gray-haired woman standing in a living room with right hand on hip, smiling — Photo provided by Amanda JP Brown.

This is a transcript of the conversation between myself, Brandi Fleck, Host of the Human Amplified podcast, and Amanda JP Brown, Nashville-based psychotherapist and best-selling author with expertise in healthy attachment, childhood and generational trauma, shame, and self-worthiness issues.

Amanda moved to Nashville recently from Oregon where she spent a couple years after moving there from Arizona. She’s here in Nashville because she followed her heart after her second divorce, which she openly talked about with me during her Human Amplified interview. She’s busy with her therapy practice serving others who want to heal from and in relationship while she’s mastering her own healing journey, dabbling in ballet in her spare time, and loving on her dog, Leroy.

Her best selling book that you’'ll likely want to grab is You’re Brave Enough: 8 Daily Practices to Be Your Own HERO.

This interview with Amanda JP Brown is the MOST popular interview in the history of Human Amplified, so I know you’ll love it. Let us know in the comments what you’re taking away from it.

If you’d rather listen than read, you can do that here, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.

What does being human mean to you?

Being human to me, it's about experiencing life and building relationships and engaging in connection with people, having moments of just that experience. It's the consciousness, but it's also this somatic, energetic experience as well. It's the totality of being human.

It's we're not just like what we think or what we've done, but we are so much more than any of those things. And it's really coming into understanding that you are beyond comprehension and that the way that you engage with people is important and being really compassionate and curious when you're in relationship and understanding that things ebb and flow. So it's all like the good, the bad and not.

I don't believe there's just like, oh, it's just being positive. It really is about being with the totality of our experience, including the grief, the tough things, the things that knock us down because through those experiences, that adversity we face, we really start to uncover pieces of who we are that we wouldn't have without that. So I think it's just embracing our whole experience of life and showing up for it.

I love that. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Everybody, I am super excited to welcome Amanda JP Brown to the show today. Amanda, thank you for being here. And how are you doing?

I am great, thank you so much for having me, Brandi. I'm super excited to be here.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to diving in. We're gonna talk about marriage, we're gonna talk about divorce, healing and all kinds of things in between. And yeah, I just think it's gonna be full of gems for our listeners. Before we jump in…

Can you tell our listeners a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Yeah, absolutely. It'd be my pleasure. So I am Amanda, I have a dog, Leroy.

I am new, recently moved to Nashville, Tennessee. And I originally grew up in Arizona, but also a little bit in Oregon, which is where I moved from, from the coast. I am a psychotherapist, which means I help people with their problems.

I listen to people talk about them. I work predominantly with adults and couples, working on relationship stuff, all the way from how do we improve our relationship to I think I'm ready for divorce, and I want to work on my self-worth, shame. I've had my own journey through shame and self-worth.

I've authored a book called Your Brave Enough, Eight Daily Practices to Be Your Own Hero. And it really looks at the practices to come through this process of looking for somebody to save you and a savior. And so all of that stuff, which often is nuanced and tied into relationships.

And yeah, I've been divorced twice, starting to date again.

That's great. I'm just making a few notes here while we talk, because the shame and the self-worth is such a big deal. And it impacts our relationships so much.

So I want to make sure we follow up on that.

Yeah, absolutely. That's probably... And whether you're a man or a woman, as humans, we have this experience.

I work with both men and women and a variety of different types of couples. And I see this come out in a lot of... So my background when I started...

So I'm a social worker, but also have a master's in criminal justice. And when I started, I started out in early childhood trauma and doing infant toddler mental health family work. So working a lot on birth to five trauma and family relationships and attachment.

So that is where I worked predominantly. And then I took that and education, training, understanding and switched into working with adults and how our early life experiences, early relationships, all and our kind of exchange in those of how those impact and imprint us. And then what meaning we make about ourselves, what meaning we make about being in relationship and all this stuff.

And sometimes it's so challenging because you might be like, why am I like this? Why is this happening? And it's stuff that's rooted before language.

It's rooted before we really understand the dynamics, but from the time we are starting to grow in utero, we are engaging in a relationship. So, and learning about life and experiences from there forward.

Oh my goodness. I'm so glad you brought that up because…

People think that before you have actual memories, back when you're little, what happens doesn't matter-you're not going to remember it. But it's there. It becomes ingrained.

Yeah, it's so interesting down to like, and never do I, when I work with my clients, never do I'm like, oh, let's just blame our parents for all our problems, right? Like, obviously, we're all working from this best that we can. Sure, some people are unhealthy and toxic and abusive, and so we're not necessarily talking about that.

But most people, most parents are doing the best that they can, and they're human. We forget as children that our parents are human until we're like older and understand, because we have more life experience. But sometimes if we're crying when we're a baby and they don't know what to do, so they just keep giving us a bottle, well, now we're associating being fed every time we're in discomfort.

And that isn't something that we understand, but it could absolutely be that emotional eating component. I'm not saying it's all of that, right? It's just like one factor and thing that could be happening.

Or what does touch like? Do you like being hugged? Do you not like being hugged?

Like some of that is all kind of imprinted early on and does stay with us. And so it doesn't mean it can't change. It doesn't mean we can't grow.

But there's a body awareness or just this meaning that we make of things that because of what we experience.

Yeah, gotcha. That is so interesting. Let me get to this. So I wasn't planning on asking you this right away, but …

How does that early childhood impact determine whether a marriage will work or not or how that plays out?

Yeah, so well, one, there's so many factors, right? But what we experience in relationship with our parents is often what we begin to lay down as like normal. So our early life experiences help dictate how we view the world.

And so whether we see the world is safe and loving or scary and chaotic, whether people can be trusted or not, those are all laid down early on based on what our experience was. And I work with couples who one person will say to the other person before they get to therapy like, yeah, that's not normal. Like that's not normal to have your parent do that to you.

And while there's some things that we know might not be normal, like sexual abuse, things like that, the more nuanced stuff of like emotional neglect, emotional abuse, the things that we're more commonly exposed to are ways that we sometimes then go, oh, this is normal, it's normal that somebody talks shitty to me, because maybe we had a parent who was critical, so then we end up in a relationship with a critical spouse, and it doesn't feel good, but it feels familiar. And so the other thing is we're witnessing, so not only are we having our own experience with our parents, with our dad, with our mom, or whoever is our primary caregiver, siblings, we're also witnessing what is their relationship like with each other. How are they treating each other?

And so we're getting imprints and maps of what men and women engage in and how they support each other or not, how they communicate or not. And it's all kind of through observation. Nobody's actually teaching us and going, this is how men and women do this.

We just learn by observing, internalizing, and we make our own meaning, whether our parents have a conversation with us. And so at four or five or older or younger, we're already going, okay, okay. So this means this.

If I do that, then this. And we're just making. And so sometimes we learn things that our parents never intended us to learn, that we don't have to go into it, but there's a controversial thing around spanking.

And like when the old kind of thing of, well, I'm doing this because I love you, that can lay down a really like not great thing of physical harm happens to me from people who love me. And so that makes it easier to accept abuse. It does not mean we do that knowingly.

These are usually very unconscious, very underneath like undercurrent kinds of beliefs or even things that we're not aware of. Oh, that might be getting in my way. That might be why I'm staying.

Not that we're responsible for anybody else's abuse. That's not it at all. But just that if we start to associate physical harm with love at a young age, then a physical harm comes in our relationship or some type of harm, and the person is that dynamic, we might be more like, okay, this is normal.

Does that make sense?

That totally makes sense. And that's huge. That's like, it sort of blows my mind a little bit, the impact.

Is that generational trauma and how do you even go about breaking the cycle?

Yeah, so a lot of work in conscious, bringing things into conscious awareness. But yes, that's part of generational trauma and some of the things that just get passed on. There was this story that I heard about this mom that was cooking a ham.

I don't know if you've ever heard this story, and she cut the ends off, and her daughter happened to be in the kitchen and was like, why do you do that? And she's like, I don't know. My mom always did.

So they go ask her mom, and so they ask grandma, why did you do that? And she's like, I don't know. It's because my mom always did.

And so it is, then they went back another generation, and it was like, oh, well, I don't know, but let's ask my mom. So it's this like, let's go four generations back, that mom happens to still be alive. And she goes, well, that's because my pan was only that big.

So I cut off the ends of the ham so it would fit in the pan. But it gets carried through our lineage because nobody asks questions. Nobody, like we just kind of accept things as they are.

And it's not that sometimes it's when we ask those questions, we dig into it, we go, well, they're doing it differently, not from a critical lens, but a lens of curiosity, a lens of if somebody says, well, that's not normal in families to go, hmm, that's interesting. I wonder what's that about? Where did that come from?

And sometimes we won't even get into epigenetics, but there's some stuff that is talked about in research that's found that generational trauma also passes through our DNA from our grandparents. And so that's a whole different side thing we don't have time to go into. But it's just interesting how all of these things kind of flow.

And it's really when we start to explore, how do I show up in the world? How do I show up for myself? How do I show up in relationships, whether it's friends, kids, family, partner, and for myself?

Like, what is that about? And how does this feel when we start exploring that? Then we can start to dive in and figure some of this stuff out.

So asking questions from a lens of curiosity is good, for sure.

Yes, the lens of curiosity. Definitely not the critical, but we're really good at that lens. Like, you know, like, why did I do that?

It brings this element of self judgment and like can lead into spiraling of negative talk and rumination. But really, this is about curiosity and wonderment and having some lightness in our experience to understand more about who we are, not to close ourselves off, but to open up and then have more conscious decision and be more intentional about how we show up in our relationships.

I love that. Like, I've gotten chills like almost the entire time you've been talking. So thank you. Let's talk about you for a minute before we dive into more of the psychology stuff.

What have you been through personally with marriage and divorce?

So great question. Well, my first experience with divorce was my parents when I was like 14. So that totally shifted so much of my life, including my relationship with my father, how I started to engage in relationships and high school.

And so it just kind of spiraled for me into some other like really tough things in life because of just what was happening and involvement with substance abuse and getting involved in those kinds of things. And so when I got out of that kind of thing, that period of my life and started to get into relationships, like there was this shame that I was caring about who I was because of what I had done in my teen years. And so I was carrying this.

So when I started to get into relationships, I didn't show up or share a lot of who I was. I didn't have a lot of self-confidence, like in some areas, but not in other areas. And I was really like looking back, I was really like wanting to get married, wanting to be accepted, wanting to be loved.

I just wanted stability. I was actually just talking to a friend about this. Like one of the deep desires I had was stability because we had like moved so much.

And because I hated change, I think I stayed in relationships too long. And so my very first real boyfriend like crushed my heart. And like many of us, we have like these and he was so and we're still friends.

But he was so important in my life and helping me get through that pivotal time back into school because I dropped out. And I thought this was the man that I was going to marry. And then it was not.

And so I ended up looking for somebody completely opposite of him and rushed into a marriage with somebody who had a lot of flags. I was young. I was in my early 20s wanting to like just so idealistic and like love conquers all things like that whole space.

And so we ended up married. It was not a good marriage. I remember even saying, Are you sure you want to do this?

I only want to get married one time. Mind you, I have never been married and divorced twice. So there were things that like I could see, but I chose to ignore because I just believe that I could fix it and I could like take care of it.

And I could see somebody's potential for growth. And because of my own experience with change and growth and overcoming difficult things in your life, I see people's capacity for growth, change and their potential, which is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing. And it does not help you stay in the reality of what's happening.

If you're focused on potential and breadcrumbs of what's actually happening. So we were married for almost five years. We split up right before a five-year anniversary, and it was very unhealthy.

He was very mentally unstable. It was extremely emotionally abusive. He would probably be considered a narcissist by definition of today.

And it was leading towards physical abuse. And I was able to have this moment of clarity of, I don't want this. And it was so much in that relationship, I'd compromised so much of who I was.

I was scared to say things like, I like stainless steel appliances over white because he liked things a certain way. So I just found myself more and more retreating, giving up, letting go of things that were important to me or I valued and distancing myself from people to be in this relationship. So I wasn't honoring, if I said I valued friends and family, I wasn't honoring that.

I was choosing him over them. And so through this process, it was interesting when we had split up. Nobody really knew, but there was this, I've talked about it a few times, but it always makes me chuckle because it was the moment that I knew I'd compromised and given up so much of my identity to be in the relationship.

I was working for attorneys as a legal assistant, and they had a party for me because it was like a five-year anniversary. I'd worked there five years. And they did the all-American girl, red, white, and blue apple pie and ice cream.

And if you know me, that's not really me. That was him. He was a Marine. Our house was very Americana. And it just was not... It was not representative of me.

And I walked in, and I was like, oh, it was like a punch in the gut, you know, when your gut drops out and your, like, heart sunk. Everything sunk. And it was...I can still… It's not as strong today because I'm like 20-plus years past that. But it was so pivotal for me to really go, okay, I need to do some work around this.

I've given up so much of myself to be in this relationship. Mind you, I was going to school for therapy. I was doing...well, just had started going into school wanting to be a forensic psychologist. And so I was like, okay, got out of that relationship. But instead of really, really, really doing my work, I just made the promise to myself that I will never do that again.

Never compromise myself like that again. But I didn't go to therapy. I didn't do work.

I just kind of like moved on. I was like, I'm still going to listen to my music. I'm still going to do this.

And so through the next couple years, I ended up meeting another person. And there was still some damage from that first relationship. There were some other things that happened that really kind of impacted me and bleed into other relationships sometimes.

And, you know, he seemed better. I seemed to uphold myself a little bit more. And yet I still compromised a lot of who I was.

I still compromised like how important physical fitness was for me or, you know, this or that or things. And there were again signs, signs of whether or not I was a priority in the relationship, whether or not this was a healthy relationship for me. But why?

And again, I got into that relationship because I wanted to be accepted and loved and I wanted stability and all the things that we taught through society to achieve. And I wanted to have a baby. And so I needed to find a man because I was like 30.

And so it's like, I need to get on this. It's like the biological clock is ticking. The pressure is real.

And so I ended up in this next relationship, and it was fun and it was carefree. It was also very surfacey. I wasn't because I was still hadn't completely done my own shame or self-worth work.

There were still things that I didn't want to talk about or I didn't want to share about myself or I didn't know how to show up confidently in or I didn't know how to uphold my own standards or boundaries or the things that were important to me. So I compromised a lot again, but it's also the relationship that actually, because it was so surfacey, it allowed me to do some of my own personal growth work. And when I started doing that, that's actually when the wedge got bigger between us, because I now wanted more emotional intimacy.

I wanted more depth. I wanted to be able to show up in this relationship, in a relationship with somebody who could meet me in this vulnerable, different way. And he was not able to do that.

And actually, it was so interesting when we were in therapy. And he's like, I just want her to go back to how she was. And I'm like, I just want you to be who I see you can be.

And neither one of us was actually looking at who are we today. And we weren't in the present with either one of us. Neither one of us was presently aware.

And it was even a year after we were married, I think I asked him if he thought I lied to him about who I was. And he was like, yes, I do. And I was like, and it was, I had started my growth work and I'm like, well, I just feel safer to share these things now because I was feeling safer within myself.

And so then it made that sense of safety within myself made it easier to kind of show up. Although it takes practice. If you're not used to being vulnerable, that takes practice over time.

And we eventually came to this understanding that while we cared about each other, it was not working in our relationship and amicably decided to divorce. And from there, I dove into a lot more deeper work for myself and just kind of like has has taken, let's see, it's been three years now have really taken some more intentional intentionality around doing my own work, really understanding what is it that I'm upholding for myself? And how do I do that?

So I don't actually give, not that compromise isn't great, but there's this balance between compromising your standards and who you are in order to make a relationship work. And then coming into agreement with someone so both of what you need is held. And so versus just giving away yours to make them happy or to keep peace, which I see a lot of my clients, I just let it go to keep the peace.

That's my experience with divorce.

Yeah, well, I really appreciate you being so open and honest about it. And a couple of things that I mean, it's all important, but a couple of things to point out is, I think…

When one person in the relationship does that personal inner work, and they start to become more of who they are, it changes you. I feel like so often that affects the relationships, and so often the other person might not be able to handle that change.

Totally. And not just an interpersonal, really, like a partner. It's a lot of your relationships.

That's actually one of the things that people don't necessarily talk about, like what's a possible outcome of going to therapy, losing people in your life.

Absolutely.

Not everyone will be able to meet you, not everyone you will want to take with you to this different level or awareness that you get to. You'll really start evaluating your relationships much differently and seeing things that you didn't see before, which is why some people choose not to do that. And there is nothing wrong with that.

But it's also like not everyone can meet you when you start to do this journey.

Right. And then the other things is…

Do you think that the shame and self worth were directly connected to compromising your identity?

I think parts of it. Yeah, I think it was there and definitely was there prior to some of that. But I think the shame and self-worth issues were often the root of why I compromised.

Like, so if we look at like, why did I compromise? It's because I didn't feel comfortable in myself. I held shame around.

I prioritized other people's needs over mine and would make justifications for their behavior. Like, oh, well, they've had a rough life. Well, that's not necessarily an excuse to be a jerk to somebody or to be abusive or harmful.

But sometimes when we feel unworthy of something better, we then justify the behavior of someone else. So then it's actually easier for us to accept why that happened. Well, it's because of this.

And but yeah, I think the compromising came a lot. And then I think it's like this cycle. Then it like reinforced like my worthiness story, and it reinforced like shame, and it reinforced like it just kind of was the cyclic.

I can't say that word. It wasn't. I try to say that in sessions and my clients laugh because sometimes it's just a hard word.

But it's that cycle that then it just keeps affirming that story. And it's until we step out of that, until we look at that deeper level of shame and self-worth and exploring through that. Once we start to go through, and I usually call it like our darkness because it feels really dark to be in, that once we start kind of working and integrating the pieces that we've rejected of who we are, once we start bringing them back in, loving them and being compassionate towards them and really going, I understand why she made those decisions or he made those decisions at that age and really loving ourselves the way that we've wanted somebody else or at least accepting ourselves, because sometimes getting to self-love is really hard.

So at least if we can accept that that was what happened, even though we don't like it, it gets easier to move into this other space.

And what have you done to heal?

Therapy.

So I went to therapy. I also did a lot with journaling and writing and reading different books, like Brené Brown's The Gifts of Imperfection is one I often give to clients struggling in some of these areas.

But really looking at going to therapy, doing some deeper work. I've worked with some really amazing coaches. Actually, what started my, I say descent into, but it's not really a descent, but my dive into this healing was really actually wanting to get more physically fit and joining, like hiring a coach for a bikini competition.

But she did this whole piece about mindset. And mind you, it's so funny, because I'm like a trained therapist, and I'm going in this other way. So, but a lot of it had to do with that.

And then it really came in. That was when I really started to open up more, going into therapy, doing deeper work. But really a lot of it for me also is this introspection.

Of questioning, again, from this curiosity lens, from honoring and upholding, and then practicing, practicing vulnerability, practicing showing up, having discussions with some friends who are, you know, therapists or coaches doing kind of some of this work, or even friends who are really into personal growth. And so it was just this ebb of moving into these directions and like being able to sit with myself and what I was holding, whether it was the beliefs I had about myself, the things that I wanted, like the regrets that I never was going to be able to experience in my life, like being able to sit in all of that pain and all of that grief. And so it's going through that process and that ebbs and flows.

It's not like it's all one and done. It's like a process of unfolding, uncovering, coming back to, but just being allowing myself to be in that space. And not just from a word space, but the other piece that I've really tried to do is be more embodied.

And what I mean by that is I'm a big proponent of using movement and getting in touch with how we feel through movement. So even incorporating that in my life more, because sometimes to process what we're feeling and what we're going through, we don't have language for. But we can feel it in our bodies.

So just movement and music and different experiential art modalities is very helpful. So the creativity aspect, but getting in to process through that way to heal as well. So I've done it like a mixture of different things.

Yeah, I love that you brought that up, that it's a mixture because a lot of times when you're healing stuff like this, it's not like a one and done kind of thing.

There's not just one modality that's going to be the silver bullet.

No. You've got to find your own concoction. I think that's like...

Yeah, it's like your own little potion of mix and match. It's like, sometimes I see it's interesting. People eat EMDR or this or that for trauma.

And I've worked with people like that didn't work for me. And it's because that doesn't... It's like, I'm not knocking that.

It's great. And it's not the only way to heal. It's like just because it's this doesn't mean it's the only way.

I mean, I've done indigenous practice healings. I've done healings with different kinds of modalities, different teachers, because they each bring something. But really, what I've had to pay attention to is what feels right to me.

And because of the self-worth, there was such this big element of self-doubt. And so it really was once I was able to start tuning in to what feels right to me, and then following that. It feels like I need to work with this person.

It feels like I need to try this. It feels like this. That's actually when it made it easier to do deeper healing.

But yeah, oftentimes, I'll have clients in session go, I thought I already dealt with this. And I'm like, I know, isn't that the worst? But welcome to therapy and life.

You just get to go a little deeper with it. And they're like, great. I'm like, I know, I feel ya.

Exactly.

Yeah. Well, if you don't mind, I would love to pivot into a conversation about the institution of marriage and how it's evolving.

So I've also been through a divorce.

And before I got remarried this time, I had this conversation with my now husband about Maslow's hierarchy of needs and how I could just see marriage on the tip top of that pyramid. It's no longer about, well, sometimes it's about security, but really…

We put this pressure on marriage to be so many other things. What are your thoughts about that?

Yeah. If I had known now then what I know now, I probably wouldn't have gotten married so young or for the reasons that I did initially. Yeah, I think we go in.

When we go in for security, it's very different than when we go in for that higher level of self-actualization. How do we grow together as a couple and have these conversations? I think naturally we have this idea and expectation of what marriage will look like, and we go in at the security level, we go in on the lower level, and then we expect to go there, but we actually haven't had any of these conversations with our partner, so that creates disconnection, that creates distance between because you both have different views.

And so marriage as an institution is, if you never asked your partner about what they expect from marriage, and you've gotten married, which I have, I've never asked that question prior, what does marriage mean to you? What does this mean? Like, I don't even think I asked myself those questions.

It gets really, when you start to grow as a person, as you start to age, if you have children and your children start to age, it's a constant coming together and reflection and getting to that self-actualization, but it's this process through these things and how do we do it together? Did that answer your question?

Yeah, I loved all those thoughts because I was looking at it a little bit differently. Like I'm almost like as an institution, it's up here now, but maybe it's not that way for everybody else. And it is like two people who decide to come into a marriage or depending who you are, maybe more than two people are in that marriage, and you go through an evolution as a unit.

Yeah, I think that you expect to. Like I think absolutely I see that. And yeah, how is marriage kind of defined now?

Because there are so many people who open their marriages or who have like this multi-layered, and really knowing that for yourself of what do I want, what am I opening with or open to or willing to explore into. Sometimes you don't know until you're in those moments, but it is very interesting because I think culturally it's set up as this is what it looks like. So it keeps us stuck, and this is the trajectory that it's supposed to go when really it doesn't have to be that way.

And we get to question it and we get to go, what is this going to look like? And it is interesting because so many people I've worked with as their kids get older, they've struggled in their relationship of connecting because they've been so busy living to parallel lives. And it is so how I view relationships and marriage.

I mean, I'm not married again. I would consider it under right circumstances, but how I view partnership and relationships is really you are leading parallel lives, but there's these constant points of connection and checking in where you're going in the same direction to build something. And sometimes we forget to check in and make sure we're still on the same page.

And we just expect that we are, and then we get down the road to whatever point that we finally check in and we're in two different places.

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So you mentioned that there's this cultural definition of what maybe marriage is, and then there's the reality of it where we're sort of like creating what marriage is, whether we're conscious of it or not, whether we're intentional about it or not. So knowing these two things are happening…

How can people change their perspective or their expectations around marriage to actually have a better relationship with the act of partnering?

Yeah, that's beautiful, the act of partnering. Yeah, I think it is opening up one again, looking really at what are my understandings of marriage from a family experience. Like, what did I witness from my parents, my grandparents, relatives?

Like, what did I, so what did I grow up with in my kind of family culture of what marriage is like and what relationships are like? So really paying attention to that. But also paying attention to what does, if you're religious, what does my religious aspect and knowledge of what relationships and marriage and partnership mean?

Because that can be very different for people, depending on what religion or even what church within the religion that they go to has views, has a culture, has a subculture to that. Then you get to the media, kind of like a bigger cultural experience of just like, what did I learn from media and TV and society in general about relationships down to like, although I don't know that music videos are as much today, but like even what am I witnessing from celebrities? And what am I witnessing if like music videos of what the dynamics of relationships are?

And what have I kind of internalized? So really, there's a lot of like self internalization. But also, even if you're married, having these discussions with your partner about what they, all those things for them, because you're given a roadmap of what relationships look like, he or she is given a roadmap of what relationships are look like and whether those match and overlap.

And you're both trying to often get somewhere that might not even be on your map. So it's really then understanding those things and how you come into partnership, but also how you navigate conflict, what kinds of like, you know, affirmations or engagement do you need from your partner? What's important?

Like it's really, there's this deeper dive of understanding who we are and what our partner is able and willing to give and having conversations around those, because that's absolutely we just start working and going. And then we just, things fall into place or they're out of place. And then we're trying to figure out, Oh my God, what happened?

And we've just been functioning in this unspoken rules. And when it works, it works. But when it doesn't, it doesn't.

And that's when usually there's even bigger conflict. Cause there's like, wait, I don't understand this.

Now, is marriage as an institution still valid?

Oh, that's a loaded question. I think it depends on who you are. I think that as an institution, like it truly gives you things that say, you can't have without it.

If you are in partnership and say a life partner with someone and you're not legally married and you, they go into the hospital and they say, oh, only family, only the spouse. Or if say you're in a relationship later and they have kids, but you're not their kid's parent and you're not married, the decisions would go to the family and you as the partner would not necessarily be considered the one to make that decision unless it was legally written out. So I think that there are some institutional things that would still be beneficial.

I don't personally think that it's absolutely necessary to get married, to have a partnership and a relationship with somebody. People will say, oh, well, it's just a piece of paper. And while that may be true, there is a lot of things that come into play with that piece of paper that get tied up into things, including our own opinions about what that means to us.

So I think it can still be valid. It's just important to understand why am I walking into this or why do I continue into this if you're not in a happy marriage?

Well, we are about to wrap up our time here, and I'm definitely going to give you a chance to share how people can find you. I think the work you're doing is so great and so important.

Is there anything that I didn't ask that you feel is important to share?

That's a great question. You know, I think that if you're questioning your relationship, I think that it's important just to know that that's okay and to find a safe place to process through. And just because you're questioning it does not mean it ends in divorce.

It just means that you get to then have this beautiful experience of figuring out this new part of yourself that's trying to come through or this new experience. And then you get to see by sharing that with your partner when you're ready, as you've processed it, if they can meet you. And so it does not mean like just if you're questioning it, questioning a relationship doesn't mean it will end.

But just means that you have the opportunity to kind of deepen in and learn more about yourself. And so just get the support and place to process that that feels the safest for you.