Rachel Abi runs a show called In the Nude: Naked Truth of Healing, and the title is accurate. She doesn’t do the gentle-voiced version of this conversation. She asks a question and then waits, which is a rarer skill than it sounds.

We spent most of it on identity — specifically, how a woman disappears into her roles without a single dramatic moment marking the disappearance. There’s no scene. Nobody hands you the costume. You become the perfect wife or the hypervigilant mother or the professional who never drops anything, and it works, and it keeps working, and then you’re forty and you can’t answer a question about your own preferences without checking who else is in the room.

The mechanism underneath it is simple and awful: if you learned early that your value was contingent on what you provided, then having a self starts to feel expensive. So you stop keeping one. Not consciously. You just quietly stop stocking it.

We also covered the part I think gets skipped most often, which is what it costs to climb out. Everybody wants to talk about the freedom on the other side. Fewer people want to name that when you stop performing, some of the people around you were attached to the performance, and they will not all follow you. That’s not a reason to keep the costume on. But you deserve to know the price before you’re standing there holding it.

And we got into nervous system literacy, which is the thing I actually care about. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn — not as a personality quiz, but as information. Your body has been running a strategy this whole time. You’re allowed to know what it is.

Fair warning: this one is more direct than the other episodes I’ve posted. If you’re in a stretch where you need soft, come back to it later. It’ll keep.

I went on The Deeper Love Podcast with Alex Croxford to talk about something most people will only discuss with a verdict already in hand.

Alex works with women in the aftermath of an affair. It’s a room almost nobody will sit in without judgment, and she does it, which is why I said yes.

What she asked me to do was explain the mechanism. Not to excuse anything — that’s a separate conversation and it doesn’t go away. But there’s a question underneath the moral one that almost never gets asked, which is: what was the body doing?

Here’s the short version. A nervous system that has been shut down for years does not respond to reason. It responds to signal. When a woman has spent a decade running on conservation — no preferences, no wants, no volume on anything — and then something finally registers as alive after years of registering as nothing, the system reaches for it with everything it has. Because it has confused aliveness with rescue. It isn’t a character assessment. It’s a body that got one bar of signal after a long time with none, and lunged.

I think there’s real harm in women being handed only the moral conversation. If the two options on the table are I’m a bad person and I had my reasons, most people pick one and stop thinking. Neither tells you what was happening in your body for the ten years before, which is the only part you can actually do anything with.

We also got into why marriages go transactional and how quietly it happens. Why the mirroring you learned at nine is still running at thirty-nine. Why talk therapy can be excellent and still not reach what’s frozen. And the finish line, which Alex has as little patience for as I do.

I brought my own story too — the divorce, the layoff, the year I couldn’t locate myself. Not the same situation, but the same underlying question: who are you when you’re not who you had to become?

Fair warning: this one goes to tender places. Read the room in your own body before you press play.

I sat down with Justina on the Sacred Soul Sisters podcast a few weeks ago, and I want to be honest about why I’m posting it here.

Her room is not my room. She comes at this through energy work and spirituality; I come at it through nervous systems and adult learning. But we ended up in the same place, which is what made the conversation worth having. Two people who arrived from opposite directions at the same observation: the women who look like they’re handling it are frequently the ones nobody thinks to ask about.

We got into a lot. The lion in the living room — what your body does when the threat sits on your couch for a decade, and why it keeps doing it after the lion leaves. Why your nervous system is the CEO and your rational brain is the intern who does not get a vote during a crisis. The threat database and the safety database, and why your system keeps running the old pattern when one of them is empty. The micro-moment work, which is smaller and less impressive than it sounds and is the only thing I’ve seen actually move the needle.

I also said the thing I say everywhere, which is that a finish line sells and a finish line is a lie. You will end up back in the Ashes. That is not failure, it is the design. What changes is how long the return takes.

And I told a story I don’t tell often, about a Christmas tree and a three-year-old and the moment I realized I was managing three people’s emotions and none of them were mine.

If you’ve been reading here and wondering what the Spiral actually is, this is probably the fastest way in. It’s a conversation, not a lecture, and Justina asked me one question near the end that I genuinely had to sit with.

Fair warning: the episode uses vocabulary I don’t use. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the substance holds, and I’d rather point you to a good conversation in a different dialect than only ever talk to people who already sound like me.

I had so much fun with this one.

Surviving-ish is hosted by someone who gets it — not in the “I’ve read the research” way, but in the “I’ve lived it and I’m still going to make you laugh about the laundry pod exploding” way. The whole premise of the show is that surviving hard things doesn’t mean you lose your sense of humor about the small ones. That you can hold real grief and real comedy in the same hand. That people don’t have to walk on eggshells around you just because you’ve been through something. I respect that more than I can say, honestly, because it’s exactly how I try to live.

We got into a lot. Ambient trauma — that low-grade, constant hum of stress that comes from just existing in 2026 even when nothing is technically wrong. High-functioning depression and why it’s so often complex trauma in disguise. Why meditation fails when your nervous system is actually activated, which is the exact moment everyone tells you to meditate. We talked about my own fireball moments, losing my identity inside my marriage, and the loop I didn’t realize I was stuck in until I was already deep in it.

We also got into the four states of the Spiral, which apparently landed, because at one point, he stopped me mid-conversation and said he had accepted that I would have to bill him for the coaching session when it was over. That’s the kind of conversation it was — the kind where you forget you’re recording.

You can find him on YouTube and TikTok, and every Tuesday night, he does a joint TikTok live with the Un-Holier Podcast (your girl may sit down with them occasionally, also!). Full disclosure: I’m sitting down with Un-Holier soon. Consider this your foreshadowing.

I reached out to Christine after listening to her episode on caregiver burnout — the quiet moment when you realize the work is no longer sustainable. The way she talked about the tension between service and self-preservation, and the invitation to actually listen to the subtle signals that something wants to shift, stopped me mid-walk.

It felt familiar. Not just as someone who teaches this stuff, but as a woman who spent years performing fine while her nervous system was running on fumes.

That’s the thread that runs through both of our works, honestly. The gap between how you look on the outside and what’s actually happening underneath. The way high-functioning people are the last ones anyone thinks to check on — including themselves. Christine comes at it through Ayurveda and conscious caregiving. I come at it through nervous system mechanics and the Spiral. Different maps, same terrain.

We got on a call, talked for a while before we hit record, and by the time we actually started the episode, it felt less like an interview and more like two people who’d been circling the same thing from different angles finally getting to say it out loud together.

If you’ve ever kept going long past the point your body was asking you to stop, this one’s for you.

Learn More about the work Christine is doing at Sacred Window on her website.

https://sacredwindowstudies.com/

This is the most technical of the guest spots I’ve posted, and probably the most useful if you want to understand how the framework actually works rather than just recognize yourself in it.

Kelly gave me room to explain things properly, which not every host does. So we got into the mechanism.

The two databases. Your nervous system keeps a running file of every moment that registered as threat, and a second one for every moment that registered as safe. When the first is overflowing and the second is nearly empty, your body defaults to the only material it has. That’s why you can walk into a genuinely safe room and have your system brace anyway. It isn’t reading the room. It’s reading its own records, and its records are one-sided.

The spiral staircase. This is the piece people ask about most. You will pass the same window again — the same numbness, the same flat stretch, the same here I am, back at the beginning. But you’re not at the beginning. You’re at a different altitude looking through the same glass, carrying things you didn’t have last time. The window doesn’t change. Your position relative to it does.

We also covered the signs that you’re running on survival rather than choice: the flatness, the sense of watching yourself from slightly outside your own life, and the hairpin triggers — where you feel nothing for weeks and then everything at once over something small. Those two aren’t opposites. They’re the same system at different points in the cycle.

And people-pleasing, which I refuse to call a personality flaw. It’s a logged conclusion. Somewhere along the line your body filed the finding that your needs cost more than they were worth, and it has been operating on that finding ever since. You don’t argue it out of that. You give it new entries — small ones, repeatedly, where you take up room and nothing bad happens.

There’s an image in here about shaving a sliver off a piece of paper every day. You never notice the day it happens. You notice the year you look down and there’s barely any paper left.