Be The Wolf

Genea hired people the wrong people and always had to do the work herself. She spent long stretches of her life single or with people who couldn’t connect deeply.  When she finally met a man who was everything she wanted, attentive, caring, his sh*t together, she couldn’t wait to get out of his house in the morning. She made up a story and ghosted him. For years, those looked like three separate p...

Twelve CEOs sat around a table, phones left at the door. The speaker knocked on the table and said, “This table, not real.” Frank O’Brien stopped him and asked him to go back. It took Frank three or four weeks to understand the point: you create your own problems. Genea puts it plainly: the meaning you give a problem is often shit you made up. It looks like replaying what you said in the meeting....

LA Tech Week had just wrapped, and Genea couldn’t stop thinking about technology. Not the newest AI tool. The one she says most people aren’t operating accurately ... the technology of you. Hers was downloaded early. Genea grew up with physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect, and her first rule to fit in, stay fed, and stay liked was to shrink. Later she got smarter and learned...

Louisette Geiss was sitting in her living room breastfeeding her baby when 60 Minutes wanted to talk to her about Harvey Weinstein. Back in 2008, she had walked out of his hotel room and turned down a three-picture deal rather than trade her body for it. Now the articles were out, and the people she had told over the years knew people. Gloria Allred agreed to represent her coming forward, but not...

In middle school, Lihi Orbach Forney had a thought she never said out loud. "I have so much to give," she remembers thinking, "and I don't know how to do it, and nobody's getting me, and I don't know how the me that I know is in there can come out." She didn't get to test that thought for a long time. She spent the next twenty years as a sound engineer, mixing commercials and documentary films, ex...

Ali Taylor grew up able to predict a room before he ever walked into it. Wherever something was missing, he figured out how to be it. That's how he survived his house. It's also how he built his entire adult life. He's a business consultant now. He helps business owners build companies that don't depend on them for everything, so they can actually have a life outside of work. He's excellent at spo...

Jennifer is an intuitive who has worked cases for the FBI and law enforcement, including helping catch someone on the world's most wanted list for child trafficking. But for years, none of that credibility stopped her from needing something else. She needed people to believe her gift was real, not for the work, but just to confirm to herself she wasn't crazy. Her own father gave her the proof, wit...

Genea was four years old the first time she learned that loving someone meant losing them. She was tied up and locked in a closet as a kid, and every time she fought her way free, the ropes came back tighter, until she stopped fighting altogether. She didn't stay stuck in that closet. She carried the rules she  made in there into everything after. She stayed in a relationship until it felt like it...

For seven years, Omar nursed his mother through a terminal illness, and he did it the only way he knew how. Compartmentalize. Keep going. Don't feel it. That was the rule he'd been raised on since he was a kid, machismo, you're a man, you don't feel, you don't do this, you don't do that. It worked. He got through it. What he didn't expect was that the same rule would still be running years later,...

By the early 1900s, every wolf had been hunted out of Yellowstone National Park. Visitors kept coming. Old Faithful kept erupting right on schedule. Nobody visiting could tell that anything was missing. But something was. The elk overpopulated. The riverbanks eroded. The beavers left, then the birds left, and one piece at a time, the whole park became a shell of what it used to be, while it still...

Alicia's boss made her print out every financial document she had, every week, so he could go through it and highlight what she wasn't allowed to spend. She was engaged to his son at the time. He told her she didn't need a raise, because once she was married and having babies, she wouldn't need one. She let him set that line. Just like she let her martial arts instructor set the line at thirteen,...

Genea's first art show was a one-night group show in a bar. She remembers standing in that room like she was on fire from the inside, what she still calls "anxiety on fire," pacing while people looked at the pieces she'd made, too scared to say a word back when someone told her they liked her work. She only talked to the people she already knew were safe. Everyone else, she shrank into the corner...

Alina Vehuni was that perfect girl. Silent most of her life, meeting every demand placed on her, putting herself last, because somewhere in childhood she learned that love had to be earned. Then, in her late 40s, her mother found out she was dating a man with a different skin color and gave her an ultimatum. Family, or him. This is what happens when love comes with conditions for long enough: you...

She was three sentences into a conversation with people she liked when her body made a decision her mind never signed off on. She turned. She walked away mid-sentence.  No argument. No trigger anyone else in the room could have named. This is what happens when a nervous system learns, long before language, that closeness carries risk. It does not wait for permission. It moves the body first and ha...

For years, Emily Depauw knew, deep down, that something was wrong. She just stopped trusting her gut. Then her body started to realign. And her whole personal life turned chaotic right along with it. Truths surfaced in her closest relationships, with her parents, with her romantic partner, truths that had been sitting there the whole time, waiting for her to stop overriding herself. She describes...

She gave that teacher exactly what she wanted. The grade came back an A, and something in her body clicked into place. Safe. Correct. Good job. This is what happens when a nervous system spends childhood in survival mode. It stops looking for the right choice and starts hunting for the choice that produces a hit of relief. That hit has a name. It is dopamine, and it is not a reward for doing well....

Angie Knierim was not having a breakdown on that waiting room floor. She was finally telling the truth. For thirteen years, doctors told her she was fine. Her body sent a different message. Migraines. Chest pain. A cough that never left. She smiled through all of it, because smiling through it was the only skill anyone ever rewarded her for. Then a scheduling mistake cracked open something that ha...

The sacrifice wasn't a choice. It was a survival strategy. And it has been running your life for a very long time. Genea Barnes doesn't talk around the hard stuff. In this episode, she goes straight to the root of one of the most painful patterns she sees in high-achieving, emotionally intelligent people … the ones who give everything, hold everyone together, and quietly wonder why they feel so fa...

The wound that's been stopping you might not have happened to you at all. Genea Barnes has spent years doing the work. Clearing money blocks. Healing abundance patterns. Trying every approach that promised to change her relationship with finances and freedom. And underneath all of it, a fear she could never fully reach. A sensation so old, so embedded, that she had no story to put to it. Because i...

There's a version of disappearing that nobody talks about. It doesn't look like falling apart. It looks like getting it all done. The matching sweatsuit at preschool drop-off. The perfectly managed household. The birthday party with the Etsy decorations. Eva Angeloff looked like a woman who had it together. And she did. She had everything managed. Everything except herself. Her husband finally sai...

You've built a life that looks right. So why does it feel like nothing? You're not someone who gave up. You've worked harder on yourself than most people will in a lifetime. Therapy. Coaches. Books. Retreats. You've rebuilt yourself more than once. And you're still here. In the gap. Between who you know you're supposed to be and where you actually are. Still waiting for it to feel the way you alwa...

She could have died. And the first thing she felt in that hospital bed was relief. Not because she wanted to die. But because for the first time in years, no one could ask anything of her. Erin Keating was a high-powered television executive …smart, driven, decorated …and completely running on empty.  Her marriage was crumbling.  Her identity was her job title.  She worked through COVID until her...

He had the money, the girlfriend, the travel, the fancy dinners. And he felt absolutely nothing. Ed Reay didn't know it at the time. That's the thing about building a life for everybody else … it looks like living …  You're moving.  You're doing.  You're showing up.  But there's no YOU in any of it. And the moment the external reason disappears, you realize you have no idea what you actually want....

She got everything she worked for. Then she quietly walked away from all of it. Genea Evola dreamed of being a news reporter from the time she was a little girl. She wanted to be seen. She wanted to tell the truth. She wanted to matter. Then she got the job. And the first thing it asked her to do was use her voice to harm people. That moment in a Flint, Michigan newsroom didn't just end a career....

She thought her communication was fine. It was the one thing quietly dismantling everything she was trying to build. Genea Barnes was likable. People loved being around her. She was warm and easy to be around. And for years, she told herself that meant she was a good communicator. But her art career never took off. Her business kept shapeshifting to match everyone else's opinions. The man she was...