#81 The Price of Trauma

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 Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women like you with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intentions. My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend.

If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Kemia

Well hey you.

Melissa

Hey girl hey! How are you doing?

Kemia

Good, how's the husband?

Melissa

Oh, he's doing so good. He's better and, um, he was… He was really sick there for a while and it was not fun. 

Kemia

Yeah, that's scary. 

Melissa

So yeah, I mean it was to the point where he doesn't get scared by much, but when he was like I'm worried that this is something other than just like… we thought it was viral crud and that type of thing. But we were very, very happy that his sinuses were filled with snot, and that his poor lower lobes of his lungs were clogged, because it could have been a lot worse.

Kemia

It’s funny how much relative goes into being sick, right?

Melissa

Yeah, the relativity. It was real.

Kemia

You look fabulous.

Melissa

Thank you, so do you.

Kemia

Well I… Thank you. So I'll accept it first and then I will say that this week has been my week for the first week where I'm not either just back from travel or heading out to travel in 3 months so I'm feeling a little disoriented and you're getting me in my flannels and jeans and in my quiet upstairs office rather than in something that looks a little nicer but I figured you wanted the real me so here you got it.

Melissa

Oh girl, always. Yeah I want, you know my podcast is called Your Favorite You so my favorite me wears jeans and sweatshirts and is cozy and like has a blanket and has her tea and all the things so…

And swears a bunch.

Kemia

Yeah do we get to swear on the podcast? I mean were already recording so I want to fucking make sure before we get too far in.

Melissa

It has an explicit warning and at the intro I say something like I like to use all of the words available to me in the English language, so if young ears are around please proceed with caution. And my families from my pediatric office know, they're like oh yeah the kids are gonna learn something new today.

Kemia

That's a nice warning. They're not learning anything new, if they tell you they are they're lying to your face.

Melissa

Well I mean they were pretty little.

Kemia

Oh okay fair enough.

Melissa

I didn't care how old they are I just started swearing from the get-go.

Kemia

Oh yeah, you know at one point I think my husband said you know, when we had Joseph, we really need to stop swearing and I said why the fuck would we do that? Only thing I want to make sure is that he knows how to do it well. 

Melissa

Exactly.

Kemia

That's the travesty. If you're going to use the words with me you better know how to use it well, creatively, and never at someone. Next to someone is okay, but never at someone.

Melissa

That's amazing when… I have Jack, who's 20, he'll be 22 next month and Owen, who just turned 19. And when Owen was about… he must've been like 18 months old, cause he was in the grocery cart, you know, in the thing, and Jack was walking beside me. So Jack was probably four and a half and Owen was one and a half. And we're walking along and Owen dropped something. We're in the paper aisle, you know, and Owen dropped something and he goes, “God damn it.” And I was like what did you say? And of course he repeated it. 

Kemia

He says are you fucking deaf? I said, “God damn it.” That's what you get from mine.

Melissa

And Jack said “Mom, is he allowed to say that?” I was like “I think so.”

Kemia

Don’t ask me, I'm making this shit up as I go along.

Melissa

So I'm just gonna like, do a soft intro, because we've already done the intro. They're getting to see exactly who we are. So I'm just gonna go ahead and welcome everybody back to Your Favorite You and tell everyone how honored and delighted I am to be joined by you today. This amazing woman is another amazing physician coach and all of you loyal listeners have already heard about her because you listened to my podcast, episode number 13. Being a Beginner Sucks and I raved about Dr. Seraf at the beginning of that podcast, so…

Dr Kemia Seraf is a badass whose two plus decade career has included becoming both an MD and a master of public health. She has worn multiple hats, and I’m sure continues to wear multiple hats throughout her illustrious career, including, and likely not limited to, being the owner of a medical practice in internal medicine, she is a public health program developer, she is involved in nonprofit leadership, she owns businesses, she's held multiple board positions, and I found her because she does much needed trauma mitigation work and she's also a farmer in her spare time. Dr K, I think you still like to be called correct, founded Lodestar… 

Kemia

Seems to be easiest for everybody.

Melissa

Yeah, exactly, she founded Loadstar specializing in trauma responsive coaching for physicians, which we all need as docs, and I attended her day long trauma responsive coaching and leadership workshop in November of 2022. And I've been a fan of hers even before then. So, what else? What am I missing? What else do my listeners need to know about you?

Kemia

Well, I'll offer two things. I'll offer two things right out of the gate. So thank you, first of all. Second of all, probably I would say those are the least interesting things about me, maybe with the exception of being a farmer about me, maybe with the exception of being a farmer. I'll make two small corrections. One I did not own my own internal medicine practice. You mentioned that.

I hope that's not out there somewhere in the universe? Oh, okay, I mean, that would be badass, right, like if I was to look at what else might I want to do. Owning my own medical practice might be pretty far up there. I think it's time for doctors to get back in the business of owning how they practice medicine. We can come back to that later. Yeah, and Dr K. So it's such an interesting thing because it was picked up as a sort of an honorary title when I was a, you know, when I was a young resident, a young attending. I can't remember who first said it, but it kind of stuck and it made it so much easier for everyone. Because my name is a challenge. Kemia, which is how my dad would pronounce it. Let's put it that way Kemia is just not a name you hear anywhere.

And so what I have come to really understand is that when I give people lots and lots of latitude to call me what is easy for them, it's just one less thing that they have to think about in the back of their head, and I think that that is a great starting point when we start talking about the cognitive load and stress and where our energies are being directed.

Melissa

I love it. Well, thank you so much.

Kemia

I also have four semi-feral sons. It's always important to say that because I bred my own farm hands and I am married to an interventional cardiologist that I met while I was in medical school. He was, he was my resident, he was my senior resident. So, yes, we were that couple. And uh and here we are, 25 years later.

Melissa

Wow, congratulations. I know because I am also 25 years into my multi physician household marriage. So, yeah, it's not for the weak.

Alright, so thank you so much for agreeing to come on the podcast and for agreeing to share your, you know, vast knowledge and your beautiful personality, which I think you're already showing everybody. So, okay, in this participant guide that you gave us, that we received in our training day, there's a quote…

Kemia

All right, we're going straight there.

Melissa

Yeah, and I'm not sure if it's yours, but I want to explore a bit. And it says “The idea that we can be immersed in suffering and loss and not be harmed is as unrealistic as expecting to walk through water without getting wet.”

Kemia

Yeah, that's Dr Rachel Naomi Ren. She wrote… one of many books that she's written that I read in medical school. I think the title of it is kitchen table wisdom. I could be misattributing the title, so you know we'll Google before we, before we go too far. Very, very, very wise, thoughtful, empathic physician and the things that I have read of hers and learned from her over what is that? I am now a PGY 25. I calculated that the other day. 

Melissa

That's amazing.

Kemia

Holy shamoly, right? Yeah, I have been reading and learning from her for a very, very long time and i think that that is a really important noticing, and it becomes really, really important when we begin stepping towards the idea that there is a cost, there is a price to be paid for the work we do and that's not a bad thing, right? That isn't to say, oh, you know, we're all paying this really heavy price. We should opt out, or we should do it differently, or we should armor up more, or we should do any of those things. I think where the cost becomes compounded is when we don't name it as such and plan for it, right,. So, if you know, I mean, let's take it out of the realm, this sort of existential realm, and let's take it over into, like our own budgets right. If you know that you are going to have these expenses coming up later in the month, you're going to plan for them, right? We understand this when it comes to monetary budgets. We have to begin to think and plan for this when it comes to the body budget, right, the energy budget, really is what I'm talking about when I say that, because everything has… there's a price, there's a cost associated with these things, and we have to decide what we're willing, what's a reasonable, appropriate price to pay.

Now, I happen to be one of those odd ducklings who still adore our profession. I adore my colleagues. I love my medical students; they're just so squishy. I love residents. I love grouchy old attendings who used to scare me to death. I, you know, I mean and I love the idea, not necessarily the execution, all the time, I love the idea of the healing profession. It is honorable and it is, I think, for most of us when we go in a calling not a, not a job, not a profession, not a career, it's a calling.

Melissa

Right, for sure. For those of you who aren't physicians, PGY stands for postgraduate year, so that means that 25 years ago, Kemia graduated from medical school.

So about the same time I did, and I don't know about you, but I knew I wanted to help people. I guess I didn't know how much trauma would be sustained in doing that and I think the idea, like you say, of naming it and planning for it instead of pretending that it's not happening and just going on about life pretending and just going to the next room, you know that is the key.

Kemia

I think it's a key and the cross fingers. I don't know if you remember, but I cross my fingers when something comes up that I don't want to forget because I don't take notes. Terrible, terrible. I think. I think two things you said that really struck me. The first is I went into this profession and I've only in recent years been able to name this without feeling pokey. 

I went into it because I wanted to heal people. There are a lot of ways, a lot of sessions that you and I could have gone into where we could help people. It's become really important for me to give the name of the ideal anyway, which is of healing, which encompasses a lot more than just curing, right or treating. I think it's a bigger, more expansive, more complete, less easily defined description. And I think it's okay to to begin to play with that idea and that terminology because we are in the healing professions. So that one leads me to to point two, which is, I think it's really important that we we understand what Dr Raymond was pointing to when she said that, that the idea that we can be immersed in this and not harmed or not impacted, not affected, and I think we're supposed to be. Look, we've got these brilliant, beautiful, wonderful, incredibly lazy brains - We'll talk about the lazy brain later - Brains that have evolved with this gorgeous limbic resonance, right, this thing in my brain that when you're smiling and you're leaning forward and your energy goes up, it gives me a little spark that makes me want to do the same right.

Limbic resonance is how we connect. It's how we share joy, right. It's also how we co-recognize and share threat or danger, right or danger right. It's also sort of the dark side of that is that it makes us susceptible to vicarious and secondary trauma, meaning that when we begin to think about trauma more broadly, not just as a single event in time that happens to me, but rather as those, those, even those smaller ruptures that occur, that cause harm, right, and that can be compounded over time, right when, when I am spending my days immersed in the suffering of colleagues, patients, clients, community, family, those who I walk alongside, that I journey with, sometimes, that I have direct responsibility for, right, and their traumas, the limbic resonance that is generated between us leaves an impact. And for anyone who might be quirking an eyebrow around the idea that secondary and vicarious trauma are every bit as real and every bit as impactful, and, frankly, phenotypically, when it starts showing up in a patient or a client, I can't differentiate between primary and secondary or vicarious trauma. Looks exactly the same, right. So we can turn back to the ACEs study. So my pediatrician friends are always the ones who know this right. The adverse childhood experiences study.

Enormous study, groundbreaking study in that it had an enormous N, right. 17 and a half thousand respondents to the survey. It was quite elegant in its simplicity. It was 10 questions. I call them sometimes, refer to them as the big 10. Is it complete? Absolutely not. Nobody would joke about that or pretend that it is. It was the first enormous data collection of its kind, that I know of anyway, that gave us hard numbers to back up what we had long observed, right, which is that trauma sticks right.

Probably a lot of your listeners have heard the  book title the Body Keeps the Score. Yes, right, trauma, especially those, you know, those traumas experienced in childhood, and any traumas that we experience that are not appropriately disrupted or mitigated. They stay in us. There is an embodied experience that we have. So let's just look at that study, right, because we have this tendency to dismiss or diminish the idea that secondary trauma, listening to it, being immersed in it, vicarious trauma, that stuff we invite in through our television screens and our TikTok and our Twitter feed and our news cycle but those impact us in the same way. And yet, even the original study, when you go back and you read the questions, do you remember how the questions are worded? 

Melissa

No.

Kemia

Children who, before their 18th birthday, experience or witness. Experience or witness.

Melissa

Wow.

Kemia

Even the original study is looking at the impact of bearing witness to harm done to others. 

Melissa

Mm hmm. Secondary trauma.

Kemia

Exactly, exactly, vicarious as well, right, and so I think that we have to begin to develop an awareness of… not because I'm going to stop being who I am, or stop caring for who I care about, or stop bearing witness even to things that are happening in the world. Right, my ethic demands that of me.

What I am going to begin to do is understand there is a cost associated and I am going to plan for that expense. I'm going to know what disrupts it. I'm going to know what increases my body budget over here, so that I can pay that price without harming myself further.

Melissa

Right, or the people that you care about.

Kemia

Oh, my goodness, exactly. But we can't do any of that right If we don't know there's a budget to be managed and we don't know those things that make it worse and those things that are wonderful mitigators and disruptors.

Melissa

I mean, can you just… I don't think that my audience probably knows the difference between what we call big T trauma versus little T trauma. Would you mind talking about that a little bit?

Kemia

Yeah, and I'm going to translate my face or my silence, depending on how people are consuming this right now.

Melissa

Both ways.

Kemia

Yeah, I'm not sure, and I've used the term before. Big T, little T.

Melissa

Yeah, I don't love it either.

Kemia

I'm not sure we're doing ourselves or anyone else any favor, so let's just say that and then set it down. Because here's what we do know right. You and I can be here. We are, you know, roughly the same age, although you look about 10 years younger, and you know approximately the same. You know, time of graduation, same era. You know we're, I'm assuming we are both um Gen Xers and you know so. So there's some, there's some relative similarities to us.

Melissa

Except I only have two feral boys. You have four. That might be the difference.

Kemia

It just means I didn't learn my lesson the first couple of times. Kidding. Joshua, Jonah, I'm just kidding. I would say that. So you know, here we are relatively similar in some ways, you know, in some major ways, right, about the same age, about the same stage. Both physicians, you know, we both like to cuss a lot. We're both pretty sturdy, I think overall. Or you know, we have pretty sturdy sense of self.

And you and I could be standing exactly together and have the exact same experience, traumatic or non-traumatic, but like the exact same huge, overwhelming experience. And after it's done, we might turn and look at each other and I might say, oh my god, that was so horrible. I, I, I just feel shattered. And you might look at me and be like what the fuck is your problem? That was nothing. Are you kidding me? It was a nothing sandwich, Kemia, move along.

Okay, why is this important? It's really important because trauma is subjective. Trauma is subjective. Dr Gabor Mete teaches us that trauma is not what happens to us. So, same event, same thing, you and me, right. It's not what happens to us, it's what happens inside as a result of what happened to us, right? So, and that, my friend, is contingent upon a lot of things, right? So what could have been different between you and me that made this land as trauma for me and as a nothing sandwich for you? Well, I may have previous experiences and exposure that caused that moment in time to activate my nervous system differently, made it appear to be an enormous threat to me when for you it was like…

Melissa

Yeah, this happens all day, every day.

Kemia

Yeah, right, or you know it was interesting but it wasn't a big deal. So our previous experiences, right. You may be very well resourced, or well resourced in ways I'm not, right. You may know that you have access to, let's just say, you have a robust bank account, you have great savings, you have great health insurance.

You have, you have, you have, and I, on the other hand, I'm like this is the thing that's that's gonna. I can't pay my bills now this month, yeah, right. So resourcing matters a lot, right. Another example you may be having that, we may be having that exposure or that experience at the same moment in time, and for you, you're coming off of, you know, you you're coming off of, you know, three weeks of regular schedule and good sleep, and I may have just spent the last month on the front lines in 2020 in New York in an ER with COVID.

Melissa

Yeah, totally different.

Kemia

Right, and so my resources may be very depleted because I am exhausted and overwhelmed, and and and and, right. So trauma is subjective and there's no trauma Olympics. You could hold very gracefully space for the fact that that landed as traumatic for me without needing to do comparison, without saying, well, what if? Or it could have been so much worse, or or. Oh well, I know exactly what you're saying because I had this experience. And then we're in some sort of comparison thing about whose pain is worse.

Melissa

Yeah, so many people want to do that.

Kemia

Yes, and I think we do it for two reasons. I think we first reach for it because it is actually a way of connecting, right.

You've heard me say “same same same,” right. So “same same same” is like how we lean in and and have and capitalize on that limbic resonance. We want to draw closer, we want to, right. I think the advanced skill is recognizing that “same same same” is very applicable in some instances and when the person sitting with us revealing a story or we're talking to us about something is in a state of activation, “same same same” lands as dismissive, diminishing, um, de-centering you know, and so that's the moment to just hold their pain, even even if your pain is bigger, right, your story is bigger, it doesn't matter, you're not the center of the story in this moment, and this becomes really, really challenging.

Melissa

Yeah, you talked a little bit about mitigating trauma, like what are the ways that you feel are most effective for the vast majority of people, or is it totally person specific?

Kemia

The good news. If it were person specific, we'd be in trouble, wouldn't we? We really need broadly applicable tools for this, and so this concept of becoming trauma responsive and how we engage with each other, I think, becomes really important, and it's what I like to refer to as inside out work. You know, it begins with my understanding, neurobiologically, what's happening, right, and that we can actually distill into some non… what's the word I'm looking for? Non-medicified. You know, we can take the neuroscience and we can distill it down into something that anybody can grasp, right? We're hardwired for threat. That's a graspable concept.

We evolved with this amazing threat detection system that is designed to do one thing and one thing only, and that is keep us alive long enough so that we can breed feral children, right? And so that system is incredibly sensitive, and when we are exposed to chronic toxic levels of stress, unrelenting toxic stress. The signals begin to get mixed up, right? What is it? The system becomes more and more sensitized, it becomes primed to react, which is why it's important that we begin to notice when the system is getting primed, when the toxic stress has been too much for too long, and begin disrupting for ourselves. If we can't learn to do this for ourselves, then our capacity to recognize it in someone else is always going to be hindered.

Melissa

Right, yeah, it explains why you know you lose your shit on your four-year-old for putting their shoes on wrong when it really doesn't matter. But you've got all this other stuff.

Kemia

It’s not about the shoes.

Melissa

It's never about the shoes or the dishwasher or the.. any of the things, right.

Kemia

Yeah, cumulative and compounding. Which is why, coming full circle, I think it's good for us to start to move away from the big T, little T. I don't think we need to quantify it. And for those,, and there are many among us, physicians in particular, frankly, who shy away from the idea of even having experienced trauma, that's okay too, right. Sometimes it's easier to just acknowledge that we're all the walking wounded. Every one of us is carrying places of harm, every single person, just like me, not different than me, right? Not “I'm better because I have fewer,” or “I'm worse because I have more.” Just, we all.

And when we begin to lean into that as a universality, as a universal truth, then we don't have to parse it anymore and we don't have to quantify it. We simply have to acknowledge it and then we can begin to don universal precautions, right. So we can skill ourselves in an approach that allows us to recognize those early signals that someone's threat detection system is being activated. We can also learn to really understand and appreciate that evolutionarily, it was just as dangerous to be excluded from your community as it was to engage with the saber tooth tiger. And so our threat detection system reads those two things the same, right. It's looking for, scanning for exclusion threat, social threat, just as actively as it is scanning and looking for physical threat, and it'll react the same way. It doesn't differentiate and this is true for every single person that evolutionary hard wiring yeah.

Melissa

I was just talking to one of my clients who happens to also be a pediatrician and she's the mom of the four-year-old with the shoes, where I'm like it's not about the shoes, and you know, she has this perception and I think we all had it at some point and many of us have maybe outgrown it that you know, if our kids can be put on this persona of being perfect, somehow it reflects back on us as mothers that we are perfect and that will keep us in the social circle. So like, this coaching just happened yesterday, so it's fresh in my mind, so I'm like this makes so much sense.

Kemia

Oh bless. You know it's interesting. There's some really really good data out there that show us that the opposite of belonging is actually fitting in. And that’s really cognitively expensive, right? So to feel wanted and needed and appreciated and like you belong. That's one thing. To be scanning the room for those cues that tell you, if you act this way, you do this thing, you whatever the whatevering right, yeah, then you'll fit, that's a really really taxing, cognitively expensive space to operate out of. And yes, to your point, it's totally normal. Young mamas, I mean I'm sure you can remember this, I can remember it in my bone, like feeling like there was a right way to do the things so that my child would have total ease and acceptance, and that somehow reflects on me as a parent.

Melissa

Yeah, so much compassion

Kemia

Yeah, I got my ass kicked on that one pretty early. I don't… I'm not for everyone, I've never been for everyone.

Melissa

Me either girl, cheers to that. 

Kemia

Well, I'm not sure that any of us are really…

Melissa

Ne, because then we’d be trying to fit in!

Kemia

Yes, it's cognitively expensive, right. And so, you know, the learning–and I think you know we don't talk enough about the normal stages of adult development.

Y'all pediatricians, you're really good with the normal stages of child development, but there are normal, healthy, predictable stages of adult development and I can tell you that as a you know as a coach, as a, you know, as a medical educator, as a lot of different things, just as a friend now. I can usually guess someone's age at this point by what they're concerned about. Not by how old their children are, but like what are the things that they are thinking about as they try to make sense of the world, what? Where is their locus of focus?

And it's fairly predictable and we all go through it, you know, and the shorthand sometimes, and I think you and I were joking about this back in Texas, but that, um, forties are where your fucks fly away, which is a, I mean, I love my 40s. I loved, they're in the rearview mirror.

They're in the rearview mirror for me now and right, it really wasn't so much that what it was as I look back on that decade, it was the clarity I began to develop around who I was when I was dead, center in my integrity. Who is that person? How does she show up? What does she… How does she move in the world? And when you begin to really get curious about those things and move into that space, and it's a cognitively heavy space too, right. I think Brene Brown talks about midlife is when… I'm gonna butcher the quote. But “Midlife is when the universe takes you by the shoulders, leans in really close and says I'm not fucking around anymore.”

Melissa

Yeah, so good.

Kemia

All of this stuff you're doing to pretend to be, to… It's preventing your growth, and there's a cost to that too. Yeah, so I think that the beauty of our forties can be an increased spaciousness to begin to explore our own becoming. And that's painful and beautiful and normal.

Melissa

Yeah, it's one of my favorite things to help women with, right. I mean, that is why my podcast is called your favorite you, it's why my group program is called your favorite you. It's like, let's figure out what your favorite version of yourself does, how she acts, you know how she dresses, how much she curses, you know all the things, right. And like, let's live into that and like see that we don't have to pretend anymore, we don't have to try to fit in. One of the first things I teach in my group is belonging and teaching women to belong to themselves first, which a lot of people are like “What the fuck are you even talking about?” And you know, so I have to explain it to them, which is fine. But, you know, once you start to really belong to yourself and can live in integrity and can look in the mirror at night and be like I did the best I could today, like I gave it everything that I've got, I don't have to do anything more. Um, I love teaching people…

Kemia

Or I didn't. I'm going to give you that, or I didn't. I did not give it everything I got today. I sat on my couch and I ate some fucking bonbons. I was really bad at some things. 

Melissa

Yes, that’s true too girl.

Kemia

I never worry, you know, I think women physicians are a funny bunch, man we're screwed up, but we are a funny bunch because I never worry that our colleagues are going to, um, not strive. But I think that the hidden fear, the paper dragon that so many of us carry, is if I slow down or, god forbid, I stop, I'll never get going again.

Melissa

Yeah, oh, yeah. The inertia will just keep me in space.

Kemia

Right, like if I'm going to somehow dissolve from structure to soup and there's just nothing further from the truth. I also, this is my big pitch, right, you were talking about what did you open with? Hard things, new things, something? You had a word, a phrase you used. You said your podcast number 13 was about…

Melissa

Oh, being a beginner sucks. I was telling him about the beginner you.

Kemia

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, here is, here's my both and to that too, you know me, I got a both and for everything. 

Melissa

I know you do give it to me 

Kemia

For the love of God, can we for our own sakes, and we for the sakes of our children… For the sake of the children, okay, never mind you, at least for the sake of the children who we are harming. We collectively, the parents, the elders, the grownups in the fucking room are harming our children because we are not encouraging them to go be bad at things. Please, for the love of God, if you're going to do anything for your children, encourage them to go be bad at a whole lot of things and have a glorious, messy, filthy roll in the dirt, screw it up, jam on the face, never going to be good at it and going to do it anyway, time of it.

Melissa

Playing the guitar, yeah.

Kemia

Because we are teaching them… by not explicitly teaching them that we are implicitly the hidden curriculum in parenting in this country at this moment in time is, if you're not going to stick with it, if you're not going to give it your all, if you're not going to do all the things, if you're not going to show grit, oh my God, can we retire that word? If you are not going to do it, then don't do it. But if you're going to do it, you better be the best and I will hire you, every coach, and I will hire you. Right, and I'm not dogging. I'm not. I swear to God, I'm not dogging. Finding things you're passionate about and becoming good at them, right.

And all glory to those of us who can… who are well enough resourced that we can provide a little bit of extra right for those passions. But somewhere along the line…

Melissa

It got fucked up

Kemia

It got toxic, it got harmful. It crossed into this place where no one is allowed to play really bad softball, right. So you know, I mean thinking about sports culture, and I often joke that I don't sport, and the reality is I'm actually not a terrible athlete, you know. I'm a really good rock climber, or I was back, you know, in my twenties and thirties and there are a lot of things I've done in my life, that physical things that I did that were that I was good at.

Growing up in the seventies and eighties, those glory years, um, you know, in a small town my summer sport was softball, right, and here's what it looked like: It was a rec league. Mom tried to remember to sign me up every year. I would grab my bat and my glove and ride my bike to the local park twice a week. We would hope that the coach would show up. We would hope that the coach wouldn't be drunk when they showed up. We’d practice for a couple of hours, right, well, he hollered at us from the sidelines and then, and it was the same group of girls, cause we all lived in the same area and we were two grades, right, because that's how it was set up. So we were, either the youngest or the oldest. And then on Saturday, mom would drive me to the ball field across town and sit there with a book and, you know, if I did something spectacular, she might look up and go and then we move on and it was fucking glorious. I played pitcher, I played catcher, I played first base, I played right field, I played, you know, all of it.

Melissa

Rode the pine.

Kemia

Poorly, at best, right. And it was so much fun. It was so much fun. Yeah, now again, I'm not dogging competition, right? And I'm not dogging… I'm not dogging anything, it's… I'm pointing to a gap. I'm pointing to a gap. I am not… I really, because I know I start seeing this and there's going to be a whole army of mamas with pitchforks lined up to burn me in effigy, because I am suggesting that a second grader who has chosen his sport and chosen his position on that sports team and has a private coach for it is somehow bad.

I'm not saying that, I'm saying where is the space for? And I'm also saying that the data do suggest that repetitive sports injuries are on the rise because of right, we evolved. Again, going back to how we evolved, right.

Melissa

Yeah, specializing.

Kemia

We evolved to do all the things and move in all the ways until such time as our bodies physically developed enough to to begin to specialize, right. The fact that we're seeing sports injuries, you know, orthopedic sports injuries that we didn't used to see until like pro ball, in teenagers. I think it is a harbinger. It's a, you know, it's a canary in the coal mine.

Melissa

Indicator, yeah.

Kemia

But I think the bigger challenge I see, and the thing I worry about, we're all out there lamenting adolescent mental health. We're wringing our hands even as we buy them iPhones at age seven. We are wringing our hands, collectively again, we are wringing our hands about social media, without remembering that at the end of the day, she who pays the bills gets to control where people who aren't paying the bills go in social media land. So for anybody whose kids are convincing them that everybody has social media, none of my kids do. My kids don't get iPhones until they are eighth grade, right, 13 years old, and the social media thing was a rule all the way through high school. I raised two… My first two boys never had social media. My younger two will not have social media while they live… And you know what? Wow, they were actually well-adjusted, fine, lots of friends did all the things. So you know it's a kid math. Now, Covid made it harder.

I'm going to acknowledge, Covid made everything harder. The point that I'm driving at here, though and I went off on a tangent is we keep pointing to that like, social media is the problem, like social media is somehow the thing that if we could fix it, then our kids wouldn't be having the… we wouldn't be seeing the adolescent mental health crisis that we're seeing. What I'm finding myself really curious about is, well, what do we think is the… When we say we have an adolescent mental health crisis, what is it actually that we're seeing? Right? We're seeing the tail end, right. Depression and profound anxiety, and, you know, sort of the pathology that requires intervention. That's what we're pointing to.

The question that I'm really interested in is what are the stressors right, or what are they lacking in terms of resourcing that is pushing towards this greater anxiety and depression. Because we have a generation of children who are being brought up with way, way, way too much trauma. Primary, secondary, vicarious, right? And not enough of all of some things that would allow them to navigate it more healthfully right? So, you know, connection mitigates trauma. That's our catchphrase at Lone Star. That is an absolute truth. How are we, where are we disrupting their natural tendencies to connect? Where is that process being short-circuited or injured? Right, their ability to connect with us, their ability to form connections with each other.

I don't think it's just social media. I also think, right when we start talking about resilience, which is a word that's getting weaponized an awful lot, and we say, well, we got to build resilience in our kids. Okay, you know what the best way to make sure somebody feels internally robust? Tell them to go be bad at a lot of things and let their ego find out it can survive it. Right? 

Melissa

Yes, yes, yes. Yeah.

Kemia

Let the ego develop right, I mean stress is good. Let the ego develop the capacity to be bad at things and take joy in being bad at it.

Melissa

Yeah, what do you think… I'm just thinking, you know, with you talking like so many of these kids are in, like, after school, they're at school all day and then they immediately go to these after school activities, sports, that type of thing, where you know they're there for hours, multiple days a week and then weekends. Like, you know, we used to travel to Dayton, which is, you're not from Ohio, but you know like an hour and a half. 

Kemia

I know where it is. I'm from Illinois, so I know what you're talking about.

Melissa

So, you know, there isn't a lot of time to connect as a family. Most families are, both parents are working, and by the time dinner rolls around with sports and that type of thing, we were lucky to all be eating at the same table. Um, so I think it's connected for sure, like this race to nowhere, that we're putting our kids on.

Kemia

I wasn't going to say it cause it sounds insulting, but since you brought it in, it's a super highway to nowhere.

Melissa

Yeah, and we're all on it.

Kemia

It's a super highway to nowhere we're opting in, right, and so the question then becomes do we see what we're opting into? Right? We have been sold a bill of goods. This is all fear-based. Look, fear is a sneaky little bitch. She is nothing but a thief. She is nothing but a thief. 

Melissa

A thief of joy. Yep, for sure.

Kemia

But fear will convince you that a lie is the truth. And that if you believe that lie, you will somehow be safe. And in this particular case, right, stay with me here. In this particular case, come in full circle to your client. What are we trying to keep safe? We're trying to keep our children safe. So we have bought into this collective lie that the only success that we can assure for our children, right, because we want our children to be successful. And we have a very narrow definition of success in America, and that crosses educational demographics, economic demographics is a very narrow definition. It means, and it's getting narrower, and that's the thing that really terrifies me, right. It's not just a four year degree followed by a graduate, it is a four-year degree at one of 10 schools, possibly five, depending on who you are, right? And the path into those schools is narrowing every day, and so we become hyper competitive on behalf of our children and it shows up in a lot of insidious ways.

I saw some advertisement, I don't watch television, but I saw some advertisement about like a cheerleader mom killing another cheerleader, or something like that, and I was like, “What the hell?” right, but it's that kind of thing. So I'm not talking about that even so much as what are the messages flow, repeated messages we are giving our children over time that says… implicitly or explicitly I think most of it is implicit that says that's the goal, and so let me curate every moment of your life in pursuit of that goal, because I love you. It's not done out of hate. I hate you, so I'm going to do this. No, it's done out of love and it's done out of only the type of fear that love can instill. 

Melissa

Yeah, I mean…

Kemia

That's a different kind of fear, right? That's the fear that has us standing next to their cribs to make sure they're breathing all night long. Only love can instill fear like that.

Melissa

Yeah, or having them so monitored that they're like on six different cameras and they've got a little SAO2 monitor on their foot that alarms in the middle of the night and makes you think your child's dead in the middle of the night. I mean talk about traumatic, like I'm going off on a tangent, but yeah, thinking about… 

Kemia

It's a good point, though, because we're normalizing these things. We're normalizing these, this hyper observed, hyper connected, hyper competitive, accelerated, like our kids get one childhood, yeah, one childhood. So I, for anybody who needs it, it is okay to tap out. Yeah, we jumped off the super highway to nowhere when my son, Joseph, my oldest son, who is now graduated from college, off doing the things right, um, when he was in the second grade and some of it was, I recognized it and some of it was I am not. Are you kidding me? I got my own life. I am not sitting and watching four baseball games with a bunch of kids who can't. I don't want to watch this shit. Even if you were good at it, I don't want to watch it. You know so, some of it was born of that.

Yeah, it was born of the reality of our lives, and then some of it was also born from um, from well, boy, now that I'm saying this out loud. Some of it's born from privilege, right, but I have the privilege of understanding and believing that I can extend my children's childhood and let them fail and figure it out. I don't. I don't have that added burden of… if they don't get it right, everything crumbles, right. And there are parents who live with that fear. So there's some, there's some…

I want to say there's some earned and unearned privilege baked into that statement, but the bigger part of it, though, I think, is we can choose to not be on the super highway to nowhere anymore, and it really, it's such a lie. So, Joseph right, first one going off to college. This was in, I should know when he graduated. I can't remember now. 2019, I think, 2018, 2019 from high school.

So you know, been a long, long, long time. He knew he wanted a smaller liberal arts college. That's fine, right? We did not do the thing that everybody does as a junior in high school, right? Which is go look at all the colleges and you know, do that.

I was like why am I going to take you somewhere if you're not in? That's stupid. I, yeah, again, I'm not for everybody. I was like I'll take you to a big school, I'll take you to a small school. You look at them, you decide what type of school you want. Then you do your research, you set off your applications. Once you're accepted we'll go look. But yeah, anyway. So that's how we did it.

Melissa

Yeah I love it.

Kemia

For anybody who wants a different path, that's how we did it. Did it that same way with my second son. Here's the thing that's interesting, though. So Joseph was academically a stronger student in high school than my second son, Jacob. Jacob graduated in the middle of COVID on top of it, and, and Joseph just had a lot more like extracurricular stuff, none of it sports, although he was really bad at a lot of things, including tennis, but he did a lot of other things that he was able to do. So when he narrowed his list down, he had some really really well known top 10 schools that he got into, and he ultimately ended up picking Middlebury, which was the perfect school for him, right? Most people have never even heard of it. That's fine. It's a little tiny liberal arts school in Vermont.

Melissa

I knew that, I was gonna say, I knew that. But I don’t know how.

Kemia

But great school, great school. But in that, whatever that US world ranking, you know the elite. Okay, yeah, so in all of this time, as we're going through this with Joseph, at no point in time did any school… Now we don't qualify for financial aid, so obviously that's a non-starter. But no school that he was applying to was offering scholarships to him. Right, so come along with Jacob now, right. He also… We did the same thing. Yeah, looked at some big schools, some small school. He's like no, I want a small. He's my farm boy, by the way, so, I want to stay in the Midwest, I want something small. So he starts applying. Now, right, he's got a couple of reach schools, because my belief is, if you're not getting rejected, you're not trying.

Melissa

Yeah, yeah if you're not failing you're not trying. 

Kemia

Right, ro he had a couple, but overall, like the, the reach schools for Jacob were probably more of a like a I'm going to get in here kind of school for Joseph, and then Jacob was like next tier down, so top 20 to 30 percent of schools, ranking. Eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars in total in scholarships offered to him across 12 different schools, or 14 schools, that he got accepted to. Now I didn't know this was a thing, first of all, because he wasn't applying for scholarships, but he applied to these schools and they're like oh yes, and based on, we will also give you this money to come here.

Melissa

Yeah, amazing.

Kemia

One tier down. One tier down. He's at Denison. You know Denison in Ohio.

Melissa

It's right in our backyard.

Kemia

Good, so I'll send him to you next time he's acting up.

Melissa

That works.

Kemia

So he’s getting a fabulous education. 

Melissa

Yeah, that's awesome.

Kemia

But you see what I'm driving at here.

Melissa

Yeah, oh yeah.

Kemia

Right, we have… Who's telling us this as parents? Whose having these conversations and saying chill out.

There are a lot of ways for children to figure out and, frankly, my last two may decide not to go to college at all. I got one who just rebuilt the truck. He's 13 years old. He's in the process of rebuilding a truck that he swindled out of a farmer. It was out in the middle of a farm field. He comes home, he's like hey, mama, I had my eye on that truck for a while. I'm like you are 13, what do you mean? Abandoned truck out in the middle of a field, right. And he says well, I saw the farmer out there today. So I went and I offered him 500 bucks for it and he told me if I could get it out, I could have it. 

Melissa

That's amazing. 

Kemia

It's running. It now has brakes. He rebuilt the front. The bench front's got like a billion miles on it. He rebuilt the front seat and then he sewed the thing to go on the front seat, right.

Okay, go be bad at things, go be bad at a lot of things. 

Melissa

That's amazing. That's so amazing.

Kemia

You know there are so many ways. Now, what does this have to do with anything? The more we narrow, I think, the less sturdy we are.

Melissa

It makes sense.

Kemia

We become sturdier. I don't even want to use the word resilient. We become sturdier when we are expanding our capacity to problem solve, figure things out when we're given permission to go figure it out. 

Melissa

Yeah, yeah, it's so interesting. I have some flexes from when my kids were younger, like I don't know if you remember at one point I was going to, like, meet the teacher night and they had this program. I don't even remember the name of it, but it was basically so that I could receive all the text messages about my children's assignments and tests and that type of thing… 

Kemia

Is it called the program from hell? I graduated from elementary school.

Melissa

That's what I said, I raised my hand and I was like “How do we opt out of this?” Because I don't want… like I already took history and I already took this science, and the teacher was like “I think you might be the first person to ever ask me that” I'm like “Yes, I am opting out.”

Kemia

Would you like me to give you another one? 

Melissa

Yeah, do it. 

Kemia

So I love this, and really y'all just for your listeners. Like I'm offering these stories not because I'm cool, because I'm really not and I'm not very well liked sometimes, I'm offering these stories because nobody ever tells us these things.

Melissa

Yeah, right, my clients hear this all the time. Chill the fuck out, calm the fuck down.

Kemia

What I hope is that by hearing that some, you know, some mama did this and it's okay and the kids are all right that maybe you get to it gives you permission to explore a little bit, to let go of a little bit of fear and experiment with maybe giving kids a little bit more oxygen to be bad. So listen, here's the thing. I come from a family of educators. There are a few things that I think are more valuable than good education, and education is very expansive to me. So I am not dogging education, right, I am all about education. I'm also the daughter of immigrant, of course, I'm all about education, right. If we want to just go ahead and go down that path. 

And when we start looking at best elementary, middle school, high school educational data, not practices, the actual data one of the first things you will find out is that homework is bullshit. 

Melissa

Oh yeah. Preaching to the choir.

Kemia

Homework is bullshit. It does absolutely nothing to enhance or improve learning. It does absolutely nothing to reinforce whatever lesson was taught that day. It does nothing. There are no benefits and enormous, enormous detriment to homework, especially nonspecific homework, meaning that it's not attached to a very carefully thoughtfully curated project, prior to high school. Okay, all right, don't believe me, go to Dr. Google, he'll give you all the data on this. All right, so I know this, I know this going in. So we're in a very good and, you know, sought public school. 

Melissa

Yeah, us too.

Kemia

Believer we're in the public education system.

Melissa

Same.

Kemia

And one of the things that I started… Why is my kindergartner coming home with homework? Why is my first grade second? So you know, Joseph firstborn, go in having the conversations with the teachers. They're like well, it's expected in a district of this type that the children have homework so that, so that, so that, right. So what does that tell me? That tells me that an educational decision is being put in place not in the interest of the child, but to shut the parents up.

Melissa

 Who are like my kid needs to have homework.

Kemia

Because it is the expectation, because the parents don't know better, right, because what? What is our internalized process? Is that if we're not striving, yeah, we're useless, right? So somewhere about halfway through kindergarten year, with Joseph, with my oldest, I went back and talked to his kindergarten teacher and she's like, well, he's not turning in his homework. I said, oh yeah, that's because I throw it away every night.

Melissa

I told you she was a bad-ass people. She scoffed at it. It's true.

Kemia

I throw it away. And the next year, when I first went to meet the teacher night with the first graders, I said listen, I love you. I love teachers. You are my favorite people in the world. Please do not take this as insulting or lack of concern or care, but we both know that homework is bullshit. And so when my kid does not bring back his homework, please know that it is that when you send it home, with all love and respect, I am taking it out of his backpack and throwing it in the trash. Every single time. Because what we are going to do instead is– He's just been here for eight, nine hours, right, he's six. 

Melissa

Yeah, we're gonna play. 

Kemia

We're gonna play, we're gonna read, we're to sit down and have dinner at probably six o'clock, and at seven o'clock he's going to be heading to bed. And he's going to be asleep by seven-thirty, because he's six and he needs 10 hours of sleep still. 

Melissa

Yeah, wow. Amazing.

Kemia

And the teachers would kind of look at me. Now, I developed a reputation pretty quickly, so, and I'm not for everyone, so I think some of them who agreed with me would like deliberately take my kids, and others were like just leave this rough woman out of my classroom. Um, but all of my kids. This has been the rule. What do kids need? They need to hear you reading to them, and you want the bonus? They need to see you reading for fun on your own.

Melissa

Yeah, oh, I love that. I love to read so yes. 

Kemia

And your husband or your spouse or your partner right. They also need to see men, in my family. They need to see men reading for fun and pleasure on their own, not just reading to them. That actually has been shown to have some benefits. Homework? No. Fuck it.

Melissa

No, not so much, fuck it.

Kemia

Set it on fire, throw it away. Tell the truth, so your kid doesn't get in trouble. I mean, at least you know, own it. I'm the problem, it’s me. 

Melissa

Own it, exactly. I will say, both of the boys did have multiple teachers who were on the no homework train and you know this was before I had found coaching and before I knew that we were on a race to nowhere and I was like wow, like no homework at all. Okay, you know, and I kept telling Owen, at some point it's going to get harder, buddy, you're going to have to like work harder and that type of thing. And he finally, as a freshman in college this year, is like mom, calculus is hard. Like yes. Yes, it is. 

Kemia

Good, good! Oh, I'm excited for him that it's hard. That means that he's catching up with his native abilities. That's awesome, that's awesome, go do the hard shit. I'll take a hard C over an easy A every day.

Melissa

Yeah, God. If that was the message, though God, that would be so revolutionary.

Kemia

Yeah, but why isn't it the message?

Melissa

Right, I know I'm agreeing with you. 

Kemia

It's our message. 

Melissa

Yeah, yeah, yeah, true, true, true.

Kemia

But you know, I mean that in the most generous sense, like we're the goddamn parents.

Melissa

Yeah, that's true. True, you got me.

Kemia

This has got to be the message that we're sharing, along with the message that you know, yes, there's so much “Yes and” in this.  Yes we can do all and we can continue to strive for excellence. It is more that, look, we're seeing how it's impacted us. We're seeing the price. You and I are seeing the price every day. I see the price every time I step into… You know we go, we do these three day leadership intensives for these enormous organizations, and I see and hear and feel the price that they are, have and continue to pay, and there's always going to be a price. I'm not suggesting there shouldn't be. I'm suggesting that somewhere along the way, we started putting the price off on our kids. We started asking them to pay, and the price they're paying is their childhood. The price they're paying is the opportunity to learn what it is to be bored. And set a fire, build a fire and set a fire and play with a knife, and fall out of a tree and get lost.

Melissa

Yeah, they don't have the opportunity to get lost anymore.

Kemia

You know, there's some great research around that too, right? Like in the 90s, I can't remember who were the data scientists who collected this, but he went back in time and tried to like, piece together what was a child's radius in the 1950s, which was approximately five miles, or you know. You know, then, what happened over the decades, right.

So in in the 70s and it shrunk to about two and a half. That's still pretty decent, right, yeah, but what else happened in the 70s and early 80s, right, was a couple of really high profile kidnappings.

Melissa

Yeah, Adam. Never forget it.

Kemia

And so all of a sudden everybody in the country was very afraid of the paper dragon, your kids going to be kidnapped by a stranger, and not at all aware of the real dragon, which is your children's development is stunted by the fact that you are watching them every second of the day.

Melissa

Constantly, yeah.

Kemia

Right, or protecting them or bubble wrapping them. So that's the real danger. And the circumference started to shrink, and that was the way I was looking for, started to shrink and shrink, and shrink, and shrink, and and the last data point I saw because I was using this for the development of some public health programs in 2008 and 2009, was that by the late 90s early odds, it had shrunk to 20 feet.

Melissa

Oh for the love of God.

Kemia

20 feet, and that within those 20 feet, 90% of children are observed at all times, meaning that parental eyes are on them.

Melissa

Wow, no way. No. And I think, what my observation has been, and you may disagree, but the more that we hear through the global and 24 hour news cycle, like we're hearing all these terrible things that are happening to people, and not to say that they're not happening, but I think that in some way, shape or form, terrible things have been happening forever, but we just didn't necessarily hear about it immediately and over a 24 hour news cycle.

Kemia

Incessantly.

Melissa

Yeah, so again, like trying to talk people out of being fearful of something that they've been made to be afraid of, it's nearly impossible to do. 

Kemia

Well, nervous systems don't ever rest. So you know, coming back to this, the very opening, right. To be immersed in suffering and loss and not be impacted, right. Well, I think the same is true when we just take it out of the medical profession and look at the human profession. Right, we are immersed in suffering and loss and harm and fear. And the question becomes what is the price?

Now my ethics says that I will bear witness. And I also know and understand that there are places I can titrate my dose. I can titrate my dose of news, I can titrate my dose of social media. You know, doom scroll, I can. I can titrate my dose. I have choice in that. I can also begin to ask myself about these fears that are sort of coming up and is it… It may be a real fear. How probable a fear is. So it may be something that's very real but has a, you know, 0.0001 probability. Well, is it worth stunting my child's development for 0.001 probability no matter how real the fear may be. So everything, there is no safe. I mean, maybe if we just start with that, safety is an illusion.

Melissa

True.

Kemia

Safety is an illusion, y'all. I hate to think that I'm the first person who ever taught you that. But safety is not real, it is an illusion. Now we live with that illusion because we'd all be under the bed sucking our thumb, right? So when we can say, okay, safety is an illusion. So when we can say, okay, safety is an illusion. And therefore I get to choose about what allows me to feel more safe, allows me to feel my children are more safe right, that's helpful.

But being immersed in all of this, what does it do? Well, it primes the pump. So when we're absorbing this all the time, that system becomes primed and the system that's scanning in the background for a face eating bear can very easily hear a sound react as if it's a face eating bear, and then I turn around, it's just it's a chipmunk. But I'm already gone, I'm already off to the races.

Melissa

Yeah, yeah, yeah, my God, we could talk forever, couldn't we? 

Kemia

I think we just did. I'm so over time, I'm sure.

Melissa

I want to say one more thing, though, because I think it's making me think about, like the mental health crisis with kids, like they are exposed to this 24 hour news cycle and exposed to, like, I mean my young adult children are almost in like doomsday, like, because they believe that the planet isn't going to be here for them when they're my age.

And you know, I mean I don't know if that's true or not. I certainly believe in climate change and you know that humans have a role to play in it, but, like, I think that, you know, they just… I sense a sense of like helplessness, hopelessness that I don't know how to, how to mitigate. You know, it's like, other than to say, like safety is an illusion, and it always has been. And you know, I mean, I don't know if that helps. 

Kemia

The danger is going to come from where you least expect it, right? I mean, yeah, we put up all of these safeguards and your listeners don't know this, but you do, right, my oldest son, when he was 13, I diagnosed him with leukemia, right. So you do all of the things. You make the homemade baby food, you do the thing, you know you prevent, you prevent, you prevent, and then the fucking danger crawls out of their bone marrow. So the danger, the danger isn't, and Joseph's fine, as you know and I want everybody else to know.

And the danger is rarely exactly where we think it is, especially these sort of existential dangers. The question becomes how do we live fully in love with this one life? What does that look like for you? What does that look like for your children? In our family, that meant really choosing to opt out of the super highway to nowhere, right, and so it's going to mean different things to everyone. Maybe it's opting out of some portions of it.

That's great. What matters to you and to your family and your children, not what does fear? The problem with fear is it always sides with the thing we're most afraid of, right, I mean, that's how it wins, and so I think we just get to be more and more honest with each other.

There's no one right way to do this, but I do think that the exposure matters, and so, particularly with our kids, when we're allowing their very high dose exposure to all of this toxic stress right aren't giving them enough of what they need, including things like rest and places to fail and see that that's not the end, and places to be bad at things and right, and also just basic developmental things, right, like like learning to navigate danger. We're supposed to be doing that from the time they're tiny. What are the dangers every child is supposed to learn to navigate? Going too fast, getting lost, playing with sharp objects, playing with fire and climbing to great heights.

Melissa

Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't forget drowning.

Kemia

Yeah, well, we're gonna set that one over here, but those five things they are absolutely supposed to learn how to actively navigate, but if we never allow them to use a real knife to cut the carrots.

Melissa

Yeah, they're never gonna learn.

Kemia

Because we're afraid of a nick, then I will tell you. They come to my house to babysit as high schoolers and they don't know how to cut up an apple and I'm like, well, I can't leave you in charge.

Melissa

That's amazing.

Kemia

Girl, I got a story for everything.

Melissa

I know you do. Okay, tell my listeners if they want to learn more about you, if they're physicians, if they're physician coaches, if they want to know more about Lodstar, how do people find you?

Kemia

Lodestar L-O-D-E-S-T-A-R-P-C.com. Lodestarpc.com

Melissa

I love it and your stuff is all over that. And I have a feeling that people are going to love this podcast and I have a feeling we're…

Kemia

Or hate it. There'll be some who hate it. Let's just own that right out of the gate.

Melissa

They're fine, they can scroll on and listen to somebody else. Okay, but like I said, we could talk forever, so we'll see. I'll ask them if they want other stories, other help and that type of thing, and I would love to have you back on at some point if you're up for that.

Kemia

Always. It was so lovely spending time with you.

Melissa

Yeah, same same girl. Same same same.

Kemia

All right, Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. Thanks for creating this.

Melissa

Yeah, you're so welcome. Thank you, thank you.

Alright, bye guys. We’ll see you next week.

Hey, everybody, don't go quite yet. I want to let you know all the ways that you can work with me.

If you've been listening to this podcast and maybe especially you have listened to episodes where I interview my clients, and you are thinking like the older woman in the diner in the classic Meg Ryan, Billy Crystal film, When Harry Met Sally... In the film, Sally is proving a point to Harry by faking an orgasm while in public at a diner. Sally finishes, so to speak, and then takes a bite of her food. The older woman in the next booth says, "I'll have what she's having." If you've been thinking, "I'll have what she's having," this is your sign from the universe to schedule a consult with me.

I have a few spots available for one-on-one coaching with me. This is a space where I am laser focused on you and your brain for six months at a time. I will also be doing consults with women who want to join my next group coaching cohort, which will likely start in the spring of 2024. The way to contact me is to go to my website, melissaparsonscoaching.com, go to the Work with Me page and click “book now” to schedule your consult. I will look forward to hearing from you. Let's make 2024 your favorite year ever as you become Your Favorite You.