Bold Becoming

Layla Rahmeh enjoyed her life, tremendously, until she had to escape it. She came from a loving family, was well educated, and after surviving cancer, no longer took everything life has to offer for granted. But then war broke out in her country, Syria, and being who she was made her a target for detention, torture, and death. So she chose to escape to save her life, and lost who she was in the pr...

Jacqueline was a school counselor, going about a pretty regular life. Everything changed on a dime when she got an HIV+ diagnosis. She decided to use God, rather than modern medicine, with the results ending up in her favor. Not only did she get cured from HIV, her life blossomed in ways she never would have expected. Hear about how Jacqueline’s perspectives changed around so many things as a resu...

Between 2019 - 2021, “I lost nearly every adult identity I had.” Meet Alex, who shares her transformation story through marriage, divorce, and a layoff, to come out overflowing with enthusiasm for life. This is the first time Alex shares her story publicly—her insights into harnessing pain, growth, and opportunity to become who she really is. Enjoy in articulate transparency, a behind the scenes v...

Raju has more unexpected identity loss events than you can shake a stick at. Today we talked about surviving the 2004 tsunami—the deadliest tsunami in history—while in Sri Lanka. Fortunately his whole family survived, but he’s had to work through a lot of trauma to come to terms with letting go of his two-year-old child to use his hands to save his own life. The tsunami would be his third of six n...

Sarah only knew her baby was alive because she cried at birth. But then everything unraveled. In a rundown hospital in foreign country, without her husband allowed to be there for the birth, her baby was instantly whisked away with only a sentence of explanation. Sarah details her family’s journey to keep their child with a catastrophic medical diagnosis alive. “The hard part is to have to adjust...

Ramming worthlessness into her head morning, noon, and night, Debbie’s father figure nipped her true identity in the bud. How wrong he was: Debbie became a pretty well functioning adult. Until a series of unwelcome, huge events, including surviving a mass shooting, turned her world upside down. She recognized that she’d not been doing so well for some time but didn’t do much to address that, until...

For decades, Stephenie never knew who she was. She grew up in a home with addiction and abuse, and since birth, her mother struggled to figure out Stephenie’s unexpected weight gain. This sowed the seeds for Stephenie’s focus on weight and body image. By age 11, she was anorexic, and eating became the one thing she could control. This morphed into anorexia and bulimia and she struggled for decades...

Andrea was really good at her PR job before she started working for her bully boss, during, and after. But working for him took a huge toll on her self-perception, to the point where she questioned whether he was right that she wasn’t any good. Andrea endured 8.5 years of chronic tears and a “living hell” until her breakthrough moment. Ponder with us, the many reasons we stay in abusive, power-ove...

Be careful what you ask for. Sara’s friend invited her on a trip. She said she’d only go if she got laid off and the rest is history. Sara began a journey away from abuse and bad behavior caused from stress, pressure, ego, and the drive for money and accolades. Leaving sunk costs behind her, she embarked on many trips, including with psychedelics. Hear about toxic work cultures impacting Sara’s id...

I’m adding a new format where I interview parents of children with catastrophic medical diagnoses. These episodes won’t focus on identity loss, but rather parents’ journeys as they navigate this specific challenge. While identity loss is still inherent in many of these stories, it won’t be the focus. We kick off with my dad’s story. I’m number three of four kids, and throughout my early childhood,...

Iryna went from being on an all-consuming academic tract to motherhood, wife, caretaker of her mom with cancer, and divorcee, and in the process found herself in a hopeless dark hole. “It felt like burned out land. Nothing alive there, like dry land with the cracked bottom when there’s no water and the tumbleweed is rolling there. This is how it felt inside.” Witness how Iryna’s life roles came ou...

Eugina Jordan’s been through some tough identity transitions. She immigrated from Russia to have a better life, survived an emotionally abusive marriage, and most recently, transformed after an unexpected layoff. Surprisingly, this last identity loss catalyst, rather than feeling like the rug was pulled out from under her, was an experience of flying away on a magic carpet. Find out how she used h...

Jess was a typical twenty-three-year-old getting to know the contours of living independently. An interior designer, she was less than a year into her first job out of college when COVID hit and she was promptly furloughed. Unable to support herself and unsure of what to do next, she started a self-discovery journey that turned into a personal transformation. Find out what discovering personal dev...

This is Part 2 of a two-part interview. Part one is about being the mother of a medically fragile child. Part 2 is about Stacey’s transformation around her brother’s death by suicide. Stacey wasn’t bent…she was broken. Her brother, who had bipolar and drug addiction, died by suicide in a jail cell. After his death, Stacey was in the darkest place of her life and contemplated suicide herself. But s...

Coming soon

show notes coming soon! Bio I’m an average human being, a mother, a poet, a writer, a trauma survivor, and a coach and healer.  I help parents who parent with a narcissistic partner or ex to preserve sanity, take their life back and support their children.  My experience of growing up in highly narcissistic environments, and later being in narcissistic relationships, led me to reflect on my own li...

When her husband got a job in Japan and she became a trailer wife, Linda was already a globetrotter. But now she gave up a successful corporate career to live in Japan with her husband. And she quickly found out how much of herself was wrapped up in her own career status. She was at a loss when people asked what her husband did and didn’t ask what she did. The move to Japan was the beginning of ma...

This episode continues the conversation with Terry Mandel. It’s where the identity shift discussion really takes off…finding out she’s lost family members in the Holocaust, when for over 60 years she believed her family had been spared that atrocity. ---------------------------------------- As a very young child, Terry Mandel had a sixth sense about her reality as it related to her family history....

As a very young child, Terry had a sixth sense about her reality as it related to her family history. Growing up in LA, she sensed there was something missing from her family’s immigration story and her family vehemently prohibited questions on this topic. As an older girl, when she learned of the Holocaust, her family story made even less sense—things just didn’t add up.   Now in her 60’s, Terry...

Amanda didn’t get the emotional support she needed growing up or for decades into adulthood. In fact, she was treated as if she was the source of her problems. In her twenties she became bulimic. In her thirties she estranged herself from her family and has been feeling better ever since.  What does it take to turn your life around to being one that works for you, regardless of whether others appr...

At eight years old, Ornela Maric became a child living with a parent with a life-threatening illness. In 1980, her mom got breast cancer. The years that followed dramatically impacted Ornela’s identity, and who she grew up to become. The most profound impact would be on the power of mindset, and in particular, how her mother role modeled responding to a prognosis by not accepting it as reality. ....

Patricia Loff remembers her first sign of illness: she got bags under her eyes when she was 10 years old. When she was about 15, she recognized something physical holding her back from reaching her pinnacle as an athlete. In her 20’s she was diagnosed with cancer. Patricia went through more surgeries than you can shake a stick at until she called it quits. And that’s when her life turned around fo...

This is Part 2 of a 2-part series. Be sure to listen to Part l. In Part 2, Quintina discusses how she’s in the 2% of people who don’t return to The Life (sex trafficking). She offers ideas around what we all can do to change this statistic and includes her educated opinions on the movie Sounds of Freedom, currently in theaters.  ————————— Quintina grew up in a dysfunctional family. She escaped the...

This is Part l of a 2 part series. Be sure to listen to Part ll next week. Quintina grew up in a dysfunctional family. She escaped the fate of her brothers—foster care and adoption. But by the time she was 20, she got caught between a rock and a hard place when she had to deal with untrue, serious legal charges levied against her, causing her already fragile house of cards to collapse. A man traff...

Christina Jones has more losses than you can shake a stick at. Today she talked about losing her son, Benjamin, to suicide. She speaks of her sense of guilt around signing the consent for him to join the military when he was 17 ½ and her sense of helplessness as he isolated himself more and more, masterfully keeping his suicide plans to himself. To top it off, her older son cut ties with her after...