To Dare, Together: Truth Seeking in the Depths for Healing, Transformation, & Collective Liberation
Hello friend! I’m so grateful you’re here. I created this space for you and I to spend some time together. To Dare, Together. To seek the truth in the depths. To Dare to tune into the wisdom and pleasure of our bodies. To honor the places that hold pain and renewal. To Dare to descend and arise, transformed in the never ending cycle of death and regeneration. To reenchant the world around us from a more embodied and integrated place. To Dare to join in honest connection where liberation, love, equity, beauty, joy, gratitude, sensuality, dignity, and reverence for all life on earth is at the heart of our sacred space.
I am your host, Erin O'Brien, licensed psychotherapist in practice for over 20 years, intuitive healer, relationship counselor, and dare I say, witch, and if you are willing, your friend. Together we will descend into the mystery, into the exquisite darkness because true liberation starts with healing from the inside out. And it happens when we dare to go there, together.
Where are we going, you may ask? Well, we are delving into all the realms of our experience. We will move through our body, heart, mind, soul, spirit, original and chosen family, relationships, communities, cultures, dominant systems in society, intergenerational patterning, ancestral wounds and wisdom, and the great expanse of our collective. Because when we are together, we will seek to know what’s true. We will alchemize and transform, knowing that our fates are inevitably intertwined with one another. So let’s will it together.
My offering here will be a combination of solo explorations together, and deep dives with other like-hearted therapists, healers, intuitives, activists, magickal practitioners, artists, abolitionists, astrologers, visionaries, witches, and more. I want to support our journey of transformation by sharing practices that we can facilitate because ultimately we are our own wisest guide, healer, and teacher. Our body holds so much intelligence if we just slow down enough to listen. When we know how to keep silent and just be, just breathe, just listen, we know how to summon our greatest powers of transformation.
We will explore practices that focus on increasing our somatic awareness, trauma integration, and nervous system regulation. We will work with our shadow to illuminate what needs to be alchemized or released. We will dismantle our internalized systems of dominance and extraction so we resonate with the reciprocity and abundance of life. We will deepen our understanding of intersectionality and how our social location in the world shifts our experiences of power and disembodiment. We will strive to relate with others in ways that are embodied and promote connection, celebrate differentiation, and respectfully move through rupture or conflict so that all beings preserve their dignity. We will conjure the wisdom of our ancestors to strengthen our communal spaces. We will create rituals to attune with the cycles of nature, lunar rhythms, astrology, and the wheel of the year. We will do pathworkings and divination to deepen our relationship to our Higher Self, Spirit Team, Intuition, Magick, Soul’s purpose, and so much more.
We are all here on Earth right now. It’s time To Dare to take a stand for healing, transformation, and collective liberation. And the first step starts from within. Let’s take it together.
“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.” – unknown
To Dare, Together: Truth Seeking in the Depths for Healing, Transformation, & Collective Liberation
Daring to Tell My Story of Healing, Transformation, and Personal Liberation
What happens when we dare to speak our deepest truths? When we step into the fullness of who we are, without editing out the uncomfortable parts?
This episode marks a turning point in our journey together as I reveal the intersections of my social identities as a licensed psychotherapist, a queer woman, a mother, and—perhaps most vulnerably—a practicing witch. I explore how these parts of myself inform one another and create the foundation for the healing work I do in the world.
From my earliest memories of guiding friends into trance states as a child to finding community within a Wiccan tradition as an adult, my spiritual path has always intertwined with my therapeutic practice. Both require rigorous self-knowledge, commitment to growth, and willingness to face shadow aspects. Both offer frameworks for transformation and healing.
I share how parenthood became my most profound initiation, confronting me with intergenerational trauma patterns I desperately wanted to break. As part of a lineage of "unmothered mothers," I faced my deepest fears about repeating harmful cycles with my own children—a reckoning that led me to integrate various healing modalities, including expanded state healing work.
This vulnerability serves a purpose beyond personal catharsis. By modeling truth-telling, I hope to create space for you to examine your own story with compassion and courage. Because our individual healing is inextricably linked to collective liberation. We must dismantle oppressive systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and the insidious legacy of colonialism from the inside out, beginning with ourselves. As above, so below.
In our next episode, I'll guide you through your own storytelling journey using a reflection process I use with the folx I work with in my practice. Until then, remember: your truth matters. And we must dare to tell it if we hope to heal ourselves and our world.
Recorded on 6/6 and 6/11.
Hello, hello and welcome back. Get ready to dare together, truth-seeking in the depths for healing, transformation and collective liberation. I'm your host, erin O'Brien, licensed psychotherapist in practice for over 20 years, intuitive healer, relationship counselor and, dare I say, witch. So I'm excited about this episode, which actually is part of a recording that I did on Friday and a little bit on Saturday, june 6 and 7. That was the first half of last episode, because I realized, wow, this is like two hours and I'm gonna have to split it a bit. So, with my new skills and creating these recordings, I figured out how to do that.
Speaker 1:We are in the beautiful month of June and celebrating all things queer, and it's also a full moon today. Today is June 11th hopefully the day that I'm going to be able to publish this episode and the full moon is in Sagittarius, which is a fire sign associated with energy and curiosity and a love of freedom a very aligned time for Pride Month, of course the freedom to love, love of freedom. And also, sagittarius is the ninth sign of the zodiac and is represented by the archer, also known as the centaur Chiron, in Greek mythology, which I shared a little bit about my Chiron in the last episode, the wounded healer and I shared more about some of my truth and got a little more real. I guess, in going into the depths of what was going on for me over the last two weeks and realizing that I wanted to be in right relationship with my truth as I want to create space here, because truth is magic and it with what is real about our experience, then we are more danger of reenacting and replicating the hierarchical power structures that we exist in right. And what are those structures? Let's name them White supremacy, institutionalized racism, patriarchal capitalism, right, the legacy of colonialism and how that shows up. What we feel is our right to own and extract and take all the privatization of property. I own this land, this you know, these are my perimeters, that are mine, and so I want to move into continuing the honest discussion around being in relationship and all the dimensions of that really, and how part of what I want to create space for here in our deep dives together is being able to tell truthful stories about what we're experiencing and how stories are powerful, spells and prayers and challenge. We reveal as we tell our story some of the hidden spaces or obscured places that need deeper inquiry, deeper illumination, so we can be a part of healing the collective and not getting pulled into patterns of dominance and structural oppression, and we have to dismantle these from the inside out. We have to heal ourselves if we want to participate in healing the earth and the beings on the earth and beyond. So this dimension we're going to go in has to start with us, has to start with our understanding, and I will go there first, because we are now in a relationship together, you and I, and I want you to know who it is that you are connecting to when you entrust me with your time, your heart and your attention. You could be listening to a lot of things and I do not take it lightly if you are listening right now.
Speaker 1:So, as you already know, I'm Erin and I've been a practicing psychotherapist since 2004. 2002, if you count. You know practicum and all the things that happen when you're in graduate school, academic institutions, private practice, residential treatment programs, civil commitment facilities. I have worked with individuals, couples, intimate relationships of all kinds, families, groups, graduate-level classrooms, groups, graduate level classrooms. I've offered clinical supervision to other therapists, developing doing that work and working for a nonprofit that really centered that as a integral practice and part of the mission in helping therapists evolve and decolonize the internalized empire right and how that shows up in the therapy space. I love being on the therapy journey with people and it lights my life with purpose and love. I love being on a supervision journey with other therapists and helping them. What I have come to know about the craft and art of therapy is that being in relationship with others while they are in a transformation process means I am inevitably transforming right alongside them, with them, in relationship with them, over and over and over again, as they're uncovering and healing and doing their shadow work, I am witnessing and you know that might live in my shadow or unconscious, start to get unearthed and awakened. It's a kind of practice of reciprocal alchemy. How amazing and what a privilege to do it.
Speaker 1:So what about my social location? Let me back up actually and define it. What is social location? Right, it's known as a social position which refers to an individual's place within a society or social hierarchy, and it's influenced by key identities or factors that are a part of us, like our gender identity, our racial identity, our culture, our ethnicity, our class, our age, our sexual or relationship identity or orientation, our ability and more, and all of this influences our access to resources and our experiences with power and privilege and depression and subjugation and being excluded, and how we even begin to navigate these structures that we are participating in and at the mercy of.
Speaker 1:So for me I use she and her pronouns I am a white queer femme, 45-year-old cis woman of Euro-Irish ancestry and working class origins, with mobility into current upper middle class privilege. I am a mama who is humbled every day by the parenting journey and how my children are my greatest teachers, and there's a lot to say on that. I am an able-bodied yet highly sensitive person. I'm an intuitive and empath who works very hard at energy management and emotional regulation on the daily. I'm a Scorpio sun and I am drawn to the mysteries of the deep, the liminal parts of our existence, the watery realms, to the intensity of what it means to be alive, moving between states of being, which includes birth, renewal, creation, the erotic intimacy, endings, death, the hidden places or the veil between worlds. I also hold significant placements in Earthy Taurus, which is all about sensuality and moving slowly through change and being deeply grounded, and the body. And, like I said earlier, aerie Gemini, which loves the multitudes and queering. Dominant patterns. Dominant patterns, queering the normal quote unquote, to hold more complexity, more on relationships to the planets, the signs and astrology in the future. So I grew up in the Northeast, more specifically the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, what is currently called the United States, and this is where I live with my beautiful.
Speaker 1:Wonderful has taken me years to appreciate and hold gratitude for Because, like I said earlier, I'm a relationship therapist and so I really love to help relationships that I work with, embrace differences between them and understand how differentiation is at the heart of having this wonderful, fully alive, vibrant partnership. And yet, all the while I was just really trying to get my person to be just like me, you know to do emotions like me, to respond in ways that you know I wanted, in ways that I wanted, and how all that focus on wanting sameness really eclipsed the magic of what she brings into my life, with all the ways that she is different and all the ways that I can learn from her and also not different. In that cliche, you complete me, sort of way, more in the you are fully whole and you are your own, unique, powerful, incredible human, and I am too, and we are different. And what can we co-create together. That just optimizes the ways that we are different to create a life that is more expansive and all of that. So I just went off on a whole little thing there. She balances out my intensity and is very grounding in ways that I really don't express to her enough. So, yeah, I need to do that more. You know, even right now I am in my therapy office. I woke up quite early this morning to try to complete this recording and it's been a challenge. We're both working and raising our two wild, wonderful, magical young children and I've been trying to take space to work on this passion project, this podcast. And you know, even right now she's at home with our kids, you know, holding it down, so I can be here. So, speaking of here, I want to honor, place and acknowledge the indigenous peoples of the Lenni Lenape, the Powhautin and the Nanticoke, the Lene Lenape, the Powhoughton and the Nanticoke, whose ancestral homelands encompassed eastern Pennsylvania, new Jersey, delaware and parts of New York, connecticut and Maryland since time immemorial prior to the European colonization of the Americas. No-transcript.
Speaker 1:During college I minored in religion because I was searching for truth, you know, for the divine, and most definitely to be better equipped during difficult family discussions to confront the contradictions that seemed so clear to me. I realized early on that I felt deeply connected to beliefs that held reverence for all life in all its forms and was drawn to my Irish ancestry and the intuitive, earth-centered practices that honor the rhythms of nature, inspiration, awin, lunar cycles and the concept of the divine that exists inside all of us and all around us. You know, for me I have been a witch, practicing magic since I was a little child. I remember inviting my friends over after school when I was, I don't know, 11 or 12 years old, sixth grade, and I would have them lay down on my living room floor and put their head in my lap and have them count backwards from 10 or 20 or something like that, as I would rub their temples. I would guide them into a trance state where they would journey to different planes of consciousness. I would guide them and, you know, interact with them as they were in this state and I would support their journey into the astral or wherever it was that they were. But I didn't know what. I didn't know back then I was just, you know, a kid, feeling some kind of call to do this. I have no idea where I got the idea. I just knew that it was something that I could do and it came from somewhere deep inside me and it felt like something that I had been doing for a really long time and that it made my house a very popular place to be after school because everyone wanted me to put them in a trance. You know, it's pretty cool. I also really felt such a deep connection to the natural world. As a little one, I would talk to trees world. As a little one, I would talk to trees, animals, plants, rocks, and I just knew they were relating right back to me. I was a little animist. I believe that everything had a soul or spirit, which was very supportive for me as an only child. In all the time that I did spend alone, I was never really alone.
Speaker 1:My journey as a solitary continued for many years and I connected deeply to Celtic mythology and Druid practices. I read all the books. I remember I have this past life Oracle deck from Brian Weiss, who, by the way, was the person that I did some past life life regression training with at the Omega Institute Omega Institute back in 2017. Anyway, I remember pulling from his deck and getting the high priestess card a lot and just feeling this deep opening, this deep awakening not unlike when I was dancing that night at Sisters and had this door open and this awareness of oh, wow, this is who I am, this feels right. It was a deep body-mind, knowing resonance that I had been a witch, that I had been a druid, even, maybe, and so that's what really opened the door into my connection with druidry. And then, ultimately, um, more specifically, uh, wiccan, magical Western practices.
Speaker 1:I still remember, actually, the first time I went to a Unitarian Universalist church when I was living in Philly, and again, this was, uh, I don't know, maybe around like 2012 or something, and I looked around and I saw all the stained glass works of art in this particular really old church and it was all images of women and the divine, feminine and the celebration of goddesses, and I remember, you know, whatever they were talking about. That day really centered the wisdom of the goddess and it was revelatory for me as someone who sat in many church services year after year after year as a child. It was all about the patriarchy, the masculine God, the he right, and I wept. I'm feeling that right now. Experience of that was profound. It was a profound again moment, an opening of seeing truth. It was liberating, you know, and as a queer witch uh, currently, you know, today, I hold a much more critical and complex understanding of magical practice. Certainly that really examines the cis heteronormativity that exists within some of the Wiccan and Druid traditions, because the dominant systems, the patriarchy, right as above, of course, exists inside us, us, so below and show up in our magical rituals and communities and concepts. Honoring magic as brilliantly and inclusively. Queer has been a newer decolonizing journey, deconditioning journey for me as a witch, and it has been an awakening experience, which I want to take a moment and thank all the queer magical authors and witches and druids and all the people in that beautiful world, one of which, enfys J Book, who is actually a member of my tradition, wrote a revelatory book for me to be reading, to be reading. So thank you to them. Yes, I am a part of a Wiccan tradition and an active member of one of their 14 syncretic covens. Oh, yes, there are 14 covens and we are in states and more covens are coming. They are currently in creation.
Speaker 1:So when I say I am a witch, I am and I dare to claim that because I believe that now is a time to have courage, to be seen and known for what is true. And it's scary. And even as I name that it's scary, there's a part of me that feels complication there, like somehow it shouldn't be, like my identity development as a witch should be more integrated or I should be more comfortable expressing it or claiming it, and I'm aware that in this space here I I'm not sure my hope is to really meet at the intersections of therapy and magic and healing and transformation and my identities as a therapist and a witch and a human certainly A human, certainly. So, yeah, it is scary and I'll name that truth, because we know the history of what is done to people who claim something outside of dominant structures, what is done to historically excluded humans, what is done to queer people? Also, right, we know what was literally done during the burning times to humans, especially women, who dared to be midwives, healers, herbalists, teachers, speakers, leaders, really anything that was in some place of power and authority or knowledge, or just people living their lives being accused of something in the name of dominance and fear. That is what happened during the crusades, during colonization. That is what happened to black people, to indigenous people, to people of color. Right, that's what we still do. This is what we do when we feel threatened by what we do not take the time to understand, when we seek to colonize or obliterate instead of expanding or including, being curious, learning and celebrating the beautiful diversity that exists in all cultures and in all the ways we live, we breathe, we connect with the divine.
Speaker 1:You know, I remember feeling this fear when my partner and I had our hand fasting ceremony. This was back in 2015. I wrote the ritual. We were married in the rounds, casting the quarters and honoring the elements of each cardinal direction. I wasn't sure how it would land with my family, with our friends. I felt like that was a moment of me coming out in ceremonial magic and I did the best I could, without you know, fully knowing. I think I got a lot of the ritual guidance from one of my druid books, so I'm sure if we redid that ceremony, it would be very different and much more vibrant now that I know much more.
Speaker 1:But, honoring my journey, my spiritual path as a witch, you know, many years I held winter solstice, open houses where I would create these rituals of release, where we would, you know, write intentions and things we wanted to release, for you know the darkness, the time of retreat and reflection. We would burn what we wrote down in the fire in our backyard and, you know, anyone who dared to join in would, and then those who felt like maybe it was a little too, I don't know on the edges would not. And that's cool, you know. Whatever you do, you, you know, I also would regularly bring my various divination tools to different get togethers with friends, and especially my two druid animal oracle and druid tarot decks were always kind of with me wherever we went and you know I would do readings for people and I, you know again, didn't know a lot but just kind of was doing something and following my intuition and felt called to bring that into my friend spaces to help go deeper.
Speaker 1:You know, in the time where my partner and I decided that we wanted to expand our family and try to create children from our bodies this was back in, you know, pretty much right after we had our ceremony we decided we were going to start the process and it ended up being a multi-year process of reproductive assistance and IVF process of reproductive assistance and IVF and, as queer people, that's a common pathway that we have to go through, which is in and of itself a whole, entire, separate episode. But I really clung to my spirituality during that time and I honored every turn of the wheel of the year, casting spells, putting out wishes in my little wish pot, calling on the help of my ancestors, the divine, the spirits that were in support of my highest path and purpose, my, you know, future children's spirit team. And when I say invite, I meant it was more of a like plea. I was like you know, please come join our family. We are ready for you, you know, and they did in their own timing, which is very much.
Speaker 1:How our two children move through the world. Our oldest child is incredible and I am in a deep process of honoring who my child is becoming, who my child is in their authenticity, in how their brain is and how I can support them in being on their highest path and purpose here in this lifetime for them, and it's been well, it's been a journey. I'll just say that I have recently come to understand that they are here to support me in understanding my and are together again for, I think, for an important reason, and my partner as well. So I'll leave that there. But becoming a mama for me has been the most significant deep dive into my own shadow realm. I was confronted with many truths and it was overwhelming and heartbreaking how watching my little ones, my babies, offered this deep well of reflection and memory into me at those very same ages, that becoming a parent or raising little humans would be such a portal into my own experience, especially my pre-verbal experiences. And, wow, that put me on a deep path of integration, work and journey, work which I'm grateful for. You know, everything I understood up until entering parenthood about creating secure attachment and relational science hovered over me as I witnessed myself having all the reactions and all the dysregulated moments that I was trying so hard not to have.
Speaker 1:For both myself and my babies, intergenerational trauma is such a strong current. It's the undertow that pulls you away from shore, away from yourself and who you are striving to be. It pulls you underwater as you struggle, as you gasp, as you try to swim to the top. You're splashing around. I am a part of a long line of unparented parents or, more specific to my line, dare I say, unmothered mothers, surviving in a deeply misogynistic, abusive context of much contradiction and complexity Poor immigrants from Ireland and other parts of Europe struggling to survive, having fled from colonization and dominance, only to perpetuate and enact it here, clinging to a religion that bound women to their childbearing years and a life of procreation, my grandmother being one of eight and my father being one of eight and my father being one of ten.
Speaker 1:Trauma and addiction patterns were served at breakfast and lunch and dinner, and being regulated and conscious and having an integrated brain and body was not on the menu. I must be hungry, with this metaphor. All of that was in my lineage, in my nervous system, in my blood, and I was terrified of how I would repeat it with my babies, who I had begged, begged the universe to have. So I feel that, again, that wave rise up of intensity, of grief, of trauma, patterning as I name what is true. My body meets me there and rises to the occasion right as I name it, I call it up, I call it forth, so I can be with it, so I can experience that wave that has to wash over me right now that I have to metabolize and integrate, surrendering, breathing, swimming with life's current and the waves that our children, my children, create around me as they become who they are, who they're meant to be right, being present, having gratitude, grounding into a wider, more compassionate perspective and context, and also being creative and silly and playful and laughing, trying not to take it so seriously, which for me is actually really hard. And all of that is the saving grace, the magic that I keep learning and I learn actually from my partner as I watch her move effortlessly through the ups and downs through our children's range of intensity and emotion and development on their own terms, and it's her parenting magic and gift to me and to them to find the humor and the joy in the hard and again, as I name it, it rises and I am with it. I will be with it and the truth is I deeply adore her for that. More calling it up, more feeling it, more being with it. She keeps me afloat in so many ways and that also lets me fly and I have really depended on her, especially in the last 10 days Since things have felt really hard as a door has been opening in my awareness and I've been confronted with some truth about being a parent and I am grateful that I've been able to really rely on her deep steadiness and groundedness and understanding.
Speaker 1:So all that brings me to a few years ago and some significant turning of events where you know how life does right. All of a sudden it's like these moments are happening simultaneously and it just illuminates so much. I was in a real I'll call it a return to the beginning, where something was happening, and it was a real portal for me to re-experience things from my deep past and I integrated some different healing modalities in my already existing healing journey with my beloved individual therapist, jane, who I started working with back when I was 27,. When I came out and things really exploded for me and my world in brilliant ways and also deeply painful ways, as who I was becoming was really hard for my mom and that really, uh, opened up some things, uh and shifted some things in our relationship that needed to happen and were also transformative and hard. So this journey began around December of 2022. And right as I was feeling the call to shift into some deeper let's call it amplified healing using psychedelics and different medicine guides and psychotherapists and healing practitioners who guide people and do that journey work with the tool of different psychedelics.
Speaker 1:Now I want to acknowledge here that indigenous communities around the world have long engaged with psychedelic plants and substances as spirit medicines for lots of different purposes healing individuals, fostering spiritual connection with nature, the universe, ancestors. And Western medicine once again has appropriated these indigenous practices through psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and has failed to really honor and include and acknowledge the origins and the current practices. And there are some efforts and some initiatives, certainly through MAPS, such as the plant medicine track at Psychedelic Science that just began this year. So I want to take a moment to acknowledge that. And the medicines that I used were ketamine, and one of my journey sessions did involve a psilocybin and another one MDMA. And the psychotherapist, the medicine practitioners that I chose to work with, were individuals that were a part of a community very intentional about honoring indigenous origins in how they worked, and that was really important to me in deciding how I wanted to integrate this kind of ancient practice into my modern healing journey. Right, so there's that.
Speaker 1:Now, back to that time, I also got an email from a local pagan meetup group and it was a group that I had actually pagan meetup group and it was a group that I had actually interfaced with like a decade prior and attended a workshop on herbalism and, as you know, life would have it, that was a door that opened, but I didn't fully walk through it. Life was busy, all the things right, and the door presented itself again and this time I walked through the door. I began what has become a deep awakening and journey on my spiritual path as number one, a spiritual person and a witch. And so I started attending witchcraft classes that the local coven here where I live offers, and you know the first witchcraft class that they offered was know thyself and how witchcraft and this Wiccan spiritual tradition really invites more expansive personal development and that that's actually an essential part of being a witch. And I thought, wow, how synchronistic that I'm a therapist and also a witch and how these paths are actually really similar in some meaningful ways. So I began attending these witchcraft classes on a monthly basis and all the rituals and ceremonies that they offer to the public for free by the way, the rituals are free to anyone in the local area that wants to come and celebrate with community and love and respect the wheel of the year, the rhythms we do, moon workings for healing. And I got to know this larger Wiccan tradition of magical people and practitioners that was founded decades ago by a bunch of queer people and all the different covens which I know I said earlier, 14 in total. That's a lot, how incredible. I had no idea how much I needed them, how much I needed a strong spiritual community, especially as a witch, especially as a human doing deep journey work with expanded state healing. You know I was doing that simultaneously and it's no surprise to me that those were happening at the same time.
Speaker 1:And even though my tradition is a legally recognized Wiccan non-profit religious organization, I still feel a fear about coming out, similar to the fear that I have when I am moving through the world, and I have this moment where someone assumes that my kids have a dad or asks me about my husband. It's this moment of oh, I want to be in my truth, I want to say what is real and is it okay, is it safe to say right? And I have two little people watching me. And so, though my coven and the larger tradition. Our mission is about healing and justice and love and liberation and reverence for all life, and educating and seeking knowledge and inclusion and re-enchanting the world around us. I mean, that's literally a part of our mission statement. We want to bring back the sense of wonder and awe and beauty and inspiration that lives in ourselves, first of all, and each other and life around us and the unseen, and knowing that we are never alone. We always have this divine source to connect into and to channel.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, there's a small part of me right now that feels scared to publish this episode, because I know there are therapists listening and there might be family members or friends and I just, yeah, it's. It feels important, more now than ever, to say what is true, to be seen, to be known and to be visible as a queer person, as a pagan, as a Wiccan, as a witch, because I also know that I exist in a body that has privilege, and so how do I let that part of me that protects me? I'm in a white body, I present very mainstream sometimes, I think, and so I can move through the world with more ease, and so, because of that, it feels essential to have the courage to also make myself more visible. In what is true, especially now when diversity and inclusion is literally being abolished, is only space for one religion, one group of people, one way of loving, one way of being one, and that just is bullshit. Right and also not surprising how the very person who sometimes very person who sometimes struggled with who I was becoming is the person who actually taught me how to dare to be who I am More naming, more calling it up, more breathing in and being with what is true and letting the wave of acknowledgement wash over me. Wash over me. So it makes space for the gratitude, for the complexity and also this gift that my mom doesn't know she gave me, so I should probably tell her right His deep wisdom that is guiding my path now naming what's true, calling it up, being with it. My mom's example is guiding me into embrace who my children are, who they are becoming, and to be confronted with what comes up in me. That recognizes the hardness for me in accepting that or making space for it. The hardness for me in accepting that or making space for it. That's our work right, because if we don't experience it, if we don't go there, it comes out in unconscious ways and it trips our children on their path. I don't want to do that.
Speaker 1:So back to my mom, who was raised, were broken up for months because he was emotionally volatile and scary and alcoholic, scary and alcoholic. But my mom was taught to be a good Catholic girl and to not shame her family, her father in particular, who she was deeply attached to. She was told by her mother you will not have a child out of wedlock. You're not going to have I'm going to use the word here that was used then a bastard right. When my mom realized that her church didn't have space for a single mother who had to leave her abusive, alcoholic husband with a five-month-old baby and, dare I say, divorce him, she found a non-denominational church, a Pentecostal church, where they sang and danced around barefoot every Sunday and she felt free, she felt like she belonged and she blossomed in her spirituality, which has taught me something about having the courage to be on my path, about having the courage to be on my path. Now I have lots to say about how my experiences were very different in that same church and how puzzled I was often when they talked each Sunday about the importance of a man being the head of the household, when the only person I saw at the head of our household was a woman. But I want to honor how it felt better to her than where she came from and that was her evolution and that was her daring to find her place, even though it brought a lot of conflict and shame and pain and disapproval.
Speaker 1:I am also thinking about the town I grew up in, this very small town, very, very homogenous small town, very, very homogenous. I looked around and all my friends had two parents right. All the families that were around us had a two parent household and mine did not. I think that experience of being different, even back then and watching my mom be different, really liberated me from some, I think, constrictions and conditioning about the nuclear family, the family unit. I think it really deeply impacted my psyche in some very important ways that enabled me to be on my path as a queer person, as a queer mama.
Speaker 1:You know I grew up not really having a relationship with my dad for many, many reasons. I just feel grateful that I had an example of what family can be so that I could create my own family in a way that was that's authentic and also is clearly different. So I am at the end of what I think I want to say right now and maybe I'll say one more thing that you know that integrating all of this and being on this path, it's forever and always. That's just being human and as long as we are breathing, there's more to experience and that means the entire spectrum of joy and pain, of life and death. And you know, I think I'm going to just let it be in this liminal space right now and I'm so grateful that I get to be alive. And you know, I want to name something as a therapist, I deeply believe in the transformative process that can occur in a therapeutic relationship. As I mentioned earlier, right, I've had my long term person that has been a critical place of my own healing and also my own development as a therapist.
Speaker 1:But not everyone can afford therapy, right, it's not accessible or sometimes experiences in therapy can replicate the harm that we already experience in the world, can replicate the harm that we already experience in the world, especially if you are a person in therapy and you are a part of a historically excluded or devalued group in the world. Microaggressions happen all over the place in the most well-intended therapy relationships, therapy relationships. So this is a call out and a call in. We therapists, we need to know ourselves and decolonize the empire within, right, we have to. Anyway, or maybe it's not a part of your culture, maybe your culture holds its own sacred practices and rituals of healing and supporting its people. And, yes, I have no doubt that the beautiful, diverse range. I know it to be true, right, we know it to be true. I don't even need to say maybe. We know it to be true. I don't even need to say maybe there is deep wisdom in cultures and how they take care of each other and heal and connect and celebrate all the rites of passage and being a person in the world.
Speaker 1:There will be a whole other episode on how therapy, in particular Western, traditional, psychology, psychiatry, social work you know all the helping and healing fields and appropriated from black, indigenous and people of colors, ways of healing, of celebrating, of being with the human experience, with suffering and all the harm that my field, our field, has done right. So, for all those reasons, my intention here with you, with us, in this space, is to be truthful. I'm going to try to be truthful even as I'm speaking. I'm going to really resist the temptation to edit out every moment where I was with a moment of grief and I felt it in my body and I heard it crack in my voice. I'm going to dare to not edit that out because I know, I believe that I think that's part of what I'm meant to do here and that's part of my magic maybe, and that's part of my magic, maybe.
Speaker 1:So we're going to tell your story next. In the next episode, I'm going to guide you through a life journey, reflection process to support your awakening, your re-experiencing, your understanding. Can I say any more words here? I want to dedicate a whole episode to guiding you through your own storytelling, which we have to be able to do first. Right, I have to tell my story first to myself so that I can tell it to you.
Speaker 1:And my truth matters, your truth matters, our truth matters, and we have to dare to tell it. And we will tell the ways right that we healed, and the tools and the practices and the spells and the exercises. We'll tell that too. That will be a part of our story. So thank you so much for being in relationship with me, for listening to, to this episode I don't even know how long it is, but I think it's long and getting to know me or knowing me in a different way if you already do, and I can't wait to be with you again soon. So I'm your host, erin O'Brien, licensed psychotherapist in practice for over 20 years, intuitive healer, relationship counselor and, dare I say, queer witch. As above, so below, as within, so without. As the universe, so the soul. Bye for now, thank you.
