Ep #55: Intergenerational Codependency

Codependent thinking habits can be so ingrained in us that we don’t even recognize when we’re having them. Putting others before ourselves, caring more about what other people think of us than what we think of ourselves on and on.

 And while codependent thinking is so often thought to be the product of growing up with an active alcohol or other substance user, I’m here to share a different take on it, along with my top tips to help you see and begin to shift these ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in the world. Keep listening my love, it’s going to be a good one.

You’re listening to Feminist Wellness, the only podcast that combines functional medicine, life coaching, and feminism to teach smart women how to reclaim their power and restore their health! Here’s your host, Nurse Practitioner, Functional Medicine Expert, Herbalist and Life Coach, Victoria Albina.

Hello, hello, my love. I hope this finds you doing so well. I am so excited to share a gift I have for you. In celebration of the one-year anniversary of the show, and because I also want to dive right in on this topic, I’ll tell you all about it at the end of the show.

So, I’m so excited to keep talking about a topic I’m super passionate about because it was such a big part of my life for so long. And this is codependent thought habits. Few things kept me feeling stuck in think-feel-act cycles that didn’t serve me as much as this habit, in which I wasn’t happen unless other people were happy.

If I thought someone was upset with me, it could send me into a tailspin for days. If I thought I had failed someone else, forget about it. I was a wreck. I put other people’s desires for my life ahead of my own, and to say that habit didn’t serve me barely begins it.

It looks dedication, commitment, and of course, learning that it was okay to fail, which we talked all about in episode 39 and 40, learning to fail on purpose and ahead of time with excitement. This all helped me to see this behavior in my own life so I could start to shift those thoughts, feelings, and actions, to get different results, different outcomes in my life.

And while I’m far from perfect, though I’m also inherently perfect and worthy of all love and good things, just like you, I have so much more awareness now and can pause and check in and shift my thinking towards my own wellness and my own happiness first. And it’s so amazing.

I like to think of my years of codependent thinking as my having this big spotlight on my head and I was constantly shining it out onto the world to attempt to please people, to get outside approval and validation. It was like this spotlight was focused on trying to assess and figure out what others were thinking, feeling, doing, particularly in regards to myself.

And now I’ve turned that spotlight around and I focus on me, on myself first and foremost now. And it is so, so healing. Identifying where our patterns of behavior originate is really important in unpacking our relationships with ourselves, to seeing, knowing, and loving who we are under all the muck of growing up.

The people who raised us, whether our biological parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles, or a collection of caretakers came into parenting with their own baggage, from their own experiences of being children in the world, and their own ways of coming into adulthood.

Growing up is hard. I mean, seriously, right? Learning how to be an adult is a challenging thing for most of us, particularly when the version of adulting that was modeled by your grownups was not always so emotionally adult-y. This can look like caretakers or parents who blamed, shamed, guilted, judged their kids or others, neglectful parents, or those who were so all up in their kid’s jam that that kid – maybe you, my love – felt that they had little space to be themselves, to do what was important to them, to live into being themselves.

For fear of displeasing, failing, or letting that caretaker adult down. It can be the artistic kid who was pushed into sports, the athletic kid who was pushed into Matheltes, and on and on. I will also share that no one needed to push me into being a mathlete. I was actually an academic decathlon. Darn proud.

So the other weekend I went home to Providence, Rhode Island. Greatest state in the union, to help my sweet parents clean their house. They’re really doing a great job like, getting rid of clutter and old junk, which I so appreciate. And I found all of my academic decathlon shirts and it was just so hilarious.

My favorite one was a big brain with like, a sweatband. The thing you wear on your head when you’re playing a sport sport. But that around a brain because you know, nerds. Anyway, refocus Vic. So, caretakers who were codependent themselves, people-pleasers, wounded folks, which frankly, is all of us. Narcissists, folks who are unkind, we teach that.

They teach that, often unwittingly to the kids in their care. Because it’s all they know and you can’t teach someone French if you don’t speak it. You can only teach the language you know. Makes sense, right? Being an adult is a thousand times harder than it needs to be until you learn to interrupt your unhealthy patterns of relating to yourself and others and even more so, it can be really challenging, I would imagine, as a non-parent, for those who are parenting kiddos themselves.

And until you can fully learn to forgive the folks who raised you as best they knew how, which is a process, not something to push, something to hold space for, you can end up creating and passing along intergenerational harms. Even for those of us who are not ourselves parents, we have the chance through this work to make sure that we know what is what, and that our relationships with our partners, nieces, nephews, coworkers, neighbors, ourselves are as healthy and secure, as sane and safe as possible.

We can, through careful analysis of our thought patterns, make sure that the values and beliefs that pass from one generation to the next are ones that bring peace, joy, and happiness. Sharon Martin, a clinical social worker who does some great work around healing from codependency writes, “The boundaries between generations are porous, with values and beliefs seeping through to the next tier.”

This quote resonates so strongly for me when thinking about codependency. As I shared last week, this concept originated in the 1970s. The term which describes relationships in which the participants depend on one another at the cost of their relationship with themselves came about in the field of substance abuse counseling.

What I’ll share today is that I don’t believe there has to be substance use or abuse in a home or a family unit for there to be codependent thought habits present. Codependent thinking develops as a response to trauma, but that trauma didn’t necessarily happen to you.

It could have been several or even one generation in the past. For example, if there was a grandparent or even a great-grandparent who had concerns with their use of alcohol or had mental health concerns, each successive generation may have had codependent ways of thinking modeled for them.

And they then model that for the next and the next and so on, down to you. And this is our focus for today. The intergenerational legacy of codependent thinking. Please note that as we move through the work today, I won’t be using words like “addict” or “alcoholic.” Those are in air quotes because I think they’re really problematic.

They’re stigmatizing and blaming and I think we need to look at those choices in context, as coping mechanisms and not to shame or blame or guilt or label anyone who uses a substance as a way to manage feelings, situations, systems of oppression that they have no other tools to manage.

We are not taught how to manage our minds, how to feel our feelings, how to communicate with and heal our inner children, how to regulate our nervous systems, how to live with and heal trauma and stress, and not everyone on the planet learns how to do these things. So people will buffer against the feelings they don’t know how to feel or process or live with, and sometimes that looks like using substances.

Casting stones at those folks who buffer or cope by overdrinking, for example, does nothing to help them, society, families, or you, my darling. So we’re not going to do it. It makes the language a little clunkier for sure, and that’s fine. It’s worth it to be loving and understanding and to hold space for everyone’s experience.

So with that said, professionals in the field recognize that the suffering and challenges experienced by folks who grew up with caretakers dealing with addiction, and those abusing, overusing alcohol in particular, reaches beyond the substance user and into the family system.

The partner of the alcohol abuser may find their mental and emotional energy directed sometimes almost entirely towards an attempt to manage, control, or make up for the addicted person, towards cleaning up their physical and emotional messes, avoiding their abuses, protecting children, otherwise attempting to mitigate perceived disaster, like a DUI or other concerns that may arise through the use and overuse of substances.

Many relationships in which an addictive substance plays a role may become abusive. And whether that abuse is physical, mental, emotional, or otherwise, whether it’s overt, like hitting, or they’re subtler forms, like manipulation, the person on the receiving end of the abuse has to put all of their resources into survival.

Forget thriving. You need to make it through the day. Who has time to take care of themselves when they feel they have to keep everyone else’s head above water? Thought partners, like that one, are classic signs of codependency, in relationships informed by addiction. And codependent behaviors and thought patterns are learned.

If you know codependent thinking is part of your habitual thoughts, or if you’re just coming to see it in your own adult thinking now, yet you didn’t grow up with active substance use, addiction, or mental health challenges in your household, there’s a good chance that one or both of your parents was also a person with codependent thinking, or came from folks who had that way of relating to the world.

The role of the codependent thinker with someone in the midst of addiction is to say the least, exhausting, depleting, entirely unsustainable. So how do they do it? How do the countless spouses, partners, children, friends of folks with addiction stay in these unhealthy relationships for the long haul?

Codependency itself may provide some answers. A once adaptive mental strategy that ends up with painful results and may keep you in things, relationships, experiences that don’t serve you long after their expiration date. I mentioned a few minutes ago that codependent relationships are those in which the participants have melded into one another, and meshed is another psychological term.

It’s often a relationship in which one or both participants lose track of their own needs, wants, emotions, and life’s purpose because they focus overly on the other. In a classic example, I’ll talk here about a woman identified human using she/her pronouns. So imagine a partnership in which one person overuses alcohol. Perhaps there are a few children in the mix.

Home life is tense. Full of unmanaged anger, subtle threats, emotional games, rejection, judgments, many of which are fueled by alcohol or the chemical withdrawal from it. The partner who is not drinking to excess may feel obligated to shield the children from the drinker, to keep up appearances in the neighborhood, to deny their own suffering due to embarrassment, shame, fear, or what they were taught in their childhood about showing your tender side.

Her codependency on her addicted spouse, her need to fix and maintain and support at all costs causes her to lose sight of herself. But the human spirit can’t sustain such a denial of self. Our hearts need love, attention, care. We seek dynamic relationships with give and take, checks and balances.

And when our primary partners can’t provide that, we turn to other sources. Enter the children. The children now become a vehicle through which the parent who is not using alcohol or another substance to excess can get the emotional support and love that the addicted parent can no longer provide.

This can result in a parent-child dyad in which the child plays the role of primary emotional support for the sober parent. They may be treated like a peer, parentified, that is put into a parent role, made to play therapist, or otherwise asked to step into shoes that are far too big and complex for them, developmentally speaking.

As these children grow up, they may see the role of selfless giver, caretaker, constant supporter, fixer of everyone else’s problems as normal and natural, and often grow up seeking relationships that replicate their experiences from growing up because the mind seeks to replicate what we already know because in its way, it’s more comfortable.

And there is the chance that we may have a restorative experience, one in which we can feel safe and supported while living out our own habits. And goodness, I know I did this again and again and again. If “needy” – and yes, I’m putting that in air quotes – feels natural, or at least familiar, then needy personalities become attractive.

Someone we can fix or change or make mold to our specifications. And the spiral of codependency thus filters into the next generation. Does this sound familiar, my love? It’s a thing. This whole spiral, this whole dance is something that I coach around so often because it really can be so insidious and can be a pattern that’s hard to see.

I will also pause to say that while so many folks of all genders can get stuck in codependency loops, I find it’s particularly those raised as girls in houses with addiction or codependency who are taught that their job was to buoy the not addicted parent, and to keep the addicted parent as happy as possible.

To be perfect and beyond reproach, often to a child brain feels like the safest option. So that smart kiddo brain holds tight to that charge. To not be notices is to not be scolded or reprimanded or seen as one more problem, so maybe your child brain worked to not even be seen at all.

And looking at these dynamics through the lens of codependency, with attention to the intergenerationality of codependent thinking, we can now pause to identify where our own present day and historical thought patterns come from.

Classic behaviors associated with codependent thinking include perfectionism, which is based on the thought, “If I don’t get this right, it could all fall apart,” a tendency to ignore one’s own needs, wants, and feelings, particularly when your thought habit is to put everyone else ahead of you, to have weak or non-existent boundaries, to have the habit of attempting to control or fix other people, which never works out, and to have strong guilt or shame reactions, especially when you try to put yourself first, when you try to set a boundary, when you say no, or when things aren’t what you want or need them to be, and you attempt to speak to that.

Many people who grew up in families with codependent patterns also tend to hide or stuff down their feelings until they come out sideways. In rage, self-blame or other extremes, which can be complicated by a tendency to be a people-pleaser, in a vain attempt to avoid upsetting others.

Understanding that these tendencies and behaviors are not evidence of moral decay or some deeply flawed personality, but rather, a once adaptive, loving, caring response to being brought up in a codependent family structure is the powerful first step in your healing.

Once we have a concept to hold on to, a shelf on which to put our struggles, we can take a step back and we can see them for what they are, and then can get into the challenging but essential work of shifting our thought patterns in order to change our feelings and our behaviors.

Now, if part of you is thinking, “This all sounds familiar but I didn’t grow up with an alcoholic, Vic,” think back to what Sharon Martin has to say. Generational boundaries are porous. Beliefs and values, the good, bad, and ugly seep through.

Once again, even if the folks who raised you didn’t live with addiction, there may have been alcohol overuse or other forms of abuse generations back that set those codependent gears into motion, which are still turning today. In my own experience, I am yet to work with a client who does not know, love, or live with an alcoholic, addict, narcissist, or codependent of one stripe or another.

Addiction and addictive thinking is extremely common, and because it’s often perceived as a sort of moral failing and associated with shame, which I do not agree with at all, I see it as a coping strategy, it doesn’t always find its way into the light. And as always, my beauty, we cannot heal what we cannot see.

So what’s a human to do to begin to unlearn these habits? To avoid passing codependency down to your children, to not act it out with your partner or your partners, at work, in whatever arena of your life where you find yourself saying yes when you mean no, worrying about what other people think about you, people-pleasing, approval-seeking, looking for validation outside yourself, it’s vital to start with you, to learn to focus your attention and energy on healing yourself and creating new thought and behavior habits. My favorite theme ever.

And for me, in the coaching work I do with my clients, it starts with learning to value yourself. This is step one. To know just how worthy of love and care you are, and that your job in this world is to show up with unconditional love for yourself first.

I love the old saying, “You can’t pour from an empty cup,” and codependent thinking takes your energetic and emotional cup and throws it against the wall. If you’re not attending to yourself and your darling inner child first, that is, taking you for a walk, speaking kindly to you, honoring your wants and needs, reparenting yourself on the daily, then your cup shall remain empty and you may stay anxious, stressed, overwhelmed, on edge, easily frazzles, depleted, fatigued.

So often in my years as a functional medicine provider, I saw this play out as depression and anxiety, insomnia, IBS, heartburn, adrenal fatigue, thyroid concerns, menstrual issues. All that energy pouring out of you like an emotional sieve meant your mind, body, and spirit are left bereft, tapped out, not getting the emotional and energetic fuel you need to have a healthy and regulated nervous system, and a body that knows you’re there for it.

If you’re always making sure everyone else is fed, my love, what are you eating? If you’re always making sure everyone else is happy, who then is making you happy? If you’re always attending to everyone else’s needs, my perfect angel, who is attending to yours?

This is not a situation that leads you to health, but rather, keeps you running like a hamster in a dangerous and exhausting wheel, the cat always at your heel. No wonder you’re tired, my love. Codependent habits are profoundly exhausting.

So step one, the first thing I’ll share is this, to know just how worthy of love and care you are, and that your job in this world is to show up with unconditional love for you first. The second step I’ll share is to begin to share your story with trusted people.

Codependent habits feel shameful for most humans, so you keep it a secret. However, secrets tend to breed shame. Freedom comes when you share your story and receive understanding, empathy, compassion, love. It is a vital part of healing and regulating our nervous systems, to find our way into that ventral vagal place, which I’ve talked about here before, which is the safe and secure part of the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system.

We feel safe and secure when we are thinking we are safe and secure in ourselves, for ourselves. When we neurocept or feel safety around us. And we can use social connection as a way to feel that warm, loving feeling of the ventral vagal system coming online.

I know that when I see and hug a dear friend, I feel that system start filling my body with oxytocin and other nice feeling neurochemicals. That feeling is healing. And the more you can tap into it with others, the more you’ll be able to recognize your own ability to create that feeling for and by yourself.

This may all feel so uncomfortable at first, and that’s okay. Growth is often uncomfortable, and I want to invite you to start the process of connecting with others, sharing your story with trusted people any chance you can. With their consent to hear it, of course, which we talked all about in episodes 27 and 28. Giving and getting emotional consent.

I talk a lot about the power of collective healing. How we all need one another to help us out, to show us what is challenging to see in and by ourselves. This is the role of a beloved friend, a spiritual counselor, a trained therapist, and also of an experienced coach like myself, and is the big reason my online master class starting in May has a built-in community where you can connect with others, hear their stories, bear witness to their struggles, and have them bear witness to yours.

This, my love, is an integral and vital part of healing. My third offering is the combination of nervous system regulation, reparenting, and thought work that I teach my clients. This process is based in science, self-love, and of course, woo and witchiness. Start with recognizing when you’re feeling activated, revved up.

When you feel that internal desire to tell other people what they should do, when you feel that inner voice telling you not to share your real thoughts and feelings lest someone else not like them. When you find yourself saying yes when you really mean no. When you’re not living in your authenticity because you fear someone else’s disapproval or opinion.

When you feel that revving up start inside you, or you find yourself sinking into that Eeyore state, which nerd alert, again is that dorsal ventral shutdown, that freeze state, which I talked about in episode 48, which is about your why, but it’s also about polyvagal theory.

So you feel yourself either sinking into that like, I give up kind of place, or if you feel yourself getting activated, I want to invite you to pause and to talk to your body. This is a thing I do all the time. I spend a significant part of my day talking to myself, to my mind, to my body, to my spirit, to my inner children.

If it feels safe, I want to invite you to take a deep breath. In through the nose, fill up that belly, and out. When you expand your belly with air, you ground yourself into the parasympathetic. So I invite you to do so. To breathe deeply and therefore, to begin to ground yourself.

If that doesn’t feel safe or right or getting into your body is too scary, then you can start with orienting. To orient yourself to time and place. If noticing your breath brings up more discomfort, more activation, consider finding another focal point. You can tap your fingers on the desk and listen to the sound of your own tapping. You can feel your fingers on the desk and orient yourself to that.

You can take a sip of water and feel that going down your throat. You could even chew some gum and bring your attention and your awareness to that act. Remembering that in your own genius, you have tuned out of your body for wise, wise reasons, and tuning back in may do the opposite of what we’re trying to do here. It may not ground you, but it might feel frightening.

It might feel scary. It may feel activating in a way that doesn’t support you. It could take you into a somatic memory, it may be more disregulating than regulating. So the work is to titrate. To do these practices of breathing. Finding where that feeling, that sensation lives in your body, recognizing that it’s challenging, and titrating the amount of time you spend checking in.

Ground yourself, ground yourself again, and then ground yourself again. And what I mean by titrating is that if doing all of this, checking into your body feels unsafe, then do it for two seconds. When that feels comfortable, when that feels okay, up it to five, and then up to 10.

You see where we’re going, my darling? Slow and steady. Gentle and loving. This is what it means to be trauma-informed in the world. To gently encourage yourself to grow and ground, but never pushing, with pushing energy. If you are a human that grew up with codependent thinking, feeling, and energy, you’ve probably been pushed enough.

So don’t give yourself that same treatment. And when you’re able to check in with yourself, meet that vibration, that movement of energy in your body that is your feelings, with gentleness, with care, not with harsh or judging energy. And listen, it may be your body and your mind’s habit to go to there, and it can be so uncomfortable.

And I want to say it clearly, it’s not a problem per se that your habit is to judge yourself or to be harsh. It’s just what you’re used to doing. It’s what you’re used to feeling, and that thought and those feelings are habits and they are ones that you can shift.

And as a person who often went into sympathetic activation, that freakout, fight or flight place very quickly and easily for so much of my life, I want to honor how much that process of going sympathetic and then judging yourself and being harsh, I want to honor how much it can feel like a problem.

I want to honor how quickly my brain would criticize me for being activated. And I want to tell you, because science, that that critical voice once served you. It is coming from a place of love and it doesn’t serve you now. It keeps you feeling stuck. So instead of meeting a harsh and critical voice with harsh criticism, be your own most loving parent and meet that voice with love.

Consider thinking it and inviting it to take a backseat, to unconditional self-love, self-care, and positive self-regard. Take some more deep breaths. Let’s center ourselves together, my darling. Deep breath in through the nose, fill that belly, fill that belly, and out.

Remember, you can choose your next thought to create your next feeling. Take another deep breath in if that feels safe, in, and out. All is well, my love. Remind your inner children of it. I want to tell you and all your inner children that it’s okay to set boundaries.

As you begin to do this work, the next vital step is learning where your own limits are, which I talked all about in episode 46. So as you start to do this work, the next step is knowing where you want to say yes and where you want to say no. And I want to let you know that it is not just okay but fabulous to set boundaries with a thought like, “I’m going to choose me in that situation where so-and-so often starts yelling, and I’m going to leave if there are raised voices.”

Maybe you decide to think, “I’m not going to go home for the holidays this year,” knowing your family of origin may not like it, and that’s okay. Or maybe it starts really simple, like, today, I’m going to practice taking care of my needs first before anyone else’s. And I want to call attention to the importance of the word practice here.

This work is about practice, learning, growing, and not perfection. I’ll be talking in an upcoming episode all about perfectionism, so make sure that you’re subscribed to the show so you don’t miss a thing. This is not about doing something in some perfect way. It’s about shifting daily into a place where you are creating a feeling of self-love and self-care.

Where you are creating space to do your future self journaling, which we talked about in episode nine. You are holding space for yourself to try breathwork, or another meditation in the morning before you jump up out of bed to attend to others.

Or before you open Instagram for external approval, a.k.a checking your likes and DMs, or whatever your habit may be to check out instead of checking in. And finally, in an ideal world, the original codependent relationship will be fixed and can be healthy again.

Sure, that would be great and would help to diminish the harmful effects of codependency moving forward. And in reality, this doesn’t always happen, which is where the gift of thought work comes in. You can change your relationship to any and every situation regardless of what the other person does or doesn’t change, what they think, what they say.

The person struggling with a substance, with codependency, with narcissism, what have you, may not want to change their habits. And that’s okay because you get to remember that your number one job is to learn to take care of yourself first and to let other adults live their own lives on their own terms, much like you get to live your life on your own terms.

This is the process of addressing and starting to undo and unravel the legacy of intergenerational codependency. I know you can do this, my darling love, and it starts with loving yourself first. You got this, baby. I know you do.

Okay my sweet loves, that’s it for this week. So I have two exciting things to share. The first one is presents. If you’ve been listening to this show, you know I love presents. And I love giving them to you in the forms of PDFs and meditations. And this one is a physical one, which is so exciting.

So it’s been a year. It’s been a year that I have been doing the Feminist Wellness podcast together with you, and time is – what even is time, right? That’s a whole other episode. But my goodness, I can’t believe it’s been a year. And I’m so excited and so, I’m going to do a giveaway.

One of the things you may have heard me or other podcasters share is that one of the most helpful ways to get your podcast out to the masses to help other humans who could need these lessons, folks struggling with codependency, self-doubt, who are having trouble thinking failure is a terrible thing, who are future-tripping, buffering, shooting that second arrow, I want to get this show out far and wide because it’s a free resource.

It’s a way that I can do my part on this beautiful earth to give back for all the privilege I’ve had, all the lessons, all the teachers, all the schooling, all the training. I have been so lucky and gifted in this life and I’m out here to share it for free with all of you. So help me help the world.

Head on over to iTunes, subscribe to the show, rate and review it. It doesn’t have to be a five-star rating if you don’t really like the show, then I’m surprised that you listened all the way to the end to hear this, but there we go. Give it a rating, put a little review on there, share your thoughts and feels, maybe the way the show has helped you, whatever you want to write is magnificent and I’m grateful.

Take a little screenshot and email it to [email protected] and that will get you one entry to win one of four sets of my homemade hand blended essential oil rollers. There are tons of details on my website, victoriaalbina.com/giveaway, where there’s pictures of the rollers, they’re so sweet.

So there’s two rollers, four lucky winners, two rollers each, a full set. So they’re a sort of reviving blend that’s to help you wake up, feel more energized, focused, and the other is my Easy Now blend, which is really relaxing, it has some magnesium oil in it, it’s a relaxing blend. I’ll often use it on my pulse points before bed, or in the evening to support me in chilling out, understanding that essential oils go right through that old factory bulb into your brain and change your brain chemistry, which is so cool.

I’ll also use Easy Now before doing my morning thought work and my inner child work and my future self journaling to really help me just get into that chill place before I do my breathwork and morning meditation. And then I’ll put the reviving energy up one on before I head to the gym.

So that’s for you because I love you. So four lucky winners will get a full set of these rollers. I do sell them for $48 for the set, so that’s a pretty nice gift. If you want to get an extra entry, take that picture that you emailed us of your review and put it on your social media. Make sure to tag me @victoriaalbinawellness and that will get you two entries total.

So that’s very exciting. I love presents and I love that it’s been a year of this show. How fun? The second exciting thing is that everything is rocking and rolling for my holistic master class. All about healing, healing codependency, managing your mind, really living an intentional life where you’re the boss of your brain, where you’re in loving connection with your nervous system and your inner child, you’re letting go of anxiety, stress, overwhelm, and are taking back your thinking and feeling and the actions you take, the results you get.

Can you tell? I’m just like, on fire about this because it’s going to be incredible. I am opening the waitlist of folks who want to get into that class. It’s going to be a very small class because it’s really important to me for it to be really high touch and for you to get an awful lot of my time and attention.

So if you want to get on that waitlist, drop us an email, [email protected]. Someone will be in touch. We’ll put you on the waitlist and when we open the doors, you will be the first to know about it. Like, you’ll get an email before anyone else. So that’s pretty cool.

Alright my sweet loves, I hope that today has been helpful for you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for taking care of yourself. Deep breath in, out. Remember, you are safe, you are held, you are loved. And when one of us heals, we help heal the world. Be well, my darling. Talk to you soon.

Thank you for listening to this week’s episode of Feminist Wellness. If you like what you’ve heard, head to VictoriaAlbina.com to learn more.