For this final episode of the season, I talk to Julie Lythcott-Haims, who is asking the question “what does it mean to grow up?” For her, it’s about lovingly letting go of your past burdens so that you can be true to yourself – while not trampling on anybody else. Our conversation flows naturally from topic to topic as we learn about how learning mindfulness took her from being a lawyer and dean of a university to becoming a New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and activist focused on helping humans find their true north. Later, we bring these themes into a discussion of inclusion, identity, and intergenerational healing. Julie shares about growing up as a Black and biracial person with a white mother, healing her past to be the parent she wants to be, and widening her scope to community engagement after isolation during COVID 19.

I'm excited to share this podcast conversation with one of my dearest friends Akilah Riley-Richardson. Akilah has been in clinical practice for 16 years, is based in Trinidad and Tobago, and specializes in work with sexual and racial minorities. In this conversation, Akilah and I talk about relational privilege and the impact historical and race based trauma has on relationships. Akilah teaches to pivot, rumble and imagine to help gain a sense of where the hurt is, what the body needs, and how these needs connect back to the behaviors expressed is relationship…and what is needed now.

Moraya Seeger DeGeare is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, consultant, writer, activist, and mom. We recorded this conversation in-person, meandering in our discussion around moving within a world that tries to adhere to dominant culture all the time. Here’s what we hope you get out of this conversation: if you are someone who’s not walking around in a dominant culture body, we hope you can simply listen and not have to do extra work to find resonance. And if you are someone that's walking around in a dominant culture body (white, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied, neurotypical, etc), we hope we’ve opened some awareness that not everyone experiences the world the way you do.

Dr. Han Ren (she/they) is deeply rooted in Liberation-oriented, anti-oppressive, culturally informed therapy. In this time of global upheaval and collective trauma many people have experienced increasing amounts of isolation. Social media is one of the places people turn when they feel alone. Han's widely viewed content on social media centers on liberating the idea that healing has to look a certain way, especially for often historically overlooked people and communities. Normalization goes a long way in undoing our collective experience of aloneness. In this gentle yet confronting conversation, Han guides us towards 3 moment to moment healing practices, accessible to us all: check in with your body, say what you mean/mean what you say, and repair.

Terry Real is the creator of Relational Life Therapy and author of the forthcoming book, Us. Tune in as Terry shares his insight on speaking to your immature, adaptive child parts vs. speaking to your wise adult parts, key differences in how boys and girls are conditioned to be in relationship and how to relearn what was taught out of us as children, the harm that patriarchy and individualism cause us in relationships and how relationships can upend them, masculinity and the current state of our country, the power in changing the choices we make in relationship in order to get more of what we want (rather than pointing the finger at our partners), plus a relational skill assignment to try in your relationship right now.

This week’s guest, Cyndi Darnell, says in her forthcoming book, "The body has always belonged to either God or science. There has never been a time in Western history that the body truly belonged to the person who inhabits it." She says we can begin to reclaim our bodies for ourselves by unlearning the things we’ve been taught about sex that aren’t serving us. By rediscovering our libidos and desires. By learning how to show ourselves to ourselves. By being in our bodies. Cyndi, clinical sexologist & sex & relationship therapist who works with clients all over the globe, is here to tell us how.

In this rich conversation, Dr. Lissa Rankin and Rebecca discuss the paradoxes in healing trauma: trauma is treatable but you have to be in the body to heal it. They discuss the necessary skills in drawing on all of your intelligences—your intellectual intelligence, yes, but also your somatic, intuitive, and emotional intelligences—and why we must stay in our bodies enough to pay attention to them. They also discuss nuances of power-over/power-under dynamics and the paradox of why the reward of shared-power-with is so unfathomable to someone in a power-over position and yet, the reward is so compelling and full of possibility.

Instead of interviewing a special guest, we’ve turned the tables and your host has become the guest! Out of curiosity and a sense of play (two things we adore here at Connectfulness), Rebecca agreed to be interviewed by our podcast editor, Al Hoberman, who is also a fabulous music therapist. Together, they let the conversation meander where it will, delving into topics like why we can never be “healed and ready” for a relationship before entering into it, the importance of knowing oneself (and why it feels so scary at first), implicit and conscious memories, the burden of generational survival mechanisms and why they should be celebrated and released, and the power that lies in letting things get awkward. This episode was really fun to record. We hope it’s equally fun for you to listen in.