Breanna Armstrong and I met on Twitter over a decade ago. She always struck me as a go-getter, and right from the start, I knew I would have to put on my running shoes to keep up with her. She towered over the male-dominated industry for many years and eventually went out on her own and created a very successful digital marketing company that caters to beauty influencers and brands. Bre has two of her very own podcasts—Ambition for Breakfast and VSG Tea—as well as creating her own content for her WLS account that has just skyrocketed over the past year. We’ve had our hearts broken, and our egos bruised countless times over the years, but we stand tall today united in the same goal – to take over the world!

—

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

How To Bank Like A Boss In A Male-Dominated Industry With Breanna Armstrong

We have Breanna Armstrong with us. She is the Founder of Editour Media. It is a digital media company. She represents brands and influencers in the beauty space. She also has a long history in journalism. We met in the MMA industry. She has written for one million different publications. She’s well versed in media, public relations, digital content, all of the above. She also has her own weight loss surgery show called VSG Tea and another show about women in business called Ambition for Breakfast.

She’s got her hand in everything. She is an amazing person and a friend and truly one of my personal inspirations. Even though she is a couple of years younger, she has always been a mentor of mine. I can’t wait for you to learn about the experiences and stories that we shared. We even talked about our struggles with weight loss, body dysmorphia, photoshopping our pictures to death and how far we’ve come on that journey. Grab a snack, sit down and enjoy this episode of the show.

—

Joining me from sunny Orange County, California is one of my best and longtime friends, Breanna Armstrong. How are you?

I’m good. How are you?

I am so wonderful because I’m seeing your shining face.

Male-Dominated Industry: If you’re writing about bow hunting, you don’t have to go out and literally do it. Just learn about the best bows on the market and try to capture the essence of these niche markets.

I’m excited. Thank you so much for having me on.

I was on your podcast and that was a fun experience. We probably could have droned on for 3 or 4 hours on that easily.

We had a long one. There’s a lot to talk about.

You have your own podcast that you came up with out of your incredible brain. You had gotten into the space of content creator for yourself. Normally, your job is to create content for others. Now, you are creating content for your weight loss journey. You tapped into this market and blew the eff up. It grew 15,000 followers in a year. Your show, VSG Tea, has thousands of downloads internationally. You do it with your friend, Sammi. How has this journey been navigating away from focusing on content for others and going to focusing on content for yourself as well?

It’s been such a trip but rewarding. I didn’t think that I would find a form of therapy out of this. Honestly, posting on my behalf and being my number one advocate, giving myself some space in this space that I know so well has been rewarding personally. It has been a form of therapy because I’ve found an amazing community in it. For once, I’m not talking about work. Anybody who knows me knows that I’m a huge workaholic and my life is mainly work. That’s not healthy and I can admit that. That’s why I took this huge leap to go and find my journey through getting healthy. I learn new things every single day. It’s crazy.

You filmed John for your story and your like, “How much time would you say that I spent relaxing?” I was thinking in my head 20% and he said 25%. I was like, “It’s 80/20, for sure.” Even when you and I have been on vacation together, you’re creating content, on email, on the phone or on a conference call. You’re always doing something even when you’re trying to have a good time.

I love that you’re adapting a little bit more to peeling yourself away from that. I love that you pull yourself away from work for your workouts. That’s positive for you. I like that you are so hyper-focused on also holding yourself accountable for others because it holds you accountable. I love to see that from your content. You look amazing and good.

I have such a huge base for accountability and it makes me more motivated. I’m like, “I’m out here doing the most and I have to walk the walk and not just talk about it.” It’s been wild. I am at the point in my life where I realized that I need to unplug. That’s even from my social media at this point too. We’re doing a series of hiring because, at this point, I am solo on running our influencer relations for our company. We manage some of the biggest names in beauty. It’s gotten to a point where it’s like, “If I want to scale this part of our company, we need to hire someone to help.” We are doing that. I have never been able to see light at the end of the tunnel but I’m seeing that I’m going to have a life.

“Started from the bottom and now we’re here,” is your motto in life. You started right out the gate. You knew what you wanted. You had this laser focus, went out and got it. I’m more than half a decade in front of you and you got your own company going and everything figured out. You got your own house with your boyfriend. I’m trying to catch up. Everyone has their own journey.

When we met, you were still working for another company. You were working for this big publisher at the time and covering all different kinds of material that most women wouldn’t have a clue about. It wasn’t like you were working for Good Housekeeping. You were talking about camping, guns, MMA, all kinds of stuff. You didn’t go to school for that particular stuff. Did you absorb it when you were reading and interviewing people? How did you learn about all those various topics?

Even though I was a longtime magazine editor, many magazines, it’s a lot of reading, for me, what’s best is I immersed myself into that genre. Not that I was out bow hunting and getting my ten-point bucks but I was trying to learn about the best bows on the market and trying to capture the essence of these incredible niche markets.

I had a female byline, so I knew that whenever I wrote anything, it was going to be studied and looked at even harder. That was the case with MMA. MMA became so natural for me. I was one of the first females on the West Coast to cover the sport. I was comfortable with every single organization, promoter, fight camp and fighter. That didn’t come right away. That came from being immersed in that community for the amount of time that I did.

Into the gun world, at the time, I was already editing Gun World Magazine, World of Firepower Magazine, American Survival Guide Magazine, Concealed-Carry Handguns Magazine, Bow and Arrow Hunting Magazine, all these different gun magazines. When I was able to start immersing into that community, it was a lot because you need to use know the ballistics, be out there on the range and test guns. You’re one of the first people to test the guns. Especially because I was a female, everyone stopped and watched me testing the gun. That was a different experience.

I felt so comfortable because I was confident in my craft. I’m a writer. I love to write and be creative. I haven’t been able to write in a long time. There are different ways. It translates in social media. It wasn’t overnight. It was something that I wanted to make sure that I was immersed in so that when you read one of my pieces or one of the magazines that I was the editor of, it translated, “These people know exactly what they’re talking about.”

I remember writing a couple of articles for you. I found myself fully immersed in the Survival Guide article. I even sought out experts. There’s Mykel Hawke. He’s this survival expert that had his show on Discovery Channel. I reached out to him on Twitter. Twitter was my main resource for everything because everyone always used to answer me. He helped me research that article. He was like, “Try this one. This is good.” I’m getting legitimate advice for the Survival Guide. That was a hard article.

You did great.

Thank you. We should tell everyone how exactly we met, which was on Twitter. Here we are years later and we’ve been on multiple trips together. I’ve come out to see you. You are a part of the family. You’re officially a sister. It’s all from one tweet. Was it that creeper guy that connected us? Who was it? Do you remember that he bent over and sent a naked selfie of his butthole to me?

Who was that?

I don’t remember. I sent you the screenshot of it. You probably blocked it out of your memory.

I blocked it out and rightfully so. Shout-out to butt boy.

I was like, “I don’t need to see either the front or the back.” He tagged us both in something probably MMA-related and I don’t know what it was but I was like, “She’s pretty. Her thing is MMA girly,” which doesn’t exist anymore. You were like, “Come cover Lion Fight with me,” which is a Muay Thai promotion. I was like, “Sure.” We met in the hotel room in Vegas. We were immediately close friends. I love that.

Male-Dominated Industry: In order to write about something, you have to fully immerse yourself in that community and genre. You’ll be comfortable in your work if you’re confident in your craft.

Don’t get me wrong, they were females in our industry but not so much in the Muay Thai industry as far as girl goes but it was a breath of fresh air. For a long time, I was always feeling that I was the odd woman out. All of a sudden, I have a girlfriend here. We’re covering this sport and empowering each other. It gave me another form of confidence. It was exciting and special.

Was that the same trip that we went to the gun store as well or was that a different trip? I don’t remember.

Remember, I was only on MMA. I was immersing in guns. We went to the gun store that next trip with our buddy.

You made the transition and created your own business, Editour Media. Anybody who wants to make a name for themselves in the beauty industry needs to be attached to you. You’re so organized and your brain works in such a creatively different way than anyone I’ve ever seen. That’s why I told you that, one day, I want to be underneath your little Editour umbrella.

I see the way you work, how professional you are and how you handle your clients. Not only your brands but also your influencers and how you represent them, they’re always taken care of. They’re like an extension of your family. Congratulations on such a successful business. It’s going to only grow and skyrocket. You’re going to be a multimillion-dollar business. When did you decide, “I’m going to step away from MMA as well?” Both you and I were super passionate about MMA. I had my reasons but what was yours?

I took my MMA career as far as I could go. There weren’t a lot of monetary benefits, honestly. I applied to the big leagues. MMA Junkie, I was on there. I’m like, “If you need me, I would fulfill it for you.” There’s something in me that I feel like I can do anything. Looking at my career, I’ve been able to get to these milestones I never thought I’d be able to get to and it’s because I truly believed in that. Honestly, I knew nothing about manifesting back then. Looking back, I was manifesting it a little bit. When I was getting some noes from Fighters Only and MMA Junkie, I’m like, “There’s not more than I can do at this point.”

I was the MMA reporter of the year in 2014, which was so awesome. I gracefully dipped out. At the time, I also was handed these two beauty magazines to start from scratch. It was the perfect timing because I was saying goodbye to my beloved MMA and the fighting world and I was going into beauty, which was so natural. I didn’t have to backcheck anything, worry about anybody reading my work and being like, “What?” We go look this up. It wasn’t like, “Go this and we’re done.” It wasn’t afraid of doing sumo with a fighter. It was much more natural for me.

Talk about an explosive career in the beauty industry even before you got on your own. You had people on your magazine covers and interviewing people that were blowing up on YouTube like Jeffree Star, Patrick Starrr and Manny MUA. At the time that came out, they were three of the biggest people in the world on YouTube.

It was iconic and it was before its time. The magazine that I was at was a 25-year-old publication. It was very old school. I gave that company a heart attack because they’re like, “What are you doing with three boys and makeup on the cover magazine?” I said, “Let’s go.” There are 9 million impressions in the first 3 weeks of that magazine. It was the most attention that the magazine had gotten. That’s what I love to bring to companies. It’s like, “Let’s think out of the box, boss up and elevate.” It was scary but it worked.

How do you keep your finger on the pulse of what’s trending in beauty? Is it Instagram, reading tangible magazines or researching on the internet? What do you do?

I get a lot of my research in the meetings that I have. I have meetings almost every single day. You have to know exactly what you’re talking about. This industry evolves so much, so if there’s something in the meeting I don’t know about, I make sure that I know about it in the next meeting. I’m not an expert but I can become pretty knowledgeable about a subject pretty fast, which is always great.

I taught myself how to video edit, edit and write, be a backpack journalist and do photography when I was in college. I was a woman with many hats, a Renaissance woman. I bring that into my research too. I would say mostly in meetings and real-life situations. Secondly, I am on Instagram. That is where I see the trends, a little bit of sprinkling from TikTok. I lean on this amazing team that I’ve been so blessed by for some of that market knowledge too because they’re more in tune with TikTok than I am.

Sometimes I spend too much time on TikTok but I truly am inspired a lot by things that I see on there but there’s the point where you’re like, “I’ve been scrolling for two and a half hours.” I’m would throw my phone away like, “Get this thing away from me.” I’ve been creating more content on TikTok and you’ve been slowly starting too as well. TikTok is so unique because you don’t need a big following to go viral and get one million followers. That’s the cool thing about that platform. Are there drawbacks to it? Yes. The trolls on there are a lot. They are ruthless down there. It’s heavy.

It is so heavy. You do have to. I started TikTok and then I had my first one go viral. That doesn’t happen often but it did. Honestly, I still haven’t read the comments because I got 5,000 followers over the amount of a few weeks. I went from 100 followers to 5,000 in a matter of a few weeks. I have comments on there and I won’t even read it because I can’t. I don’t have a heart for it.

I’m getting hives thinking about it for you. People say stuff all the time about me too. I’ve been on this weight loss journey. I even had the surgery and everything. People are still like, “You’re not sexy. You need to go do cardio.” I’m like, “I had a back injury, so calm down. I’ll get there.” I don’t cry over it anymore. You know me, I used to cry over things like that. Now, I’m like, “That’s annoying.” I’ll still talk about it but I’m not crying over it, at least anymore. Speaking of growth, we need to touch on a very sensitive subject for both of us. We used to Photoshop our pictures.

I was introduced to Facetune on a trip with Steph. She’s my best friend in the entire world.

Your parents and us were in Hawaii. On that trip, we went to the Big Island and O’ahu for a couple of days in Honolulu. I remember you took this picture of me on the beach. I felt good in my head and then when I saw that picture of me, I was like, “Is that what I look like?” I was so evil to myself. I warped my body into a completely different body. I don’t even know what I looked like.

The pictures are gone.

I don’t want to see that anymore. I deleted it. I’m glad we have our pictures before our bigger weight losses but I wish I’d kept it to see the progress. I put on Instagram that I had to unfollow Khloé Kardashian. I liked her but she was photoshopping her pictures so much. I can’t wrap my brain around it. Kim, for example, I love her. She’s had all the surgery. Who cares? I can wrap my brain around the surgery. I can’t wrap my brain around altering it digitally anymore. It’s a trigger. If you’re a cigarette smoker and you stop smoking, you hate cigarettes so much. It’s like that.

I get that. It’s good to know because I was looking at that picture that you were talking about and I know that they Photoshopped her swimsuit. I’ve been thinking this entire time that this is her actual body but I’m like, “Who has a body like that? Tell me.”

The whole episode with her publicist and trying to take down that picture off the internet, it’s not like she looked bad. I get wanting to have creative license over what the content is you put out there but to make such a big deal out of it to where she was threatening to sue the people who wouldn’t take the image down that her mema put up, I felt her crippling body dysmorphia and it triggered me. It stems a lot too from her relationship and problems. I’m speculating. I don’t know her personally. People judge her as the big fat one all the time, evil things people say.

It is rough. I’ve seen her in person too. I’m like, “She is a boss.” She’s so stunning. I’m trying to remember what picture it was that her mema posted.

It was a bikini pic. They were in Palm Springs. She was in a black bikini. She looked amazing but it wasn’t edited to her aesthetic.

That’s exhausting, especially being in this community I’m in. I haven’t touched base on my body since starting this account because I don’t want to mislead one person. People already are asking me all the time, “Have you had a tummy tuck?” I’m like, “No.” I don’t want anybody to think anything different. I don’t want to have any smoke and mirrors because I don’t need it. The second I started becoming myself on social media, it’s paid off. It’s been the missing link.

You gave me some good advice. You were like, “You need to be more vulnerable.” I took that to heart. It’s benefited me. My female following and the engagement of the female following have increased because of that. Thank you for that piece of advice. I thought that I was being vulnerable but I wasn’t. I was holding back a little bit.

I’ve seen a huge improvement on your page. You’re killing it. You mean a lot to a lot of people. Your story is important.

Thank you. I know you get thousands of messages like this but when people write me stuff and they’re like, “You’re the person who made me feel okay to take a picture in a bathing suit,” I’m crying. It makes me so happy to hear it.

I love that. That means a lot because look at all the times where we’ve spoiled a trip to the beach because we’re trying to get a bikini picture.

Do you remember that one picture where we were at your secret beach and you sent it to your friend or something and she photoshopped it? It looked like you were an alien.

Yes. She was like, “I know how to edit your cellulite out.” I’m like, “What?” I didn’t know I had cellulite.

You don’t have cellulite. You have perfect legs. Your gams are a chef’s kiss.

Thank you very much. I blame the eleven years of soccer and running like a psycho in every single sport. I’m like, “Thank God.” I love your body.

Thank you. I have a different body than you. We have completely different bodies. When you’re like, “Try the sports rods. It’s so amazing.” I tried it and I was like, “My back fat is hanging off.” It hits me differently than you and that’s okay. We have different bodies but we both love each other’s bodies for who we are. I like the little fits that you have, like the sports bra with leggings. You show a little bit the top of the belly. It looks good. You would have never done that before.

No way. I didn’t even know how far gone I had gotten, honestly. I wasn’t even looking at myself for years in the mirror.

There was this video that you posted of you in that very sparkly dress. It was a year since you had worn the dress. It was to a gala, award show or something. I don’t remember what it was. What was it for?

It was an influencer event.

I cried watching the video because I saw the joy in your face. It’s not even your transformation. What got me and my heart was the joy on your face. You could tell it in your brain like, “I didn’t even realize that I looked like this.”

I have bad body dysmorphia and I still do. Sometimes when I do my side to side, I have to ask John or one of my girls, “Is this dramatic enough for me to post?” They’re like, “What are you talking about? Are you okay? She’s out of her damn mind.” I’m like, “Honestly, I feel like I look the same.” It’s like, “You’re insane.” This is the icky part of it.

I do, too. Sometimes I’ll be laying on my side and I’m used to my stomach hanging out. I reach down to touch it and it’s flatter. I forget it. There are pictures of myself sometimes still where I’m like, “Ew.” Don’t ew yourself. You have to switch your mindset. When you have body dysmorphia and people telling you you’re fat for many years, it’s hard to get out of that.

When you’re doing it in front of a community that’s also going through that, that’s what has helped me, honestly.

Male-Dominated Industry: You get to know what’s trending in beauty by going to meetings and just real-life situations. You can also see what’s trending on Instagram or TikTok.

You’ve come out a little bit about your weight loss. How are you feeling about exposing Breanna Armstrong versus your VSG family to everything?

I was going to go on my close friends on my Bre Armstrong page, which has probably over 25 people. I was going to go on and let them know, “If you haven’t seen me for a while, you can follow me here.” I had a client follow me. I almost choked to death. I’m not ready for it. I’m like, “She doesn’t need to be seeing bikini pictures.” I had to block a few people. Rachel’s mom followed me and I had to block her because I was like, “I’m not ready for it.”

There are some people who I’m not ready for. This is such an intimate part of my life and I don’t want anyone to feel like they have any reign over it or can connect with me on this level. I’m like, “I haven’t chosen to connect with you on this level yet. This is going to be my choice whether I do or not.” There are still some people that don’t know.

That’s something we’ll discuss when your episode comes out of what you want me to tag and what you want me to do because I want to respect that part of your life. I’m proud of you at the same time. There are so many times where I want to repost something of yours and I have to respect the privacy.

It’s true because we have so many cross people.

I remember your new page got suggested to me and it was right after you’ve made it. I was like, “I’m not going to follow it. I don’t want to invade her privacy. When she’s ready, she will tell me.” When I told you about my surgery, you told me about yours.

I’m serious. There are still friends that don’t know. It’s not that I’m trying to hide anything, especially with friends. It’s all in good time.

It’s crazy. If they google your name, they will find your show and everything.

I don’t use Breanna Armstrong on my show. People know me in the community as Bre, which is a bummer because I have big things happening. I’m collaborating with some big brands and coming out with a lash with a brand. I’m not going to have my name tied to it anywhere. If I ever want to get verified on Instagram, I’m like, “There go my chances. I’m not tying the Breanna Armstrong name to it.” It confuses me sometimes. I’m like, “Should I dive right in?” That was my back and forth on TikTok.

In our community, you know how fast it is to grow on TikTok. It fast that I was like, “Do I even want to?” People were using my pictures on TikTok. I was like, “Let me tell my own story on TikTok.” That’s the only reason why I posted. It was forced upon me. I’ve run into a couple of situations like that where I’m like, “What am I trying to do over here?”

What does your boyfriend, John, say about letting the other people in your life know about it? Does he say, “Whatever you want?” I know him. He’s so sweet. What does he advise you?

There are some of his family members that don’t know if they’re all being lift, which I would hope so. With the entire journey, it’s whatever I feel like. He goes with the flow. He’s helped me build this brand, Editour, which is awesome. He loves my vision for things, appreciates and respects it.

What’s it like having a supportive partner when you have your own business? How does that benefit you?

Relationship stuff used to flood my thought process. Even if I was dating someone and they maybe send me a short text, I would think about it all day and it would affect my work. If I was getting ready for a date, I’ll be thinking about that date the entire time. Not that I don’t think about John all the time because look what I’m doing for us and what I’m building together with him but it’s night and day to have that support and I don’t have to worry about relationship stuff.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that our relationship is on the back burner but there are times where our relationship does have to be on the back burner because of the volume and pace that I’m working at. It is nice. I have ADHD too. Sometimes I’ll be talking to you right here but I’m thinking about something completely different and I’m not present. Sometimes it’s hard for me to be able to communicate with people, especially when I’m busy in my brain. He knows that and he’s able to champion that. No one my entire life has ever been able to do that, not even my parents. I appreciate it.

He’s very calming to you. Whenever you do get a little flustered, he keeps his cool, which we both super need.

We went to The Four Seasons Westlake back in March 2020 and there was something going on. We were in a lockdown for the pandemic and they weren’t allowing delivery companies to come to the actual pool and drop off the food. It was the room service. Stephanie was told that she ordered room service and they would come in bring it to her at the pool. They didn’t bring it to her at the pool. They were going to make her go and get her room service herself. It’s very upsetting. I would have never let that fly either. She pulled somebody aside.

The manager was like, “I got you, Stephanie. Don’t worry. We’ve got this under control.” I was doing an influencer thing for them for the cabana. They were giving us the cabana for free and I had to do the post. I was expecting them not to give me food for free but at least to help me out and deliver it for God’s sake or at least put it somewhere accessible. I don’t want to go up to my room carrying this big tray back downstairs, through the corridor, out to the pool. It’s too much.

The manager was MIA. She could get the manager. She talked to somebody else and said, “This isn’t Four Seasons standard.” It was probably the most serious moment of this person’s life who worked there. We were like, “Is she going to be okay or be pissed still?” She turned around, started laughing and we all started laughing.

You know that I am going to get what I want. That’s my Luxury Dropout life. That’s where it comes back into play where I’m like, “This is what I’m used to.” I’m still polite. If you’re paying $700 a night for a hotel room, I’m sorry but you have to say, “This is not the standard care that I’m supposed to be receiving. This is not Four Seasons standard.” Four Seasons, I love you.

You’re probably not reading but if you ever do, work on that. Step up the room service game. No matter what their request has been, any Four Seasons, it’s always been yes. That was the first time at Four Seasons that they’ve told me no. I worked for them. That was my first job out of college. That’s how I knew what the Four Seasons standard was. Sometimes the luxury part of me is still in there.

I’m glad that this is the name you came up with because you and I were brainstorming.

It was hard.

I was like, “You need an antithesis.” Here we are.

I love the VSG Tea. I love their rhyming. I love that you have the little clinking of the glasses. It’s well put together and cute. I was like, “I need to come up with a good idea like that.” You encouraged me to think about what embodies you. It needs to be something that’s a juxtaposition between your old life and new life. Here we are. I used to go, spend $11,000 on an outfit and be in debt for 6 months. For what though? It’s different if you have the money and you can drop that but I didn’t have the money to be doing that. I would be miserable on the inside and look okay on the outside for one Instagram picture. It’s not worth it.

Honestly, my mom is pretty bougie and can be very bougie. One of my first experiences with a friend who was interested in that was you. We have matching rings.

At least these appreciate over time. They hold their value.

I learned a lot about certain things through you. I’ve been inspired by certain designers that you have supported and that’s fine. I love that you’re getting to the point where you’re like, “I don’t need to be spending this if I need to be doing X, Y, Z first.” It’s putting those goals. I use luxury as a goal setter for me in my career where I’ll spoil myself. It used to be once a year. It’s crept its way up to more quarterly. Ordering a shirt like this, I would have never done it before I met you. Honestly, I was thinking, “Why not?”

Christy was the same way. She never ordered anything designer ever. I go to her closet and it’s fully designer. I’m like, “Who are you?” She’s like, “This is your fault.”

You rubbed off on us. Honestly, it’s fun. You get the designers and have the people that you shop with. It’s a good time.

Do you remember when we went to Nordstrom and we had that debacle with the woman who’s helping us?

Yeah. I’m like, “What is the commotion?” I had an issue.

Here’s what happens. You don’t judge people by what they wear when you walk in a store as an associate. I know that because I did high-end retail forever. The people who are the most dressed down are the people who spend the most money. It is what it is. I remember Nicky Hilton would come into where I worked. She is super loaded. I wouldn’t have recognized her because she’s wearing no makeup. She had brown hair at the time. It was pulled back in a ponytail. She was super low-key. I looked at her and I was like, “That’s Nicky Hilton.”

You have to focus and see that she’s not decked out. Maybe she was carrying a Balenciaga motorcycle bag at the time. It was popular. That was it. There were no other indicators. This woman didn’t want to help me. They were like, “It’s over there.” As soon as I started looking at the designer stuff, all of a sudden, she wanted to help me. The other lady had already started helping me. There was a debacle between them, fighting over who got to help me. I ended up saying, “Eff it. I’m not going to even buy anything because you guys are super crazy and annoying.”

I saw you’re wearing the jacket.

We ended up getting our friendship rings.

I use it as a motivator sometimes. I haven’t been able to get a house yet. I didn’t have those goals when I was doing my taxes. I still have to find new goals. My splurge wasn’t the house because I wasn’t able to get it at the time but it’s been my little trinkets here and there.

You deserve it. You work so hard. If you don’t reward yourself a little bit, what are you going to do?

That’s how I feel too.

We should go on a vacation at some point in 2022. You and I are very similar when we travel. It’s hard for me to travel with a lot of people. I can’t stay at a Holiday Inn. It’s not me. I understand it’s supposed to be Luxury Dropout but I need luxury where I’m sleeping. To me, that is a quality experience and I’m going to enrich my life by staying at a quality place. I will be miserable if we go and stay at a two-star place. I won’t like it.

That’s our hobby. That’s what brings us joy. We like to have luxury on the road.

That would be fun. If you want, I could be the third wheel. I don’t care.

We’ll go somewhere cool. I’m also very comfortable with going somewhere that’s out of my comfort zone. You know how I feel about Mexico. I don’t do anything overseas. We don’t have to. We can go and do something fun. That’s the whole thing about Bali. We were talking about going to Bali and I was like, “I’m scared.”

It’s a lot. When I went with Christy, I had to take full responsibility for the travel, getting us to the destination, through the airports, everything. She doesn’t talk. At least you’re not shy where you would help me out. When I got to the hotel, I was like, “Can you pay attention to this part?” She was like, “No. You’ve got it.” I’m like, “No. You will pay attention to this part.” I am dead because we’ve been traveling for 24 hours. I want to go to Bora Bora or something like that. My parents would never go because it’s fully a relaxed type of destination. My dad is not about that.

Male-Dominated Industry: Find a supportive partner who can help you build your business. Find someone who shares your vision for things and appreciates and respects it.

I’m down for that too. I would love to have gone to Bora Bora for my honeymoon but then it stresses me out to be so far away from the business. I have very odd priorities and they will get strained out.

You’re not odd. That’s normal. Hard-working America is ingrained within you. I have a little bit of the European like, “Let’s take a nap from 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM.” You’re like, “God bless USA,” at all times. You’re so patriotic. On the 4th of July, I fully expect to see an American bald eagle in your living room.

I’m going to DC when I’m back East and I got this t-shirt.

She’s holding up a t-shirt with an American bald eagle holding an American flag. She had it on her table. That is funny. When are you going?

I’m going to be at one of my good friend’s weddings. She was supposed to get married in 2020. Her wedding is going to be at the Mondrian in Park Avenue. We’re going to stay there for a few days and fly into DC because John’s never been to DC. I am obsessed with DC. I love history. We’re going to stay at St. Regis right by The White House.

They have a good afternoon tea there.

You would know about that. That’s where you stayed.

I didn’t stay there. We stayed at a different place. The name is escaping me but it was good. It was a super nice place. We were there one night. Christy lives in Maryland. I flew in there, left, came back, stayed overnight and then left. I was only there one day. The Smithsonian is disappointing. I was sad.

Have you ever been before?

In eighth grade. To be frank, I don’t remember it.

I remember loving it. I love the outfits.

This was the Natural History Museum, not American history.

We’re not going to natural history. We’re going to the Arab one and then the American one. We’re doing that, fly over to Tennessee and visit Rachel in her new house.

You get to see everybody and all the kids. That’s great. I saw that Rachel sent two of the kiddos to public school and I was shocked.

She was considering maybe even sending more than two and maybe having Jamie and Benny start in public school. She’s not going to do that. It’s great because Rachel’s homeschooling everybody and it’s a lot to have all the kids home at once.

She never gets a break.

She’s a mom all the time. We’ll see. Also, the school systems in Tennessee are night and day from the school system in Hawaii. They’re the worst in the nation. It’s tragic.

I set my Hinge profile to Maui. They’re like, “What are you doing here?”

You have too much fun on Hinge. I love it. You use it for your entertainment.

I don’t even plan on meeting anyone on there but I have so much fun fucking with the guys on there. They’re easy to mess with. Truly having gone on a date from it, I’ve not even tried. There was one guy that I talked to for a couple of days and then it immediately fell off. I don’t think I’m ready for it. When the right guy arrives, I’ll be ready. I don’t feel like I’m focused on that aspect. Do I get lonely? Of course. There are some nights where I’m like, “It’d be nice to have a dude here.” I’m good without it.

I’m very proud of you because I don’t want you to settle.

We were settling for a little while. That’s the escape to Orange County. It was great. I couldn’t have made a better decision. You have met him and then it was over.

There was some manipulation that was trying to come into play. You deserve so much more. I’m proud. You are sound-minded about that.

I get sad when sad things happen to me but I’m more resilient than I used to be. I’m handling it a little bit better. You’re handling stuff so well too. You used to fall apart easily as I did but you hold all your things together. I don’t think I’ve seen you cry for a long time.

It’s hard to hold it all in. I was talking to my cousin about this because she was handling something super mature. She’s like, “We’re adults. We’ve grown up.” Maybe this is what happens when you grow up and you’re an adult. You feel things a lot better.

To be fair, I was in my late twenties or something when I met you. I should have been an adult already. I don’t even think I found my footing until I aged.

I’m not even a real adult yet. My friend, who comes and films with us, we used to be the best of friends in college. We were in the same cheer team together. She was like, “Can you believe that we’re actual adults?” She’s got two kids and married. I’m like, “It is insane. This is it. This is our life. We’re here to live it.”

I look at my parents still for a lot of stuff. Another reason why I admire you is because you’ve lived away from your parents and far away from them for a long time. Even when I was in Vegas and they were here in Houston, I was struggling so hard, even something as small as me being sick and I don’t have anyone.

At the time, there was no Uber Eats when I was living in Vegas. There was no delivery or grocery delivery. I would want someone to bring me a Sprite or something. Nobody was around and that was hard. You have John but you were alone before. You had to go through all of that alone. I admire that a lot where I’m like, “She’s got it together.”

That helped me to hunker down with work because I didn’t have a lot going on in my home life. When Rachel and Chad moved over there, I was like, “I have to pave my own way, make my own path and have my own life.” I did go through a rough transition into coping with that though.

Your faith is important to you as well. You and your parents share that. That probably has kept you close. Your dad’s a chef. You talk on the phone and he’s instructing you. The deviled eggs on Easter were truly a real undertaking. You’re like, “Dad, I did that already.” They were good, though.

This is what he’s used to. He’s multitasking while making his own Easter feast.

When we go to your parent’s house in Hawaii, we grub. It’s so good. The view from their house, you’re on a cloud in heaven. I’m getting nostalgic thinking about it. Our personalities showed on that trip because we did stuff together. We did the volcano together, which is a whole other story in itself. We hiked to a volcano for 10 miles. It was insane. I remember the last day I wanted to see the dolphins. That was my trigger word and kryptonite. I was like, “I have to see the dolphins.” You were like, “I want to go play golf.” I was like, “This is the difference between the two of us.” You’re the adult and I am the child who’s like, “I want to go to the animals, mommy.”

When in Hawaii, you know how to live it up.

I came across this video of us at The Waikoloa Hilton. That’s where the dolphins are. There’s that bridge across the pool. You were working on it and I was like, “She can twerk. She’s good at it.” You were twerking that whole trip.

Twerking had just started. You’re like, “Are you going to twerk?” I’m like, “I can try.” I can’t now. Something happened. I can’t twerk as good as I used to, that’s for sure.

I have one question that I ask everybody that comes on the show. I’m so interested to hear your response because you’re going to give me a thoughtful one. If you saw twenty-year-old Breanna walking down the street and you wanted to go over to her and give her a big hug. As you looked at her, you wanted to tell her one thing as you aged. What is the one thing you would tell her?

Honestly, care less about what people think about you and your career. You’re doing great. Stay focused on God. Not every man who talks to you is going to want to marry you. FYI, keep your number down a little bit lower. Stay focused on God. That’s it. Honestly, I did and still do care so much what people think but not as much as I did back then. It’s been a big battle. Honestly, in 2020, I’ve been way freer of that than anything.

Isn’t that incredible how things change?

Yes.

People say 2020 was the worst. For me, it was the best. Not for civilization but for me, I feel like my growth has been exponential and it’s been the same for you.

I do too. I’ve seen so much growth in you that I’m proud of. I wish I could be more president with you. Honestly, the small things that I have been able to contribute, how you take it and run with it, even with the small introduction with your platform. I want to see you succeed. I am a true believer that if I can do it, you can do it 100%.

I love you so much because you’re so supportive. You remind me all the time, “I can’t believe that you’re doing this.” You’re always so encouraging about my business and stuff. Honestly, I look at you and I’m like, “You can do this as well.” I’m proud of you. I’m very thankful that you have this platform because people can feed off of your joy. That are some of the things that I’ve been seeing pop up in your stories that people talk about. It’s like, “We’ve met with Stephanie Joplin. She’s full of joy and a blast.” It’s like, “Good.”

I love having these conversations with people. There’s never an awkward moment. Sometimes we talk for two hours and I’m like, “We have to get off. We can’t edit a two-hour podcast.”

Same here. We try to do 1 hour and when we go over 1.5 hours, we’re like, “We got to hop off here.”

Male-Dominated Industry: When you grow up and become an adult, you just handle things and problems a lot better.

At some point, it’s still interesting content but I don’t think the followers are going to want to stick around for two hours. You’re going to lose them. I also wanted to go back real quick about your number. I was talking to these girls from this podcast called Hotter in Person. They’re funny and explicit. They talk about sex a lot. They don’t hold anything back. Your language is gift-giving and so is mine. I love giving gifts. I like words of affirmation. Also, I give words of affirmation.

When I was in my early 20s or mid-20s, I was like, “If I give my body to this guy, he’s going to love, accept and want to marry me.” That’s a good lesson for a lot of younger women in their 20s, early-20s or whatever. We have to remember that is not what is going to make a man fall in love with you. No matter how good you are in bed, it’s not going to work.

You got to fall in love with yourself first.

There are hard days where I’m mad at myself and I’m like, “I’m so frustrated with myself.” In the end, you have to speak kindness into yourself. You and I both have done a good job of rewriting the script on that because we used to be negative with ourselves and bodies. It’s like, “Why are we like this? Why are we so fat? We’re ugly. We look like this. I can’t wear this. Don’t post that. I look like shit. Don’t do it.” Now, we’re so much better about it.

We’re more comfortable with ourselves. That happens. It takes time.

You miss out on a lot of life when you are constantly so amped up about that. We need another voyage to Hawaii. Thank you so much for spending time with me. I know you have a busy schedule. I text you incessantly and sometimes you can’t respond. You probably read it and you’re too busy to reply. Know that I admire and love you. You are such a creatively wonderful person. You will always be a close friend of mine no matter where we are in life, what age we are, no matter the distance. You’re always going to be a huge part of my life.

I love and adore you. I’m proud of you. Keep up the good work. Thank you so much for having me on.

Thank you.

—

That’s it for this episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed my chat with Breanna. She is such a light. We always cackle and have so much fun. We’re sometimes screaming in laughter on the phone with one another. I hope you caught some of that vibe. If you’re watching on YouTube, make sure you like, comment and subscribe to the channel. Don’t forget to hit that notification bell. If you are streaming audio, please don’t forget to leave a review. I am glad that you’re here. I am thrilled that you’re coming along on this journey with my friends and me. Until next time. I’m sending you love. Stay well. I will see you soon.

Important Links:

• Editour Media
• VSG Tea
• Ambition for Breakfast – Apple Podcasts
• Tummy Tuck Surgery And Postoperative Care With Stephanie Joplin – Previous episode on Podbay
• Hotter in Person – Previous episode
• YouTube – The Luxury Dropout Podcast

About Breanna Armstrong

Our relationships with our loved ones aren’t just personal relationships; they’re also legal relationships. Our guest for today understands this very well. Family law attorney Brenda DeRouen is an advocate, entrepreneur, trailblazer and all-around badass. She was named 2021’s Rising Star by Super Lawyers, Top 40 under 40 by the National Association of Black Attorneys, and was awarded AVVO’s Client’s Choice award in 2019 and 2020 for family law. She is currently on the Board of Directors for the Houston Association of Women Attorneys. She won’t ever tell you this, but I will! In this chat, Brenda gives us all some insightful, useful, and tangible knowledge to carry with us into the future regarding our legal relationships with both our partners, our family, and our children. We talk about divorce counsel, custody and kids, mental health, accolades, advocacy, and the driving force behind the scorched earth this beauty leaves in her wake. Get ready to jump down the rabbit hole on today’s episode with one of Texas’ most prominent and successful female attorneys.

—

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

How To Advocate For Yourself And Your Kids During a Divorce With Attorney Brenda DeRouen

I’ve got a very special guest. She is a friend but also someone that I think is fantastic, and you’re going to love her too. Her name is Brenda DeRouen. She is an attorney here in Houston, and she practices Family Law. She has her own practice and was named 1 of the Top 40 Under 40 by The National Trial Lawyers Association and the 2021 Super Lawyer Rising Star.

We talk about a lot of things in this episode. We’re going to talk about her roots, why she got into Family Law, Co-Parenting 101, and things to think about before you tie the knot with someone, tie your life to theirs. You can’t be too careful because it’s your life. You’ve got to look out for yourself first. You’ve got to put that oxygen mask on first before you can help anyone else.

Normally, I talk about relationships in an emotional capacity, and this is going to be different because we’re going to be talking about it in a very straightforward and business-like way so it won’t be so woo-woo. It’s normal and a little bit more straight to the point. Also, we’ll talk about how to be an ally. How to be an ally to someone who is going through a divorce, has gone through a divorce, is co-parenting or going through any Family Law issues. It’s super important. This also includes things like adoption. I know those items are close to many of your hearts. Without further ado, let’s get into it and welcome her to the show.

—

We are here with my friend, Brenda DeRouen. Welcome, Brenda, to the show. How are you?

I’m good. Thanks so much for having me, Steph.

We love having you here on the Luxury Dropout. It is okay to have luxury goods and do luxury things, but the nitty-gritty of it is that you and I both know that this life is enriching us with experiences, especially as of late. Wouldn’t you agree?

I definitely agree. We had to figure out luxury and COVID and what does luxury truly means when you have to be combined into four walls.

That is so true. I’ve already introduced you so everyone knows that you are a Family Law attorney and you have your own practice, which is absolutely amazing. You’re under 35 and you have your own company. You have people that work for you that look up to you. You help people every single day. When you sit down at night with yourself and you’re alone, how do you feel? What feelings do you feel inside your heart?

There are a lot of feelings that I feel when I lay down in my bed at night thinking about all of my accomplishments. Some of the words that come to mind are great gratitude, gratefulness. I come from a very small town, humble beginnings. To look at my life and all I’ve been able to accomplish, I’m sometimes shocked and surprised, but I’m also grateful. It’s been an interesting and amazing journey. I have all the fields when I think about where I am now in life.

Family Law is probably one of the hardest things you can do as an attorney or hardest laws you can practice. What made you decide on Family Law?

You’re absolutely right. Family Law is full of drama. It’s baby mama and baby daddy drama. If you call my office, you are not calling because you want $1 million. You call me because somebody is trying to rip your heart out of you. I chose Family Law because I thought I wanted to be a corporate attorney. I track that, I did some internships and I didn’t like it. I’d have interaction with people. I thought I wanted to be a criminal defense attorney, which I’m glad I did it. I couldn’t work for that. That’s another practice area you definitely have to have the heart to do. There are a lot of people who need help and minorities in that field but I did it for a little bit and I did not like it.

There was a situation where I went through a custody situation with my son while I was studying for the bar exam. We don’t go into depth about Family Law litigation or things like that. They teach you the bare minimum. As you can imagine, I was a law student, poor, broke, and I didn’t have the money to spend thousands of dollars on an attorney, so I opened up this family handbook and I started reading and trying to represent myself. I fell in love with the law of Family Law because you get the opportunity to help guide people in the most turbulent portions of their lives and help them see the light at the end of the tunnel. I love kids, talking with people, and helping people. It’s rewarding for me. That’s why I chose Family Law.

It was truly personal to you like you were in it.

Family Law: At the end of the day, we’re extensions of our clients. We advocate for our clients.

I’m still in it every day.

You’re still co-parenting, obviously. How did that go for you? When you learned all the things you did, you were in law school. Did you, in fact, represent yourself? What happened with that?

A lot of times, cases handled themselves outside of court. I didn’t have to litigate my case. I had to prepare for litigation if, in fact, it went that route but my case was handled outside of court. I didn’t get into the nitty-gritty that I do now.

Outside of court, does that mean mediation?

Yes. We’re at practice in Texas but specifically in Harris county. In order for you to even go for a judge unless there are extreme circumstances or there’s an emergency, the court requires you to go to mediation before you come into court so it was handed to the mediation.

Do you still have to have an attorney present for mediation?

It’s advisable to have an attorney present because you don’t know your rights. You don’t know what you can have, what you can’t have, what you can ask for or what you can’t ask for. As parents, we know what’s in the best interest of our children. Sometimes those things cannot necessarily be put into a court order unless the other party is agreeable to that because we have standards in our Texas Family Codebook that judges have to go by. There are a lot of things that you need to know in order to get into mediation and to negotiate a favorable result for yourself.

You say we as parents know what’s best. I feel that sometimes they don’t care what’s best. They want to win for themselves. I’ve experienced that with my recent ex. That was in mediation with his ex-baby mama or whatever drama, all that was. She was asking for stuff like what she gets versus what he gets and all that stuff. She had asked for a tummy tuck, breast augmentation and a BBL in mediation.

Was she represented by counsel and they asked for it?

Yes, and his attorney was like, “I’ve been practicing for a long time. I’ve never heard anyone ask for plastic surgery ever.”

At the end of the day, we’re extensions of our clients. We advocate for our clients. If a client is telling me, “Attorney DeRouen, I want you to go in there. I want you to ask for a BBL, new tits and a new face.” I’m going to advise them like, “There’s no way in hell you’re going to get these things because you look horrible, but because you’re asking me this and I am an extension of you, I have to go in and advocate for my client.” There are those cases when there are no kids involved and it’s strictly financial property cases but in the cases where there are children, we have a thing here in Texas where it says, “You have to do what’s in the best interest of the child. The best interest of the child is the law.” That’s how we determine custody, child support and visitation.

It’s important for us to talk to our clients because sometimes they do go and think that this is something that they’re winning. No one is winning when a child is in the middle of litigation. There are no wins and losses. That’s a conversation that I have with my clients. I always tell them, “When you go to mediation, you should not feel like you’re winning or losing. You should feel like you’ve done what’s right for your child.” In court as well, you should never feel like you’ve won. There are those cases where it’s like, “We won because that truly was in the best interest of the child.” Maybe the child was in a toxic living environment or an abusive situation and somebody wants custody. That is a win because the child is in a better situation but you’re right. There are some emotions.

It’s a fine line. There must be some boundaries that you have to set with your clients. Say I came to you. My relationship with you as my attorney would be a little bit different than some random person that came off the street that you don’t know, but it’s paying you to retain your services, but there’s got to be that boundary like when do you get involved and say, “You need to go to see someone about what’s happening up here.” When is that fit for you?

That conversation is day one. In fact, I collaborated with different counselors and therapists in my practice because this is highly emotional. When you are dealing with divorce or child custody, this is nothing where you’re excited and you’re in a great headspace. It feels like your world is falling apart. When you came to me for a consultation and you decided to sign as a client, I put pamphlets in your new client folder and I’ll have a conversation with my clients about mental health because if you’ve not watched the news, these cases can turn nasty.

People have committed suicide because they’ve lost custody. People have killed their families because of whatever was not going in their favor. Therefore, it is important that anytime you’re going through any situation, it doesn’t have to be a divorce or even be a bad thing that you’re going through, we always have to check-in and make sure that we’re balancing ourselves the best way that we can.

Are there telltale signs? Have you gotten quicker at picking up on those signs?

When someone is coming into my office and not thinking logically like they’re not trying to make decisions in the best interest of the child or they’re trying to make the other parties miserable in some way, that’s a telltale sign that they haven’t dealt with their own shit. Because they haven’t dealt with their own shit, they’re trying to make someone else suffer. That’s a telltale sign. Maybe they have lost all hope or they felt like, “I can’t win.” She or he has all this evidence and they have multiple attorneys or whatever, so they’ve lost all hope. That can also be a telltale sign that someone needs to get some mental health services.

That’s good to know. I always wonder that it must be tough on you. Moving to the other side of things being tough on you, have there been situations where no matter how many years go by, a situation has stuck in your head and remained in your heart and your gut may be involving a child or something like that. Do you have situations like that?

I do. There was a case. It was my first custody case ever. It was supposed to be super easy. Dad wanted to get visitation and mom denied him visiting. This is an enforcement action. All we need is the order and we go to court. This turned out into a whole custody case. I don’t know if you know anything about Munchausen By Proxy. This was the textbook Munchausen By Proxy.

Mom was doping this kid up making this kid believe that he or she couldn’t stay. It had all of these disabilities constantly in and out of hospitals and doctor’s offices. I’d seen it on TV. I’ve never seen this in real life and here I am, the attorney taking on this huge case. I thought it was going to be enforcement action. It turned out to be a custody case. The judge believed in the first hearings that we had and she drifted dad’s visitation. He wanted to give up on this case.

I started working for free because I started peeling back layers of this case. It got crazy but we ended up winning custody for dad. He had this beautiful child and that case stuck with me. It’s a reminder that you have to fight, even when your clients feel like they don’t want to fight anymore because they feel like they’re losing. Custody cases and divorce cases take time and you have to be a fighter. You have to have someone who is willing to go to the end with you with these cases because it is highly emotional. You would have your highs and lows.

You need an attorney to just tell you, “You’ve got to continue fighting. I see something in this case that you probably don’t see. At the end of the day, you can tell me when you want to end this case but if you allow me, I will continue to fight for you.” That case has stuck with me. It’s a daily reminder to always fight for my clients. It’s a reminder that sometimes you don’t win in the beginning. You don’t get good results in court but if you stay the course, everything will work out.

For those who don’t know what Munchausen By Proxy is, go watch The Act on Hulu about Gypsy Rose Blanchard, and you’ll find out what that is.

It is the same.

That is so wild.

Family Law: Running a law firm is basically like having two super hard jobs – being a lawyer and being an entrepreneur – at the same time.

The better case. I was like, “What the fuck did I get myself into?”

Was it medical stuff that they discovered?

I dated a physician, so I’m going through these cases and trying to learn terminology and things. I’m asking him these questions, he’s teaching me and I’m learning. I’m putting my lawyer hat on and now, I’m this fake medical doctor. I’m going through these medical records and things are not adding up. I end up getting the court to order that the child goes to a different doctor that they’ve never gone to. That doctor has seen the same thing that I have seen and took this kid off with all these medications. It was bizarre.

I figured it out because my honey was helping me out. The case attorney was amazing too. For those who don’t know, oftentimes, kids don’t have voices in cases, which is so crazy to me. They should have a say so in a lot of things because they have feelings and things of that nature. We also had an amazing amicus attorney who was able to come in on the case, represent the child’s best interests and was able to see some of the same things that me and dad were able to see.

There was a separate attorney to represent the child. I’ve never heard of that. What’s it called?

Amicus.

That’s new. Write that down. That’s important.

That’s something that you can request if you have a child under the age of twelve. That’s not a hardcore law. It doesn’t say under the age of twelve, but it’s likely that if the child is under the age of twelve, you can ask the court to appoint an amicus to represent your child to have another eye. Remember, you have your attorney and they’re fighting like shit for you. They have their attorney and they’re fighting like shit for you but who is truly fighting for the child?

It makes complete sense but I never thought about it. I feel like law and order failed me because that’s how I know all of my stuff. It’s like Chicago Med. It’s what I watch and how I know all of my medical stuff.

My guy loves all the lawyers’ shows. He watched Court TV and 30 Days. I’m watching Chicago Med and all the medical shows, and I’m like, “Can we watch something else?”

I don’t know if that’s weird or not. I feel like you’re in it all day. The last thing you want to do is to be in it again unless it’s for research purposes, and you need to give a critique or something like that then maybe but otherwise. Let’s talk about some prestigious titles you’ve been given. Let’s talk about Top 40 Under 40 by The National Trial Lawyers Association, which is insane and 2021 Super Lawyer Rising Star. I’m so proud of you. I can’t even talk. I know that you are appreciative and excited but you need to give yourself some pats on the back because you worked hard for this. It’s not like you didn’t go to law school, mosey on to a law firm, sit in a chair and read a couple of briefs. You’ve done the work. Can you talk about the amount of work that you’ve put in to get here?

Thank you, Steph. I appreciate that. I’m always honored when people acknowledge some of the accolades because I don’t celebrate them enough and I should. The work that I’ve done, obviously the educational portion of it all. I went to law school for three years. It’s my first Bachelor’s degree, then the LSAT, which is a ridiculous test in and of itself then law school and doing your internships and trying to figure out what area of law you want to work in. Me starting my own law firm has been the greatest accomplishment that I’ve been able to accomplish in life. It’s creating a business and something that I get to dictate the day’s end and the operations of. It’s a lot of work. I’m still young and having people that you boss around, I don’t like to manage people. It’s hard because I’m still having fun. I don’t want to come across as stern, aggressive and boring. Learning that balance of what a boss looks like and not becoming too much of a friend to my employees. That has been hard.

Building the foundation, I do all of my own marketing so branding myself, branding my firm, making sure that I’m networking, going out and on top of it all, staying on top of the laws. Our laws change every time our legislation meets. I have to stay on top of that. We have continuing legal education. We have a ton of hours that we have to do every year. Making sure I’m standing on top of the law, learning the law and learning the business of law because no one teaches us that in law school. They don’t teach how to run a business, how to get clients, how to bill hours, how to make plain customer service and all of those great things. That has been the hardest.

It’s to be an entrepreneur as well as an attorney, which is huge. It’s two huge jobs that are super hard.

You’re right. Being a lawyer and being an entrepreneur are two hard jobs at the same time.

You’re a very smart woman. I knew that the second I met you. In fact, I didn’t even know you were an attorney when we met. We met at the gym, FYI. I haven’t worked out because of my accident, but I was intimidated by you. I don’t want to say intimidated in a negative way but your presence is strong. I was like, “That woman is a super fucking strong woman and I want to be her friend. I don’t know if she’ll let me.”

Your presence was intimidating. I was like, “Look at her.” First of all, let’s talk about it. I came into the gym and you were like super fit doing all these crazy fucking workouts. I had started working out again and I was huffing and puffing. You’re like, “You got it.” You were so strong. What are you talking about? You came off as the sweetest, kindest person. When you spoke to me, I wanted to say something before but I didn’t want to say something to her.

You never know if you are bothering someone but I felt very good vibes from you, although powerful. I said to myself, “I have to know this woman. I got to be in her energy.” When we have hung out, you bring such great energy. I don’t know how you do it because you give so much energy of yourself to not only to your clients, business associates, employees, boyfriend, family and friends but also, you are an activist as well. You were an integral part of the Houston BLM Movement. I would love for you to talk a little bit about that if you don’t mind.

Thank you. In 2020, we had the George Floyd situation. I felt moved at that moment. I could not sit at home and not do something. It hit differently. Every day, there is a situation where we hear about a minority and specifically African-American men or women being shot down by the police for unwarranted reasons or for reasons maybe it was warranted but it was over and beyond what was necessary for that particular situation.

The first thing that I did was I posted on my social media. There were a lot of protesters who were getting arrested. I said, “Enough is enough. If you’ve been arrested for being a protester, I want to represent you for free.” This situation was national. It was everywhere. When I posted that, people reached out to me and there were people calling me to represent them in Chicago, California or Louisiana. All these places. I’m only licensed in the State of Texas so I couldn’t help these people but I said, “I have a platform and I have resources. I know how to organize. What I’m going to do is start a base of attorneys who are willing to do the same thing that I’m doing, which represents protesters pro bono. I’m going to start this database and I’m going to host it on my website.”

I’m a Family Law Attorney. I don’t do a lot of criminal defense work but I have done it before. I hosted this database on my website and posted it on social media. I want to say we had over 500 attorneys on our list from around the United States. If you were arrested, you had a free attorney. Now, there were cases where if you were breaking glass or doing something crazy like you’re damaging property, I couldn’t represent you. That was my baseline but if you were only in the street or doing something, I’d represent you.

We got to a situation where we were out protesting one night. I was out in the streets and then Houston police got a group of people and centered them into this fenced-in area. They’re protesting in the street and they were hurting them into this pastor. I think it was over 900 people. If you think about that like, “You told me to get out of the street, but now you’re hurting me into this space where I can’t go anywhere.”

I thought that was not okay. It’s unfair. What we did was me, Eddrea McKnight and a lot of other attorneys got together and we said, “Enough was enough.” We wrote letters to the District Attorney’s Office. We asked a group of attorneys to speak to our DA. We were able to get all of those cases dismissed based on our presence being there, based on our legal expertise knowing what the law is and gathering witnesses to tell these protestors stories about what happened. That was one of my activist moments. It was helping protesters during the George Floyd situation and making sure that the DA dismissed those cases because it was unwarranted.

That was not the first nor the last time you have done things pro bono. I remember, on your birthday month, you made an announcement that you would be representing a client pro bono in celebration of your birthday. I admire that. I know that it is a difficult financial burden sometimes to take on all by yourself. I want to say thank you on behalf of our Houston community. I think that is truly so selfless.

I love doing it. Attorney fees are not cheap. As I say, I remember that time I had to study Family Law on my own because I could not afford an attorney. I don’t do these things for recognition at all because I love helping people. It fills me up. It makes my energy increase. For whatever reason, I truly love helping people and I love helping people who can’t help themselves.

Family Law: In order to be an ally, you just need to be able to be available and allow individuals to vent to you without judgment.

You have published a few written blogs on topics. Maybe our audience hasn’t read them. You can give us a few tips on a few of the subjects that you’ve spoken about. The first one is I want to know how I can be an ally hypothetically if I have a girlfriend who’s going through a divorce and a nasty custody battle? I have a boyfriend who was going through a divorce, a custody battle or a parent who’s going through a divorce with my other parent. How are you an ally?

Allyship is so important. We talked about the mental health aspect of these cases. When people are going through custody battles or a divorce, they need somebody to be supportive of them. You can be an ally simply by acknowledging that someone is going through a situation that maybe you’ve not experienced before but you could probably relate to if you think about the worst heartbreak that you’ve ever had or if you’ve ever lost anything like an animal, a friend or anything. It feels like when people are going through divorce or custody cases, they’re going a debt. It is a true grieving process for them. In order to be an ally, you only need to be available and allow individuals to vent to you without judgment.

No one wants to be judged because they have a judge. They have a judge that they eventually have to go to and they don’t need it to be other people around them. Also, helping them to get out of the funk. Showing them that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. We get so into whatever moment we’re in that we don’t think that, “This is only a fraction of my life. This is not my total life.” Getting them out of the house if they’re depressed, recognizing if they need mental health services and being there for them.

What do you do if your friend is like, “Let’s go slash his tires.” How do you take them off the freaking ledge? It’s like the rider drive vision side. It was like, “Let’s go do it,” but I’m like, “We can’t do that.”

To be honest, I was that friend before I became an attorney. If you want to slash his tires, I’m like, “Yes. Let’s put on our black hoodies and our face mask. Fuck him.” Now that I’m an attorney and I know that there are serious consequences behind it, I would say, “If someone wants to slash someone’s tires, there is an emotion that they’re trying to get out. They are frustrated and are putting all of this energy into this guy, this girl, this property or whatever because they’ve not found a way to analyze those feelings or express those feelings.”

I would recommend that if you have a friend that’s wanting to do that, find something else for them to do. Maybe get a fat head off his face, get some paint gun and shoot his face or her face or go to one of those smashed rooms where you can smash and throw glasses so they can get that frustration. Redirect that energy to something that is not going to be a criminal and will allow them to vent and express themselves.

If you can’t find a place that’s open or if it’s late at night, I’ll be like, “Let’s go get some ice cream. Don’t worry about it. It’s going to be okay.”

Instead of that, let’s go get ice cream.

You’re right. Back in the day, I was so mad at now my ex-husband but at that time, he was my fiance and he wouldn’t let me in our house that we shared with our friend, Eric, in Vegas. I was in my car and he wouldn’t let me in the door and pick up the phone. It was his house. He owned it. I was like, “I’m going to casually tap the garage,” but no. It wasn’t a tap. I fucked up the garage door badly. “Let me in the fucking house.” That story will not die because, of course, his whole fraternity heard about it. Even many years later they’re like, “Remember when Stephanie ran into Ryan’s garage?” I don’t talk to him anymore.

They always bring it up. I won’t repeat his name because I don’t know if he wants me to tell this story about him. We’ll call him Harry. “Do you remember when Harry was holding you back from you trying to get to Ryan and you accidentally gave him a black eye?” I’m like, “I don’t remember that. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sorry. I think I’m getting old and my memory is going.” Co-Parenting 101. You’ve written about this. Give us a couple of tips on Co-Parenting 101 that maybe seem obvious to you but aren’t so obvious to most.

On my social media, I collaborate with Anne Lewis, who is a Parenting Coach and Psychologist. It’s called Co-Parenting in 2021. One thing that I’ve learned with co-parenting is you have to be able to one, always put the child first. The best interest of the child. Number two is to be flexible. Things are going to always go your way or his way. You got to learn how to be flexible. Communicate like hell.

I am a partner with this app called TalkingParents. It is so helpful for parents to find resources that can help facilitate an effective co-parenting relationship. That app is one but there are many others out there and where you can share calendars. It’s hard to keep up with your kids when you have kids doing football, tutoring, going to doctor’s appointments and finding resources where you can communicate and share information about your child in one centralized location.

Real quick about the co-parenting app. Can you communicate through that app? For example, I know that there are some court-mandated things where you have to communicate solely through a portal, an app or something.

TalkingParents is a texting app but it’s also an app where you could mince certain things like maybe out-of-pocket medical expenses as well as share calendars. You’re right. TalkingParents is one of those apps that can be court-ordered. It’s only court-ordered in those situations where it is high conflict or there has been some situation of abuse. Absent of that, parents can mutually agree to sign on to a co-parenting app to make parenting efficient for them. I recommend it because it is helpful. It is automatically admissible in court as evidence.

It keeps everything in one place and not the Facebook Messenger, Instagram messenger or texts.

Think about it. If he or she did something 2 or 3 months ago, I know on my phone I delete stuff after a month, two days or something like that. If you have this co-parenting app, nothing is deleted. When your attorney needs evidence or needs to know when you notify the other parent of a certain thing, you can literally go into the app and it stays it forever. You might lose your phone or forget your iCloud information and it takes too much time to try to find things like emails and text messages so I recommend it.

Anything else that you would recommend for co-parenting?

There are other things if you want to read up on that. Check out my page, @BrendasMyLawyer on Instagram.

What are the things to consider before saying, “I do?”

That is the million-dollar question. That is also another thing that can be found on my Instagram. That was a great conversation. I met with so many different professionals to come together to give advice on things to consider before you say I do. As a family attorney, the number one thing I’m going to say is to consider a pre-nuptial agreement.

I talked about this not too long ago, but pre-nuptial agreements used to be a thing for men to get. They were the breadwinners back in the days and had all these assets that they wanted to protect. If you look at the statistics and the numbers, women are starting to make a lot more money than men. Although we love to get married and we want to have this dream wedding, we also have assets and things that we need to protect.

Not only those things that we have before we get married but also the things that we acquire after we get married. Those are conversations and things that you want to think about before you say I do. Do you want this long, drawn-out divorce or do you want something in place to say, “If this thing does not work out, this is what’s going to happen? I’m going to pay half the bills or you’re going to pay me spousal support and I’m going to go find another place to live. You’re going to have the house and I’m going to have this.” How are we going to divide our assets? Are we going to go off a Texas Law? I call it Planning for the inevitable. A lot of people get into these marriages and don’t realize that 50% of these marriages don’t last. It’s almost a wheel to me. You need to plan for the inevitable. We pray that you make it but it is almost certain that you probably won’t.

Your partner proposes and you talk to him/her about getting a pre-nuptial agreement. You say it in the calmest way and the clearest way possible and they freak the fuck out. Are we talking red flag? Are we talking deal breaker here?

Neither. I would say it’s all about communication. A pre-nuptial agreement isn’t always a bad thing. You can negotiate what you want in your pre-nuptial agreement. Now sometimes you won’t agree on all of those things but you can leave that out. If it’s such a big deal, neither one of you guys want to commit to that, you don’t have to agree on that thing in that pre-nuptial agreement but it is a contract. It is something that I wouldn’t say is a red flag but if it is a huge deal then that is going to be a red flag because now you need to think about this person who is not considerate of something that is so important to me. That’s a big thing. If it’s something huge like, “If we get married then I want 50% of everything,” and that’s a big deal to you. He’s like, “Fuck that. I want 90%.” That’s a red flag.

When I first got married, I was 22 so I didn’t have any assets and neither did he but now, if I were to get married, I absolutely would want that. I can’t help but think when that day comes. If he tries to gaslight me into, “I don’t love you because I’m asking for a prenup.” I will dump his ass in a second.

Family Law: A prenuptial agreement isn’t always a bad thing, but if it’s a big deal to the other person, then that is going to be a red flag.

My guy and I have already had a conversation about a pre-nuptial agreement and it’s a done deal. That was an easy conversation for us.

You guys both have solid careers too. That’s another thing. If he was floating around having an odd job here or there, it would be beneficial to you and him too but now it’s very mutually beneficial to both of you. I think that’s excellent. I can’t believe you’re having those discussions and I’m excited about it. On the show, I normally talk about the romantic side of love and signs. You should look for the red flags. It’s more in a romantic sense and emotional sense but this is straightforward and a physical red flag that you would look for. Anything else that you would look for as like a red flag before you marry someone?

A lot of people don’t think about it but I think it’s important to think about religion, money and debt. How much debt do you have? How much debt does he have? Money is up there as one of the top reasons why people get divorced. Financial stability or the lack thereof. Finances are anything she would go digging. How do people spend their money? What do they spend their money on? Are they open to having a conversation about their finances? It’s because when you come together, you need to be able to have the money talk.

Another thing is how do they deal with conflict. If you’re in a relationship with someone and they’re not dealing with conflict well when you guys have arguments, it’s not going to get better. We have this huge ring and this huge wedding, it’s not going to change the person that they are to their core and it’s not going to change who you are to your core. Be looking at how you resolve conflict. Now, if you’re in a new relationship, that’s not a big deal. You learn to combat with each other and you learn to argue with each other. If both parties are able to come together to figure out how do we argue? It’s beneficial for you and beneficial for him or her or however that works then that’s not a red flag. That’s you growing in a relationship but if you get to the point where someone’s proposing and you know that you guys have not figured out how to argue with each other, that is a red flag.

I have one more question for you. It’s something I ask everybody that’s on the show. If you were walking down the street and you saw twenty-year-old Brenda walking towards you, you gave her a big hug and you pulled away and you looked at her. What is one thing that you would tell twenty-year-old Brenda?

I would slap her on the ass and say, “You come doing it a little bit. You are going to be fine. All this stress, late nights, broke moments where you don’t have gas for your car. You can’t go anywhere because you don’t have money. You are going to do fine. Keep doing what you’re doing and know that you are beautiful. You’re going to meet some amazing people and everything is going to work out just fine.”

I love that. That’s beautiful. Thank you for being on the show. I hope you enjoyed your time with us. I learned so much from you.

It was so fun. Thank you for having me. I wish you nothing but the best with this show. You have phenomenal people come on and I’m excited for all that you have to bring. Thank you for creating this platform.

I want to do like you. I want to help other people especially women who have no resources to pay for the advice that you gave me. Now, they will be able to come to this show and read to some solid advice from an attorney who knows her shit. I can’t thank you enough. Thank you for your time. I’ll talk to you soon. Thank you so much. I love you.

I love you too. Thank you.

—

Dropouts, I hope that you enjoyed that. That was so informative. I learned something brand new. I hope you did too. I hope this is a great resource for you. Brenda is an absolutely fantastic attorney with a beautiful heart and she is one of the smartest people I know. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the show. Until next time, I’m sending you love. I will see you soon.

Important Links:

• Brenda DeRouen
• The National Trial Lawyers Association
• Super Lawyer Rising Star
• Houston BLM Movement
• Eddrea McKnight
• TalkingParents – Co-parenting App
• @BrendasMyLawyer – Instagram
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/brenda-derouen-a755a068/
• https://www.Facebook.com/pg/derouenlaw/posts/

About Brenda DeRouen

Named  Top 40 under 40 by the National Trial Lawyers Association and 2021 Super Lawyer – Rising Star, Attorney Brenda DeRouen is passionate about providing families with quality legal representation. She knows how overwhelming the legal process can be and works diligently to help our clients understand their rights and the issues affecting their case. Attorney DeRouen is known for her aggressive advocacy and works hard to get things done. 

Outside of managing DLF, our Attorney is a trailblazer in the community. She has a passion for criminal justice reform and the advancement of women. She is on the Board of Directors for the Houston Association of Women Attorneys, is the Founder & CEO of Women of Law, and a proud member of Jack and Jill of America, Inc. Prior to building her practice Attorney DeRouen worked as a Policy Analyst for the Senate Committee on Criminal Justice.

 In her spare time, Brenda enjoys traveling and trying new things. 

The digital space contains enough information to make our heads explode. From 5-minute crafts and fun facts or quick tips you encounter as you scroll through your feed, it’s easy to accept the information as we scroll. But, when it comes to fitness and caring for your body, it is so important to sort through the bullshit, and quickly at that. Sophie Sanguedolce is a fitness, health, body confidence, and self-love influencer on TikTok and Instagram. Having a social media platform isn’t the joyride many people think it is, especially with content that deals with issues regarding health and body image. Sophie uses hers to dispel myths and empower her audience to be physically and mentally healthy, away from shady weight loss gimmicks. Sophie is on a mission to expose these myths and explains how to be more selective when it comes to following fitness influencers and steer clear of weight-loss fads. She and I both are self-love stans, so we touch on our own experiences with body image, as well as dealing with negativity in the digital space.

—

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

Social Media Is Blinding Us To Fitness Realities With Sophie Sanguedolce

I am so glad that you are with us. I have got my friend, Sophie Sanguedolce. She is joining us all the way from San Diego, California. She is a body positivity and fitness influencer. I love her style because she truly gets it. She sends the message across that it’s okay to love your body and to give yourself a pat on the back. I love her sweet disposition. We talked about a lot of subjects during this episode.

One of those is dealing with internet trolls, dealing with posting your body and being vulnerable, dealing with your body image, how to handle that and what’s right for you. We talked about juggling, being a content creator with corporate life. We talked about the pitfalls of fitness influencers on all social platforms and how they possibly might be poisoning the internet. Without further ado, let’s get right into it. Let’s welcome Sophie Sanguedolce to the show. Enjoy.

—

I have a sweet friend with me on the show. I would like to welcome Sophie Sanguedolce to the show. How are you?

Good.

Sophie and I met on Instagram. I loved her content and instantly fell in love with her. She’s got the sweetest personality. Your content resonates with a lot of women because you put workouts out there that are both functional and easy to replicate. Say, in your home, you don’t necessarily have to have a lot of equipment. It’s easy to follow and you give clear instructions. You have a beautiful body but you are not so body-focused. You are more focused on the form and also the functionality of whatever it is you are talking about. Tell me a little bit about how you’ve got started in fitness specifically, and then how you translated that to your content online.

It’s funny, I talked to my parents. I was going through a bit of a rough patch in the middle of quarantine and I lost my happiness. I called my parents and said, “When I was a toddler and my purest form of a human being with no worries of judgment or anything, what made me happy?” The number one thing they said was exercise and moving your body. I had so much energy. I was always stretching and trying to move my body. It’s true, I have always been an active person.

When I was a kid, I was always into sports and stuff. When I was old enough to get into a gym, I was immediately in. This is always my favorite thing. One of my good friends in middle school, her dad is a big MMA fighter and he made a gym. I went there when I was not old enough to be in a gym yet and went to town. I loved the idea of being physically strong because I have always been a short, small human being.

How tall are you?

I’m 5’2.75”

The 0.75” is important.

It makes a difference. I can’t say 5’3” but I’m almost there.

I’m 5’5.5”. I have to specify there’s 0.5”, so I understand.

Put yourself some height.

How did you translate that into online content? Did you decide in 2020 when you spoke with your parents, “Let me put this online?” Did you get back into the gym more heavily? What happened?

My fitness and health journey was rocky. I was into it as a kid. When I was in high school, I was doing double days. I would go on the StairMaster until it stopped. I went for one hour and I would keep going. To be honest, my motive for exercising was totally different than it is now. It was more negatively. I formed this difficult, weird relationship with fitness and working out. I was into dance so I chose dance as my version of moving my body for a while. Halfway through college, I started heavily going to the gym again. It’s a 5:30 AM, 6:30 AM session. Break of dawn, I was getting up when the door was opened.

You are wild.

I had a whole crew that did it with me. Honestly, gym buddies change the game.

In college, I will be honest with you, at 5:30 AM I was 100% still drunk from the night before.

On weekends, I was not doing this. I had five corndogs the night before. This was not on weekends, don’t you worry. I would have passed away. I’ve got back into it then. When I graduated college, I stayed decently consistent but I was working so hard on my first job out of college. I was the first person in and the last person out. By the time it came for me to go to the gym, I did not have the energy at all. That’s when it hit the backburner. When quarantine happened, that’s when I was like, “I have so much time.” I was going to the gym before work at my company’s office but I wasn’t working out like I wanted to. I was just going and moving my body.

When quarantine happened, I was like, “This is my chance. I have so much free time. I’m not commuting two hours to and from work. I can do this.” I’ve got back into eating well and into finding workouts that were fun for me. Not the ones where I was like, “I have to do this to see the progress,” which you don’t have to do just one thing. I’ve got a coach that was super helpful with my schedule so I wouldn’t make excuses and not get around to it. I made my fitness Instagram the week that I finished my coaching and did at-home workouts and took it from there.

It hasn’t even been that long.

I hit a year in June 2020 of having my account.

First of all, congratulations because you have grown it so well. You are doing stuff that I don’t even see creators that have been at it for five years, engaging the way that you do, replying to every comment, being consistent with your posting, and keeping up with all of the algorithm changes. You are doing all of those things. How do you actively stay on top of those things? Do you sit there and scroll for hours or do you read about it online? How do you keep current?

It’s hard because, with my corporate job, I’m working twelve-plus hours every single day just on that. It gets difficult. Usually what I do is I wake up extra early, 5:00 AM or 5:30 AM if I can get my butt out of bed. While I’m having my coffee and stuff, I will do my gratitude manifestations and all that. I will take the time to go on Instagram and scroll. I will go through the hashtags that I use. I will mainly go through people who have tagged me in their stuff. With the comments throughout the day, I have to try and get to it.

You put out two excellent posts so you’ve got a lot of comments to go through.

There are lots of stuff to go through. That’s for sure. I get so excited when I get comments and stuff. Any break that I get, I’m like, “I need to go try and do it, too. Got to support other girls.” It’s good spending breaks. Right when I wake up, and then right before bed, I would scroll down and try to read some trends. The algorithm is changing every day. I don’t know what’s going on.

It’s so hard. I see my engagement sometimes, where even my Story views, I have 1,700 Story views, and then it’s 500. I’m like, “What happened here? What’s happening?” It’s so strange. Same thing with my likes. Sometimes I will get a post that’s 2,000, and then another post will get 348. I’m like, “Is Instagram okay?”

I checked my insights on the workout I posted. They’ve only got out to 1,100 people the whole day.

That’s so odd and it was a great post.

Instagram is hard stuff to figure out.

TikTok is such a great tool but on the other hand, it is also difficult because even if you are putting out content consistently, you don’t always hit the lottery. I have been putting out content on there. Granted, I took a six months break. Even when you are putting out content consistently, maybe at most 4,000 views is on the very high end. It’s typically around 200 to 300 for me. I haven’t quite cracked the code.

It’s an excellent tool and with the right content, you can take off. We know this because of music artists that have gotten record deals just from singing on TikTok. People getting extra famous like Addison Rae. We didn’t know who she was before TikTok and now, she’s one of the most famous people on the planet. It’s crazy.

Speaking of TikTok, not that I have cracked the code by any means but I started posting more consistently. I noticed before, I would get out to 200 people and I was like, “I don’t understand how anyone is blowing up on TikTok.” I noticed that you have to catch trends early. We have started implementing that and I have had two videos. One is at 1.5 million and one is at a million views. I have gotten a little bit higher. I went from 1,000 and now I’m at 18,500 followers.

That’s crazy. I need to look for you because I don’t think I follow you there, which is weird.

I don’t think I have you there.

I don’t interact as much. I scroll for ideas. I have found guests for the show on TikTok. I don’t sit around and interact with a whole bunch. Sometimes I will find an account that makes me giggle and cackle myself to death where I’m in tears. I will scroll through that for hours. Mostly, I’m looking for ideas for the show, if I’m honest.

I do, too. The thing that makes me nervous is I never comment on TikTok because if you are friends with anybody and they see that TikTok as well, you will come to the very top. Not that I’m not worried about embarrassing myself but I don’t want to comment.

If it’s a thirst trap in TikTok and you comment a heart eye emoji or whatever and someone screenshots it, then sends it to your boyfriend. I would die just for clout. Some of them are fine. I can’t lie.

Fitness Myths: People who are severely unhappy and mad at the world get off of spreading negativity.

They are well-crafted humans.

I feel like a cougar because I’m looking at these twenty-year-old boys and I’m like, “He can get it.” I’m like, “I’m old. That’s disgusting. What’s wrong with me?”

What’s confusing me is that I used to talk, even with girls, too. They will look like they are in their mid-20s and they are 16.  What’s going on? I looked my age then. I didn’t know how to do makeup. I didn’t have anything in this area.

I was awkward as hell. I have one eyebrow. My hair was frizzy. It wasn’t cute.

Did I ever say about my boy haircut?

No. What boy haircut?

Think of Audrey Hepburn. I had that for five years.

I can’t picture it at all. I’m not picturing it. I do want to see it.

This will be fun. I love exposing myself. This is the story. I was in second grade. I had a teacher I admired so much. She was the coolest human on Earth. She had a pixie cut. In second grade, you are so far prepubescent. You couldn’t be doing that quite yet. I was still a girly girl but I wanted this haircut. I was like, “That is so badass.” I’m trying to debate If I want to show you the cute ones and the bad ones.

Either, I want to see both.

It’s a medium embarrassment. I kept it from 2nd grade until the end of 7th grade. My family moved so I was the new kid showing up looking exciting.

I was mistaken for a boy all the time. In PE, we wore the same shirt and shorts. I cannot tell you how many times guys come from behind like, “Hey, Sean.” When I turn, they were like, “I’m so sorry.” I was like, “Can you guys come?” Which they never even did. I’m like, “Hello.”

They are beautiful. They are perfect. Don’t worry. My sister had a similar cut to yours. Sweet thing, she had one eye that was stronger than another. She had to use a patch on one eye. She had the cut and the patch, and she didn’t develop early as I did. She would be like, “Where’s the bathroom?” They would point her to the boy’s restroom. She was destroyed, poor thing, poor love. I know I’m exposing her too but she’s gorgeous and so womanly now. She’s got two beautiful children. That was a long time ago but she had the same haircut as you.

I always look back on those times when I was like, “Did I feel crushed at the moment?” The bullying that came from that when I was a kid made me to a woman. I don’t care.

Speaking of that, do you ever get negative comments on your stuff?

Yes. I went live on TikTok during my lunch for five minutes. I’ve got a new perfume and I was doing a little tester. Not the YSL. It is Chef’s Kiss. I was live and there were 40 people on it. It was not a big deal. I was doing a Q&A and people were talking and asking questions. Someone goes, “She’s so boring. She’s just another wannabe Addison Rae.” I was like, “Am I boring? That’s so mean.”

First of all, you are not doing what Addison is doing. Secondly, you are not boring. If they are bored, there’s a little X and you just click out. That’s what you need to do.

I literally said like, “You don’t have to be here.”

No one is holding you hostage here. You are welcome to leave.

Do you know when Reels blow up or it gets to the most random internet trolls? It was the first one that decently did well when Reels were first coming out. It was this one where I was talking about wearing a sports bra kind of a thing. The number of men in my comments, I remember I screenshotted a lot of them and I exposed these people. I put in my Stories ten of the worst comments.

The one that stuck with me that shakes me to my core. Keep in mind, he had a picture with his girlfriend, wife or something in his profile picture. He said something like, “When you dress like that, you obviously know that a consequence is going to happen to you. You are going to be attacked or someone is going to try and do something.” It shook me to my core. I responded and I was like, “Whoever that girl is in your photo, I am hoping she is okay. You are a terrifying human.”

That’s triggering. I have a lot of things to say about that. I’m going to tell you that that’s horrible. I’m about to ask you for his account so I can go report him to the FBI. I’ve got to go ham on this motherfucker. Honestly, for my whole life, I have been ripped apart about my body. That’s why I post a lot of the body positivity stuff. Also, by exposing myself by saying, “I used to Photoshop myself all the time.” That’s not to say there’s a part of my shirt that’s sticking out and making me look weird. I don’t Photoshop that. That’s different.

I’m talking about when you are completely altering your body that it looks like this and you have made it to this, that’s not okay. That’s what I was doing because I have never been naturally thin. I have always been chubby since I was a kid. It took a long time for me to get comfortable with people making comments about my body. I have always had boobs, a big ass, and big hips. Men in their twenties were hitting on me when I was thirteen. They had no idea that I was thirteen. I had my first kiss when I was 13 and the guy was 24, and he had no clue. I didn’t tell him.

At the time, nobody was educating people about child molestation. I was excited that a guy wanted to kiss me. We were in Europe, so I will excuse it. I’m like, “He’s French. It’s fine. No big deal.” I was uneducated that it wasn’t right for a 13-year-old to kiss a 24-year-old. I didn’t know. It was so long ago, before the internet, before Facebook or anything.

The comments that used to get to me are, “You are fat. You need to work on your body.” I have put a filter on my Instagram comments that take away the ability of anybody to comment something negative about my body saying like fat or pig, or pig in Italian because people do that. Anything related to a negative connotation for my body.

That is not only to protect me but it’s to also protect the other people who might be triggered by a comment like that in seeing my content. One time, someone got around it and they commented on that. I was wearing a long-sleeve brown shirt and I’m posed off to the side. They said, “Your body is not sexy. You need to do cardio.” Something like that. I blocked him immediately. I was like, “Why do you take time out of your day to comment?” It doesn’t make sense to me.

It probably never will because I will never think that way. It’s either someone who’s incredibly unhappy with themselves and sitting there wanting to bring misery to you because they are miserable or it’s a troll 1 of the 2. It doesn’t bother me anymore but in 2019, I could safely tell you that I would probably have cried.

I remember I saw your post that you did. That wasn’t that long ago. We were talking about the comments. It’s frustrating because the internet is a powerful place to spread good information and help others. Every time I have gotten a comment like that or something that’s negative and inappropriate, I would sit back, and try and ask myself that question, “What is it?” I usually come up with the two things that you said. I still can’t wrap my head around why somebody would want to say that to somebody else. I always try to think of that person physically holding their phone, typing that out, and going afterward and being like, “Yes.”

“I’ve got her.”

What does that give you? I will never understand that. Truly, the main finger you can point is that people who are severely unhappy, not in the world and get off of spreading negativity.

A big turning point for me and you can probably relate to this is I started creating content for others and not for me. I took the focus off of validation for me and I want it to be education and positivity for other people. I don’t know if you can relate to that.

When I first started posting, I didn’t think anyone was going to see it anyway. It was just for progress. When I started getting out to more people, it became more around like, “I need to take another picture. My stomach, you can see it.” I realized and I was like, “My Stories aren’t adding up. I’m telling people to put their bodies to be healthy and accept themselves but here I am.”

Worried about my little belly bulge or whatever it is.

I’m like, “By the way, it’s for your organs.” That’s awesome.

“By the way, that’s your uterus. I don’t know if you know.”

My father had a huge slap in the face. I was like, “Time to fix that and get over it.” Sometimes if I haven’t posted for the day and I want to keep up with the algorithm and I need to get something out there, there have been moments where I posted a photo that I posted before because I don’t have time to take a new one, “Let’s put a caption to say something.” I will look back and ask myself, “ln the shoes of somebody who’s following me, what are they getting from this?” This serves no purpose. It’s just to beat the stupid algorithm. I did shift. If I don’t have anything to post that’s helpful, I’m not going to post.

I’m working with someone out of LA who is helping me when I’m posting, not for the algorithm but in general, he’s like, “You don’t need to post every day, Stephanie. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about quality. Make your audience wait a little bit. Fuck the algorithm. That will come. It’s the quality of what you are posting. Hit me up between 7:00 PM and 7:30 PM. We will discuss what you need to post.” I have hired him to help me with that because I was all over the place before and I didn’t have a pattern. I wasn’t classifying my posts like, “Is this a lifestyle post? Is this a fitness post? Is this a body positivity post?” Classifying them has helped me.

That’s true because I changed my name, Sophie Dolce Fitness. When I changed it, people noticed it as a fitness account when you see it. Also, I was like, “I want to do more stuff about life. It doesn’t have to be fitness.” You are not supposed to have a specific niche but, in my opinion, why limit yourself? You can help people in an array of different forms. Just because someone is following you for fitness doesn’t mean you can’t help them with self-love and manifestation.

Fitness Myths: Once you realize that you’ve made a difference in somebody’s life, it literally changes and shapes your life as a human.

If your everyday job was working out in a gym, that would be different but because you have a lot of stuff going on in your life, that’s valid.

On the other hand, I’m one of those people that never had a passion or saw myself doing anything, which was concerning when I was a senior in college because I was going to apply to colleges. I called my parents crying. I was like, “I’m going to die at a young age. I can’t picture anything for myself.” Looking back, I’m like, “Sophie, you will find your thing.” It was traumatic. Now I feel like I have found it. I always said this since I was a kid, I was always the person helping others, trying to make other people feel included. “Now I feel like I’m helping people,” and that is giving me so much more purpose in life than ever that I feel more driven than ever to make this more of than I can get there.

You will get there for sure. It’s important. You are so young that you have time to do that. You have the time to build a solid foundation, and then you can invest more in your own business and get away from corporate life if that’s what you want to do.

It would be so nice to have a little expert like what you have, to tell you everything.

It’s expensive because he’s also helping me with getting press out there about me because that helps you get verified. I know that having a show and being verified is important. When people will look at my account, they might like me but they will be like, “Is she an expert? Why should I listen to her?” All of a sudden, you see a blue tick and you are like, “She’s an expert, 100%.” It’s all about perception but it’s important. That’s why I made the investment. I talked to my parents, too. I was like, “This is a lot of money. Do you think this is a good investment?” They were like, “We do think so.” I was like, “I will nod it out for at least two months.” That’s okay.

It’s so worth it. It’s investing in yourself. It’s not on the same scale at all but a lot of people are nervous to go to therapy. Invest in yourself. Invest in your future, invest in your company. This is your career. This is super important.

A lot of us have that failure-to-launch thing going on.

Did you hear about the book I’m reading?

No.

It’s called Think and Grow Rich. It gives you the kick in the butt that you need to run straight forward for exactly what you want in life.

Who’s the author?

Napoleon Hill. It’s an old book. The reason I even started reading it was I want to push for what I want to do. There are so many societal pressures that make me feel that I can’t, I shouldn’t or it’s too risky. You don’t ever want to live life settling. I don’t want to turn 60 years old, look back and be like, “Why didn’t you do that? You had a chance to be happy to your core and have a way better mental health.” I’ve got this book because I saw a documentary. All the most successful people in the US used these ideas in the past. They have been reading this book multiple times a year and it has given them all the tools that they need to drive their own business forward or follow their passion, which I like.

I remember you were having some personal stuff going on. You were like, “I’m sorry I’m not posting.” I was like, “How can I support you? How can I be there for you?” Of course, you give your friends their space. How did you pull yourself out of that?

I honestly would say that sounds so goofy and cliché. I had people messaging me saying, “Are you okay? What’s going on? We miss your workouts. We miss your daily positivity. I feel like we are on FaceTime on your Stories. We don’t have that. Where are your tips?” Not that it guilt-tripped me into it but I was like, “This does bring me a lot of joy. I’m going through a hard time.” I gave myself a week off of posting and being on there. It was like, “I miss seeing everyone. It feels like a big, massive family.”

It was the idea that when I didn’t feel I was helping somebody, inspiring them or influencing them to better their lives and that it halted, I realized, “Maybe during this time, although it’s hard, I can let people know that I’m going through it that they know I’m not going to be my 100% happy self but I can still get joy from what I’m doing and don’t have to fake it.”

Sometimes you have to take those days. There was a time where I deleted Instagram off my phone for two months. People were messaging my best friend. My best friend has three million followers. She was receiving messages and she was screenshotting her request box and sending them to me. They were like, “Is Stephanie okay?” She was like, “People think you are dead. You need to get back on.” The first post that I put when I came back was “Not dead. Just living.” I truly took that time to be away and collect my thoughts, and then came back stronger. Sometimes you have to take a break. Now I can’t because of the show.

Before I’ve got into having social media that I cared about and was trying to turn into something, I always would look at influencers and stuff for anyone large and be like, “How nice. They are taking a minute out of their day to post. How hard.” Once you are in it, it is draining and hard. It is fun but I never expected the amount of work that you have to put into it. It’s daunting the idea of being like, “Amongst all this other stuff I’m juggling, amongst my life, you don’t get that many breaks from it. If you do, Instagram punishes you for it.” It’s difficult and there is a lot of pressure I feel. I love what your caption was of just living.

I was in Vegas with my family. I was hanging out with one of my guy friends from UNLV. He took this picture of me. We were staying at the Wynn. It’s me on the bed, chilling out, watching TV, and that was the caption. Side note, I was still working a corporate job at the time. A lot of my burnout was that. I have to tell you, you trade that 9:00 to 5:00 for 24/7. When you go into this creator space, you are working twelve hours a day.

I’m working for 14 to 16 hours a day because I’m constantly doing this. I’m like, “I’ve got to email this and I do this.” It’s not like I’m scrolling or whatever all the time. Sometimes, “I’ve got to listen to this podcast. I’ve got to listen to this person’s course on feminine energy. I’ve got to go through my email,” all different kinds of stuff. You are aware that it’s a full-time job. No guarantees, no guaranteed pay.

That’s why it feels so risky and scary to jump. I have a question for you. What would you say was the biggest pro of leaving corporate life? I can’t tell you how many people I have talked to that are like, “I want to start doing this. I want to leave corporate life.” It’s such a trend now. What would you say was the biggest push to make you do it? That is the hardest step and most people don’t. Are you happy about it?

Absolutely. I was in corporate hospitality. I did private event sales for an upscale steakhouse here in Houston. It’s famous. A lot of people go there. It has amazing food. It’s hugely corporately owned by the Fertitta family. They own most of California, Nevada, Texas and also Louisiana. They are everywhere. They used to own part of the UFC. They owned so many hotels and restaurants. You are working your ass off for someone who doesn’t know shit about you. If you do great and you meet your sales call, nobody is giving you a pat on the back. Nobody is saying, “You helped my life. You changed my life. You changed my perspective on things.”

No one even says, “Thank you for planning a good event,” ever. Not that I need that validation but it’s nice to hear some feedback about your work, any feedback at all. All there was always negative. They used to say, “You need to go drive around and drop off these sales kits.” I would then submit an expense report logically with the mileage that I spent driving around. My boss was like, “Why are you submitting this?” I’m like, “It’s because I used my card and drive around to drop off sales kits.” He’s like, “It’s in a 5-mile radius.” I’m like, “I drove five hours doing that all day.”

Whatever it is, it’s like you are not appreciated. It’s the same thing every day. First of all, it was a closet. It wasn’t even an office. I had the roof hatch over my head so if it rain, it would rain on my head. I was underneath the ladder. Every time I move my chair, I would bump into the ladder. The environment was horrible. If you miss a day of work, it was like the Spanish Inquisition. Doctors know what you have. I ended up just saying, “Fuck it.” I would go to work and I put a mask on. This is before COVID. People were like, “Why is she in a mask? Does she have the Ebola virus or something?” It’s so funny because it was in December that I had gotten so sick. I wore a mask to work, and then two months later, COVID was happening. I thought I might have had COVID during that time.

We don’t see you in December.

The push that I experienced was when I’ve got laid off. I’ve got furloughed at first. I was in quarantine because I was in Egypt on vacation when COVID hit. I had to come back early quarantine. By the time my quarantine was about to be up, they furloughed me. Later on, in July 2020, they were like, “There’s no business. We can’t have people gather so there’s nothing for you to do.”

They kept on my colleague because she was hourly and I was salary. Naturally, they cut the bigger salary. That was the push that I had originally. I was like, “I want to go into business for myself.” I had this failure to launch. I had all the tools and all the equipment to do the show. I had a brand new Mac computer and all that stuff but I still had this failure to launch.

I had to check myself, pull myself together, get organized, and get my mental health right because I was in a shitty relationship where I wasn’t being supported, encouraged or anything. It was looked upon as shitty because I was at home, not at a physical place by him. I had to get out of that relationship and make sure you surround yourself with supportive people

The biggest pro is helping other people. The validation that I receive is not physical. It’s in my heart because I’m receiving these messages. “This resonated with me. I want you to know that I took a picture in this bikini because of you.” Stuff like that makes me want to cry. I’m like, “You have the confidence to go take a picture in a bikini from me? That makes me so happy.”

I don’t blame you. One of my TikToks that blew up was about self-love and treating yourself like somebody that you love and ask the question, “Do you do that?” There are a couple of thousands of comments. I was trying to go through them and get to people and I was crying my eyes out. I was sending them all to my parents and it was clicking for so many people that they had not been attributing themselves well. I feel like we need these reminders. Once you realize that you have made a difference in somebody’s life, they don’t realize what that comment did to you. It changes and shapes your life as a human.

Sophie Dolce?

My username is taken so I had to put a period in between.

I had that Musical.ly app that I posted two things of me lip-syncing a long time ago. That’s Stephanie Joplin and I can’t get into it to change it and take it away. Now, I’m @RealStephanieJoplin because I couldn’t use Stephanie Joplin.

Did you contact support?

I sure did. You can imagine it’s taking a while for them to respond at all.

It’s so annoying.

I’m like, “Can I talk to a person?”

Never ever. For anyone that gets their Instagrams hacked or anything, I had a girl who had around 10,100 followers and it was hacked and you can’t talk to anybody.

I would die. There’s one girl I follow. I’m sure you have seen her stuff. Her name is Drew. She completely tears these misogynistic men into a new A-hole.

Fitness Myths: Anybody could eat the exact same things for their entire lives and do the exact same workouts, yet never look the same. Genetics plays a big part. We’re all made up differently.

Blonde hair?

Yes. I saw on her Instagram that she hit a million and she lost access to her TikTok. They banned her from her TikTok and she was like, “I’m going to die if something doesn’t happen.” She was like, “Can you please write TikTok an email and tell them what my account means to you.” She was pleading with people because a lot of people who have a couple million on TikTok might have 50,000 on Instagram. They don’t have maybe as many. You can imagine if she didn’t have that many on Instagram, what would she do? She was able to get it back thankfully. Her content is so funny. It’s good.

She’s amazing. Everyone’s worst nightmare is more of that happening. You spend so much time. Not to mention all of your content is gone forever. I don’t save mine.

I don’t either. I was glad for her that she got hers back. I was like, “I can’t imagine having a million and losing your account.”

I would love to have a million. I would love to not lose it.

Of course but that makes you want to jump off a cliff.

That’s heartbreaking.

What is your goal? Keeping in mind monetary, you want to monetize. Those are the typical goals. Let’s take your Instagram, for example. What do you see for the future of your Instagram account?

It’s a hard question to answer because I never thought that I would be as into it as I am.

You’ve got to think about it.

Honestly, the whole goal behind all this is to influence and help as many people as possible. That is literally it. Along the way, if I can influence as many as I influence now and that’s all I can do, then I did my job. It is to expand it and help more people, help things click for them with self-love, help them accept themselves as a human being and their bodies. Also, not be so critical and not view fitness or food as something that’s a punishment and enjoy it.

You’ve got to flip your mentality towards food and fitness. You’ve got to do that.

One of my goals is to get enough people to trump these terrible fads, quick fixes, waist trainers, fat-burning pills, and all this stuff that’s rotting the internet.

It’s poisoning. I thought you are right. I thought of this girl, she’s a fitness influencer. She’s like, “What I eat in a day is intuitive eating.” I was like, “Intuitive eating, I’m into that.” I watched it and it’s hardly any protein and mostly complex carbohydrates.” She’s naturally skinny. She could probably get away with it for now but by the time she’s 30, she will have diabetes if she continues eating that way.

I sent it to my friend who is an intuitive eater, a certified nutritionist. She was like, “I hate this. It’s so frustrating. It doesn’t even matter if I say anything to her because she’s not going to listen.” It was just oatmeal for breakfast, and then a big ciabatta sandwich with a huge chunk of bread, a little piece of chicken and a side salad. It was popcorn and then there were grapes. It was almost like all carbs. I was like, “What is happening?”

Carbs are totally fine. What happened to whole plant-based foods or your protein? Nobody eats vegetables anymore. You can make them fun, I will show you. What I eat in a day can be toxic.

People need to understand that you need a balance of fats, proteins and carbs. That’s your little triangle and you need to stay in that little triangle. They need to have a certain ratio. If you want to have a plate of pasta, have a plate of pasta. Eat it with 1 or 2 eggs or have some chicken with it so it’s not going to spike your insulin.

People don’t have that knowledge. That’s why I have people like my friend Nicola that I was telling you about. I had her on the show. I want to educate people because they don’t know and I didn’t know. I never used to know that. I was like, “I will have pasta and I will have it with pesto sauce so it’s more healthy.”

More basil for me.

Veggies.

You don’t know until you know though, that’s the thing. Most people aren’t on an extreme fitness journey where they have to look up this stuff. You learn some of this stuff in school but a lot of that is proven to be incorrect. I feel that we can push away the incorrect content and trump it as a whole big community and make it better, that’s my goal. The other underlying goal for me is when I was a kid, I had bad relationships with food and with my body. I’m not 100% over it now. It’s something people struggle with their whole life.

A lot of it fed on other people’s comments and stuff but it was mostly when the internet came out with social media and stuff. Seeing all these people and what other people are eating like, “Am I eating too much?” Everything was wrong. I was comparing and confused. That funneled into the reason why I had so many issues.

I have gotten some messages that warm my heart more than anything in the world saying that I helped people with their eating, their relationship with their food, their relationship with their body, and how they do themselves. If I could have had someone like me, I didn’t follow anyone helpful in those instances. That would have changed a lot sooner.

The trend when I was at the most vulnerable age was that everybody was Kate Moss skinny. Their diet was cigarettes and Diet Coke. What would I have for lunch? Diet Coke. That’s what I would have all day. I used to have caffeine pills. It’s so unhealthy. Nobody was there to teach me about nutrition. At the time, there was no Instagram, no Facebook or whatever. People take what they see on the internet as truth. I’m like, “I hope nobody is modeling what I eat in a day after this person.” It’s hard. You want to share your story and be like, “Don’t eat like this,” but then you don’t want to shame that woman either. It’s a fine line.

It’s an uncomfortable fine line where you want to educate and you want to be able to show people what you are not supposed to do but you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings and talk crap.

You are like, “You look beautiful. You are just skinny and that’s why you can eat that way.”

Genetics. This is the other issue. Another thing I always try and teach is me and you, me and anybody, we could eat the same things for our entire lives and do the same workouts but we are never going to look the same. Once that clicks for people and they were like, “I see this famous TikTok girl that is this thin has her ab showing all the time and never bloated. Why don’t I look like that? Maybe if I starve myself, I’m going to look like that.” I see so many comments like that on people’s profiles or videos.

I’m like, “If you understood genetics plays a big part, that person probably is naturally happy that way or could be a big issue. Maybe they are healthy and what they found works for them. It doesn’t mean that you should ever be comparing yourself to them. That’s like comparing a zebra to a pig. None of this makes sense. We are all made up differently.”

That’s something that people need to hear. I’m glad we are talking about it because a lot of people are like, “I wish I could get a flat stomach like you.” I’m like, “You can. It’s called a tummy tuck and a lot of weight loss.” That’s why I was candid about my tummy tuck because I don’t want people to think that I was able to get rid of all the excess skin myself. I couldn’t have. The doctor had to take all of that skin and take it off my body. That was the only way to do it.

I had to put in the work before that to lose that weight. On my arms, I still have a lot of excess skin right here. I’m like, “Should I get rid of it? Should I get the surgery? Do I need it?” This was getting in the way of my workouts. I’m like, “Is this getting in the way? Not really. I could probably do without it. Would it be better for me aesthetically? Yes, it would but then is it just vanity at that point?” I’m having this internal struggle with that.

I have an interesting perspective on making any alterations to yourself. A lot of people view it as a form of self-hatred sometimes like, “I hate this part of me. Therefore, I’m going to change it.” It’s out of a total negative mindset. With your situation, with any type of other things that you could get done, to me, to each have their own effect, it’s truly is going to make them feel more confident and it’s not out of some negative awful stuff that they are saying themselves like, “I would feel a lot better.”

Whenever I do a photo shoot, I’m like, “Can you tell me how to pose my arms?” I’m always conscious about my arms and I hate that but it’s something that I have to admit.

My thing is, do your thing for yourself. It’s your body. It’s nobody else’s body. It might take time to come to your decision but if it’s going to make you feel more confident and not as worrisome, then it’s something that you might decide to do. Awesome for you. If not, awesome again.

I would like to get back to the gym after this car accident that I have had, that would be great. All I can do is have my Pilates instructor come here three times a week and we do mat Pilates and physical therapy. Things like clamshells are small movements but they are penetrating deep into the muscle. We do things like that. I can’t wait to get back to lifting and stuff but I can’t even lift a case of water now.

That’s got to be so frustrating, especially when you are so used to being active. When that’s your way, that’s hard.

I have to watch my eating even more because the extra calories I was expending, I’m not expending anymore. I’m like, “I can’t have this pizza but let me replicate the pizza.” I made myself a pizza but I baked some eggplant in the oven. I used that as the base, and then I put pizza sauce and cheese. I broiled it. I like eggplant.

I was a picky kid and I wouldn’t eat any vegetables or fruit. I would make myself throw up instead of eating. I was the worst child. You did not want me as a kid but now I’m great. The only thing I liked are eggplant and pasta.

Fitness Myths: The more that you remind yourself of the things that you want and deserve and picture yourself with them, the more you will subconsciously take steps and minor decisions in your day to get there.

I love eggplant. It’s so good. It’s delicious. The greens are what I have trouble getting down. My friend Nicola prescribed it to me. She’s like, “You don’t need to take a daily probiotic. You need to have one salad a day and that’s going to help your gut flora.” Since I have been doing that, there has been such a change in my digestive health. It’s incredible.

This could be wrong. The internet spreads a lot of bad stuff. I heard someone say, “There is no true knowledge of the gut.” I don’t know if that’s true or not.

She is a certified nutritionist. She works with people with eating disorders like binge eating and things like that. That’s something that I struggled with, binge eating, volume eating. I believe what she says. She said, “There’s no true research on taking a probiotic.” If you chew on a sugar gummy probiotic, that is not going to do shit for you. She’s like, “The real thing to do is to make sure that you have cleaned out from the inside out. If you are having the leafy greens, that’s going to help your gut.” You could be right but I believe her. I feel better. I was on probiotics for more than eight years. I thought it was doing something but it could have been a placebo effect. I have no idea.

It’s hard. I’m not nutrition certified at all. The gut is one of the biggest things that people need to fix. I experienced stomach issues so I’m going to start doing smaller leafy greens.

“One big leafy green salad a day,” she said. You can put chopped-up apples and lentils. She always talks about using Primal Kitchen for dressing. You should follow her, by the way. I will send you her profile. You would love her. This conversation could go on forever. You are fantastic. I’m glad we’ve got to talk because we chat all the time but we don’t sit down and talk. I feel we will need to have you back to see how much you have grown because I have a feeling it’s going to be up from here.

I hope so.

You are manifesting it. I love the manifestation journal that you do. That’s so great. Can you tell people about that real quick? I would love to hear it.

I’m getting more into manifestation. What I do every morning and every night if I can but always every morning, is I write down five things of gratitude. I do five things of intentions. I do as many manifestations as I want, I have learned and I’m still doing some trial and error. If you write things down as if you already have them, think of a goal that you have and say, “I already have XYZ. I’m already happy in XYZ.” I write it down, and then I always say it out loud afterward and I heard that speaking into existence is key, then that’s when the Law of Attraction is going to come into play.

Also, whether manifestation works or not, which I like to think that it does. Even if it doesn’t, the more that you remind yourself of the things that you want and you deserve, and picture yourself with it, the more that you are subconsciously going to make steps and little decisions in your day to get yourself there. Another new tip that I learned that I’m going to try is to write out your story exactly what you envision for yourself and to do a meditation practice beforehand that guides you through. I will send you some of the stuff. What you truly want for yourself, and then write out the whole story. You start reading it out loud every now and then. It’s like you wrote your future. It’s cool.

I did the same things. I’m single so I was advised to do the same thing to manifest the exact kind of man that I want. Write as many characteristics as you want of what your ideal man has. You are like, “My husband has this.” I wrote it like that and it was hard to do at first because I was like, “I sound crazy. My husband has this.” As I went on, I’m like, “My husband is intentional with me. My husband asked me on dates. He doesn’t just ask me to hang out. He doesn’t ask me to hang out on the same day. He makes a plan,” all these things. I have found that because of my convictions, my dating life has changed. Not that I found anyone yet but my convictions have changed to where my boundaries are set so early that I weed out all of the fuckboys because they reveal themselves immediately. That’s helped.

It could be the universe working in your favor but also, it’s you. You have realized, “This is what I want. I’m not settling for less.”

I’m proud of you.

Your husband is coming.

He’s on his way.

He’s coming up to your door.

He’s here. That’s Uber Eats actually. I was going to ask you one more question that I asked everybody that comes on the show. I already know the answer to it but I’m going to ask you. Say you saw twenty-year-old Sophie walking down the street and you’ve got to go up to her and give her a big hug. As you left her hug, you could tell her one thing. What is the one thing you would tell her?

This is so basic but this speaks to everything that I needed when I was twenty. I would say, “You are enough.” It never felt like I was and I finally understand it.

That’s beautiful. I thought you were going to say something along the lines of, “Do what makes you happy. Follow your passion.”

Now, I want to do that.

You can say that, too. That’s fine. That goes with it, too. You are enough. You are more than enough. You are a beautiful person. I’m so happy that the universe brought us together. Thank you for sharing such a positive and beautiful message with people. Thank you for being authentic. There are so many women in the fitness world and beauty world because I would consider you beautiful, that truly use their platform in the worst way. It’s more of a toxic cycle of them. Validating themselves in bikinis or workout videos or one selfie at the gym but you take that time to go a step further and make sure people are getting it. Thank you for being you.

Thank you. Honestly, I feel we were meant to have our paths cross. You are a beautiful human. You are going to do so well with this show. It’s going to go up and up. It’s so much fun. I feel like we have known each other forever.

I want to come to visit you. We could do a staycation near you or somewhere we could go. I don’t want to impose on your apartment. We can have a little staycation on the beach. That would be fun.

URL to IRL.

I like it. What does URL stand for?

Don’t ask me and I have no idea.

I was like, “What does URL stand for?”

I have always wondered that. Now that you have asked it, I don’t know.

We will have to google it. I don’t know if you have any more but will you send me your background for your Zoom?

Yes, I will. It manifests the apartment, that we deserve the place. Open windows, overlooking a beautiful sunset.

I’m moving to Italy eventually. I don’t know when but it will happen.

If you do, I’m coming with you.

Thank you again for being a part of The Luxury Dropout.

I’m excited. We will talk soon. Thank you for having me. I seriously had so much fun. That time flew by.

I love you. I will talk to you soon. Bye.

—

That’s it for this episode. Hopefully, you enjoyed and took something away from Sophie. She is such a bright light. At such a young age, she’s got it all figured out. There’s only up from here. The only direction that Sophie can go is up. If you are listening to me streaming, I would love it if you could give me a five-star review. If not, thanks for being here, and thanks for making it this far into the episode. It’s a treat to have you guys follow and interact with me in every single way. I love it. I love you, guys. I’m sending you all the love and all the hugs. Until next time, stay well and I will see you soon.

Important Links:

• Sophie Sanguedolce – Instagram
• TikTok – Sophie Dolce
• Think and Grow Rich
• Nicola Burbank – Previous episode
• Primal Kitchen
• Addison Rae – TikTok
• Long-sleeve brown shirt –  Stephanie Joplin Instagram post
• Musical.ly
• @RealStephanieJoplin – TikTok
• https://Linktr.ee/sophiedolcefitness

About Sophie Sanguedolce

Sophie is a fitness, health, body confidence, and self-love influencer on Instagram and TikTok. She has always had a passion for health and fitness and the passion to help and inspire others to find a sustainable way to achieve their goals. Breaking the false trends on social media and providing a source of truth for those who need it. She currently works in a corporate sales job while managing her social platforms all at once and wants to continue this journey further to touch and inspire as many people as possible to live their best mentally and physically healthy lives.

I stumbled across This Spiritual Fix on TikTok. Anna was chatting about the abandonment wound, and why those with that particular wound crave the “good morning” text from their partner. It struck a chord with me, because I could totally relate to a time when my ex had broken that routine and things started to fall apart. Little did I know, I had just scratched the surface. Anna and Kristina’s podcast has become my obsession. At a time in my life where I thought I was empowering myself and learning everything I needed to with the resources I already had, This Spiritual Fix has given me the missing puzzle piece. In this episode, we do a deep dive into the subject matter that I thought would resonate with all of you the most: the primal wounds, their Masks, “The Drama Triangle,” my car accident (and a huge “OMG” moment with clairvoyant Kristina), and working with a teacher, or Shaman. You will not want to miss this episode. It’s pure gold.

—

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

Releasing Primal Wounds And Stepping Out Of The Drama Triangle With Anna Stromquist And Kristina Wiltsee

What’s up Dropouts? This is a doozy. I have two strong, powerful women that are going to speak to us, Anna Stromquist and Kristina Wiltsee of This Spiritual Fix podcast. You guys need to go and subscribe to their podcast and I say this in the show as well. They have taught me so much. I was going along in my life thinking that I had learned all I need to learn about my spirituality, my love languages and healing myself. I got to This Spiritual Fix, which I found on TikTok and I was immediately engulfed in this absolute wealth of spiritual knowledge and self-healing that I truly never knew that I needed.

I don’t take this lightly when I say this, they changed my life. I want you to pay attention closely when we talk about the primal wounds because there’s a primal wound I didn’t even know that I had. I totally said it to them during this episode and they were like, “It’s this.” I’m like, “Obviously.” It’s a big duh moment. There are huge a-ha moments for me during this session. We talked about the drama triangle, which is something that Kristina herself came up with that spirit shared with her. You’re going to resonate with this. We need to get ourselves out of this drama triangle. What is the drama triangle? Stay tuned. We’re going to find out. We also talk about working with shamans and how Kristina and Anna both say that in the correct situation can eliminate the need for traditional psychotherapy. You’re going to want to stick around for all of that and more. We have a lot to talk about so let’s go ahead and jump right in.

—

Welcome, Anna and Kristina of This Spiritual Fix, to the show. How are you, guys?

Thanks for having us.

We’re great.

Have you recorded together so far?

We recorded last night an interview with someone.

It was a lot of fun. It was a woman that both Anna and I have worked with in the past. We don’t normally do interviews on our podcast often. It’s few and far between. We were talking about the divine feminine with her, which is something that we’re going to be touching on next season. It was juicy and sexy. I’m excited.

It was sexy and a little controversial.

I took a course on the divine feminine and I’ve been learning about the divine masculine and the wounded masculine. I’ve been doing a lot of work on that because I’ve been attracting the wounded masculine quite a bit so I had to do the work on that. I can’t wait for that episode. That’ll be cool.

Releasing Primal Wounds: We’re all going to find things inside us that we might not be proud of or parts of us we don’t like. When you do, recognize there’s more of you to love and not parts of you to heal, purge, or scold.

It will be a cool thing because it’s bookmarked. Her husband leads the one on the divine masculine. In the following episode, it’s her. It’ll be a whole tantra series to discuss both.

I love that you guys aren’t afraid to delve into all the sectors of spirituality. It’s not just one form of spirituality. It’s amazing

We’re willing to try anything.

That’s where it started for us. We weren’t dogmatic about anything so that’s what made it interesting.

Every episode, I’m on the edge of my seat listening. For our readers, please, go immediately and subscribe to This Spiritual Fix on wherever you stream. You guys are good friends, close friends, you say best friends probably at this point in time. You share stories of childhood pain and unite in the same goal of healing that pain. Is that correct?

Yes. Beyond that is more realizing that there’s more of us to love because we joke, there’s nothing to fix and there’s nothing to heal. There’s just more of us to love. As we dive deeper into the whole self-discovery, we’re all going to find things inside us that we might not be proud of or parts of us we don’t like. Our biggest message is when you find these things, recognize there’s more of you to love and not parts of you to heal, purge or scold.

That’s what we mean when we say healing those layers of pain that come up because we want everyone to know that we all have this pain in us. We all have wounds. We’re all playing “toxic games”. We’re all on this Earth to learn lessons. As we uncover the things we have to learn, our journey is to love that in us and then, in turn, we come to love it and everyone else because if we can love all the ugly parts of us, it’s easier to love and accept everyone around us because everyone has ugly side parts.

Sometimes it works even the other way around. We find that in looking and forgiving another person’s stuff, we start to recognize that the thing that we have the biggest problem with somebody else is just us, reflected back at us. If we can forgive them then we can start to do the work on ourselves. There are lots of entry points whether it’s going into ourselves first or whether it’s looking at our relationships or looking at the things we have difficulty with in the world or keep attracting.

I’ve heard this before and I always say this to myself, “You don’t have to be completely healed to be loved all the way through.” I know you guys both say, “If you’re completely healed, you’re at the level of enlightenment,” which none of us are going to get there.

My major joke has always been, if I was married to Jesus Christ or Buddha who were the perfect men that have probably ever walked the planet, I’d be bitching at them. I would find something to bitch about because to me, that’s always been my yardstick to measure the perfect man. I would still find fault with Buddha and Jesus like, “Where is the fault here?” It’s through my own perception.

I won’t take credit for this. It was a meme. It was me to Jesus on the third day, “Where have you been? Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you tell me where you were? You could have at least texted.”

“Why are we speeding all these people? Why don’t you take me out on a date just alone?” You find something.

Women from their early 20s, Gen Z, all the way up to 40s, 50s and beyond have heard about the love languages. We all know what they are. Now, thankfully, we are more aware of the love languages. I have come to know what my love language is to where what I thought it was, which I thought was words of affirmation. Now I’ve come to find out it’s quality time because I was being loved bombed a lot. The words of affirmation were what were getting me going at first but now I realized it wasn’t.

We know all about that but what I want to talk about are the primal wounds. I know that you guys have done extensive episodes of this. Don’t worry, it won’t be too in-depth. I will direct the audience to go and read. I’ll go through the primal wounds. We’ve got abandonment, rejection, betrayal, injustice and humiliation. For those reading, the corresponding masks, the masks that we wear, abandonment is the codependent then we’ve got rejection, which is the fugitive. We’ve got betrayal, which is the controller. We’ve got injustice and that is the harsh critic and then humiliation is the masochist.

Me personally, I was looking at abandonment and betrayal. Those are things that I have experienced in my relationships. It’s a little bit different because I’m still out here on the streets in the dating scene and it’s rough out here. First one, abandonment. My abandonment and my codependency. For example, I’m with someone and every morning, they call me or they text me and then for two weeks, they stopped doing that. Maybe I might hear from them throughout the day but it’s not that consistent every morning good morning phone call or good morning text.

My mind starts going, “Are they leaving me? Are they abandoning me?” Becoming codependent as in texting them like, “Is everything okay? Did I do something wrong?” That kind of a thing, that’s how I was behaving before. I know this is relatable for a lot of women. How do we self-soothe in that kind of situation? What’s the type of work that we have to do? Does it depend on how deep-seated it is? Is it person by person? How do you go about attacking that?

It’s interesting, when I did my yoga teacher training a couple of years ago, I had a yoga teacher and she would talk about how when you come up to people, you’re usually relating to them on the level of a chakra. She was using that analogy. One of the things that we talked about in TSF is how these primal wounds are a lot like the shadow chakras. Whereas the heart and having an open heart is the light side of the shadow chakra and rejection is the dark side. Abandonment is in the second chakra. Those are the ways that we relate to it.

Releasing Primal Wounds: The whole world is a forgiveness machine of opportunity, medicine, and food. We can choose to see that as nourishing or we can choose to see it as hurtful.

What is interesting about that is that if you use that, if you recognize that your primal wound is like a magnet and it’s going to be attracting the opposite magnet that is going to pull this lesson. The whole world is a forgiveness machine, which is what we talked about. It’s all this opportunity, medicine and food for us. We can choose to see that as nourishing or we can choose to see it as hurtful. When you come to recognize that you’re attracting someone who is triggering the lesson of like, “I feel abandoned,” your magnet is specifically honed for that abandonment room.

When it comes to, “How do I attract the person who isn’t going to be the magnet that’s going to pull this out?” The work to preempt that is to create your own magnet. Complete your own circuit is what I mean. It’s to be like, “I don’t need somebody else to have to learn this lesson right now.” It sounds crazy but it works. Your mind can’t tell the difference between what happens in real life and what happens in your mind.

You create this work and you recognize that nobody can abandon you. You come down and you peel away all the different things that you’re feeling about abandonment. You’re getting angry and you experience all of that without even needing to have the other partner to play off of. By doing that, the magnet becomes less magnetized and you don’t have to attract the partner that’s going to bring out that lesson because you’re doing it anyway. You’re doing the work that the lesson would have to bring with you. It’s like, “Let’s do the pre-work.”

To close that circuit, if you’re paying attention to the universe, the universe is always here teaching us what we need to learn. I read a beautiful quote that said, “If you don’t take the day off that the universe is giving you, hence you need to rest and take a day off, it’s going to make you sick so you have no choice but to rest.” If you tell yourself, “I’ve got this abandonment wound. Let me notice it and everything,” you might start to notice that your abandonment wound is being triggered by a commercial or by your boss’s email. This was hilarious. I saw a TikTok about it, by the car behind you choosing to get in another lane. You’re like, “What did I do? Why have you left me?”

If you decide that you’re going to hone in and heal that abandonment wound and notice it everywhere, then you don’t need this teacher to come along because the people who trigger us are our dark teachers, not our light teachers. You’re less likely to need them to come to teach you a lesson because you’ve already let the universe know, “I’ve decided I’m going to take on this lesson.” One of my mantras is, I learn my lessons easily and effortlessly. It’s like, “Yes, I have things to learn but let me learn it easily and effortlessly. I don’t want to learn it in a hard way. Let me learn it quick so I can bypass a lot of the drama of it.”

That’s a great example of something that happened between Anna and I in the second season. We started doing all this work on the drama triangle and then we became the subject of each other’s drama triangle. I see that as such a gift as bad as it got and as much as I wanted to throw up every single one of my rejection room stuff. I wanted to throw every single wound in the world and I went through the whole gamut. For sure, Anna did, too.

I felt that we were in a safe space and we could do it without the consequence of needing bad validation, like, “There it is. She left me. We stopped doing the podcast.” We didn’t need that because we were both on the path of like, “We got to learn these lessons. This is absolute crap and it feels so bad.”

Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships

I can talk a little bit about navigating dating with an abandonment wound as someone who did that. I read a wonderful book by John Gray who wrote Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. He has a book called Mars and Venus On a Date. In it, he talks about the five stages of dating, which are attraction, uncertainty, exclusivity, intimacy and engagement. Right after attraction comes uncertainty. Usually, in the attraction stage, there’s a lot of love bombing and fantasy. It’s an abandonment wound’s dream because that person is right there, completely involved, completely claiming you, owning you, calling you, texting you every day the whole day and it looks a lot like the intimacy stage. That intimacy stage doesn’t come until after uncertainty and exclusivity.

After attraction comes uncertainty and men will usually use that uncertainty to take a step back and evaluate the relationship and often even test you. They might not text you or do something screwed up. They might not even consciously be doing it. It’s an unconscious thing, just like children unconsciously test authority. They’re unconsciously testing you to see how are you under pressure, how are you under disappointment or how pathetic are you in some ways. It’s an unconscious thing. After the uncertainty stage comes exclusivity, where you decide you’re going to be exclusive then comes deeper intimacy. After that, you got engagement and marriage and “happily ever after”.

Understanding uncertainty was a huge eye-opener as someone with an abandonment wound because I used to perceive that when the man would start to take a step away from me after coming on so strongly. He now has abandoned me and he now no longer liked me. He was leaving me. I didn’t matter to him. I would react strongly but when I understood that that is a normal phase of healthy relationships to be uncertain and to ask questions like, “Is this person good for me? Do I even like this person?”

That’s what they’re doing but I wouldn’t be doing it. I’d be over here being like, “What do I need to do to get him to like me again? What do I need to do for him to love bomb me again?” I’d be more worried about what do I need to do to overperform to get his attention again instead of using that stage wisely to ask myself the questions of, “Is he a good fit for me?” For an abandonment wound, understanding that uncertainty is normal and healthy. When someone pulls away in the beginning right after that initial attraction, it doesn’t always spell out abandonment or rejection.

Introspectively, Anna, you hit the nail on the head. It’s like, “Is this making me happy? Why am I reacting with my gift-giving love language and showering him in gifts, experiences and things like that?” It’s like, “Let me treat you to dinner.” You should be focused on like, “Are you happy? Is he making you feel complete and not the opposite?”

With abandonment, when people pull away from us, our response is to try harder, work harder, blame ourselves and think, “What have I done wrong? What can I do?” You go through your Rolodex of personalities and be like, “What kind of woman do I need to be for this guy?” That’s codependency in a nutshell. It’s creating whatever you think they want instead of asking, “Are they good for me?”

Mars and Venus On A Date: A Guide for Navigating the 5 Stages of Dating to Create a Loving and Lasting Relationship

I find that my abandonment wound gets triggered even online, on Instagram or whatever. Say, I get into a disagreement with a friend on Instagram or a text that comes in or a comment that is made on something I’ve written or a caption that I’ve written and they’re disagreeing with me. I feel like I automatically get into this, “I got to DM them and tell them all these things, that they’re so beautiful and wonderful. I’ve got to get out of this quickly.” The drama triangle situation comes into play. I’m sure your feedback is mostly positive. On TikTok, I know sometimes it can get a little sketch with people in their commentary. Do you ever find yourself triggered by anything that people comment or say?

Luckily, we’ve only had two negative comments out of thousands. I remember one triggered me. Kris, do you remember? It was the one about cultural appropriation. I was discussing the teachings of the Buddha and someone said that I was whitewashing and culturally appropriating the Buddha, which was in my mind, I could understand their point of view but I also was like, “I have put so much study into this.” The Buddha wanted to be loved and understood by the whole planet. He was not a cultural fighter. He wasn’t about the culture. He was about consciousness. I was biting my tongue to be not triggered. Right, Kristina?

The dynamic of what goes on online is a whole bunch of control dramas going all over the place. It’s a whole bunch of people inviting you into the drama triangle. People want engagement in whatever form of engagement it comes in. The drama triangle says there’s a persecutor and there’s a rescuer and then ultimately, those two types are trying to always become the victim. As the drama triangle, you get people in your comments that start becoming the persecutor and saying, “How could you do this? You didn’t do this right.” You want to fall into the victim.

Something goes on and some conflict happens and all of a sudden, you want to become the rescuer. You’re like, “I totally relate to what you’re saying. I’m going to start showering you with random other comments in order to make you feel better because I am terrified.” Automatically taken responsibility for this conflict and I am already trying to mitigate the fallout so that nothing happens even though it is such a betrayal of myself to do it.

There’s maybe a point when we don’t have opinions because we’re totally loving and accepting. Right now, we live in duality and experience in which we have opinions. Most of the time, those opinions are not going to be swayed by other people. That’s a controversial thing to say. Ultimately, it’s our own learning and our own reflection in the world that helps us to move positions, which is why we’re in a climate that we’re in. Everyone thinks they can change everybody else’s opinions about something.

The idea is that whatever your truth is right now, we all need to recognize that our truth is the only truth but it’s also not really the truth at all because it’s our truth. It’s nobody else’s truth but that’s where we are right now. We honor that and we accept where we are. We accept that if this hurts our feelings that we need to keep our integrity and not give away all that power because we’re terrified that someone’s going to leave us.

It happens with friends too even over text, where we’ll get into a disagreement and I’ll eventually go into that rescuer mode, where I’m like, “You look so beautiful on your Instagram post.” I’m trying to get the problem away.

“Don’t leave me.”

I do have that wound. I won’t say I won’t. In dating, I want to put it out there that I have set strong boundaries with regards to how I allow a man to court me because it should be a courtship. I’m a little “old fashioned” in that way, whereas I don’t accept the same-day date. I don’t want you to ask me to hang out. I want you to ask me on a date. I want a place and time and things like that. If they don’t text or call the day after or the day after that, I expect to know a reason why.

I’m not saying you have to tell me every single bit of your life but it’s to be expected if you disappear for two days to say, “I know we haven’t touched base in a couple of days. Work’s been crazy. Do you want to get together on Saturday?” Something like that. If they don’t do that then I automatically give them the ax. At first, I was like, “Maybe that’s my abandonment wound,” but then I said to myself, “Maybe that’s because I’ve set good boundaries in dating.” What do you think?

We have a whole episode on this called Super Sweet Soulmate Love: Exploring Deal-Makers and Deal-Breakers. With my husband, I was also big on courtship. My husband is from Georgia and he’s the gentleman who always pays and always opens the door. He’s such a Georgian gentleman. He’s a Georgia Peach but he’s a man. I don’t know what the equivalent is. He’s like that. What he’s going to say, I had it in my mind. I made a vision board. Not even a vision board is necessary but I knew in my mind, “The man I want to marry has got to have these five qualities. Beyond that, I’m going to radically forgive everything else.”

If it’s not important enough to put on my list then it’s not important for me to go nitpick. It’s up to you then what is on your list. If you have a thing like, “He has to text me back 40 hours after our date.” If you want to put that on your deal-breaker list, that’s fine. You can put anything on there. The world is vast. You could say, “Only wears purple shirts.” You can put whatever you want on that list.

For the sake of understanding that humans are multi-layered and multifaceted, I would choose the things and then stick to them and then give a lot of wiggle room for other things. For example, I put on my list these qualities and then I meet my husband. He was a lot older than me than I had expected my future husband to be and he had been married before but never on my list had I put that he needs to be within five years of my age or he needs to be never married. I didn’t put that on my list so when I met him, he was older and he had been married before. I thought, “It wasn’t on my list so I’m going to let that go and be curious and be open-minded.” I’m so glad I did. He had the qualities I needed him to have and then everything else, I chose to be flexible about.

Your vision board also had an engagement ring, I understand.

I should find my vision board one day.

It’s gorgeous.

He got me the exact ring from my vision board without knowing it. I had forgotten and I showed it to another friend when I got engaged. I go, “Look.” She goes, “Anna, get out your vision board from a few years ago.” I pulled it up and we were both freaking out. It was the same ring. She’s like, “Did he have your password to your computer?” I’m like, “He’s not a snooper and no, he didn’t have my password.” My stepdaughter helped pick it out so it wasn’t even him. It was crazy.

What you said about manifestation is true in the sense that by creating those boundaries, you are effectively saying, “This is what I want right now.” The universe is probably going to keep testing you and be like, “Here’s 80% of what you want. Is that okay? Here’s 95% of what you want. Is that okay?” You need to be like, “No, I’m waiting for 100%. I’m good. I’m patient to be able to do it.” Putting another layer on to it. Let me know if this is too premature. Betrayal’s mask is controlling. For some people, it can get confusing in this area because you’re like, “You’re trying to control things too much. You’re creating too narrow of a field. You need to be open to whatever is coming into the world.” You could say all sorts of things.

The real test of this is that betrayal people like to avoid pain so they try and limit the possibility of pain in their life. All the wounds are using masks to avoid pain or have pain come in a controlled fashion. When it comes to the betrayal wound and whether or not you know that that’s playing a part in what you’re doing to say, “Are my boundaries being too controlling?” What is a good test is to say, “Am I saying that this person needs to do this and this because ultimately, I don’t trust them?”

This is the psychic woo coming in and I’m going to be super clear that this is what’s coming in right now. It’s that if your boundaries start to change to be more controlling or if they become reactionary. If it becomes reactionary, you’ll be like, “Now I have to create another boundary because you’re breaking my other deal-breaker. I’m not in a place where I’m going to end it because you broke this deal so I’m going to create this other deal-breaker.” That is the clear sign that you know that the betrayal wound is coming in to control things because it’s trying to avoid the pain but it’s also wanting to avoid ending things and breaking up with things.

When you have betrayal and abandonment working side by side, they’re diametrically opposed. One is wanting to control everything and push it away and the other is always like, “No, never leave me.” It’s a push-pull. Knowing that your deal breakers keep changing because you’re afraid to have that moment and say, “This is a deal-breaker. My deal-breaker happened a long time ago but I was afraid or I had lost faith that I was going to find my 100%.” It’s a way to recognize that with betrayal wound.

I’m glad that you said that there’s the push-pull because sometimes I mix up the two in my head, whereas it’s almost like I’m trying not to get abandoned so I control the situation. That’s fused in a weird way.

Codependents were controlling but we’re manipulative about it. It’s under the surface. It’s not direct.

If you want to bring the drama triangle, the betrayer is the persecutor more and the abandonment is the rescuer. The rescuer is tricky about the way that they’re trying to become the victim whereas the betrayer person’s like, “I’m going to be the persecutor about it.”

When my love and my gift-giving were not reciprocated, I’m the victim. I want to get into the drama triangle. In the episode about Eric and the texting, Anna kept referring to that wound as she, as an entity. That’s what I do for my anxiety and self-sabotage. I have given them names and I have humanized them. I want to put that out there because I gave my friend this advice. We named her self-sabotage and ever since then, she texts me and she’s like, “Stephanie, Maria’s acting up again.” I’m like, “What did she do now?” We talk about it like that and it gives it this element of humor so we take the power away from it a little bit. I hope that’s helpful to someone reading.

Releasing Primal Wounds: Betrayal and abandonment are diametrically opposed. One is wanting to control everything and push it away, and the other is always, “No, never leave me.”

I call my PMDD, which is severe PMS, my dragon. I turn into a dragon like Medusa. It’s helpful because she’s another side of me. The thing about boundaries is worthwhile especially if you’re codependent because codependents are the doormats of the universe because we’re willing to tolerate almost any behavior if that person doesn’t leave us. I know that one of the great ways that I use a yardstick for boundaries is I have to ask myself things like, “Would he treat his boss like that? This guy I’m dating, if his boss took him out to dinner, would he probably send his boss a thank you text a day later? If he had a meeting with his boss and he couldn’t show up, would he send a courtesy text to reschedule?”

I would get so wrapped up in, “Maybe he’s awesome and I’m being abandonment woundy here.” If I can be like, “What would he treat his boss like that? Would he treat his colleague like that?” I can make it a little more objective and then I can more easily discern behavior as respectful or disrespectful because sometimes we get caught up in our wound and it clouds our vision. If you’re also self-deprecating then you start to wonder, “Am I just being needy or was he doing this respectful behavior?” Sometimes I do that. I say, “How would he treat a colleague?”

That’s a great analogy. Being a polite human being is normal to me than not cancel at the start time of the date. That is under no surprise.

You can ask yourself, “If he did that to his boss five times in a row, would he get fired?” The behavior that goes on in dating is not that much different than office etiquette if you think about it. That’s one way to yardstick it.

For those of you who are familiar with the drama triangle, you have to go to This Spiritual Fix and listen to all the episodes on the drama triangle because it is essential for your life. It has taught me so much about my cyclical need for drama and I didn’t even think I was creating drama. “I am enlightened. I am healed. I’m better now. Look at me.” When I listened to your episodes, I was like, “I am not enlightened or fixed right now. I need more fixing.”

The drama triangle has three facets. You have the victim, persecutor and rescuer. Those are the elements of the drama triangle. I’m sure you can infer from what we’ve been talking about. Let’s take an example. You get a message online or comment online from a person that says you are culturally appropriating and it triggers you. You’re like, “That is not how I feel at all.” Internally, you’re having this anxiety so you either go 1 of 2 ways. You go to the persecutor, which is you go on the attack and you go attack that person or you go to the rescuer, which is you try to fix the situation.

“Let me educate you on how I’m not appropriating.”

Because you have let this comment affect you, you’re automatically taking this victim mentality. Am I right?

Ultimately, you feel victimized so then your next response is persecutor, rescuer or maybe victim. “Poor me. How could they possibly think that I culture appropriate when I just love Buddha,” or whatever it is.

Normally, you guys don’t eat anywhere except in the kitchen. That’s a general rule in your house. Your husband had gone into the guestroom and eaten some Doritos because he was not trying to wake you up. He’s watching TV and he’s left some Dorito crumbs by the bedside. This triggered you and you’re like, “WTF. Are you joking me?”

We had guests coming that day so I go into the bedroom to double-check how clean it was, make sure no puppy had pooped in the bedroom or whatever. I come into the room and I see the Dorito chips. I saw Red and my first thought was, “Holy shit,” and then I go into the victim, “Poor me. I’m always cleaning the house and no one recognizes how much hard work I do. I’m such an amazing housekeeper but no one cares.” I went into persecutor, which is like, “That pig. How can we leave chips on this thing?” Rescuer was like, “I’ll take care of it.”

I stopped myself in my tracks and I was like, “Anna, you’re playing drama triangle here and there was no cheese at the end of the tunnel.” It was even my birthday that day and I was like, “Do you want to be in the drama triangle for your birthday?” I’m like, “I’m not. I’m going to be mature,” because the drama triangle is all about immaturity. It’s all about being afraid to directly ask for your needs to be met. We go around it by either pointing a finger and playing persecutor or saying, “Poor me,” being the victim or trying to play rescuer so then we can say, “I tried to rescue you. Didn’t you see what an awesome job I did?” I was like, “I’m not going to do any of those three options. I’m going to be mature.”

I calmly told him, “In the future, will you please not eat Dorito chips in the guest room especially before a friend comes?” He was like, “Yeah.” All the color drained from his face. He’s like, “I’m so sorry. It will never happen again,” and then it was over. We went on with our day. It was a one-minute thing instead of a 30-minute thing. For anyone who’s been married, it could have turned into a five-hour resentment. The reality is when you live with someone and they pissed you off, you can hold on to that for as long as you want. It became a one-minute thing because I was able to catch it before the drama triangle serotonin addiction thing set off.

Kristina, spirit gave you this information. Is that correct?

Yeah. It was an interesting thing because our mutual teacher, Robbie, who’s a shaman who we interviewed, mentioned the drama triangle to me. I misunderstood it when she first told me. She was like, “In one lifetime, you’re the abuser. The next one, you’re the abusee and then you may be the rescuer. You’re always going to flip flop in these roles throughout your whole life.” I would do work to try and release my ancestral abusers, who I knew were in my family line and my ancestral abusees.

I was doing it on a meta, not day-to-day level. It was a conflict between Anna and I, where I got upset about something. I noticed how I was roiling in this experience of being upset but not saying anything because I didn’t want to make her upset. I was flip-flopping through all these roles. It was the spirit who came in and was like, “Look at what you’re doing. One second, you’re the persecutor, you’re the abuser. The next second, you are saying stuff to Anna, like, ‘It’s so great. It’s all fine. Don’t worry about it.’ You’re trying to do this and then the whole time, you’re sitting here bitching to your husband about how much of a bitch she is and you’re playing the victim. You’re persecuting yourself and then playing the victim and then playing all three.” At the exact same time, I was playing all of them.

We were flip-flopping between the three of them as our drama unfolded but it was awesome. I told Kris later there was no one else in this world I’d rather have been in the drama triangle with than her because we were both willing to see it, stop it and get out of it. We pushed each other. We flip-flopped.

This was a lot for me. This is why I talk about betrayal because betrayal and rejection are my two gems. Those are my wounds. Both of those like to avoid feeling anything that’s painful. The rejection wound will retreat completely away from it and become small and disappear. The betrayal wound will try and control everything to prevent it from happening. It’s those two different sides of it.

I was so upset about this experience. I felt it in my body and I wanted to get rid of it. It was like this ball of pain in my body and I was like, “I got to do something about this.” That’s what the drama triangle wants us to do. It wants us to pass on that feeling, that hot potato of nasty drama to somebody else so that you don’t have to feel it. The thing is that it doesn’t work like that because the minute you pass it on to somebody else, you’re making their ball glow hotter and your ball is still glowing hotter. There’s nothing you know and eventually, there’ll be a reckoning. Even if it seems like you’ve temporarily passed it off, you’re not.

That day, I went on a walk with this super uncomfortable feeling sitting right in my solar plexus. I was like, “I’m going to be okay with this super uncomfortable drama triangle sitting in my body.” It was the first time I had been like, “It’s okay to feel uncomfortable. It’s okay to be wrong and it’s okay to be right and you don’t have to make somebody pay for it.” There’s no cheese at the end of this tunnel. There’s no exchange of energy with this dynamic that makes anything feel better.

You’re never going to get what you want with it.

In a triangle forever.

The biggest takeaway for me with doing this work was I recognized the way that I use rescuing to get things that I wanted. Instead of asking directly for my needs to be met, I would rescue people. I would do more of my fair share of group projects so that way, when I wanted to take a break, I felt justified to take one. Even around the house with me and my husband, whatever the chore distribution was, I would go 120% over mine because that way, I knew that if I ever wanted a break, I could ask for it instead of asking for it and not having to earn it.

What I came to recognize with this work was, one, there’s no cheese at the end of the tunnel. It’s never going to give you what you want. Number two, if you’re tired of playing victim, if you’re tired of the victim consciousness, playing the victim card, feeling like a victim in your relationship or you’re tired of being the persecutor, fault-finding in others, you can’t give up one leg of the drama triangle and expect the other two to be okay. You have to give up the whole drama triangle.

I was in a situation where I was constantly playing the victim with someone and I realized that if I wanted to stop, I had to stop rescuing them, too. If I don’t want to be a victim to them, I had to stop rescuing them, too. I had to give the whole thing up. I couldn’t just give up the parts I didn’t like. That’s hard because one leg of the drama triangle, if not multiple, is feeding you somehow whether it’s a serotonin hit, a dopamine hit, a sense of worthiness, a sense of, “I’m so amazing. I’m rescuing this person.” You’re getting some feedback from one of the points of the triangle. You got to be willing to give up the addiction to all of it or you’re going to always be trapped in it. Right, Kristina?

We go through even the twelve steps from AA because that was how I approached it. I was like, “I am such an addict. I don’t even know how to be emotionally mature. The only way I know how to operate when it comes to any conflict is in this way. I have to figure out how to grow up.” Trauma and all these other experiences arrested my envelopment from when I was younger and it was like, “Adulthood exists to get over our childhood.” Sometimes I think that. We’re here to undo whether it’s past lives or childhoods. It was particularly because of my kids but because of every interaction, my work was to grow up emotionally and find a new way to interact.

I want to read a quote from you, Kristina, that resonated with me so much that I wrote it down. You said, “It is important to focus on healing the wound so the anxiety ceases, codependency, the overperforming ceases and the maladaptive behaviors. The toxic behaviors start to fall off because they do not serve us.” I thought that was introspective.

Releasing Primal Wounds: The drama triangle is all about immaturity. It’s all about being afraid to directly ask for your needs to be met.

We have so much old stuff that we’re used to doing because it’s our habit. The more work you do, the faster it falls off because it’s like, “We’re done. We don’t need this lesson.” You start to sprint through your lessons. Sometimes you get slowed down by bigger ones but the work is there and you’re doing it.

You said to me, “Our potential partners trigger our wounds the most because they’re the closest thing to us in terms of an extension of ourselves more so than even our children.”

Our partners whether male, female, trans, non-binary or whoever our romantic partner is, are inverse. Let’s say I’m 60% feminine and 40% masculine. Most likely, my husband is the flip. He’s 60% masculine and 40% feminine. He is my mere half. Especially when you live with someone or when you love someone and you are in a relationship or you are married, your identity is wrapped up in that person. They’re the person who is our biggest trigger. They are our biggest tuning forks because they are ourselves.

Especially if you’re like me, one of the things codependents do is self-abandon. When people self-abandon, we don’t look at our own shit. We try to save the world around us. Especially for someone who has abandonment issues, I wouldn’t look inside as much. I would look to what my husband was doing wrong. If I was upset, I’d be like, “I’m upset today. What the hell did he do wrong today? Let me figure this out.” I was like a little Sherlock Holmes with my magnifying glass. “What did he do? Why am I in a bad mood?” Instead of looking inside. For me and it’s true for a lot of people, our partner is the biggest extension of who we are. The more we can love and forgive them, that’s a closer reflection to our own self-love and then it goes to children, maybe siblings and parents. It expands from there.

It’s whatever your inner circle is, honestly. They say, “Surround yourself with the five people that you want to become.” Make sure that the people around you are expanders for your life, not contractors. They’re pushing the possibilities of what you can do in your own life. I joke with Anna that my husband is my representation of my mind. My daughter’s my representation of my inner child. Before I had any of those relationships, the closest people that I had were also reflecting it, like work relationships and things like that. They were representing my own archetypes in my life.

It’s true that when you do have a partner, that does give you that amazing lesson to see your stuff so clearly. One of the massive realizations I had years ago was with a colleague. I had kept having these issues with this colleague and I was like, “I don’t like this about her,” and then I was like, “I don’t like all that stuff about myself.” She was giving it to me. She was showing me.

When you get in that intimate thing with partners and things, with all relationships, you’re able to see that dynamic and you’re also able to see the wound dynamic. Everyone that in your inner circle, whatever’s in that roundhouse circle for you, you can read them like a book if you want to. You’d be like, “These are all the lessons you have to learn.”

Have you guys heard the story about the Bengali tea boy? This is a great analogy. There was this famed monk. Bengal is part of India. The tea ceremony says, “Be graceful, beautiful, calm and lovely.” There was this tea boy that was terrible at it. He clangs the dishes and breaks everything. He was clumsy and annoying. He talks and he was a pain in the ass. This monk was invited to go to Tibet and he heard that everyone in Tibet was so enlightened and peaceful that nothing was going to bother him when he went. He says, “I’ll take the tea boy with me.”

First of all, he needed to grow with that anger so he needed someone that irritated to come along. Number two, maybe it was preventing God knows what to happen in Tibet because if he didn’t have that outlet, he would get it somewhere else. The joke was people in Tibet were just as much assholes as anywhere else that he didn’t need to bring the tea boy. The point was, it’s like our partner. Whether you’re married or unmarried, single, divorced, a hermit or a monk working in a high-profile job, we all have our tea boys.

My tea boy sometimes is me.

Ultimately, our tea boy is us.

That’s the thing, we live in the drama. Our realization is that we wouldn’t even be in a body if we didn’t have an inception in becoming incarnate. We are born into a drama triangle of sorts. The world is created from this machine of having to work out your stuff, which means interacting with whatever’s around you. You can go up into a cave in the middle of the Himalayas and it’s going to be within yourself. Your own playground is forgiveness and all your lessons exist within your body or you can play the householder’s life. You can be on social media and get all your lessons. You can choose wherever it is to do that.

There are guys living in the basement of their mom’s house with no social interaction, trolling, playing persecutor all day. You can get it wherever you want it.

You can get it in Target.

As my friend said, “The world is a big golden corral. You can eat a buffet. What are you going to put on your plate?” It’s all there.

That’s the thing. I’m going through a period where I feel like I’m getting lesson after lesson and I’m like, “I need this to let up a little bit.” It’s a lot, but at the same time, I also recognize that I could totally slow down if I wanted to. I know that I could stop stimulating myself with all these other things and I could be like, “I’m going to relax. I’m going to be in my divine feminine spa life. I’m going to go do this and then I could go back into the fray. I could go back into doing my work.” There’s a saying that I love, which is, “If you haven’t started, best not to start but once you start, best to finish.” Once you get into a lesson, try and see it all the way through. It’s best to finish once you start.

The lessons are a blessing because here I was before I found you and I was like, “I’m doing the work. I’m doing a lot better,” and then I found the drama triangle and then I listened to your episode with Robbie. It’s an infinite number of lessons. Am I willing to take them all in? Am I willing to comprehend them at the time they’re given to me at that moment? Maybe not. Maybe it’s going to take me a couple of weeks. Maybe it’s going to take me a year but I want to get there. The intention is what is important.

I said in one of the episodes, “Meditation is the work you do on the mat. Coming out of the drama triangle is the work you do off the mat.” It’s that automatic reaction, wanting to push or pull and not just sitting there with the uncomfortableness of things. It’s the same thing, ones out here and ones inside. The drama triangle was a big piece missing from my meditation practice because it’s so easy to be equanimous on a mat.

It’s easy to put your fingers together and pretend like you’re Zen and all of that. It’s quite another to be Zen up here in your mind. I was a believer in time heals all wounds. Time helps to heal wounds but it’s up to me to make sure I am actively healing. I was in a bad car accident. That was completely the driver’s fault. I was deep in that drama triangle because I was the victim hardcore and persecutor. No rescuer was there.

I was angry every day because my back still to this day hurts badly. I already had a bad back and now I have an even worse back. It’s hindering me from doing what I love from working out. Even travel is difficult for me, lifting anything that’s above five pounds and bending over to pick up something off the ground. Here I am, every time I try to bend over and pick up something, I get angry. I had to do so much work to get myself out of the manifesting of that anger directed at that guy. Having to say to myself, “Where’s the cheese at the end of the tunnel? Getting angry at this dude is going to do what for me? Nothing. It makes me more angry.”

One of the things that Anna and I have discovered, we’ve done two rounds of primal wounds. We did it before we started a podcast and then we did it while we did the podcast and then we went into the drama triangle. One of the things that I found and Anna, you can tell me if you resonate with this, too, is that whenever I find myself going into the drama triangle, it’s like a wound popping up its head being like, “Let’s do a little bit more work on us.”

For you, you experienced injustice. This is massive injustice wound. In Anna’s analogy, the wound is like the piano and the drama triangle is the keys. How it plays itself out is how it plays it out in your life. You experienced so much injustice in it and then you’re going to experience the drama triangle. When you defuse the drama triangle then you can use other tools to get into that injustice wound because the injustice wound is still there. You’re still reminded every day of it. You’re just going to use a better tool to get into it. The drama triangle lets it fester.

It’s like pinball.

Now you’re like, “The drama triangle has let me know I have an injustice wound. Now let’s deal with this using all of our other tools.”

I’m so glad that you said that, Kristina, because I didn’t even realize I had an injustice wound but now I’m having a light ball on the top of my head that says duh on it. That’s so obvious now that you say it.

Also, injustice is in the back. People with injustice wounds often have rigid, stiff backs.

Another ding up here. That’s fascinating. My mind is completely blown.

If you see someone with a stiff, erect spine, you can guarantee that 9 times out of 10, their primary wound is injustice. It becomes so rigid in their beliefs. My friend who turned me on to the primal wound is injustice but she has the best posture though.

I had a bigger chair but it blocked the background so I sit on a stool now and I’m constantly trying to keep my back straight and then my legs are still supposed to be in figure four because that stretches out my hip and keeps my back pain-free. I’m constantly adjusting my legs. There’s all this stuff going on here behind the scenes always at every show I do. It’s a reminder every day of this stupid back thing that I have to go through every day. Whereas before, I would be so angry. I would cry every day and be like, “Fuck this guy. I hate this guy.” I never wish death upon anyone but I wish he would get manure truck dumped on his head or something silly.

Releasing Primal Wounds: We have so much old stuff that we’re used to doing because it’s our habit. The more work you do, the faster it falls off because you’re done.

Justice loves revenge.

It’s like a monster. I want to say I’ve forgiven him but I don’t think I have truly forgiven him. I’m still working on that but I have forgiven myself for allowing me to put myself in this situation where it happened. I’m there but I haven’t forgiven him. Does that make sense?

Yeah. There are pieces. It’s like an onion. You’ll forgive the circumstance and you’ll forgive the back pain. You open it up and there’s so much to forgive. We go in that forgiveness factory.

People know this, who follow the show. I did almost die that day and my seatbelt saved me. We flipped the car 3 or 4 times and I was hanging upside down with my hair above my head. It was bad. That’s why I’m so angry about it because it wasn’t just a car accident. The car was destroyed. When we flipped, the full impact was on my side, the passenger side. I had safety glass everywhere in my eyelashes and my mouth. I’m thanking the heavens I am alive.

To give you the little thing that they’re telling me out there, it’s interesting because of the work that you’ve been doing, from what I can see, the accident was supposed to be much worse. Think of it like karma if you want to say it like that. There’s all this action-reaction. Karma means action. Something happened before and then it has to have an equal and opposite reaction coming on the other side. A lot of the time, the fields of the wounds, in particular, pull energy from your karma. They perpetuate karma. You can have injustice karma and betrayal karma and all this kind of stuff.

What I get is that sometimes with these wounds, if they sit in the back or if they’re ready to be released or something along those lines, what will happen is there will be this massive explosion of energy in the world. Sometimes it feels catastrophic. It feels like a massive accident or something like that. The work that you were doing, you were relieving the pressure valve before the accident so that the accident was bad but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

That’s what we were talking about in terms of this whole experience. Your lesson is going to come to you. Do you want to just do the work? It’s like, “Relieve the pressure valve on your injustice wound and rejection wound. Love yourself and all those different ways and all those different areas. Forgive those parts of yourself. Forgive the people who have triggered them in you.” Suddenly, those massive releases of energy don’t have to be so catastrophic. You don’t have to lose your body.

That makes me tingle all over. My mom is constantly saying to me that this accident was the catalyst and the gateway to everything coming together for the show. It was on the road to getting there but I agree with her that the accident was the turning point in a way for me, too. I had been doing work before then. I was almost like a beeline to the finish line of getting it up and running. Thank you for that affirmation and the confirmation. I appreciate that so much. Thank you, Kristina.

I want to touch on your episode with Robbie. This is something I know little about and I want to learn more. I want to get hooked up with Robbie. I need to work with her as well. She seems like a badass lady. I’ve done Reiki before so that’s the closest work that I’ve done to working with a shaman. There’s one important question that I do want to ask you. One of you guys said that psychotherapy isn’t enough versus working with a shaman. Do you guys believe that working with a shaman can eliminate the need for traditional psychotherapy?

Yes but it has to be from someone who’s living on all the different planes. What I mean by that is you have your emotional body, physical body, energy body and mental body. When you go to a psychotherapist, they’re only targeting the mental body and sometimes the emotional body. It’s a big mind game to me. I’m sure there’s a whole variety of good and bad shamans out there but the good ones are going to target your issue on all four levels.

I’ve completely given up on psychotherapy altogether because I had been going to psychotherapy for a year to work on a dysfunctional relationship with a family member and nothing changed. I went to Robbie and in the first session, she changed everything. Me and that family member are now best friends, which is what I always wanted. I never thought that was possible. It’s because she targeted on all levels.

It was funny because I had a friend who’s going through a health problem. I was like, “You should see my shaman about that.” She’s like, “Why?” I was thinking, “Never mind. It’s not for everybody.” For the people who resonate and live on all four planes, energy, physical, mental, emotional, it’s the best recipe and it’s the quickest recipe for healing because it goes everywhere.

I know people that spend years in therapy and I’m like, “You’re exactly the same person five years later. Whereas the people I know who meditate or visit shamans and who are putting themselves in the alpha state through hypnosis, meditation or whatever, one month to the next, they’re different.” Kristina is a totally different person than she was last month. The person down the street who’s been going to therapy for twenty years is exactly the same person they were when I met them six years ago.

One of the things we talked about in that episode is the three different types of work. There’s light work, shadow work and dark work. Light work is expensive. It’s like, “Let me see all these different possibilities.” Expand love and your heart out. Shadow work is looking at your past and saying, “What is it that I can transmute?” I think of it as that energy that is sitting. Shadow work is energy that is there to be released and it can be freely used within your aura. It doesn’t have to be attached to trauma, wound and all these things.

There’s dark work, which is entity attachments. You’re getting into this deeper level of experience. I talk about all the time that there’s some stuff that you can’t explain but somebody will do something and it is like night and day. All of a sudden, you come out and you’re like, “I feel like a different person. I was going crazy. My anxiety was out of control. I was going through panic attacks.” Yana releases an implant on me and then I’m like, “I’m fine.” You can get into the dynamics of why those things exist or why they attract you or all that kind of stuff. You can say, “Maybe it’s good to cover all my bases here,” to get somebody who can deal in that realm.

Releasing Primal Wounds: When you’re married or live with someone you are in a relationship with, your identity is wrapped up in that person and they become our biggest trigger.

When you think of shadow work or dark work, I feel like they’re automatically going to think of voodoo or hoodoo or the Shadow Man from the Princess and the Frog or something. It’s not like that.

Shadow work is the drama triangle work. It’s looking at your shit. It’s looking at your skeletons in your closet. It’s what shadow work is.

It’s fascinating to me. This Reiki master that I did two Zoom sessions with, the first one was three hours long. They’re supposed to be an hour. This poor woman was dripping sweat at the end of our session. She’s like, “I’m so sorry.” She was apologizing because she was dripping sweat all over. She’s probably 55 or close to 60. She’s like, “I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I’ve never drip so much sweat. I’m so sorry. I apologize.” She was in this apologetic stage. I was like, “It’s okay. Do what you need to do. Cool down. Go lay on your bed for a second.”

When she was scanning my chakras, she would find implants and those types of things and ask whichever archangel she was speaking to at the time or asking for assistance to release them, make them go away and phoenix fire them away. We talked about past life regression and she was telling me that in one of my lives, I was this enchantress with big curly red hair and I wore this beautiful ruby medallion. I was the dexter of enchantresses, whereas I would hurt people but only people that needed to be hurt. I thought that was freaking cool.

Injustice wound. Even the scales.

The imagery that she came up with was so accurate. Some of the things she touched on, she’s like, “Did you almost drown once?” I’m like, “How would you know that?” We were in Italy and I was probably 12 or 13. We were at a waterpark. No one knows this. No one had social media. I never recorded it anywhere. The only people that know are my mom, my sister and my cousins from Italy. We were in the wave pool and I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t swim fast enough because the waves were coming at me. Right when I was about to give up, someone came and pulled me out of the water. That’s what got me believing.

I grew up in a strict Roman Catholic type of situation so I have an altar where I have my mixed bag. It’s got my rosary, prayer cards, crystals, a dagger, coins, incense and sage. It’s a mixed bag of everything. Some people say it’s sacrilegious. I’m like, “To me, this is what helps me and this is how I speak to my higher power. However you speak to your higher power, I accept and you should be accepting of how I speak to my higher power. It’s nothing to do with Satanism or something evil. This is about educating yourself that there’s not just one way to speak to your higher power.” Can you guys touch on what is a shaman? What can they do for you? Can you explain past life regression? Because I can’t explain it.

A shaman, traditionally, is someone who’s been taught in a lineage. It could be an indigenous lineage. In Robbie’s case, in which she was initiated as an Apache Shaman or it could be someone who could be a self-proclaimed shaman, which is something else. It could be someone who is adept at dealing with these sorts of things. It sounds like the Reiki master that you have worked with. I work a lot with my clients with these sorts of things. I’m a Reiki master as well but I work to try and do this. Anna does it as well.

If you want to know if it’s an actual shaman, speaking to the lineages of that but it’s someone who is dealing with the mystical energetic relationships that we have with one another. The unseen relationships that we have within our own body, with energy, as well as the unseen that’s going on with other things. They’re using things like dreams or trance states. They have all sorts of tools in their bag and they’ve gone through an initiation. Specifically, a shaman will have gone through an initiation to say, “I am able to stand here and hold space for you and hold you while you are going through the hurricane but I will not step into the hurricane with you.”

That’s the real trick with all this because there’s a lot of rescuing and energy work that goes, where people will sacrifice themselves and say, “I’m going to go in and rescue you.” That’s not what a shaman is taught to do. I’m making a generalization. There’s the whole number that I’m probably not even aware of but that’s the shaman piece of that.

I know that and I have talked about Nine Perfect Strangers. Kristina, have you started watching it yet?

I haven’t. It’s the fourth time it’s come up now.

She needs to watch it.

I want to get on a call to chat with you guys when you do watch it. It won’t give it anything away but it’s funny because Masha, Nicole Kidman, is the shaman character and she does step into the hurricane with her clients. That is interesting that you said that. Anna, I love how you showed me the wounds manifested in physical form and how the characters of the show match the wounds. I was down the rabbit hole. That was so cool to me. Apparently, the book is different so I want to read the book because my friend, Christy, is reading it. She said she started watching the show and she’s like, “The show’s totally different.”

It’s the first time that Hollywood has done a show about shadow work. Someone working with a facilitator, in this case, a Russian shaman but she doesn’t call herself a shaman, to tackle their inner demons. There are nine different strangers. Three of them are working with grief, which isn’t necessarily a wound and then the other six are all dealing with different primal wounds. It’s fascinating to see how they unravel. It’s a great show.

I’m going to be so curious to know because Stephanie, one of the things that we’re playing with next season is the mother and father wound, which sits in the head. I’ve been exploring a lot. That’s the work that I’m doing so I wonder if the grief is associated with those. Maybe it is an extension of the primal wounds into going into other things.

That’ll be interesting to touch on and see. If you can explain a past life regression because I know that when I first heard it, I can infer what it means but I don’t know exactly what it means. I want to be educated. I want my followership to be educated.

Back in the ‘90s, there was a doctor named Dr. Brian Weiss, who was a psychotherapist and he used hypnosis to have his clients go back into their childhood to relive traumatic events. One day, either he accidentally said it or he said it on purpose, instead of saying, “Go back to your childhood,” he said, “You can go back to any place or any time.” He left it open-ended. The client went back to talk about historical events. He accidentally led someone to a past life, a memory. When he did it on accident, he was like, “Can I do it on purpose?”

He started doing it on purpose to other clients and he would find, for example, that a woman dealing with breast cancer in the left breast would go back and see herself as a Native American who got shot in the chest with an arrow. She had a karmic ball that led to breast cancer in her life. He was playing around with it to find out, “Did it work?” He found with great success that everyone, when put into hypnosis and left open-ended, could go back and remember other lifetimes. The arrow story might be incorrect but it was stuff like that.

In his office, he had a man come in. I’m going to get the dates wrong and all that but he went back to a life where he was an Aztec and he had a lover. Something pulled them apart and he couldn’t be with his beloved. Fast forward, he was in another time period. This time he was an Inca or this time he was in Kenya. The man went through 4 or 5 different lifetimes where every time he was meant to meet with his beloved, male or female because genders would switch, he was somehow not able to be with that person.

Simultaneously, another client in his office was having the same exact memories from a different perspective. She was an Aztec woman and she would tell the exact same stories. Patient confidentiality, there was no wiretapping. There was no way on Earth that their stories matched in the time, setting and plot. Everything matched up. He realized they had been star-crossed lovers across time. He ends up booking their appointments to be back-to-back or he double-booked them so that they’re forced to be in the waiting room at the same time or something. Patient confidentiality, he can’t be like, “4:00 is your future wife.” He couldn’t do that.

Only Love is Real

He double-booked them so they were stuck to be in the lobby together. They ended up falling in love, getting married, having children and finally got to be together. That book is called Only Love Is Real. He had a lot of books, many lives, many masters. The one that spoke to me was called Through Time Into Healing. In 1998, my friend and I discovered Brian Weiss and his books and we started reading the book. In the back of the Through Time Into Healing, the past life regression, how to do it thing.

This is a long time. This is in the ‘90s. We made a cassette tape and we recorded it. We learned to give ourselves past life regressions. Eventually, we can memorize the script and do it ourselves but we were able to go back and see our own memories. There are three different ways that people can have a past. One is people can remember them. My son remembers one. Usually, it’s before the age of seven and then children stop remembering them.

Another one is like you did, you’ve met a psychic and she could see you. Some have the clairvoyance to see it. The third way would be through hypnosis, where you go back and you relive the memory. First of all, I always go back to being a farmworker, a housekeeper, a soldier, mundane things. If I was making it up, maybe I would do Marilyn Monroe. I’m always doing these normal situations and normal things but I always tell myself, “Even if it’s not true, the emotional relief and the insight I get from it is therapeutic. It doesn’t matter if it happened or not. It will change my life now.”

I call it a shadow work process or light work process because it’s not entertainment. The first 1 or 2 times you do past life regression, you might be like, “Who was I? Is this real?” The first couple of times I did it, I was like, “What the hell,” and then after that, you start to see it as a tool for insight. You come to recognize that the beef you have with this person was because they were the person who clicked the guillotine in a past life and killed you.

You’re constantly falling for the man who’s wrong for you because in a past life, he was your soldier friend who got buried in a pile of rubble and you couldn’t get them free before the other soldiers came or whatever. You start to understand why we have certain relationships and themes in our life. It’s an amazing tool to keep reminding us that we’re all connected. We all share similar stories of loss and love and we have a purpose on this Earth and lessons to learn. That’s past life regression in a nutshell.

I believe in past lives. After you told me about Brian Weiss, I went and Googled him. I didn’t hear some of the stories but I did watch a snippet of the Oprah interview where he talked about his one patient that had gone through the past life regression. The spirit started talking to her through her, talked to him about the passing of his son that was born with some heart deformity, had passed away at three months old and then about his father who had passed away. She became this vessel to talk to him. She was like, “My dad didn’t even have an obituary. This wasn’t even googleable.” At the time, nothing was Googleable anyways. The fact that this woman started spouting off things about him and his history, he was like, “This is how I know that she’s tapping into something.”

Through Time Into Healing: Discovering the Power of Regression Therapy to Erase Trauma and Transform Mind, Body and Relationships

I tell this story a lot because it’s so cool. I had a memory of being saved by a soldier on a black horse. That same day, my son said to me, “Mommy, in a past life, our dog was a black horse.” I was like, “What? Was I there?” He goes, “Yeah, mom. I was a soldier and you were a little girl.” Not that I didn’t love my dog before but I sure love my dog a lot because he helped save my life.

Your pug.

My little black pug. For me, that was some validation.

That is beautiful. I love that. I hope that my Griffin will be with me in many lifetimes because he’s honestly been the one that’s been there for me through thick and thin. Everybody has their partner in their lives and I’m the single woman in the family. He’s the one that’s been there for me through.

I’m sure he has been before and he will be again.

“No matter how good of a psychic you are, you can only read in your configuration.” Can you explain that, Kristina?

I joke with some of my friend-client. They’re like, “How is it that you’re able to read me? Why is it that you bring up the things that you bring up?” I was like, “I only bring up the things that my body understands.” If I were to suddenly come across a person who had a completely different configuration, you could say frequency, life experiences or whatever. If they’re resonating with some wounds that I’ve never experienced, which isn’t true because I have all of them and we all do, the idea is that as a psychic, the clients who come to you who resonate are usually similar to you.

Similar to the thing we’re talking about with family, giving you your lessons. You are able to help facilitate as a psychic the experience that other people have because you share, Robbie calls them codes. Other people can call them experiences. You could call them little packets of wisdom or whatever. You share something and you’re able to give them insights into aspects of themselves. You were put together for them. Even a psychic-client relationship is like that.

An example would be if you’ve ever had an eating disorder, you can spot someone with an eating disorder in a restaurant a mile away but other people can’t. Let’s say you’ve been around a sexual predator or you’ve been a survivor of sexual predation, you can spot them a mile away and people who haven’t can’t. What a shaman does in their initiation and their training is they go through the equivalent on an energy level of every “demon” that you could imagine. That way, they can recognize it and vibrate to it with anyone else.

They can hold space for what they understand and you can’t hold space for what you don’t understand. This happens a lot. Someone having a privileged life can’t necessarily understand what it’s like to be the underdog in society or a marginalized group because they don’t have the framework with which to even put themselves in that world. It’s like that idea. You only know what you know.

I remember once, I had a session and I was feeling particularly victim-y that day. I was like, “Why did all this stuff happen to me? Why is it like that?” We were doing an exercise where I was my small self. I was like little Kristina in one chair and then there was a chair across from me then I would get up and I would become big Kristina, my big self, my higher self. My little self was like, “Why did I have to experience all this stuff?” I got up and got to the other parents who were like, “If you didn’t experience this, you would not be able to help people in the range of ways that you can.” That was the lesson and after that, I was like, “I totally get it.” Now, every experience I have, the learning I have helps add to my repertoire. Even if it’s a painful experience, it helps me help people more.

I don’t think you need to necessarily put yourself through a lot of things but you can study your own thing. For example, my mom died when I was a child so I feel like I’ve studied the ins and outs of grief. In my job, I’m in healthcare and I’ll work with people who are suddenly disabled. They’ve suddenly had an arm amputated or they’re paralyzed. I’ve never experienced that in this life. I’ve not experienced the loss of a limb or paralyzation but I have visited the many sides of grief. I know what it’s like to lose something. I know what it’s like to have something completely changed and it can never go back. I know what it’s like to grieve.

Because I feel like I’ve studied whatever life is thrown at me from so many different angles, I can then empathize so much better. I don’t say this to them but I’m thinking, “I don’t know what it’s like to lose my knee from below down. I don’t know what it’s like to have to learn to walk with a prosthesis but I do know what it’s like to miss something and know it will never be back and how much that hurts.” I don’t think you necessarily have to go looking for an eating disorder, a sexual predator or something to be able to hold space for those people. Whatever pain story you have, study it and know it in and out. In there is a spider web and it can help you understand everybody.

It’s funny what you were saying, Kristina, about the child in one seat, the adult you and the other. It’s like that TikTok trend where it was little you talking to big you. I thought it was a decent trend. Instead of a dancey one or whatever that doesn’t mean anything, I thought it was cool. I like doing the whoa.

Talking to myself at twenty years old before my failed marriage versus me in my mid-30s saying, “How many kids do we have? How’s Ryan? How’s everything going?” I’m like, “No kids. You’re not pregnant and you’re not even married.” The younger me being like, “What do you mean? That’s the love of our life.” It put me in this thankful mentality. That’s awesome. Same thing.

I have one more question for you both. This is a question that I ask everyone that comes on the show. We’ll start with Kristina and we’ll go to Anna. Kristina, if you were walking down the street and you saw twenty-year-old Kristina walking towards you, you gave her a big hug and you pulled away and as you left her embrace, you got to tell her one thing, what would that one thing be? It could be advice, a statement or whatever you want.

If I recognize, it wasn’t like I was a stranger and I was like, “I know this is my older self,” I would give myself the love that I did not have as a twenty-year-old and I didn’t have for most of the time until my late 30s. I’d say, “It’s okay to be wrong and I love you.”

I don’t think I would have been ready to be anyone that I was then. No advice could have changed the course of my life because I was ready to hear and be what I was. Does that make sense? I’ve also thought, “I did my first at 23.” I’d go back to my younger self and tell myself, “Go do it sooner.” Would I have been ready for it sooner? I don’t know. I would just tell myself, “You’re enough.”

This took me a long time to figure out but mine was never let anybody else’s opinion of you define you because I lived constantly in the space where I am defined by the man I’m with. I’m defined by who my parents are. I’m defined by what this person online says about me. I wasn’t ever thinking to myself, “What do I think about myself?” That is what I would say. I don’t know if she would have been ready to accept that because she was such an insecure little thing.

Thank you so much. This has been insightful. I can’t wait. Every time a new episode comes out, I gobble it up. I’m happy. We are blessed to have you both put in the energy and effort to give us all of this information we didn’t know that we needed. That is exactly what it is. It’s all stuff I didn’t know that I needed in my life so I can’t thank you enough for that.

—

That’s all for this episode. I hope that you learn so much from Anna and Kristina. I know that I did. Can you believe what Kristina said about my car accident? I honestly am shocked and I don’t know how to process this information quite yet. I’m still taking it in. It’s a lot. Anna is talking about my back, about the injustice wound and how people with the injustice always have issues with their backs. It’s all resonating for me right now. I hope that it’s resonating with you.

Take the time to read this episode a few times. You can find Anna and Kristina on This Spiritual Fix. They are on Instagram, TikTok and all the audio streaming platforms. I’d highly recommend their podcast to you especially if you are on an empowerment healing journey or spiritual journey or you’re a mama doing it for your husband and your kids. Being a better self, better you, more empowered you. That’s what we’re all about here on the show. We want to make sure that you have all the information right at your fingertips.

If you are watching me on YouTube, go ahead and hit like. It’s a way to support me. That’s free. I would love it if you would subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don’t miss a minute of our content. If you are listening to audio, thank you for being a part of this family. I can’t thank you enough. Your support means the world to me. I can’t wait to see you next time. Until then, I’m sending you all the love in the world. Stay safe and I will see you soon.

Important Links:

• This Spiritual Fix
• This Spiritual Fix – TikTok
• Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
• Mars Venus On a Date
• Super Sweet Soulmate Love: Exploring Deal-Makers and Deal-Breakers – past episode on This Spiritual Fix
• Robbie – past episode on This Spiritual Fix
• Nine Perfect Strangers
• Only Love Is Real
• Through Time Into Healing
• Instagram – This Spiritual Fix
• YouTube – The Luxury Dropout Podcast

About Anna Stromquist and Kristina Wiltsee

What meditation works for you? What is it like to do tantra? How do you best communicate with a loved one? Kristina Wiltsee & Anna Stromquist are two best friends on a quest to try all things spiritual in order to attain enlightenment — or just stay sane while juggling a lot on their plates. Their internationally recognized podcast hits close to home for many people who are struggling for peace amidst the pain of trauma, emotional wounds, and neurodivergent brains. As we uncover deeper layers of ourselves, they teach, with humor, that there is nothing to fix – just more of us to love.

Branding yourself and leveraging that brand is just one of the many things you need to do if you want to create a business empire that lasts. In this episode, we hear from a woman who is no stranger to building her brand. Our host, Stephanie Joplin, talks to her long-time friend, Christy Mack. A former adult entertainment star, Christy has parlayed those experiences into a profitable personal brand. Listen in as she discusses boundaries, getting into sex work, and how to build your personal brand.

—

Listen to the podcast here:

Understanding your Niche: Lessons On Branding And Building Your Business Empire With Christy Mack

I’m here with my best friend in the whole world, Christy Mack. We met years ago and I was an MMA journalist at the time. I was introduced to a person that she was seeing and I interviewed him. He ended up putting me on the line with her and we chatted. We ended up meeting in person and we’ve got along well.

From day one, it was like peas and carrots.

From there, we developed a close friendship. We have been making each other’s lives hell ever since then.

Trying to.

In all honesty, she is the best person I know, the most empathetic, loyal and kind. There’s going to be a lot of people that are familiar with you, not only because of your notoriety but because you are my best friend. People that have been following me for a while probably know who you are.

The entire years, from day one.

The fact that we go on vacations together, you are basically a part of my family. You are like the third sister as my mom likes to say. For those of you who don’t know Christy Mack, she has been in the leadership of the sex work industry for several years. She built her brand so that it was long-lasting and would give her longevity in her chosen career path. It wasn’t one of those things that she dabbled in it when she was younger to make a buck and got out. She was tactful and planned all of her moves like chess from the beginning. To me, that’s why she has been successful for many years. First of all, Christy, can you give us a background about how you’ve got into sex work, what you did and how the beginning part of that was like for you?

I started doing sex work when I was nineteen years old. Back home in Indiana, I woke up one day and I hadn’t even watched porn before and I was like, “This sounds fun. That sounds like something that I want to do.” A young girl from the middle of nowhere found an agent online and flew to Florida. I filmed three scenes in my first week. I was told that I probably wouldn’t get that much work because I had a Mohawk and tattoos. It was different at the time. Back then, nobody looked like me. Nobody was that alternative as you could say. It was out of the left field. Everyone liked the bleached blonde hair, the big boobs, the straight body, and the very Girl Next Door also with a little bit of slut thrown in there. I was completely different at the time.

You were more grunge.

I was prepared to stack some money for a month, see how much work I could get and see how long I can make it last. After my first week, I became number one on several sites. It was what the market was calling for and I found my niche.

Did that surprise you?

Absolutely, because I was told I can’t and I decided I was going to do it anyway.

Did it surprise the people that you were working for as well? Were they surprised?

Absolutely. Even after I became number one, I was told that this wouldn’t last long. I’m going to shoot several scenes, get that little bit of money and then the market was going to dry up. That’s it. That’s all the further I could work. I wasn’t happy with that answer. I wasn’t happy with the management team telling me to put extensions in the side of my head and telling me not to get any more tattoos because that’s who I was. That’s who I wanted to be. That’s what I wanted it to look like. I didn’t listen to it. I kept going with all of it. I kept going with the sex work. I kept going with my hair, how I wanted to be with more tattoos, experimenting with plastic surgeries, doing what I wanted to do and expressing myself how I felt I needed to.

It’s almost like a musical artist who gets told what music to sing. It’s the same thing. You told me that when you do a sex scene, you get paid for the sex scene but then you don’t get paid royalties. Is that correct?

That is correct. If you are doing a scene for another company, you get paid one flat fee and it can range anywhere from a few $100 to a few $1,000 depending on what scene you are performing, who you are performing with and what contract you are under. You do not get paid the royalties unless it is for your own website or you have set something up for yourself.

Can that ever be negotiated?

With most companies, no. In most companies, that’s your flat fee. What they do is they own that content now. In the time of DVDs, they would sell them out to different companies to make compilation videos. There are still new videos coming out now with my scene or content from years ago and marketing it as new because it is a new compilation with several other ideas. I don’t own that content, never have, never will. I sold my rights to that.

Over the pandemic, there was an influx of these beautiful women wanting to express themselves, hustle and make some money to bring into their income, into their household, doing OnlyFans and other similar websites. My question is twofold. What advice would you give to the girl who wants to go into the actual porn industry? Would you recommend, for example, getting a manager representing yourself? Would you recommend researching before you go into it? Who are the people you need to approach? The second half of the question would be, if you are going to the OnlyFans route, what advice would you give to those women?

It depends on what area of sex work you choose to go into. If you want to do video work, it depends on it. If you want to be a “porn star” that is well-known and marketed by a different company that can build your market for you or if you want to be an independent creator and control 100% of your funds. There are many great options. The great thing about OnlyFans is it allows you to be anonymous, sell only, do only what you are comfortable with and build your own base how you want it. You can market with other women that are similar to you and build off each other’s fan bases. That’s wonderful. That’s how the future of the industry is exactly where it’s going to go.

The DVD companies and the large companies are going to start dying out. I don’t think there is as much of a need for a marketing manager or a manager at all at this point. I’m sure there are always going to be the big-name porn stars that the large companies do find online. From OnlyFans, Instagram, Twitter, there will always be a few of those, I’m sure. The OnlyFans and the personal sites are the way to go. The DVD companies, the management companies and the large porn companies are going to become more obsolete.

What about online sites like Pornhub for example? How does one get onto a platform like that? What are the workings of that?

Pornhub is a polarizing site for a lot of people and for a lot of reasons. It has become the scapegoat for anti-sex trafficking and anti-sex work. They think that people are selling underage girls through that website or they are putting revenge porn on there and they are not moderating it enough, which 100% does happen but seldomly. It is a website like any other that allows users to post whatever content they want. It is going to be difficult for them to moderate it.

They have cracked it down to where you have to have your own username and verification to be able to post that content now. That has helped a great amount and shut down a lot of the anti-Pornhub people. It does have a lot of other problems. The porn stars of the past like myself would rip content from our independent sites or the companies but it wasn’t them doing it. Sometimes it was the companies themselves putting it on Pornhub to make Pornhub work for them.

There would be people that would buy the DVDs and buy the content, download it on their own computer and upload it on there. They would be the ones making money. The company saw that and they are like, “We’ve got to start doing this before they can do it.” The company started doing it. Now it’s down to the girls posting it. People will take our things from OnlyFans. Now we have to be the ones that take it from our OnlyFans, put it on Pornhub and either monetize it or link it to our own sites. There’s a direct evolution of how things have gone for sites like Pornhub.

It’s such a lot of work.

You have to be sure that other people aren’t doing the same thing with your own content. You have to search through it and make sure that you are the only one.

You would have to flag it.

They get to it fairly quickly. It still could have thousands of views or sometimes millions of views on things that you are not getting paid on.

If you are getting into the sex industry now and you want to go and be a “porn star,” you would suggest monetizing it yourself, being in charge of yourself, and not going to someone and saying, “Place me in this video here or this scene here.” Do it yourself. Be in control of yourself.

Unless you know one of the major porn stars already and you can be like, “Will you do a video with me?” Even then, you can still be in charge of your own content and not be contracted through one of the large companies. It’s not worth it if you plan to make it a money game rather than, “I don’t notoriety gain.” A lot of people are in it to find fame, which is a weird way to go about it. If that’s what you want to do, by all means.

They always say sex sells.

It always has and it always will.

Some women do think that to get famous, that’s their only ticket. It’s not their only ticket but it’s the quickest way.

There’s still no guarantee that you will be famous. There’s still no guarantee that you will make money. You have to think about longevity, “Is this something that I want to put online to last forever?” It will never come down once you put it out there. That’s not something you can take back.

You can’t pull a Khloe Kardashian.

If only we could. I’m not saying I would.

One bikini picture.

She still looked great.

She looked amazing. What I want those out there to know is that when you get into sex work, I don’t want you to go out there with the idea that you are going to make $10,000 and then hop off again. If your goal is you need to make $10,000 and that’s all, that’s fine. If you want to build a career or build financial wealth and security, I wanted Christy to come on and talk a little bit about that.

She quit the industry years ago. You would never know that. People still think she’s in the industry actively. You have your OnlyFans but you are not active in the porn industry like you were before doing the AVNs, doing all the publicity and all that. We were in DC and this guy was in a van quite far away on the other side of the street and he yells out the window, “You are a porn star.”

We are sitting there, the eyes on some people, “How. Out.”

Does he have 20/15 vision? I’m like, “You are accurate.” I’m impressed. She’s still recognizable. We will be sitting at dinner and a lot of time, it’s women. There’s one guy in DC that came up to us who’s super sweet and he was on speakerphone with his wife. They are respectful to her, which I love. She has been in charge of that herself because she’s put it out there. She does not tolerate disrespect or tomfoolery of any kind.

I will not be touched. You will not speak to me a certain way.

She will fuck you up. Honestly, I respect that about her. I have been defensive of her over the years. If anyone tries to come up and touch her when she was living in Vegas, I would turn into the Hulk and I was like, “Get off my friend. Don’t touch.” It was dramatic.

It’s still is.

She’s also small, cute and little so I don’t want anyone touching her. It hurts my feelings. Building longevity, continuing her success and keeping her wealth intact has been something that I admire. You can work a corporate job for fifteen years and still not have a savings account and still not have $20,000 in the bank to even retire on, which means you are broke again by the time you are 70 years old. Let’s give some advice to you aspirational sex workers that want to build that longevity and do not necessarily want to work until they are 50 years old. What did you do to ensure your success?

There are quite a few things. A lot of people see the money that they are getting and they think, “I have never had this before. I can keep this going for a long time.” It feels permanent. It has a feeling of permanence but it’s not. Your money flow can stop at any time. It’s important to start saving immediately. Once you build decent savings and you get more comfortable, start investing, build your portfolio and see where you want to go. Pay your taxes.

Especially with OnlyFans, a lot of people think that it’s a cash game but it’s not. You will see little cash and sex work unless you are a dancer or escort. Those are the only times that you will see the cash. Other than that, the IRS is getting your number. You have to remember to pay your taxes, keep track of everything and find a good accountant. That is valuable. They will teach you lifelong lessons. Even if you are not going to stay in this industry forever, they will tell you how to keep track of your money, where to put it, what to do with it and how to make your money work for you.

This is not a permanent industry for anyone, whether it lasts five months, five years or however long you choose to stay, it will not be forever. The cashflow will not be forever. Plan for that. Plan what you are going to do after sex work, whether you want to build your brand, and then start marketing yourself differently. I built my brand. I started selling products while I was still in the industry. I quit shortly after. I was only shooting for main companies for maybe a year and a half. It was not a long time.

It was only about almost two years.

I started selling products and merchandise while I was still in the industry. I quit shortly after that and didn’t tell anyone. I never told anyone that I stopped shooting.

You will see very little cash in sex work unless you are a dancer or escort. Those are really the only times that you will see the cash.

That’s why people think she still is.

I started letting people know in Instagram comments years later that I haven’t shot since 3 or 4 years ago at the time. People were still confused, “When are you going to shoot for Brazzers next? When are you going to shoot for this next?”

They are confused about how sexy you still are.

All the time, people are like, “You look different.” I’m not going to look like I’m nineteen forever. It’s not going to happen. It’s impossible. I’ve got my Botox look. That’s the only thing.

I wish I could pull up your skater boy photo at this point. She has this photo from Myspace that her brother sent me. It legit looks like Avril Lavigne.

I went through a phase. Everyone goes through phases. In high school, I was Christy Death. You can still find it. You can still search for it on Google, Myspace or whatever. You can see photos of me in the shower because that was my white background and my face against it and all dramatic. All of my makeup and my hair were all kinds of fuck. It’s a sad selfie. It was bad. That set me up for who I was after that with a Mohawk and everything. I never really changed. She’s still in there. There are still photos out there. People will try and bring those up or bring up photos from before I had my nose job or my boob job and should I be embarrassed by that? No. I was still cute as heck.

Let’s say the nose job was something you didn’t choose.

It wasn’t my choice. I like this nose anyway.

I’m not going to say anything else about it but that’s my subtle shade.

It’s cute.

You are more beautiful now than when I met you.

I would agree with that.

I’m being legit.

Thank you. I know how to take care of my skin better now. When you met me, I wouldn’t even moisturize.

She wouldn’t eat properly. She would eat whenever at whatever time. We still indulge and we still have dessert, eat pasta and whatever but we know what and when to put into our bodies.

I eat mostly for sustenance now instead of pleasure. I’m happy. Now I can eat chicken rather than eating a hamburger from McDonald’s. I cook for myself. I live in a place where I must cook for myself almost all of the time. There’s little opportunity to go other places.

Your lifestyle is completely different. You live day-to-day back then. Now you live for a particular future. That is an important message to send to young women because you have to remember that it’s not about just tomorrow, it’s about looking ahead. I know that we are always taught like, “Don’t look too far ahead. You will stress yourself out.” I’m not saying you have to write out a five-year plan. I’m saying think about how your actions are going to affect you ten years from now.

Especially going into sex work, that is something that you have to think about because that is something that is forever, whether you want it to be or not. Once you put yourself and your body on the internet, it is there for good. Think about how this will impact your future. Let’s say you want to be a teacher, don’t do mainstream porn. You can do OnlyFans if you are not going to show your face or you don’t have any identifiable tattoos. That’s fine. I support that 100%. You have to think not everyone is going to be as open-minded as you hope they are.

A lot of people aren’t.

It’s never going to happen.

It’s funny because, to me, Americans are the most sex-crazed people in the world and the most conservative at the same time.

I would agree with that.

If you go to Italy and there are boobs on TV on a commercial, it’s no big deal. Here, if there are boobs on TV, there would be an uprising. There’s OnlyFans. It’s strange.

I agree with how we shame the sex workers that we also indulge in. It’s the dichotomy of sexualized America. You can’t force people to see things the way that you do. I live in a conservative place and I do feel judged quite a bit. Once somebody gets to know me and myself, I’m fine. Nobody is going to speak badly about me, for the most part. I do rub people the wrong way sometimes, everyone does. You can’t love everyone.

If anyone says something judgmental, you will be the first to say something. You will speak up. Even if you don’t even know the person, you will say something. That’s fine. I find that even introducing you to my other friends, immediately once they met you, they were like, “I love Christy. I can see why you guys are best friends. I get it.” People do prejudge. They see the tattoos, they see what you have done in the past and they were like, “She’s this certain way.” You are not. You are the complete opposite of what that is.

Even if you choose to indulge in that sex worker personality, persona, that’s who you are, you are a bimbo and you love it, good for you. That’s fantastic. That is some people and I love that.

That’s their schtick.

For me, I’m wholesome and down to Earth. I don’t even know how to tell people about myself or describe myself.

Do you know that trend that was like, “Tell everyone your accountant because no one asks any other questions?” It’s like, “I have a full-time job as an accountant.” It’s a conversation killer. They don’t ask questions. After you were done with filming, how did you choose how you wanted to brand and market yourself to continue your revenue stream?

It was difficult how I was going to figure out what I would do next in my progression as a sex worker or an individual. I was selling products online at TheMackMarket.com and that sustained me for quite a while.

Were you also working behind the scenes with that?

Absolutely, 100%. I did porn, I was a sex worker and then I was peddling products that were about my brand. I was selling my own magazines. I was selling hats with my name on them. I was selling T-shirts.

That Inked Magazine, was it with the lollipop?

There was one with the ice cream and then one with my snakes.

I remember you texted me on the day of that shoot and you are like, “I’m covered in a sticky mess.” You had the ice cream all over you.

There was ice cream. There were watermelons. I was covered in food and I don’t know why they chose it.

Food is a fetish.

They covered me in food all day. It was a solid twelve hours of me eating sweets all day.

The Campout, I love that shoot.

I did two of them. It’s a cute shoot. I would sell magazines, hats, T-shirts and posters, everything with my brand, my face, my name. My name is powerful. It’s one syllable, Mack. That’s how I branded it.

People like to tell her what her name is. It’s our inside joke.

They will go on my Instagram and leave a comment, “I love you, Christina.” It’s not even my name. It’s not on my birth certificate. One guy argued with me, “We went to high school together.” He’s like, “I remember when you were Christina Mackinday.” I’m like, “I have never been Christina Mackinday.” He’s like, “I have proof. It’s in my yearbook.” I’m like, “Go look at it, please, because that’s not my name.”

Should we call your mom now?

Call my mother.

“Mom, what’s my real name?”

“Mom, what did you name me?”

She would be like, “What the hell?”

“Why are you calling me?”

That was smart though. Mackinday if you think about it now it makes sense. Coming up with Mack right away, did you think about it? Was it something that came over time?

When I was younger, I was working at Nike with my brother, they would call us the Macks because it was a shortened version of our name. It’s easy because you won’t be like, “Mackindays.” No, it’s the Macks.

Your brother also goes by that moniker.

It was easier to lump us in that way and we both kept the name Mack. I figured going into the industry if you see me, you are going to know it’s me. I’m easily identifiable, I always have been. Why not keep my name? Why not keep it short? I did.

Branding Lessons: Pornhub is a very polarizing site for a lot of people for a lot of reasons. It has become the scapegoat for anti-sex trafficking and anti-sex work people.

Instead of naming yourself like Narwhal or something.

I haven’t heard that before.

There was this stripper that was on TikTok and her name was Sativa and I was like, “She must like a weed.” I thought, “Narwhal, a mystical unicorn.”

It’s a good thing you are not going to be a sex worker, OnlyFans.com/narwhal.

We know that you merchandised yourself. We know that you put your name out there. We know that you put your face and your name on everything. You did also dance. Tell us a little bit about how that came to pass and how you have kept that going.

It was probably four years after I stopped doing porn that I started to dance. A lot of girls would Feature dance while they were doing porn and then escort on their tours.

Can you explain what feature dance means?

Feature dancing, a club will contact you and offer you a spot on a weekend to promote you and your fans to come out. Sometimes you will dance Thursday through Sunday or Friday and Saturday. You will do 1 or 2 stage shows a night. Your fans will come and tip you. You can do private dances. You can sell your merchandise. Meet and greets. You can sell pictures and you can do whatever you want.

I did mine a little differently because a lot of girls would show up, Feature, wherever and plan this for a moment. I planned about a year in advance a whole tour. I had T-shirts made with my tour dates and everything for my first year. I wanted it to be an event. I wanted it to be like a concert. I wanted people to show up and show out. I wanted to feel like this was an event.

Like a rock star.

That’s how I want to feel. I tried to negotiate a tour bus. It wasn’t happening.

The Mack bus? That would be fun.

The dogs rolling with me across the country. I’ve got it dialed in. I took pole dancing classes.

You took them seriously.

Yes. I hired a private teacher. I designed my own outfits. I wanted something unique. I did an electrical tape outfit. I had never seen it done before. I never heard of it being done before. Since then, there have been a few but they have contacted me first like, “Is it okay if I use this?” “Absolutely, by all means.” I would design intricate outfits on myself of electrical tape that looked like a tight-fitting bikini or something that was painted on. As I would go out in the audience, I would have women in the audience peel one piece of tape at a time. It was interactive but not aggressively overly sexual. It felt classier to me.

You wanted to be more Burlesque.

More Burlesque and less stripper. Not that there’s anything wrong with stripping, I do it but I wanted something different.

That was your vision.

I wanted everything about this Mack tour to be unique, different and an experience. It’s something that these people would come to the strip club for, even if they have never been before. It was phenomenal. Every year that I did was amazing. I had the best time meeting everyone. My shows were fantastic. They were packed.

It’s very professional always.

My manager would come on tour with me. The security and all of the staff were always amazing. Everything was as I had dreamed it and it always has been since. I haven’t danced in the past couple of years.

It’s like a musician. They put her up in a hotel, they gave her a stipend, a dinner or whatever it is. They would provide transportation for her from the airport back and forth, and things like that. Everything was taken care of more or less for her.

I had a rider. Anything that I wanted would be at the club for me already. I had a private dressing room. I had all my candy and Cherry Coke. I would have everything that I wanted. I would have my own hotel room with my manager. The flights out, transportation was covered. They would pay my fee every night. They would pay separately for my meet and greets because I never charged my fans to take pictures with me.

The club would charge the ticket price, whatever their fee was, and that would be it. I would never ask for more money from anyone for anything. I would hand out merchandise on stage, whether it be a hat, T-shirt or stickers. That way, people can feel like they’ve got something for coming into the club that night as well as seeing me dance.

Tell them about the other dancers. They were excited that you were coming in, too.

Whether it was for financial reasons because I was bringing a new clientele in and 600, 700, 800 people a night. Some of them could be cheap but it’s a new clientele that maybe had never been to the club before. Some of the girls had seen me online and are excited to meet me in general. I loved the club dancers, the house dancers. They are always amazing. I never had a negative experience with any of the girls or with anything. They were thrilled. I have never had a bad experience on the road.

I remember them thanking you. They were like, “The house is packed. Thank you so much.” They were grateful. I thought that was cool.

They are always sweet and kind. If I ever go to their stage, of course, I’m tipping them as well. If someone tries and gives me their tips, I’m like, “No. You keep your money here and take some more. Make that man give me his money and then I will give it to you.”

Speaking of being generous, you don’t get enough credit for this. If you are comfortable, we can talk about it. I want to talk a little bit about your charitable efforts. You don’t have to name them all. There are so many. She helps out not only charitable organizations but she helps out friends, friends of friends, no matter who it is, it wouldn’t matter what they are going through. If something were to happen to me and I didn’t have any financial way of getting out of it, she wouldn’t even think twice to help me. I know that. Let’s talk a little bit about the charitable organizations that you are fond of. Let’s give them a little bit of light. Let’s talk a little bit about what your passions are in that aspect.

I donate myself five figures every month to charities. I have never stopped with one charity in particular, whether it is a dog rescue or a domestic violence application. It could be a cancer fund. It could be anything. If there is a world event that’s happening that I feel needs more donations, I will put funds in there. I do that all silently. I don’t need to put it online. I don’t need to show like, “Look, I gave $30,000 to this.” It’s nobody’s business. Whatever charity I see that needs funds at the time, I will post it on my Story.

A lot of people give me flack for it, they are like, “You have money. Why don’t you do it?” I would never put a charity up that I haven’t personally donated to before because that’s silly. I put up a lot of charities on my stories. If you guys want to go on my Instagram, it’s Instagram.com/christymack. In my Stories, every day or two, there are adoptable dogs or there are different charities through domestic violence resources that could use a little help at the time. There’s any fund that you could possibly think of.

If you don’t want to donate to that particular fund, you could find one in your own community that you feel you could impact even if it’s $2. It doesn’t matter. Donate your time. Donate old blankets or towels. They can go to so many different resources. If you have old rags around, if you have T-shirts that have holes in them that Goodwill won’t take, an animal shelter will. There are so many different places that you wouldn’t even think of donating to but maybe a post of mine or a post of somebody else’s that I repost will spur you to think about that. There are many ways that not even your own monetary self but your physical self can help.

Even if you like to spread knowledge about the cause or even sharing a post would help. That’s what I have found, too. Maybe not necessarily I have been able to donate money at that time but sharing information about it has helped a lot to make people informed.

You can spread anything. Hopefully, it’s a positive thing. The internet does give you access to everything.

Also, falsities, too.

You have to look into whatever charity you are going to donate to. 501(c)(3)s are the best because they are registered. Sometimes it is like a GoFundMe of somebody that has cancer or anything like that. GoFundMe is a great system since we don’t have universal healthcare and we don’t have access to a lot of things that could help. If it is found to be a fake thing, they will give you your money back. It’s great. GoFundMe is a great resource for people. Sometimes I will browse on there and see if there’s anything that I could help with. If I’m feeling down on myself that night, sometimes things like that make me feel better knowing that I am making a difference in somebody’s day positively.

That’s her love language, by the way. That’s how she shows love, gift-giving.

I will send people flowers. It’s like, “I’m not having a good day. I’m going to send somebody flowers.”

It depends if it’s romantic or friendship. For friendship, yours is quality time the way you receive. Between physical touch and quality time for romantic, I would say. The way that you give out is gift-giving.

I am a gift-giver. I’m not always good at words of affirmation like, “You are doing great.”

If I’m crying, she will listen to me and she will take in everything that I’m saying but she’s not necessarily the most like, “It’s okay. Don’t worry.” That’s not her personality. She will send me a coloring book that’s like, “Go fuck yourself,” or whatever.

That works.

That’s her way of being like, “It’s okay.” That’s the way she expresses her love.

It doesn’t work for everybody. It’s not going to be okay for everyone. For some people, it works.

It works for us.

Our friendship is unique. We figured each other out over the years.

We know how far we can push each other by making fun of each other. It’s at the line. We are almost at the edge.

I will push her over. If I have the opportunity to throw someone off a cliff, I’m going to do it.

I want to talk about one more thing before I get to my last question. How would you advise a girl in her twenties that comes from a stricter family that is afraid of the stigma and of being labeled a “slut?” What advice would you give to those women who do want to genuinely get into sex work the correct way but are struggling with that thought in their head, “I’m going to be judged?”

If you are not secure enough with yourself to make that leap and take the criticism, maybe it’s time to rethink your route. Maybe sex work isn’t the best for you. Maybe give it a couple of years to stew on it, think about it and openly discuss it from a third-person perspective, “What about if this person were to do this?” Do hypotheticals with your family and friends, and get a feel for how they are feeling about it. If they are going to be negative, it’s going to ruin your relationships and if it’s going to burn all your bridges, I would say don’t do it unless those are things that you are comfortable losing and if those are people that you don’t necessarily want in your life.

For me, let’s say hypothetically that my mom was a racist, which she’s not and I’m dating a black man. I would be fine with cutting her out of my life because I don’t want somebody like that in my life. I wouldn’t be comfortable with that. I would choose my new path over something like that. That’s something. It’s personal to you, whether you want to make that jump and, whether you want to burn those bridges and those connections. If you think that a personal connection, in that way, such as you being a sex worker will make them see a new path, new light and turn them into someone more open.

You get your own feel for that. You have your own choices to make. I can’t guide you 100% about what to do and say, “Fuck it. I’m going to do it. You should do it.” That’s a personal choice that you have to consider. It’s not something that you can take back. It’s not something that everyone will forgive you for even though you don’t need forgiveness or permission. It’s not something that a more conservative family would be open to. It’s not something that friends that are constantly putting down women for being a slut would necessarily forgive or understand. You have to assess your relationships and your personal bonds with people in your life and see if that is something you want to do.

Branding Lessons: Finding a good accountant is very valuable. They will teach you lifelong lessons and tell you how to keep track of your money, where to put it, what to do with it, and how to make your money work for you.

How did your mom first react when you told her?

She didn’t mind at all.

She’s chill.

She 100% has always been of the mind if I’m not hurting anyone else, then why would it be a problem? I’m not doing anything that is negatively impacting people. The more conservative people do see porn as negatively impacting people. I have never directly harmed anyone with my action. My mother has never seen a problem with it. My brother has never seen a problem with it.

Except he’s screaming.

“I can’t watch porn anymore.” That’s not my problem. There’s OnlyFans.

Me too. If I ever scroll through porn, I’m like, “No.”

Nobody in my life has ever judged me for my actions because I have not harmed anyone in any of our eyes.

I would say my family is freaking conservative compared to most. They never once hesitated to bring her in family because they met her. They don’t prejudge people. That’s something about my family that is cool. They didn’t prejudge even though I did tell them at the time that she was in the sex work industry. They met her and they fell in love with her because of her amazing personality. She’s witty and intelligent. She could match wits with anybody. Mark me on this. Except for about narwhals, maybe planning a trip or calling down for more pillows but besides those things, she can match them.

I have anxiety. I can’t call people on the phone.

Not when I need things though, then I don’t have anxiety.

I could never pick up the phone and call someone.

You have. You called for the buggy that one time in Indonesia.

It was hard.

They never did judge her. Going back to that, I want to say make sure you feel out your family before you cut out your dream. Make sure you fill them out because you might be surprised that they might be supportive. Depending on which way you go about it. If you go to them and you say, “This is my business plan. This is my goal for this. These are my financial things. This is what I plan to do every day to create content.” They may be supportive.

You have to remember it is extremely difficult to keep up a lie. Don’t do it if you can avoid it. I understand some people need a familiar support system. They have to keep up with this life for a long time. Every situation is different. I wouldn’t say 100% never lie. If you have to lie to your family for a long time, it’s got to be hard. Maybe don’t do that.

If you can avoid it, don’t lie to your family. Don’t lie to your support system because you will have hard days going through being a sex worker. You will have difficult days ahead. Lying to your support system in that is asking for a lot of mental and emotional trauma that you don’t have to put yourself through. Unless you can afford a great therapist, by all means, do it.

There are ways to be on OnlyFans without showing completely nude, without having sex on camera. There are different ways to go about that.

You create your own content. You create your own market. I have advised several women how to do OnlyFans without being nude, without selling sex, without doing all of these things.

You could do a tough workout in a bikini.

I have suggested that before, do workouts, do whatever you are comfortable doing and do not push your own boundaries because you will regret it in the long run.

I ask this to every guest on my show. What I want to know is let’s say you walked up to yourself on the street. You saw yourself at twenty years old on the street, you ran up to her, you gave her this big warm hug and you were excited and emotional to see her. You pulled away from the hug and what is the first thing that you say to that woman?

I would tell her that everything is going to be okay. I have a lot of women message me and tell me that they have been in similar positions to myself, and that seeing me live my life to the fullest and without exception has given them confidence and knowledge to know that they are going to be okay. Life does go on and everything gets better. That’s what I would say to myself, it gets better and it’s going to be okay.

Would you warn her about any of the stuff coming?

No. I wouldn’t change a single thing that has happened in my life.

Not many can say that.

Even with my negative experiences, I wouldn’t change them. For having those experiences, I am better, I have a greater reach and I have a better message. I have a more in-depth knowledge of what a great number of people have gone through. It gives me a reason to help and a way to help.

I like that message. There would be some things I would warn your younger self about, maybe 1 or 2 things I would probably tell her to stay clear. Thank you for coming on the show. You are such an amazing friend.

Thank you.

This has been insightful and I have learned some stuff about you that I didn’t know before. How can my readers support you?

If you want to see more of the charities I post or me in a bikini, there is Instagram.com/christymack or OnlyFans.com/christymack. Also, Twitter.com/christymack, TheMackMaket.com, I have hats, T-shirts, stickers, posters and everything on there if you are interested. No pressure.

Until next time. I love you, guys. Bye from me and Christy. We will see you at the next one.

Important links

• Christy Mack
• Instagram.com/christymack
• Facebook.com/christymack
• GoFundMe
• OnlyFans.com/christymack
• Twitter.com/christymack
• Myspace – Christy Mack Photo
• Snakes – Inked Mag
• Sativa – TikTok

About Christy Mack

Christine Mackinday, known professionally as Christy Mack, is an American model and former actress.