EP74: Loving Hard with Symphonie Smith, PhD

Hello, this is Jodi White, and you're listening to Journals of a Love Addict.

Be careful what you're good at because you might end up doing it for the rest of your life.

I heard this quote nearly 20 years ago in a yoga workshop.

Back then, I was working in the magazine publishing industry on the advertising side of the business, or ad sales as it's called, and I hated it.

It just was not a fit for me.

even though by that time I had been doing it for more than a decade.

But this quote stuck with me because what I heard in it was, be careful of what's good enough because you could stay stuck in good enough for the rest of your life.

I knew I wanted to change careers, but I was terrified to do it.

And I also knew that I couldn't keep doing what I was doing.

It took a few years after that yoga workshop, but I finally made the leap and went back to graduate school to be a therapist.

And now, here I am, 17 years after that, with a podcast talking to you about love addiction and recovery and everything that goes with all of it.

But last spring, I sent an email to my newsletter subscribers with a subject line that read, be careful what you're good at.

And I shared this story about the yoga workshop and working in my first career.

And then I asked them, my readers, what they wanted to stop doing.

I received a lot of responses.

And one of those responses was from Dr. Symphony Smith, who not only shared with me a few things that she wanted to stop doing, but also shared with me how Pia Melody's work found her during a dark time in her life and how finding Pia's work then led her to journals of a love addict.

And then the role that Pia's work and the podcast have played in her recovery.

If you've been listening to me here on this podcast for a while, you know I love talking with other therapists who are in recovery.

So I invited Dr. Smith to join me for this episode.

Dr. Symphony Smith is a marriage and family therapist with more than 12 years of experience and the founder of Personal Space Self-Centering Therapy.

She created the self-centering framework, which is a family systems approach built through her work with women navigating over-functioning with a particular focus on the superwoman burden carried by Black women.

And this framework helps her clients shift the relational patterns that lead to over-functioning without abandoning the people they love.

Dr. Smith was also, like me, diagnosed with ADHD about a year ago.

And like me, she is in the process of learning more about women and ADHD and looking at how ADHD might contribute to the symptoms of love addiction.

Let's get started with Dr. Symphony Smith as she shares about her recent ADHD diagnosis and what she's been studying and learning about the topic of women and ADHD.

Hello, this is Jodi White, and you're listening to Journals of a Love Addict.

Be careful what you're good at because you might end up doing it for the rest of your life.

I heard this quote nearly 20 years ago in a yoga workshop.

Back then, I was working in the magazine publishing industry on the advertising side of the business, or ad sales as it's called, and I hated it.

It just was not a fit for me.

even though by that time I had been doing it for more than a decade.

But this quote stuck with me because what I heard in it was, be careful of what's good enough because you could stay stuck in good enough for the rest of your life.

I knew I wanted to change careers, but I was terrified to do it.

And I also knew that I couldn't keep doing what I was doing.

It took a few years after that yoga workshop, but I finally made the leap and went back to graduate school to be a therapist.

And now, here I am, 17 years after that, with a podcast talking to you about love addiction and recovery and everything that goes with all of it.

But last spring, I sent an email to my newsletter subscribers with a subject line that read, be careful what you're good at.

And I shared this story about the yoga workshop and working in my first career.

And then I asked them, my readers, what they wanted to stop doing.

I received a lot of responses.

And one of those responses was from Dr. Symphony Smith, who not only shared with me a few things that she wanted to stop doing, but also shared with me how Pia Melody's work found her during a dark time in her life and how finding Pia's work then led her to journals of a love addict.

And then the role that Pia's work and the podcast have played in her recovery.

If you've been listening to me here on this podcast for a while, you know I love talking with other therapists who are in recovery.

So I invited Dr. Smith to join me for this episode.

Dr. Symphony Smith is a marriage and family therapist with more than 12 years of experience and the founder of Personal Space Self-Centering Therapy.

She created the self-centering framework, which is a family systems approach built through her work with women navigating over-functioning with a particular focus on the superwoman burden carried by Black women.

And this framework helps her clients shift the relational patterns that lead to over-functioning without abandoning the people they love.

Dr. Smith was also, like me, diagnosed with ADHD about a year ago.

And like me, she is in the process of learning more about women and ADHD and looking at how ADHD might contribute to the symptoms of love addiction.

Let's get started with Dr. Symphony Smith as she shares about her recent ADHD diagnosis and what she's been studying and learning about the topic of women and ADHD.