But I feel like since both of us started there, we should start there.

Okay, we'll dive straight in.

It is so interesting because writing Into Me See, this book has had me tell my story and it had been a decade since I'd really been an advocate telling my story.

So it's interesting to be back here from this new space.

But little me, little Lisha.

Grew up Midwest.

My mom met the stepdad.

So I want to make sure that we do touch on them because that is part of the entire transformational experience here.

Mm

...

but that was happening.

We didn't know until I was, later, until I was almost 50.

And, um, and endometriosis.

So all of that stuff was happening, and I actually kind of flipped out on the place I was getting treatment.

They were gonna give me a cone biopsy and radiation ball, and they had to have this special instrument to cut, cut me.

Um, and so then after that period of time, when, when did you start moving perhaps more into the, I don't want to say the ac- academic side of things, but you know, the, the more coaching, therapy, that kind of thing?

At

the time, in group therapy, we'd go in and everyone would share the horrors of what happened to them.

And we knew that we weren't alone in what happened to us.

But we were also bunched.

I was, you know, an early teenager.

So I was bunched in with people that were having a lot of sex and doing a lot of drugs at the time.

And I wasn't there yet in my journey.

I wanted to just pull something out that I've been thinking about back at the very start of our conversation, Lisha, you mentioned, because I think that this is a, this might be something that's important to talk about you mentioned that your experiences were sporadic your experiences of abuse were sporadic versus you know having happening daily on you know for a number of years um and i'm just i'm just wondering how how or if you feel the fact that it was sporadic maybe impacted you for your own individual experience versus somebody who, you know, were there, are there any differences or anything that's come up that you feel that sporadicness made a difference for better or worse for you? You

What does it look like when someone is technically functional, but maybe they're not very successful, but they're still making major decisions from survival rather than from what she actually wants?

Thank you for that question.

I think that so often we look at people and success and we say, well, if they make a lot of money, then that means that they're doing really good.

Or if they have a marriage and on the outside, it looks like it's the perfect marriage.

That means that they're, they got it all together.

They got it figured out.

Or if, they have the perfect house with the Pinterest aesthetic, then they're doing great.

So what gets lost when someone has spent years adapting themselves to survive and how do they begin reclaiming it?

So what do you mean by that statement? And why is that message important?

It's so important because when you get, you know, you can have the abuse or you can have the trauma and the trauma becomes some people's identity.

But other people, they're like, no, I want to heal this trauma, right? So they do the self-help.

They go to the therapy.

They're looking for the problem.

They become experts at digging for what's wrong with them, what's wrong with their week, how they could have done something better.

And that I becomes their identity, right? They're healing from something.

How can they begin releasing those beliefs and developing healthy self-compassion with themselves?