103: She Was Groomed and Abused By This "Spiritual Healer" - Then She Exposed Him with Lauren Geertsen

I was first diagnosed with ulcerative colitis when I was 14 years old, and the medical industry did its best to kill me. Over the next four years, I didn't know any better than to listen to my doctors. I was even having a conversation with a life insurance broker the other day, and we caught on to the subject of children's illness. It's almost like I forgot that others don't think this way. This man was an evil wizard. There are those people in this world who use those dark arts, black magic and curses. They know what they're doing and they use it. Every single pharmaceutical, I believe, does that. And it's not healthy to enable our tolerance of a dysfunctional environment, but it serves a purpose to bring us to a breaking point. I learned how to heal myself through a nutritional protocol. I quit all my pharmaceuticals. I went to a nutrition school and trained as a holistic nutritionist and began my journey into supporting other people's physical healing journey. Hi, and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan, and today I sit down with author and coach Lauren Geertsen. I have long considered Lauren an ally on many subjects, including the shadow of feminism and health reclamation, specifically the transformation of autoimmune diagnoses. But today we sit down to talk about her most recent book called The Scorpion and the Lion, which is a memoir of what could very easily be described as narcissistic abuse by an authority figure. And she very artfully takes us from the seemingly irresistible version of the story that paints her as victim all the way through to the redemption, the pain to purpose experience of alchemy that is available when we are ready to recognize the deep meaning and specificity of our struggles and experiences. of what we would describe as abuse. So if this is a part of your story, a part of your narrative, where you look back on a relationship or maybe even you're in one now, that can be described as a power over experience of unwanted domination and control. This story will crack open a new vista of possibility for transformation. Enjoy. Hi, Lauren, and welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Kelly. It's so great to chat with you. Amazing. So I was like chatting your ear off before we pressed record. And I want to, first of all, set the stage for what I'd like to focus on in our conversation today, which is just the neat and easily packaged topic of what love is. So we're going to figure that out by the end of our session here. And I want to talk a little bit about your journey and the journey that we have shared. I think of it almost like walking up the rungs of Maslow's hierarchy from health reclamation to feminine reclamation and this soulful path that you and I both believe we chose at some point in the interlife or beyond and that we are having the experience and privilege of living out. but I really want to showcase your latest book, which is called The Scorpion and the Lion. You sent like a sample, I don't know what it was, of your audio recording. It was like a small sample. And I have a stack on my desk at any given time of probably like 10, 15 books that I've been asked to like check out or endorse or whatever. And I already am a fan of your work. And so, you know, it worked its way up to the top of my to-do list. And I think I listened to, I don't know, five minutes of your audio recording of the book before I ran to Amazon, ran to Audible and bought the entire thing. And I listened to it in like two days walking around my neighborhood. It was so, so, so compelling. And the reason that I want to have this conversation with you specifically is because I could talk to all sorts of ladies about challenging relationships and what you learn from those challenging relationships and how like heartache breaks us open and all the things. But you and I share a worldview that I will summarize as being predicated on the role of victim consciousness in personal empowerment and personal experience. And that's why I want to talk to you about what so many women are experiencing in romantic and erotic dynamics with men in the world today that without this frame could allow them to sink even deeper into that abyss of powerlessness and the trauma field of these old habits of caretaking and codependency and just violation and betrayal and all the rest. So let's start out with your sort of the architecture of your journey and what started with your at such a young age, your experience with that fork in the road around, you know, conventional medicine versus health reclamation and how you resolve that to walk forward into this, let's say, next phase of your journey. So I want to I want to rewind the tape a bit. Yeah, it's a very archetypal path where it started with gaining my health back and having a health crisis. And then that led to the deeper spiritual awakenings in my journey. But I was bedridden with autoimmune disease by the time I was 18. My body very thoroughly kicked me out of a life that was not suited to my soul. And just, it was such a gift, although I didn't realize it at the time. But that is the gift when chronic illness reaches a peak and you can't live a life that's not meant for you. I was first diagnosed with ulcerative colitis when I was 14 years old. And the medical industry did its best to kill me over the next four years. I didn't know any better than to listen to my doctors. And I was also talk about another archetypal experience. I was the symptom to be silenced in my family. I grew up in a very emotionally abusive home with a narcissistic parent and a codependent parent. And so I was their symptom to be silenced because my body and my soul was expressing what was wrong in this dynamic and the lack of love. And instead of recognizing that both, they didn't recognize it, I didn't recognize it. So I allowed myself to be silenced first through the medical industry and the pharmaceutical approaches for four years. And that just didn't work. It just made me sicker. I want to double click on this, Lauren, because while this may be a very familiar concept to us, I was even having a conversation with a life insurance broker the other day, and we caught on to the subject of children's illness, right? Because his kid is struggling with something. And I said, you know, this may sound funny, but I've come to believe that when children are struggling with their health, that it's almost always, if not always, a reflection of the parent's stuff, right? So they seemed open to it, and I really just thought, it's almost like I forgot that others don't think this way. And how easy it is to get focused on the kid's problem, right? And the ready pathologizing of the kid's symptoms and also the authentic concern, the genuine concern that a parent might have for their child's well-being. And to never consider the possibility that the kid is expressing like the festering wound that is the parents probably almost always, at least in family constellations, always the mother. dysfunction and their unexamined emotional material. And what's funny is that when I was in my conventional training, I learned the phrase identified patient in a family structure, right? So like in family therapy, even in the conventional world, there is something called the identified patient, which means that that is the individual in the family system who everyone's decided is the patient, but it's a system-wide issue. So even in that world, there's an understanding of this, but somehow it's very easy to lose sight of that and to imagine that the kid is something independently broken to be fixed. And so I love your referencing that and just bringing us back to awareness of the systemic nature of these struggles. Yeah. So important to put a pin on that one. And I would say largely it can reflect the parental dynamic and the parents. And there's also an aspect of it reflecting the culture or the school system or other aspects. But I can feel like some of your listeners recoiling a little bit because it's so much responsibility to take on that my child is a mirror for my energy in a very large way. That is true. and that's a theme in your book, right? I am responsible for my experience and if we're a parent, I'm not, I haven't chosen that path in this lifetime but what I will say is when I get requests from new clients for me to work with their children, usually it's their teenage daughter. People know I had an eating disorder growing up or when I was younger, I was getting myself out of the medical system. So they will come to me with children who are in those struggles and they want me to work with the child. And I will say, I will do one session with the child for every three I do with you. That's the agreement. And it might be surprising or might not be that a good deal of those parents will run the other way instead of deep diving into the work that they need to do to support their child. Yeah, so it's a taste of that codependent dynamic where, yeah, there is almost a subconscious need for the child to be the one. Right, to fix. Obviously, overtly expressed through like, you know, much has a kind of phenomenon. Yes. So I'm the symptom to be silenced. I go through the medical industry. I get really poisoned with pharmaceuticals and they don't work the way that they were supposed to work. The way I see pharmaceuticals is they just enable a person's tolerance of a dysfunctional environment longer. Every single pharmaceutical, I believe, does that. And it's not healthy to enable our tolerance of a dysfunctional environment, but it serves a purpose to bring us to a breaking point. And the breaking point is where we choose to change our environment. For me, that was when I was 18. I had a moment I was laying in bed. I had dropped out of college. I couldn't have a social life. I couldn't do anything I love to do. And I was questioning if my life was worth living. and I had a moment of very powerful divine grace where it was just like the breath of God moved through me. And I opened a book of devotions on my bedside table that said, open to the verse, I know the plans that I have for you, says the Lord, plans to prosper, not to harm you, plans to give you hope in a future. And I grew up in a very religious home, not resonating with much of religion, but there are those moments where the Spirit speaks. It speaks to the spirit and the still small voice within a person. And that was a turning point for me. I, within a few days, discovered the specific carbohydrate diet, which is like the GAPS diet. I learned how to heal myself through a nutritional protocol. And I just felt so empowered and liberated. I quit all my pharmaceuticals. I went to a nutrition school and trained as a holistic nutritionist. and thus began my journey into supporting other people's physical healing journey. Amazing. So when we reconnect with the body and get on the same team, right, as our bodies, there is some life force returned, right? And I like to think of it as like sending this signal of safety to the system that allows for enough capacity, maybe even just on a nervous system level to start to explore dynamics, relationships, jobs, vocation, purpose that you would have otherwise been in an arrested state of development had you gone down, perhaps, who knows, right? But had you gone down the pharmaceutical path, you know, just engaging in this erotic caress of the enemy all the time, every day, all day, your doctor's appointments, your meds, your episodes, right? So you opted out of that and suddenly you have this reconnection to your God channel. You have this orientation towards your life and you begin to explore the world of romantic dynamics and romantic relationships. And what I love about your story, which I want to get into now, is that, of course, the journey is not over once you're healthy. Right. It's like it's in many ways, as was the case for me, when the soul seems to have permission to to actually occupy the vessel and where you begin what it is that you came here to explore as a human being in a body relating to other human beings and exploring what intimacy even means, what, you know, sexuality even means, what love even is. And your story is extraordinary. Obviously, you detail it with such artistry in this book. It's so compelling. It's like literally the definition of a page turner. And I listened to it and that was my experience. And I want to sort of give the overarching signposts because I know that women listening will recognize many aspects, not specifically, perhaps, but many aspects of what it is that you've been through. So give us a bit of a window into the relationships that you describe in this tale that is your life. Yeah, it was a pretty dramatic entrance into the world of romance. And for me, getting physically healthy was actually just getting to a point in my frequency where I could go deeper in my soul growth. So I never see that as, oh, I was healthy. And then it was like, no, it's all about it. When we get to a place of physical health, we are vibrating differently. We can access higher states of consciousness, different states of cognition and emotional processing. And it just, you know, for me, that was just a continuation of my healing journey. Now that I knew how to listen to the still small voice in me, and it was the still small voice in me that led me into what seemed like such darkness. But in the end, it led me right out. So I was meant to walk through hell and out the other side. And that's where we get out of the victim consciousness. When women think they've done something wrong by getting into these dark situations. No, because for so many of us, we know we have the soul connection with a person. And there was like, there is this sense when it happens that this is meant to be. It is meant to be. It's not meant to be forever. It's meant to be a lesson. It's meant to be part of the soul's evolution. And so my story was, okay, here I am. Now I'm 21. I have been training as a holistic nutritionist and in the nutrition world for a while, I start to see a pretty renowned practitioner in Seattle. And his name is John Janice. Just I like to get the name out there. In the book, I use a pseudonym. I call him Jay, so I'll do that for the rest of the recording. But he was a lead instructor at the nutrition school I attended. And then he was also this well-known practitioner in Seattle. So I start to see him. And within just a couple sessions, he has utilized the playbook that I would later learn. He used on many many young clients and students to get them to a place of trauma bonding of vulnerability opening up and then going to his house And he would forcibly or through coercion initiate sexual abuse. And I was 21. I was so naive. I was so new to the world. I mean, I had been uber religiously homeschooled, sheltered child to come out of that, to come into this situation where I was being groomed by my healthcare practitioner who was almost 60 and I was 21. Crazy age gap. But what I did recognize, I didn't recognize the grooming, the coercion, the lack of choice. I didn't recognize that this wasn't a relationship. It was an exploitation ship. Our relationship requires fully informed consent and choice. What I did recognize at the time was there was a very palpable soul connection. For me, it was actually a revocable memory of past lives. For me, that is as real as the hand I hold in front of my face. Many people have different perspectives on that. I am a very old soul child. I was one of those children who the spirit world was almost more palpable and real to me. It made more sense than the physical world. And so for me, that's what past lives are. I know the sky's blue because I see it. I know past lives are real because I remember it and I feel it. So there was a soul agreement between us. And not to get into too much detail, but just I guess the overview of the story here was I experienced the archetype of psychopathic abuse, not just narcissistic abuse. I know you might have you don't like to use that term it is something i use to draw patterns so sea moss has become quite a thing lately and i love myself a therapeutic food over a supplement any day but there's sea moss and then there's my fave samadhi sea moss so most people don't realize that mineral deficiency is one of the biggest drivers of imbalance whether you're experiencing that as fatigue or weight gain or cravings so unless you're growing your own food it doesn't contain almost by definition, the spectrum of minerals that our ancestors enjoyed. So that's why I am excited about Samadhi Seamoss. It's not your typical store-bought rope-farmed Seamoss. It's 100% wild, and it's harvested by Caribbean divers from super clean waters, ensuring purity and also ecological respect. It contains over 90 bioavailable minerals and vitamins, many of which are hard to get even in a very high quality diet. Plus, it's a natural collagen booster and prebiotic, making it an effortless way to support the gut, your skin and your overall vitality. So I take one to two tablespoons a day in warm water that I also put a little bit of sea salt in and lime or lemon. Key lime is actually my favorite. And I noticed a shift in my digestion after just a week. The best part is that it tastes like nothing, which makes it super easy to add to your routine. So if you want to experience the benefits yourself, Samadhi is offering 10% off with the code KELLY10. Check out the link in show notes and enjoy. So psychiatry is helpful for pattern recognition and not for ideology, nor for treatment recommendations, if I could be so bold as to say. But yeah, no, for the purposes of our conversation. I mean, I might even ask you ask you how you conceive of that pattern, but we can also get to that. Yeah. So to go back to my story in this, this psychopath archetype was an individual who I would describe as the heart is completely dead. There's no energy in the heart. Whereas more of the classic narcissist, I see that intuitively and emotionally and psychologically, I see that they have a heart there, but they are choosing to separate themselves from that truth and that energy because it would compel them to so much uncomfortable change and loss of ego identity. The psychopath does not have that conundrum because they have no heart energy. It truly is evil. This is another dynamic we can discuss because there is evil and at the biggest spiritual level, there's no victimhood. Now that's a tricky one to negotiate, but I experienced that firsthand. Yeah. And I hear you defining it similarly to how I have, which is, you know, because in the activist world, there's so many who are preoccupied with those who are doing evil, right? And the commitment that I've had over these years to maturing my system into one that does not blame and defend for my own benefit, because it feels better for me to live my life this way. It has allowed me to look at so-called evil as being an experience of disconnection that you're describing, right? Like you're saying there's no heart energy to me. I hear there's a disconnection from God, right? There's a disconnection from spirit. There's a disconnection of that open vitalizing channel that integrates all of these different internal aspects into a coherent whole on some level, right? I hear you referring to it the same way. Yeah. The interesting thing there is the more disconnected that we could say, quote, perpetrator is from source, the more they give the opportunity to us to reconnect, because it takes that much more intention and power and purpose to reconnect after an experience of such disconnection to heal from that, because there is an imprint of disconnection that is left energetically and psychically after a close encounter with somebody like that. Where you're subsumed right into their field. Yeah. And it is there. I mean, there are aspects of what I would call spiritual evil, demonic influences that can be at play because it creates a vacuum where there's when there's no hard energy like that. And so that was definitely the case. This man was an evil wizard. There are those people in this world who use those dark arts, black magic and curses. They know what they're doing and they use it. And so it was a powerful experience for me in this situation to be so subsumed and abused by that dynamic, then to recognize it, then to realize how to free myself from it and open my heart afterwards. afterwards. Because what I walked through in that microcosm was the macrocosm of what's happening in the world. It's the macrocosm of evil doers who are trying to control humanity and take our life force, just like this man was trying to do to his clients and students. But who ultimately, right, potentially catalyze the reclamation of that life force. Absolutely. I sometimes do an exercise practice in my containers called the victim and the anthropologists. So I wonder if we can sort of play that because there is a version of your story and the telling of your story that, you know, allows your inner victim, right? You could call it your child self, whatever it is, allows this inner, you know, how dare you, no fair, I hate this, right? This is, I've been forsaken part to narrate, right? And we can talk about what happens when the adult telling the story blends with that part. And that's the only version of the story that ever makes it out to the world. But there is the victim version of the story. And then there's the anthropologist's version of the story where you can zoom out, you can see the beautiful design and you can render the tale through a very different narrative. And so I wonder if we could treat your story. And again, we're not gonna obviously get into the fine details because you go there. You definitely go there in your telling of it. However, there are aspects of it that I think deserve to be woven into the fabric of this invitation we're offering here for women to explore it further because they're really quite sensational. So tell us a bit about the victim version of the story. What happened to kind of a thing? Well, yeah, the victim version is I was a 21-year-old client of an evil man who liked to sexually abuse and rape and financially exploit his young clients and students. And he had done that for 30 plus years. And he was actually protected by the nutrition school that employed him because the founder of the school itself was a predator. And so there were these two men who were protecting each other in order to have an ongoing supply of naive, vulnerable prey. And many of the individuals in the nutrition school, because of the dynamics of these charismatic leaders and the power structure that they had created, it was working as designed. The predators were protected and they had, of course, their quote, flying monkeys to protect them further, to blame the victim. I did lead a very significant Me Too movement against these two men. I outed, whistle blew the story and I was very publicly smeared. I realized that people don't like it when you tell them that their gurus or their heroes or their healers are actually professional predators. And in the process, you know, lost a lot of money, lost my business. That's the victim story. It's like a juicy victim story. For sure. And that's why I just, you know, I find you so inspirational because so many of us at a certain stage in our maturation would just like really massage that and just get stuck there. I know. Exactly. And you get like a stream of life force from that luge ritual, right? That is like sourcing pity from others and maybe even collusion with people who agree. And you reference the sort of me too. It's like a verb, right? Like you me too'd it. And, you know, I'd like to touch on, you know, how that dovetails with the feminist supported impulse to rally against the identified enemy, you know, which ultimately potentially keeps us arrested in this victim posture. But you didn't stop there and you didn't rest in the squishy, warm recesses of your own, like, can you believe it story, finger pointing and trying to rally energy around, you know, the experience of your own victimhood. I don't know in what timing and how quick the alchemy was for you, but it seems like you were able to arrive at a place where you can see how this man and this pretty prolonged experience served and probably continues to serve your understanding of what love is, what love is not. And the role that we play as victims of what we might call abuse or exploitation, I mean, understanding that is, I mean, that's spiritual gold, right? Because you are saying I played a part in this, right? Even though on paper you were this young, naive, you know, nubile, virginal woman and had no means to understand even what was happening, let alone, you know, true consent. So tell me a bit about that version of the story and how it is, the anthropological view, how it is that your soul might have ordered up, you know, so many of the horrors of what you dealt with. I discuss this in the book because I am so grateful that I did have a beyond the veil experience that made it so palpably clear to me that my soul chose this and that at the spiritual level, there are no victims. I, you know, had to get to a place of on one level, on the human level, it is valid that there's victimhood in sexual abuse dynamics, especially with children. there is somebody who is perpetuating harm against an innocent, we could say, just on the human level. But all spiritual truth is paradox. And paradox to me means two things are true at the same time. And there's a smaller truth that the human mind can conceive of. And then there's a bigger truth. And if we can expand to hold that bigger truth that our souls know, that is spiritual maturity, that psychological and emotional maturity. And I had an experience midway through my relationship with this man where it was starting to dawn on me that this was not healthy. I didn't realize what an abusive relationship was yet. But I had this moment of being in such emotional pain, starting to realize that the man that I loved didn't seem to care that he was hurting me. And instead of numbing out in that moment, I let that pain completely overwhelm me. It was so physically intense that I was standing in my living room and I had to lean against the wall and squat down. I almost blacked out from the pain. I closed my eyes and I was just like, I'm just going to go there. And what happened was I had an out of body moment. I found my soul go up to the ethers, connect with this man's soul. And this question arose from inside my being. Why are you making this so hard for us? And his soul replied with some sadness to his voice. and said, Lauren, this is for your books. And I went right back into my body and I stood up kind of dazed. And I didn't have the means to process it at that point, but the knowing was planted in me. And when I realized about a year and a half later, what all was happening in my life and with him, I knew I had to write about it, but I knew it from a place that was older than I can describe. And I realized that this is my purpose, to write the map that shows people this territory and how to get to the promised land out of it. So there was this very palpable sense of purpose. You know what's so interesting? I'm so grateful to be talking to you about this because I went on this podcast called Cults to Consciousness and I shared this experience. and the commenters were the most vicious internet mom I have ever personally experienced. They could not take it. They were like, I am a victim to my sexual abuse. How dare you say that there's a purpose here? And there is. I truly believe in every situation of pain and abuse, there is a spiritual purpose because we are on earth to learn love. And the more we're able to comprehend the power of the disconnection, the darkness, the evil, whatever you want to call it, the more we're able to see and experience that, it means that love is so much bigger and more powerful. And I would live 10 lifetimes over going through what I went through to have the palpable experience of that kind of love in my being, because it is the highest experience of bliss and purpose that I could ever put words to. I think about this a lot. I actually had a recent experience, which was probably the first in my career I was on a podcast. And, you know, I have a big mouth and I like to use it and I'm not like afraid of conflict or debate or whatever. But I don't often encounter it. And it was on this exact subject that I was really more talking about marriage and the role of women in marital dynamics. And the interviewer basically ended the interview over her upset that I was insinuating that, that, you know, women are responsible for their experience, right? Let alone perhaps are getting something out of it. And the attachment to this innocent victim, I get it. You know, I certainly get it. And all you have to do is like feel in your body what it's like to have a fucking enemy, right? Like feel in your body, what it's like to fucking hate someone, right? And to feel like you want to punish them. Guess what? In that moment you know just what their life is like right Where you become somebody who perpetrates from your victim stance You become the villain and the chain of punishment carries forward And there nothing inherently wrong or bad. It's not about that. It's just about, do you want to be in, I call it, erotic dynamic with that which you reject and hate? Is that what you actually want for your life? And if it is, great. It sounds like you know you're oriented and you can see where you are. But if what you want is to feel your own life, right? It's like I often use this example of like the one day somewhat recently that I got a very provocative email blaming me for something is work related stuff. I told you I work out all of my stuff in the business realm. Super provocative email. And I could feel like my punisher, right? I could feel like he's wrong. He's not taking responsibility for this. It's like a vendor for this situation. I'm going to educate him about what I see and what he doesn't see. And I'm going to get him to see. So I had that fork in the road where I could answer the stupid email in my righteousness, but ultimately in my villain. I ultimately was out for symbolic blood. I wouldn't have been happy until he was contrite or apologetic or somehow righted the wrong. or I could, and with a little help from my friends, I was reminded that I'm in my playful era and that my energy matters and it's mine. It's fucking mine. And so in that moment, I simply did not take the bait. I simply turned somewhere else and I found something more interesting to do with my day. That's going from fixing to creating. That's going from the erotic caress of the enemy to, you know, the exploration of what it is that you're here to, you know, experience on this plane. And it's a lot more fun. It's a lot more energizing. It has this like self-propagating, you know, so-called positivity. And I don't use that word lightly. And it's just a choice. But until this extinguishes in its, you know, fulfilling nature, I don't know that we can perceive that as a choice. And then that's all the life force you can get is being right about how wronged you are. That's literally all you can access. So it's not like you and I are trying to take that from anyone. And you're only speaking about your experience. I mean, I certainly probably go a bit beyond what is often my purview and speak about women's experience in general. But in the end, I'm really speaking from my own and the preference that I have to really learn how to guard my energy with more ferocity, right? And not to give it to, you know, that which I reject. And obviously, the legal system is built on this, right? Where you go to the legal system to punish. And I certainly have been there, trust me. And you really were able to consciously discern and navigate how much of that felt like important compensation in family consolation is called compensation, right? Like an important rebalancing and when to let go and turn towards your life. I love that you're talking about righting the wrong. That's what I call justice consciousness. And it is not the pathway to freedom and love. Because I knew a couple months out of getting out of this situation, I wasn't seeing the changes that my ego wanted to see. I wanted this man publicized. I wanted the founder to have repercussions. He just slipped into this quiet retirement. People didn't know what had happened to the degree I wanted them to know what had happened. And this man, Jay, was still seeing clients without his license, even after some legal repercussions. And I was like, no, this isn't it. I wanted to be the last victim. I wanted that. And I had to realize if I'm going to be somebody who ensures that the wrong is righted, I will not be able to be a joyful woman. And everything I wanted, I went and I looked at my vision board binder that I've been making over 10 years and pretty significant. I flipped through those pages in that moment. And I was like, everything here requires me to access joy in my being. And if I am holding on to this deed to fix an old frequency, what happens? I can't have the outcome I want in my life. And it was this pivotal moment of realizing I don't get to change the old world because the only eyes I can open are my own. And if i'm stuck in this place of trying to take an eye for an eye I won't ever open my heart and I decided okay. So then that means my role is to create the new world where That kind of harm Isn't happening But I don't get to do that in the old world. I get to go be a pioneer and That was talk about a blow for my ego, but it immediately started generating these beautiful results in my life, like really fun romance, really healing experiences, joy, happiness. And it's just accumulated. So that was the turnaround was this moment of like, okay, I recognized I was standing at the crossroads of bitter woman, joyful woman, and nothing at this crossroads to bitterness was offering what I desired from my dreams. You've done the work. You've regulated your nervous system. You've reclaimed your feminine. And somehow still you're met with blank stares, dropped balls, and dead bedroom energy. But you didn't sign up to be his coach, his therapist, or his mother. You signed up for partnership, for a husband and a man, for devotion, for polarity. And now you may be wondering, is this just how it is? Do I just settle or do I go all collie and burn it down? Suffocated staying, terrified of leaving, this is the trap. Reclaimed relationship is the third pass. No therapy, no ultimatums, just a new way of moving that shifts everything. If you're ready to stop commiserating and start commanding a deeper, safer, sexier bond, you'll want to join me in my upcoming masterclass, Reclaimed Relationship, on April 15th, where we'll explore how to shift your entire relational field through softness, embodiment, and the kind of energetic recalibration that invites devotion back in without needing to say a word. Head to kellybroganmd.com to join and receive my five-day soft power protocol. See you there. I'm fascinated by this crossroads because I have, you know, the reason I probably know so much about victim consciousness is because I've trafficked in it for quite a number of decades, right? Like I know it really well. And I also am very artful at manipulating my own awareness and the awareness of others as to whether or not I'm actually in it, right? Like I'm like, I'm good at hiding it, right. Or like cloaking it. And so I know that it can be, it can feel like the only thing available, not conscious, but subconsciously, right. It just feels like I must do this. Like I must dedicate the rest of my life to taking him down and making sure every last victim, you know, is compensated and making sure I protect and save. So then you're the savior too, right? All of these nameless women who these anonymous victims who will come in the future if I don't. And that's your narcissism, not you personally, but that's the narcissism that comes from like, I must, right? Like I must take him down and save the world. And I played that out, you know, on the grand, on a grand scale with, you know, pharma and everything else. But I'm fascinated by this, this choice point, because I do think that there is a moment where you say, I matter, like my life matters and I'm going to choose it. And it's not necessarily conscious, but that's actually this existential fulcrum that allows you to turn towards your life instead of in these entanglements that really can pull you into, you know, a death space. And I'm fascinated by your awareness, you know, that you were at that point when you really confronted it. So you talk about pioneering the reclamation, let's say, I'll use that word. I love that word, obviously, but for women and potentially even creating these systems of understanding to, you know, render this irrelevant, this kind of experience, this kind of dynamic. It's really like that Bucky Fuller quote, you know, you don't fight the existing system. You create a new one that renders it obsolete. So I imagine that required that you understand what your role was in this experience so that you could help yourself and others know how and when you might be taking the bait. This is where we get into this crux of the matter of what love is, because I looked back at my experience and I realized if I knew what love really was, I wouldn't have gotten into this painful experience in the first place. because I thought that love was a soul connection, which meant we're supposed to be together no matter what. And now as I've spiritually matured, I have recognized numerous soul connections. And actually the highest expression in love in some of those situations is we honor each other and we respect each other's life path and we don't interfere, intervene, or even connect in any way because it's not respectful. And so just because there's a soul connection doesn't mean that's love. Just because there's a sexual chemistry or emotional, deep emotional vulnerability and connection doesn't mean that that's love. I have come to the conclusion that love is a state of consciousness, not just an emotion. And that state of consciousness, first of all, it gives more choice rather than taking choice away. So it never uses emotions on the lower map of consciousness, like guilt, shame, even anger. All these emotions are useful for us to feel, but they can be utilized to control a person. Love is always allowing and trusting the other person to experience the consequences of their choices. That for me, my old codependent self was like, oh my goodness gracious. If I love someone, I trust them to learn. And now I realize that there are some people who I have to trust. They're not going to learn in this lifetime, but everything they're experiencing is actually serving their soul. And, you know, love creates more freedom. And so there are some basic principles that when I really wrapped my head around it, I understood that I was not acting from a consciousness of love. when I was in this relationship that I thought was a love relationship. And it was only my lack of understanding of what love was that made me appear for somebody who was so unloving. So how were you not doing that, acting in the consciousness of love? Like when you look back, you're like, oh, yeah, I can see that I was not where my valorized, like I'm the innocent victim perspective would have you believe you were. How actually were you participating in the same resonance that the relationship afforded, that maybe he represented? I'd like to get specific. I wanted to carry my soulmate into a happily ever after. He wanted to stay in hell. And I thought it was a loving thing to do to keep him company in hell instead of being like, well, this isn't for me. I'm not meant to live in a dimension of hell on planet Earth. I'm actually supposed to experience the kingdom of heaven down here. So if you want to join me, you can. I'm going to be over here. Love calls people into their highest expression. Love is an invitation into embodying our highest expression. And so an invitation isn't like, oh, I'm so sorry your life sucks. And I'll just hang out with you here so you feel better. And I'll make myself feel worse in order for you to feel better. Not love. Right. So what I hear when you're talking about that is a lot of rescuer energy, caretaker energy, savior energy. That is, of course, the very bright whites that the codependent wears. It's like, oh, well, I'll do this for you. For me, it was also fear of being alone, a deep and tremendous fear of being alone. because I think that this is not a very unique experience, but it did, maybe I had a heightened experience of it where much of my life, I had few connections that felt as deep as my soul was longing for. They would come across along once in a blue moon. Now I realize that the more I connect to my own soul, the more I can connect to the souls of other people. The more I connect to God, the more the loneliness disappears. But I was a very, very, very deeply lonely child and teen and young adult. And so here comes this person who I feel such a depth of connection with their soul. And I was thinking, well, this is it. Like, got to make this work because I am afraid of not having this in my life. What I didn't realize that if I choose love and choosing to get closer to God, the closer I get to God, the more impossible it is to feel any loneliness. And I did go through quite a period of chosen isolation. It was about five years of being very, very single and pretty isolated. And in that experience, I actually had such a tremendous transformation of these remnants of loneliness just like gone. And, you know, sure enough, after that, I meet my soulmate and it's like the most intense and pure connection without any of disharmony between the human selves. Like what I also didn't understand when I was younger is that there can be a harmony between souls and a total disharmony between the people. And that's OK. The people aren't meant to be together. Simple as that. But I couldn't have comprehended that at the time. You describe in your book a relationship that followed exiting this relationship. And as you're reading, I don't want to, you know, spoiler the ending. However, as you're reading, you really feel like, wow, look at this. She exited that dumpster fire. And now this is, you know, a white knight waiting for her kind of a thing. And you model in this dynamic how it is that you now have grown a capacity to discern when two individuals, humans, may have different destinies, even when there's a strong, especially erotic connection. So I wonder how you narrate these days, what you needed to go through so that you could learn how to discern and navigate whether something is a trauma bond, whether something is just a soul connection, or whether something is a relationship that warrants your commitment and presence and investment of your life force energy. energy. Why is it that you needed to go through that so that you could now, I call it seeing with sober eyes, so that you could now see more clearly what's actually happening with fewer positive and negative projections and really get that clarity. I felt that while I was listening to it. I just felt like, oh, wow, she's so much clearer now. She can actually see what's happening and she has the fortitude to take loving steps in the direction of even ending something that feels like it would otherwise have been fodder for that same, like, oh, fantasy, like one day, someday, you know, it'll feel like I want it to feel. Well, I think part of it was I had expanded beyond the framework that if you're meant to be, it meant to be forever Sometimes you meant to be to learn And the other piece was I chose to cultivate more peace in my life Like this is not going to be a very logical explanation but I just decided whatever it takes I going to learn peace And the more I got to peace, the more clear that still small voice was in my life. And so when one day it just told me, it literally told me it is complete. And I knew it meant this relationship with this really fun boyfriend that I had. It was just deeply fun, sexual healing experience that I needed. And it serves his healing in other ways, too. And it was so profound because the clearer that voice came in, I could listen to that and know that I was doing the most loving thing, even though this person was saying to me, this man at the time was like, you're hurting me. This isn't love. And I just I knew that was his story, but I knew it wasn't true. And that that allowed even deeper peace. And sure enough, four years, three years later, I get a text message out of the blue from him, from the depth of his heart. He's thanking me for the role that I played in his life to show him what secure attachment style was and that now he's had the flip side of that experience. Now he has embodied that role with somebody else. And it was just this beautiful experience of gratitude at the deepest soul level. And I'm very, yeah, I'm very grateful for that. I love that. I want to talk this, you know, we can have a weekend workshop on this and we'll wrap up soon, but I want to talk briefly about what you perceive to be the shadow of the feminist impulse in situations like this and of the Me Too loose ritual agesis that you, you know, sort of touched into, you butt up against. and you certainly could have been totally engulfed by in the experience of what happened in the aftermath of your exiting that relationship. How do you think that women are collectively taking the bait? And I know you probably don't want to speak on behalf of all women, but just from your perspective, how might we be taking the bait of these kinds of dynamics and missing an opportunity that you have now embodied? And what do you think is important for women to bear in mind if they find themselves like a way I almost think of it as like you're awakening out of anesthesia or something but like this the operation is still going on like you know it's it's harrowing terrain that we're talking about when you are able to access the faculties to to to demonstrate to yourself I am in the midst of something that is genuinely at odds with my human experience of fulfillment happiness love connection all the things right and like fuck I gotta get out. And then the extrication often ends up leaving a lot of hooks, right? So if you make that individual, that guy, the enemy, you'll be pulling those like fish hooks out for years and years to come, right? Because they represent, in my opinion, and I think you agree, like so much of the projected, disavowed, rejected dimensions of yourself, right? The perpetrator, the villain, you know, in you. And so pulling those hooks out for years on end can become, you know, a defining aspect of your life experience. And that's what we see in so many of the bitter feminists in the world who are very invested in making men the evil, bad perpetrators that we will one day vanquish. And, you know, the temptation to join that movement when you're in the vulnerable place that you were leaving this relationship was probably pretty strong. Oh, no, it was strong. I was in the movement. I was in it. Yeah. I'll try to answer this succinctly because I know it's a huge stuff. It is a big question. And the way I look at it is through the map of consciousness. So David Hawkins used muscle testing to determine what psychological perspectives lead to what emotional states in the body and that changes our vibration. So way down on the map of consciousness, we have emotions like guilt and shame and hate. We have to feel our emotions to get them out of our body and to get out of those states. But when we raise to a higher level of consciousness, we can live from a place where those emotional experiences are no longer a part of us. And for example, one of my mentors is one of the most spiritually enlightened beings, I think, on the face of planet Earth. And she wears a purple tracksuit and walks around this tiny town in Washington State. She has explained to me that she is such a high state of consciousness that grief is no longer a part of her emotional experience. And this woman loves, she's capable of more love than most people can comprehend. Some people think that grief is an expression of loving so much, but that's actually not true. It is an expression we have when we are attached to a human perspective. Whereas if we are truly able to see things from the soul level, from the biggest picture, it is love and there's no grief there. That's not to say feeling grief is a bad thing. I still feel grief. It's just to say you get to a high enough state of consciousness, you don't have those emotional experiences. So the Me Too movement, we have a lot of lowered down on the map of consciousness emotions in that, but it served me. It did because it allowed me to understand these dynamics of what coercion is and how sexual energy is misused and that it often takes numbers, like many, many voices to bring light to a pattern for people to understand that pattern's wrong. So there was a place for it. I remember part of the reason I was able to shine a light on the situation was because so many women shared their experiences at the same time. It did take numbers. It absolutely did. And then from that place, it's a whole bunch of women at these emotions of hate and anger. So that was useful to us. if we are able to then get to a higher state of consciousness so we can experience higher level emotions like empowerment, freedom, joy. And I just decided I'm going to learn a different perspective so I can experience more enjoyable emotions. And that took me out of the feminist movement and the feminist mindset. But I just, you know, there are a lot of women who didn't want to go through the identity crisis of choosing different perceptions. And so they weren't able to access higher level emotions and they just stay at the anger emotions and then they have to, you know, just validate the old perceptions together. The sacrifice is real, you know, the sacrifice that is made at the altar of sovereignty, you know, that when you exit this ready role as a victim and choose to just have had an experience, you know, there's a huge sacrifice, or at least it feels like one at the time, right? Because it could be community, it could feel, you know, belonging, you can feel a sense of validation, you can feel that coddling, right? Like that, that something like love, you know, something that feels like compassion, something that feels, of course, it's conditional usually, right? Because the moment that you choose to exit the field, it's usually withdrawn. So it's probably just a simulacrum, but there's a lot that is lost. And so you can only really be pulled in that direction by something bigger, right? By something greater. And you talk about it, in fact, in the book with this, I felt this like your sensuality, right? Like I could feel the reclamation as a woman of your own delight, right? And just being, just being, existing, you know, looking at the beauty, smelling the delicious things, tasting, you know, everything wonderful. And my, your lived experience, right? And so I wonder if you can describe whether or not at this point you would change anything, right? Or if you really see that it needed to be this way so that you could experience your body, your purpose, your self-expression in exactly the way that you are so that you could learn to love in the way that you have not only yourself, but others. I wonder if you'd go so far as to say, like, I wouldn't have changed it. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. That's what love is, is a state of everything right now is exactly as it should be. Everything in the past is exactly as it should be. Everything in the future is exactly as it should be. It's that simple. Yeah, I agree with that. I am actually, I got to a point of gratitude. Talk about another thing that pissed off people who were listening to my story on the other podcast. They're like, how dare you suggest we ought to be grateful for the pain that happened to us? But I can't help it. Why would I not be grateful for the privilege of the opportunity to become myself? That is how I define privilege. It's not getting good things so that your life is easier. Privilege is having the opportunity to know love, to know God and to know yourself. And how do you know what those opportunities are? They're exactly what you have in your life right now. Period. End of story. So do you think that it's even a worthwhile pursuit, you know, I find myself asking myself this question, to support awareness in women around taking the bait and around trauma bonds and around when you are in the circumstances of self-betrayal and all of the stigmata of codependency? like, is it a worthy thing that we sometimes do to say like, hey, here's how you know when you're in that, like, these are what red flags look like. Or is it just sort of like your life is what it is? You're putting one foot in front of the next and the exact resource you need is going to show up at exactly the time you need it and not a moment sooner. It's like, you know, what's so interesting is I didn't write this book, The Scorpion and the Lion to help people or to fix people or to save That was not it. I wrote it because first of all, I had to. I had to. I couldn't sleep until I wrote it. And second, because it got to a place of being enjoyable for me, I started living a delicious life. I talk about the sensual self-reclamation. My life became delicious. I was like, oh my gosh, this is fun to write. This is fun to share and it will be fun to read. And so there's some painful parts in the beginning of the book, but it's like, I didn't write this to fix or change people. If people find it, I truly believe it's because their souls are resonating in such a way that they're ready for some change. And then they get to see how good it can get. And yeah, that's where I came from. Not to fix anybody's life, but just because I had to do this for me and it was fun. And you do coach and you are in a position to sort of pay it forward. And hopefully that's by living the most embodied, fulfilled version of you, right? Like that is that you have access to perhaps because of exactly what it is that you've gone through. And I love your story because it's the heroine story, right? It is the, in Reclan Woman, I talk about The Handless Maiden, right? Like this folk tale that I think really depicts, you know, the horrors that we endure, potentially invite so that we can go on the journey that we never would have otherwise accessed. And if that's not really the worldview that you inhabit, then of course, it's just random bad shit that happens to some poor people. I get that. I totally get that. And there's just another lens through which you can look. And it's very personal, right? Like how you arrive at that lens, whether you do, and it's not linear, right? And this is where I might take some issue with Dawkins' kind of perspective. It's just not my perspective to suggest that there's sort of like a linearity in any way. And I think that part of the reason I need to look at it that way is because otherwise I fall into the trap of superiority. Right. And I and I come to say, oh, who I am today is is better qualitatively than who I was when I took various bait. Right. And, you know, who I am today is better than that woman down the street. And it's it's subtle, especially it's especially relevant in the activist world, I think, because there's an implicit superiority that comes with the I know better, I'll get you to see posture, you know. And so for me, when I just collapse the whole journey into just experience, all of which is valuable, then it's easier for me to not imagine that it's actually better to think it's purposeful, you know, better to think there's meaning inherent in everything that happens, better to think, you know, that accepting what's in front of you, you know, is the way and worse to fight with reality. Right. So it's like, because otherwise I end up back in that same resonance of disconnection, but somehow like championing connection. Right. So it's like, talk about paradox. Can I add one thing to that? The way I see it is to take out the superiority and create more of a neutral playing field. It's just a natural law situation that if I am looking at it from this perspective of purpose and a soul level viewpoint, then I get to experience by default of natural law, more enjoyable emotions and more enjoyable life experiences. Better, worse, I don't know who cares, but this is the experience that I want. Yeah. Yeah. And it's according to you, right? Like it's according to your metrics of what more enjoyable is and that relativism and subjectivity is something that nobody can contest, right? Like if this perspective feels better for you, that's all that you're saying. And that's enough, right? Like you don't need the reasons and even a wonderful life to validate why this perspective is better for you. And I love that. And I found your telling of the story and your rendering of your lived experience to be an extraordinarily unique perspective in an otherwise like rather fetishized realm of discussion around narcissistic dynamics and toxic men and predators and sexual abuse. And so I really am so happy to put a microphone to your beautiful mouth and to encourage even just lovers of fiction, right? It's like, so it was so lovely for me to just like be in a story realm as somebody who like pretty much only reads nonfiction. And I know this is not fiction. It's your life, but it had that, it had that, um, that imaginal feel to it. You're such a writer. And I really, uh, I think it's, it's a powerful contribution, even though that wasn't your intention, you know, that you've made, um, to what is really a very relevant topic for women today. So thank you. Thank you so much. Those words went to my heart, Kelly. Thank you. I mean, every one of them. And I know that, you know, we've been walking in parallel processes, you know, this journey home to ourselves as women. And I look forward to what more is coming from you. I'll be subscribed. Sounds good. What a great conversation. Thank you, Kelly. Thank you. I'll make sure everybody knows where to find you, connect to you, and of course, to get the book. So until next time. Thank you.