keeps coming. This shit is not fair. Why is this happening to us? And I continued that work with like, again, different healers, you know, escaping to Bali every year as I'm hosting my own retreats and doing the same work for myself. That forgiveness was the opening doorway. And being in, you know, Tony Robbins' community, he always says, like, there is, you know, if he calls it effective blaming, meaning like when you have a shitty situation, like what can you do and effectively thank that person? But like deep down, I just didn't like the word blame. It was just still bringing up that like resistance in me. So I said, What if I call this something else? And I said, divine blessing. So in that moment, I said, What were the divine blessings that came from this experience? And I said, I was again, our souls choose our parents, and I was chose my family, my dad and my mom, right, to have that healing experience because I'm here to make a huge difference in people's lives and mental health, who are suffering in silence, who don't know what to do, who are ashamed to even talk about that they have something going on. And that inner work, my love, allowed me to face my dad after 25 years, rebuild that relationship with him, and for the very first time tell my kids that they have a grandpa, which was so hard because we're talking about identity. Here I am, my kids love my mom. Like they love, love, love, love my mom. But one day my daughter's like, when I told them, like, we're gonna go see my dad, my daughter is she is 12 at that time. She's like, You have a dad? I was like, Fuck, this shit's getting real. I lived in two identities, like two different worlds. Of I cannot talk about my dad, I cannot talk about the shame. You know, my husband has never met him. You know, sometimes I don't even share all the details, the pain that came with this, because my husband is not in the way, in a space to understand that. And I respect that. I'm not gonna just like dump all the shit on him at the moment. It's gonna come in time, right? But yeah, I, you know, last year I found that peace in my heart to go see my dad. The kids came, my husband came. But he's still homeless. He is in um he he moved, so my brother took care of him. Um, and they they moved to Florida and he's in a facility in Florida, so it's kind of like a nursing homeslash you know, facility. So at least he has a space. Yes, he got off of the streets. Um, but I think again, I don't part of him still doesn't want to know all the details because I'm still hurt a little bit. Yeah, it will come and I'll ask my brother because he took care of him like throughout the whole time. Um, but yeah, at least now we can go, we know where he's at and we can go see him. Um, and also, like, as my mom, this is important too for everyone to hear. When we're doing this inner work for ourselves, we're not just healing ourselves, we're healing our ancestors and our coming generations. So, like this inner work that I'm doing, it's healing my daughter. There's part of her that's being healed because she sees the mom that is healed. My healing healed my mom to find that peace to go see my dad after all those years, which was something that I really wanted to kind of have like a closure. I was like, mom, like all your stress and emotions have caused like three, four autoimmune diseases in your body, especially her thyroid autoimmune, which is our throat chakra. This is why women have more thyroid issues because we don't speak up, we don't say our truth. It's just the energy gets trapped. But even seeing my dad and my mom in one room after all these fucking years, I was like, I'm on the right path. And I was chosen to come to this world to bring this blessing because there's so many families who are suffering in silence. And this is causing so much dysfunction, yeah, disease in our bodies that we think a pill can fix, a retreat can fix. No, not none of that shit can fix unless we give ourselves permission to do the inner work and still and trust the process. Yeah, trusting the process because this is not gonna happen overnight, as you know, it's gonna take time. Yeah, you just say you're 17 years sober, like this shit didn't happen overnight, babe, right? Yeah, it took time, and I'm sure every single day you wake up, you're blessing yourself like wow, thank you. That moment that you make a decision to forever change your life. Yeah, and look at all the people you are impacting and inspiring to take that action. Yeah, the shit is not sexy, yeah, the shit is not easy, but it's fucking available to all of us. And I want everyone to understand, and we're not special, we just took action, yeah. Right? Yeah, do you want to elaborate on that, B, because yeah, there's it's a process, and I want to hear your journey too.

Forgiveness Work That Changes Generations

Self Forgiveness And Boundaries With Family

SPEAKER_01 33:51

Like, well, also, like I didn't know we had this in common, this huge thing in common. And I don't know how much you know about this part of my story, and I think about this a lot. I don't speak on it maybe because my mom is still alive, but I'm also such an open book. I'm very candid about my marital crisis and infidelity, and my husband is very much alive, you know, and I feel fine about that. But there's so I want to make sure that I I talk right now about my own mother and mental illness, and also why I believe I'm able to have a relationship with her today, which touches on forgiveness, yeah, which you also talked about. I really think that when I created that sense of safety with that woman, I was five years sober, so we're talking about 12 years ago. One of the ways that I had access to safety, besides being in the presence of someone who made me feel safe, who I knew had been through really hard things and survived, was because at the ninth step, which is making an amends, all I had ever done, not just in recovery in my life, was make amends to someone else. Because in the traditional AA framework, we are the self-centered addict, we are the problem, and we need to get new solutions and rectify our wrongs. And there's no question we make really bad choices and we hurt a lot of people, but we also really hurt ourselves. And why that amends process was never turned around on me until five years sober, I will never understand. And it's the driving force behind writing my book and the work that I do. Because when that woman met my resistance at the idea of having to make an amends to my husband one more time, she said, No. Have you ever made an amends to yourself? I was like, What are you talking about? I didn't even know that was something people did. I had to rigorously, this is why my work is at the intersection, I think yours is too, of where science meets the soul. Oh, 100%. I had to rigorously get into action around stepping into a woman who loved and forgave herself, which meant that my consciousness was elevated from that moment on when I felt I had permission to become this new person, such that every single time, and it was very often, that voice came up in my head that said, This is what you fucking get for what you did. I had to go, wait a second. That is what the old version of me wants me to believe and what I've been believing. But what would a woman who loves and forgives herself say to herself instead? What would she do right now to soothe herself? How would she care for herself? And and I had to shift my focus to that. I had to imagine what that was, and then I had to double down on doing the thing or saying the thing. So I got into this rigorous practice, which is the science part, practicing the new pattern, creating the new feedback loop until it's more cemented. If not for that, then I'm not really sure. Less than a year later, when I found out my husband was in fact having a five-year extramarital affair with the same woman, and for two years telling me he wasn't cheating, and I went insane in sobriety. I don't know that I would have had anything in me to pull as a resource to forgive him. Yeah, let alone the journey of my mother's mental illness, which had always been a thing. But it's interesting because when I look back at my childhood, what I remember the most is that my mom was always so sad, so sad. Depression was a dark cloud that loomed over her, and I was always trying to make her happy. Never do I remember, consciously anyway, experiencing bipolar, the mania side of that disorder. But somewhere in adulthood, when I had moved to California, which was 2010, and my sister and dad were still living in New York, and so was my mother, manic episodes began. And my dad and my mom had the most emotionally immature, enmeshed relationship. They'd never been happily married. They stayed unhappily married and financially entangled till the day he died. And so they were constantly dealing with one another, stressed all the time, and sharing all of that with us. One of the pushbacks my sister and I would receive constantly as the manic episodes increased and became more severe and dangerous was I don't want to pay for your mom living in an assisted facility. And he legally sort of had to help her out, and it would have been twice as expensive as the random apartment in Long Island she was living in. And my sister and I, again, were parentified, which was so much of our lives, and we had to continue to say something horrible is going to happen to her. How many times do we, the daughters, have to acutely hospitalize our own mother in a psych ward because she was found twirling around like a ballerina in the middle of New York City street before you think this is serious enough to do something about? And it, by the way, dad, it's not our fault that you decided to stay married. This is your bed. You know, get in it and fix it. And I think it was the fifth hospitalization where we got her into a facility. He didn't tell us that he did not sign up for her meds being monitored because he didn't want to also pay for that. So she went manic again after being acutely stable in the facility, got threatened for eviction, the whole thing.

SPEAKER_05 40:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:25

And somewhere in that period after living there for two-ish years, my sister dies. No, my dad had already passed. It's a there's a you know, a lot of stuff that happened. But now my dad's not here. It's my sister and I, and my mom who's going manic, my sister and mom are estranged. I'm able to maintain when she's not out of her mind, some level of conversation because of the work I had done. But then I boundaried up like crazy when she was unhealthy because she was extremely emotionally abusive when she was manic. My sister dies, my mom goes almost immediately into a depression. It just mania goes away. She's miserable, sad, doesn't leave her room, doesn't leave her bed. And the sad thing was that it was almost easier to handle because it was so familiar when she was depressed. And it was seemingly not as dangerous. That's very much in quotations. About eight months later, the building of the facility was being bought out by someone else. I remember her calling me and saying, They're telling us we all have to leave, they're turning it into, I don't know, condominium. And I'm picturing the potential obstacles that are about to show up about and I'm by myself now having to deal with this, right? I don't have a dad, I don't have a sister. And I said, Would you come to California? Knowing full well anything could happen with her mental illness, anything at all. But that that would be so much easier for me if she were here, than the idea of me having to fly back to the East Coast and do it alone. You know, sometimes New York feels to me now like the city of ghosts. A lot of people I loved have died there.

SPEAKER_05 42:18

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 42:18

And so part of my rewiring is to go back and make new memories in service of myself and my healing. And I've done quite a bit of that since then. But at that time, especially, the idea of getting back on a plane for some massive crisis with my mother sounded like a nightmare. And I don't know how she complied, but she did. She came out to California, I set her up in a facility two miles from where I currently live right now. And for a few months, it was lovely. And then she went manic again. And I spent about a year uh not really speaking to her at all. I had, you know, intervened in the way that I could, in terms of um, I love you. I cannot have a relationship with you unless you are compliant with your medication. You will not be able to see your grandchildren, who you now have a relationship with in real time. This is going to fracture and sever everything. And I need you to hear me when I say that, not because I want it to, but because it has to for my own well-being and safety, and frankly, for the safety of my children. I had intervened with my psychiatrist and her, her own physician, uh, and and anything I could say or do. And when she refused, all communication stopped. She had brought strangers to our house that she had just met and just walked through the front door while my children were home. I mean, it was, I had to call the cops on her, scary and dangerous. And I had never felt so sure that I could love her from a great distance. I didn't feel a massive Amount of resentment and hostility, I was heartbroken. Of course. And when I put energy into how could this be? This part of my story? How could it be? How, you know, this idea of like, haven't I suffered enough? God, whoever you are, I've lost my father. I've lost my sister. My mom is essentially dead right now. The version of her that I have any real access to who can love me the way I need to be loved. How much, right? When I go there, it's very dangerous. Very, very sad. When I leaned into how well I cared for myself, and that I could reach a point in my own healing where there was a difference between being my mother's daughter and my children's mother. And that I could choose being my children's mother without guilt and shame. That is so powerful. And I really rooted all the way back to that initial forgiveness work I had done on myself, which I had done so many more times in the years that I had remained sober and had to overcome many, many other things where the blame and the shame was kicked back up, right? And I can I can safely say happily and safely say today she is stable. She's been stable for over a year. I see my mom every Friday. She comes over for pizza movie night. She has a relationship with her grandkids. And the fact that I am deeply aware that at any moment that could change and it could all go away. But that I still would be so proud of how I've showed up. So grateful for the time that I've had with her in this last year that I was able to be courageous enough to keep my heart open to loving her without bending and breaking my own spirit. I will forever take that part of the story with me too.

SPEAKER_02 46:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 46:16

Oh my God. So we have a lot more in common. I didn't have so much more in.

Closing Takeaways On Breath And Peace

SPEAKER_02 46:20

There's season two or podcast second version is going to come out soon. Because we're about to run out of time. But you know, on this episode, we want to make sure we're respecting everyone's time and energy. But there's always seasons of growth and transformation. And you also talked about, you know, how are you going to feel knowing your mom is around? And same thing, same shit here. Like, I was like, how do I put these in my writing, in my book, and talk about it? But I also knew if I don't talk about it, I'm repeating the cycles of that generational pain. And no, this shit ends with us. Yep. So as we wrap up this episode, I want everyone to know that you are in control of transforming your life and healing yourself first. You're not being selfish. It all starts with you, healing yourself first, doing the work. Just breathe. I mean, and forgiveness. Just fucking breathe. Fucking breathe. Seriously. Will set you free. And when you make decisions from that regulated, peaceful state of mind, everything shifts. And also, universe has this beautiful ways of giving you things that you have manifested. You wanted to create the impact, you want to do. Congratulations, opening your space and doing all these things. You too. Because you have expanded your own capacity to receive. Yeah. And universe is not only rewarding you, my love, but it's also giving you the platform to shine and be fucking unapologetic for your success. Because you've done the work, you've gone first, and you did not give up on yourself first. So right back at you, baby. Oh, any last words from you, babe?

SPEAKER_01 48:07

I mean, other than I can I can say with conviction that I'm so proud of me and that I'm so proud of you. And the idea that we can attract women who just want to raise each other up and go out and do God's bidding, whoever and whatever that means to you, is so unbelievable. And how lucky are we to do this shit?

SPEAKER_02 48:35

Let's do it. Love you and love you so much for this conversation. So well, to continue.