Codependency and the Fawn Response (with Amanda Kate)

[Dana] (00:01)
Welcome to Phoenix in Flame. I’m Dana, and this is my podcast on pushing through and transforming even when you feel like a pile of ash. Today we have this awesome, wonderful person, her name is Amanda Kate. Now Amanda Kate is a self-mastery facilitator who flips the current paradigm of what it truly means to be a master of self. She also survived chronic narcissistic abuse, chronic fatigue brought on by consistent emotional, mental, and psychological abuse and toxic relationship cycles. She had a supporting role in other people’s trauma and walked the path of depression to the point of being on her floor screaming for God to take her home. Amanda, welcome to Phoenix in Flame.

[Amanda] (01:06)
Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

[Dana] (01:09)
Now in addition to all of that, which, oh my gosh, there’s so much to dig into with just that, but I wanted to throw in as well, you also describe yourself as a recovering people pleaser and self-flagellator, and you walk the path straddling the divine and messy. Oh my gosh, this sounds so intriguing and real to me, and how people really live their life.

[Amanda] (01:14)
I’m sorry. Mm-hmm. Hehehe

[Dana] (01:38)
Just, my goodness, tell us about yourself. Start wherever you want to, because we’re going to wander around and just kind of organically flow back and forth together here.

[Amanda] (01:46)
Yeah, look, I guess it was that whole thing of I did all the things that I was told I should do. Good grades, travel, marry the man you should marry, two children, nice house, more travel. Check, check. As a balance sheet I had the perfect life. Yet behind closed doors it was completely different. I was sick, I was depressed, I was scared, I was utterly unfulfilled, I felt like I couldn’t put a foot right. I was constantly dancing on eggshells. There was always shifting goalposts. One day I’d do something and it was like the best thing I ever could have done, and then the next thing I’d do something similar and it was like I’d made the biggest mistake ever, and it would unleash these tirades. So I was just getting more and more confused, but that was sort of how I’d been set up to be from early in life. It’s like you don’t ask questions, you do what you’re told, you follow this prescription for life, and you sit down, shut up, and put up with it. Good girls don’t ask questions.

[Dana] (03:01)
Yeah, I mean, you feel like you’re crossing all the T’s. Yeah.

[Amanda] (03:05)
Good girls don’t ask questions. Good girls don’t get angry. Good girls don’t speak up. Good girls don’t shout. Good girls don’t, I mean, we can go on with that list, can’t we? Actually, to be fair, men have a very similar list, so it’s not just about the good girl. I think pretty much every child has grown up with that. We should be seen and not heard, especially in our generation. Don’t cry, there’s no blood.

[Dana] (03:31)
Yeah, that seems to be changing. It’s like if there’s no bones sticking out or blood spewing on the wall, then suck it up, move on.

[Amanda] (03:35)
Exactly, you’re fine. Exactly, exactly. And so there was a lot of that denial of my emotional experience, having been such an emotional person and child, because humans are emotional beings. Sorry to ruin it for everyone out there, but you know, humans are emotional. And because my parents couldn’t handle my big emotions,

[Dana] (03:43)
Mm-hmm.

[Amanda] (04:05)
it was always, “it’s your fault, you’re oversensitive, you need thicker skin.” It was always that projected blame about my reaction. And my ex-husband would do the same. And this is a big topic anyway, but look at one of the biggest problems in our society today: people don’t take responsibility for their action. And what we say is everybody needs to be non-reactive, because that’s what mindfulness is, so we need to not have a reaction, and if we have a reaction, we’re not spiritual enough or we’ve not been doing enough work, because we choose our emotional state and we choose our thoughts. So you’re choosing that. There’s a lot of shame involved in it. And actually, when somebody does an action and you have a reaction to said action, that’s actually normal human behavior. We are wired to have reactions. We are wired for fight and flight. We are wired to be shocked. We’re wired to have a reaction. Now where spirituality kicks in is actually after the initial reaction, because we need to notice what reaction we’ve had, work out what led to that reaction, and then work out if it was triggering past trauma or

[Dana] (05:10)
Hmm?

[Amanda] (05:29)
activating something in our bodies that’s come from the past, or if it was something we’re actually really pissed off with in the now. And then we can change and go into responsiveness, that response-ability, choosing our response. But we will always have that initial reaction. And that’s what I found I was blamed with my whole life. People would do some really horrible, shitty things to me, and I was the one who was blamed for daring to have a reaction about it. “You’re oversensitive. You need thicker skin. You need to deal with your emotions better. You’ve got all these issues.” And I’m going, when are they going to apologize for being assholes?

[Dana] (06:14)
Yeah, that’s never gonna happen. They don’t ever do that. But what you’re describing sounds like gaslighting. It’s sort of like you are having a very appropriate response to a dysfunctional behavior, and they were blaming you for your response.

[Amanda] (06:16)
Like, I can’t. It is! Yeah. But if you look at society now, we’re almost built like that. Even when you look at somebody who’s trolling another person’s social media account, and the person who’s being trolled has a negative response, we blame them. If somebody was threatening to kill me or my children, guess what, I’d have a pretty big response too. Hello?

[Dana] (06:51)
That’s it, right. Well, and I want to toss in here for a minute, I see you really trying to create honoring space for our emotions and our feelings, because I ran into something interesting, because I’m a psychotherapist, so I do a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy, and I noticed, this was years ago, and there’s voluminous research supporting cognitive behavioral therapy, right?

[Amanda] (07:01)
Yeah. Mm. Yeah, yeah.

[Dana] (07:18)
But here’s what I noticed. This is before I started getting into trauma therapy: I would have a patient and we would go through all the rational versus irrational beliefs, and they would sit there and look at me and go, “Dana, I know what you’re saying, and I know that this is supposed to be my rational response to this situation, and yet I still feel these other things.”

[Amanda] (07:22)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

[Dana] (07:45)
And so I started doing more research on trauma and how our emotions and our trauma response is notoriously irrational, but it is so much stronger than the rational part of our mind.

[Amanda] (07:57)
Yeah. Well, it’s survival, isn’t it? It’s life or death. And even if it’s just somebody telling you you’re worthless, to you that’s life or death, because we’re wired for connection. There’s safety in numbers and we’re tribal creatures. If we’re not accepted by our tribe, we’d be cast out into the wilderness and we’d die, because that’s the way we’re built as humans. So you’re absolutely right, it is this deep, visceral, gut response that happens from almost a cellular level where we’re feeling attacked. So what do you do when you’re feeling attacked? You go on the attack yourself, you defend yourself, or you run away and lick your wounds.

[Dana] (08:41)
That’s it. That’s it. And let me ask you what you think, because gosh, I feel like I’m at a buffet, I have so much I could bring up to talk about. Okay, slow down, Dana, slow down. So let’s talk about the four F’s. Now we typically think about fight or flight, but there’s also, you have fight or flight, there’s freeze,

[Amanda] (08:47)
Yeah, I know. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Dana] (09:09)
which a lot of people get stuck in freeze and that ends up with depression. But then there’s a fourth F that people are talking about more and more, it’s fawn. And I remember what you said when you first started describing your childhood, “good girls don’t do this, good girls don’t do that.” And just the fawning, trying to please those around us so that we don’t get

[Amanda] (09:13)
Oh yeah. Fawning. Yes. Mm. Oh yeah.

[Dana] (09:34)
abandoned, like you said, what are your thoughts on all of that and what your experience has been?

[Amanda] (09:35)
Yeah. Oh, look, the more I’ve done this work, my chronic fatigue was because I lived the first 37 years of my life in hypervigilance. Now people talk about empathy being their superpower, and I’m an empath and all that stuff, but have you thought that empathy is actually a trauma response? What we are trained to do as empaths, I had a very explosive mother, and I get it, she had hormonal issues, I completely understand where she was at, but as a young child that terrified me. It was frightening when she would fly off the handle for the tiniest little error, and of course then it was my fault, because I’d be the one who’d end up with a wooden spoon around my legs. Even though I didn’t see what I’d done wrong, I didn’t know what I’d done wrong, it came seemingly from nowhere. So I was in this response of watching her like a hawk to see if I could pick up when that behavior was gonna switch, because then maybe if I was a better person she wouldn’t explode and I wouldn’t get hit for seemingly nothing that I understood. So there’s this hypervigilance that comes. I am a brilliant reader of people. I am highly empathic, I can tell you what you’re feeling, I can often feel it in my body because it has become such a raised trauma response in me. Now I can use it as a superpower because I understand it’s a trauma response. I can also understand, hang on, what they’re feeling is not my responsibility, it’s interesting to know and it helps inform how I then deal with them, but I need to step back here. Now I’ve done a lot of work to get to that point. But when we start to realize that being an empath isn’t the big “I’m an empath and I understand people,” it actually comes from trauma. So when you deal with your trauma, it can then become a superpower, but that’s the fawning you’re talking about. That is the people pleasing. If I watch my caregiver closely enough, I’m going to be able to stop them behaving in that way that is dangerous for me, whether physically, mentally, emotionally, energetically, whatever it is. And you find it a lot with children, most empaths have come from traumatic backgrounds, and what they’re doing is trying to please their parent to keep themselves out of trouble. In kinesiology we actually speak about five F’s: fight, obviously someone attacks you, you go in with rage and fists going. And it’s funny, a lot of people have a preference for one, every time I do a personality test I’m like, three are really high up and one’s off to the side. I’ve been asked to redo personality tests so many times because they come out in this really balanced way. Now I say it’s because I’ve done so much work, but who knows, maybe it’s just a weird anomaly with me, but every time I do one, whether it’s a DISC profile or whatever it is, it always comes out in this way that people are like, “I can’t read you.”

[Dana] (12:40)
Ha ha ha. Mm-hmm.

[Amanda] (13:02)
If you look at even that, that’s this fawning. What do people want? What are they looking for? It’s kind of this, I’m putting my responses outside of myself. So I also go between fight, “you come at me, depending on what it is, I’ll go at you,” and that’s that response, and okay, it may not always be the healthiest response, but at least now, after the response, I can go, “you know what, my bad, I completely overreacted and I understand why I overreacted, but none of that’s your fault.” Then there’s the flight, the runaway, I’m a big runner, I just want to get out of there, shit goes bad and I’m like, “tap me out.” Our freeze is really when we go into fight and flight at the same time, and it’s that,

[Dana] (13:45)
Peace out.

[Amanda] (13:56)
“I wanna fight you but I also wanna run away, but I don’t know what to do, so uuuhhh.”

[Dana] (14:00)
Well, and two, when we get stuck where we want to fight or we want to run and we can’t do either one, we can’t fight them and we can’t run away, we want to do both, we can’t do either one, and we’re just frozen.

[Amanda] (14:05)
Mm. Yeah. Yeah. In the headlines. Absolutely. In kinesiology then we also talk about fragmentation, and I remember getting there, this kind of goes towards those last stages, your adrenal maladaption, the chronic fatigue, it sort of heads down that way, something happens and you just fall to pieces. People would ask me how I was at the end of my marriage and I couldn’t even talk, I would just burst into

[Dana] (14:18)
Yeah.

[Amanda] (14:47)
tears, couldn’t put anything into words. I was so traumatized at that point, I could barely speak without crying.

[Dana] (14:55)
So you’re talking about the fifth F being fragmentation.

[Amanda] (14:58)
Yeah, that’s what we talk about in kinesiology. And then we obviously bring in the fawning, which is the people pleasing, which how many, again, I’m gonna use the term women, but we know it goes for anybody who has that really strong caregiving, which tends to come from having a parent who couldn’t regulate their emotions, or a parent who was scary, or a parent who they had to be hypervigilant around. Because that abuse cycle kind of becomes like a rubber band, we know at a visceral level our parents are there to protect us. It’s like an archetypal knowledge, we are born into these people, they are the adults, they’re the ones who are supposed to keep me safe. So this is why so many abused people keep going back to their abuser, because they’ve had, say, a parent in this role, and I’m not just talking about my overly explosive mother, I’ve worked with clients who’ve had all sorts of other abuse that go a lot more extreme than that from their parent, but that parent is supposed to be the caregiver. So they’re running away from that parent because that parent is scary and creating trauma, but then there’s this archetypal cellular knowing that, well, this is the person who’s supposed to keep me safe, and so they run to them and then they’re like, “oh, hang on, but I’m getting abused again.” And so you end up with this rubber band type

[Amanda] (16:26)
response, and it’s, how do I keep you happy enough that you’re going to be that safe place, because you mustn’t be a safe place, because as you know, as children we’re egocentric, so it’s all about us. So if you’re not a safe place, it’s my fault that you’re not a safe place, so what do I need to do to make you be that safe place that I need? How do I keep you happy enough?

[Dana] (16:45)
Yes, yeah, that is, that’s it, that’s 100% exactly. And I also wanted to get your thoughts on the unpredictability that seems to happen, because I can relate to a lot of what you’re saying in terms of parental experience. And what’s also there, maybe you experienced it, maybe you didn’t, I did, was the unpredictability. Sometimes you run into the awfulness, the impulsive, over-the-top stuff, but then four days or even weeks, sometimes everything’s fine until it’s not, and you never really know. And I think the child trying to figure out how to, and thinking, “oh it’s okay, oh it’s okay, that’s just some weird thing that happened two weeks ago,”

[Amanda] (17:23)
Yeah. Yep. Mmm.

[Dana] (17:42)
that’s not going to happen again. And then it does, and then it does, and then it doesn’t. And then it does.

[Amanda] (17:49)
Yeah, you know that was my marriage. I’d have two or three months where things were okay, they were never amazing but they were okay, and I was like, maybe I imagined all of that. And you know what it’s like when you’re in, and I know this term is thrown around so much, but it kind of dismisses those of us who were truly in those relationships, he’s a full-blown narcissist.

[Dana] (17:59)
Mm-hmm.

[Amanda] (18:16)
Full, like, there’s no question about it. Now obviously there’s no diagnosis for it, because when you think you’re God, you don’t need a diagnosis. So this is why they don’t go on to get diagnosed, because “I’m perfect, there’s something wrong with you.” So this is why they ended up staying in my marriage so long, because it goes through these stages and you’re kind of going,

[Dana] (18:16)
Yes. Yes. They’re not going to go get a diagnosis, right? Mm-hmm.

[Amanda] (18:41)
“oh, everything’s okay now, did I imagine it?” Now that was me as an adult. Imagine me as a little tiny child who doesn’t have this cognitive awareness and doesn’t have these coping skills, not that I had many coping skills apart from wine, and God knows what else, binging on Netflix or something. Let’s face it, I did what I knew and what I could do at the time, and what was socially acceptable, because again,

[Dana] (19:00)
No judging!

[Amanda] (19:09)
wine is the socially acceptable thing to reach for when it’s been a rough day. But I look back at that little girl who wasn’t sure what was happening, why it was happening, what she’d done. A lot of the time I didn’t even know what caused the explosions, and so I’d be like, “I thought I was being a good girl, but clearly I wasn’t good enough.” And so then I’m on this sliding scale of perfectionism, setting myself up for failure, creating that power imbalance, putting everybody else up on these pedestals above me. Because if I keep them happy enough, if I make them happy enough, then I’m gonna have an easier, more peaceful life. But in doing that power imbalance, I’m automatically putting myself as less than and them as more than, so they don’t even need to set up the power imbalance because I’ve already done it, they just get to play it out. And that’s a really tough thing, because perfectionism is unobtainable. It is impossible. There’s not many things in this world that are impossible, but perfectionism is, it’s not gonna happen. And I think this is where people pleasing and perfectionism end up going hand in hand. Now I see some people going much more

[Dana] (20:20)
of such saying.

[Amanda] (20:30)
down that people-pleasing route, I see a lot of people going down that perfectionism route in terms of “my work needs to be perfect, or my space needs to be perfect.” But I don’t think they’re that far apart really, and a lot of times they go hand in hand, because if I’m just a little bit more perfect, you will be happier and I won’t end up with all these explosive reactions for not having done anything.

[Dana] (20:59)
You know, I’ve heard Brené Brown use, she calls it the tap dance of please, perform, and perfect. And I thought that was really, I love Brené Brown, and I thought I loved the way she worded that, she’s so funny and self-effacing, but she talked about that triad, please, perform, and perfect.

[Amanda] (21:07)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[Dana] (21:22)
that we weave in and out of those. Now Amanda, let me ask you something. I was really intrigued by, you said you were flipping the current paradigm of what it truly means to be a master of self. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[Amanda] (21:36)
Yeah, absolutely. Think about what I said before about somebody doing an action and you having a reaction. If I walked into your room and smacked you in the shin with a lead pipe and you’re rolling around on the floor, and I’m like, “honey, you choose your reactions, you’re having a bit of an overreaction, aren’t you, you’re choosing that, you could choose different.” That’s what we’re doing in the spiritual community, all the time. That’s what we’re doing in self-help stuff. Everybody is blaming the reaction, not the action that caused the reaction. Who’s going to go, “you know what, you shouldn’t be hitting people with lead pipes, that’s not okay?” They’re going, “don’t you think you’ve rolled around long enough on the floor? Don’t you think you should get up now? You should be a non-reactivity, otherwise you’re not spiritual enough.” There’s all of this story, and it comes so many times. I use the example the other week, my uncle used to come up and run his hands inappropriately on my body and try to kiss me on the lips, and sometimes he’d try to stick his tongue down my throat, he was completely inappropriate. I was really, really rude to him, as a teenager, when I was polite to everybody else. Guess who was told off? I was the one being hauled over the coals for being rude to him. Nobody asked why I was being rude to him, because you know what, they all knew, they just didn’t want to deal with it. So let’s not blame the action, let’s blame the reaction. How many times does that happen in multiple different ways in our society all the time? Something bad happens and rather than looking at the behavior that created their reaction, we’re blaming the reaction. Now that’s one of the ways: own your reactions, feel the emotions, feel what is coming up in you, because that’s your signpost, that’s your guidepost. And then we can work on whether those feelings and emotions are because of this action, or because of some action back in your past that’s creating

[Dana] (23:41)
Uh-huh.

[Amanda] (23:55)
a reaction now that perhaps is stronger than it would be if we dealt with those traumas early in life. Those sorts of things are what I’m talking about, flipping those paradigms. You hear it so much, people talk about being non-judgmental, we are going to judge straight away, I hate to say it, it’s a really human behavior. We are going to judge.

[Dana] (24:02)
Mm-hmm.

[Amanda] (24:21)
You’re going to judge everybody. How many times have you seen someone in a BMW or a Merc and you’ve gone, “drive like an idiot,” or whatever it is? There’s very little truth in that sometimes, that’s the first thought. Now we can change those things if we work on the underlying beliefs that are creating that reaction. Even when you look at things like overwhelm and burnout, how many things are on social media at the moment about overwhelm and burnout and how big an issue they are. Overwhelm and burnout are symptoms, symptoms of belief systems that are driving you into the ground because you’re in that dance, as you mentioned before, the please, perform, perfect.

[Dana] (24:59)
Yeah. Uh-huh. Right.

[Amanda] (25:12)
You’re in that dance, and so you are burning yourself out, not because, the overwhelm and the burnout are a symptom of a much deeper problem. So if we can reverse engineer what the actual problem is that is driving the behaviors that then lead to overwhelm and burnout, you don’t get to overwhelm and burnout, because you’re catching it before it happens.

[Dana] (25:35)
I love that. That’s because that’s in therapy, that’s what I ended up doing with my patients, basically reverse engineering, figuring out, okay, let’s go back to the beginning and figure out how did you get here, in this particular, where are you and how did you get here, and where do you want to be? You know, and what’s the difference?

[Amanda] (25:40)
Mm. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of people then go into the blaming of parents, and I’m like, you know what, it’s not about blaming your parents. My parents are extremely loving people, they have taught me some incredible things, and I was also terrified of them growing up. I still get nervous when I have to go see them, because I know their comments are sometimes gonna cross lines, and it is not worth me putting my boundaries in place because they, it’s like talking to a brick wall, it doesn’t matter what I say my boundaries are, because they’ve got their belief systems and that’s gonna come through. Now that doesn’t mean I don’t love them, it doesn’t mean they don’t love me, it doesn’t mean they’re not doing the best they can. And I think a lot of the time when people talk about going back to childhood trauma and dealing with this stuff, there’s these senses of loyalty, “I’m being disloyal to my family,” or whatever it is, “I had a good childhood, therefore I shouldn’t be going into those realms.” And I often find with clients it’s almost like they get into this defending, “yes this happened, but,” and they’re trying to justify why those actions happened, and I’m going, you know what, you’re coming from this adult point of view, we need to go back and feel what it was like for you as a child who didn’t have these coping mechanisms. Because I think that’s actually a really important point. I can logically see why my parents are the way they are, and I can still deeply, deeply love and adore them, and also I can hold the fact that they don’t always act in my best interest, and that I’ve outgrown a lot of the guidance that they want to give me.

[Dana] (27:38)
See, I love the way that you’re able to hold both things as truth. And I’m wondering if that kind of gets back to what you were talking about, being able to straddle the divine and the messy. Is that what you were coming from when you say that?

[Amanda] (27:43)
Mm. Yeah, I think paradox is such a big important concept to really hold. It’s like we unpack everything that’s happened, and it all sits out in front of us, and we go, “that all happened, that’s all true,” and sometimes it feels completely at odds with each other, but both things are true. My parents deeply loved me and they deeply put the fear of God in me. I was terrified of them. And I’ve managed to dial that down over the years, but I can still feel it, days before I have to go see them I still feel that nervousness, and I just know what to do with it now. And I can hold those two things together and go, okay, they’re both sitting there. And I do a little bit more self-care, and I make sure that my inner children know that I’ve got their back, that I’m gonna

[Dana] (28:34)
Hahaha

[Amanda] (28:52)
adult my way through this, that they don’t need to stand in front of me and have those behaviors. I’ve got this, I’m going to keep you safe, it’s okay. And I do that work before I see them, I do it after I see them, and it’s much less traumatizing now, but it is recognizing they are doing the best they can with the tools they have, they always have. My ex-husband was doing the best he could with the tools he had, everybody is, and we can’t always access all the tools we have, because sometimes we’re in fight and flight and we’re in a different part of the brain, the tool shed’s locked and we can’t find the key. But I think that’s also that self-compassion, the self-acceptance of, “I’m having a reaction now and it’s not what I would usually choose, but I can’t stop this, this is coming from somewhere.”

[Dana] (29:47)
Mm-hmm.

[Amanda] (29:47)
Okay, can I be kind enough to myself to let me get through this reaction? Then, because I’m out of fight and flight, I’ll be able to have a look at why I got into that reaction in the first place. But we can’t do it when we’re in there, because we don’t have the key to the tool shed, we can’t access our tools. And so bringing in that empathy.

[Dana] (30:05)
Right. I love the way that you give yourself permission, like you talked about going back and visiting your parents. And first of all, I love Internal Family Systems, basically acknowledging we have different parts of ourselves. We have younger versions, we have teenage versions, we have all these different parts that are in there with their messages and their traumas, and they’re all trying to help us.

[Amanda] (30:16)
Yeah. Yeah.

[Dana] (30:32)
But sometimes they don’t all need to be in what I call the CEO chair. But I like the fact that you were giving space for whatever it is that you were feeling, whatever parts that you were feeling, you didn’t wait for someone else to give you permission. You gave yourself permission, and you’re going into a situation and you’re like, “I kind of feel this, but I kind of feel this too,” even if they’re opposing. And you said, “I give myself permission.”

[Amanda] (30:59)
Yeah, yeah, it’s the “both and,” you know, often we go it’s either/or, it’s black or white, it’s yes or no, it’s wrong or right, but it’s all of that and more. And the more we can hold simultaneously and be comfortable holding simultaneously, the easier it becomes to manage life.

[Dana] (31:01)
That was awesome. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s, well, because that’s the reality of it. If we try to deny something that’s there, it’s still there. We might as well feel it and face it and process it. Now, we’re about out of time, Amanda, but I wanted to ask you, you had a question on your bio list that I was intrigued with. You said, “what is the heroine’s journey, and how does it differ from the hero’s journey?”

[Amanda] (31:29)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We don’t have a huge amount of time, so I won’t go into massive depth on it, but basically I love the heroine’s journey, and it’s been something that I have lived the last probably two and a half years. If you think about the hero’s journey, and again we’re kind of going into the archetypal field here, so when I talk masculine, we all have masculine, we all have feminine, it’s like the yin-yang symbol, there’s light in the dark, there’s dark in the light, there’s masculine

[Amanda] (32:28)
in the feminine. Now the feminine is, if you think about the in-breath, the sex organs, they’re hidden, they’re receptive, they’re mysterious, all of that internal stuff, that’s our feminine. The masculine, again think about the sex organs, they are out there, they’re projective, they’re visible, they’re what we do in the world, they’re those things that we go and get stuff done with.

[Dana] (32:51)
this.

[Amanda] (32:53)
And that’s for me the best way to describe the masculine and feminine. If you think about the hero’s journey, there’s this call to adventure, we know something needs to change, I’m gonna go. The heroine’s journey often starts because oftentimes we’ve been betrayed, and we recognize we’ve been betrayed, or there’s been some kind of disconnect from our feminine, whether it be our actual mother or from those feminine traits of ours, the emotions. Men shouldn’t feel anger, good girls shouldn’t, boys don’t cry, all of these things that we were raised with, and yes, I know they’re changing now, thank God. But it’s all of that stuff that disconnects us from our feminine essence, disconnects us from those deep emotions that we do feel. The emotional state is very much within that feminine part of ourself, and we deny it, we shove it down. And we gain some kind of success in this masculine world, and then we’re looking around like, “huh, is this it?” And we all go through some form of crisis like this. This is not about gender or sex or any of that stuff, it’s about our archetypal journey. The hero’s journey is that archetypal journey, but it tends to be going out. The heroine’s journey is “I have gone and achieved all this, it’s not working, now what?” And that’s when we have to go inward. There’s a story of a goddess, Inanna, and she went into the underworld to save her sister, and at every level of the underworld she went to, she had to strip something off. She was a queen, so she takes off her cloak at one, she takes off her crown, and by the time she gets to the underworld she is stripped bare. And that’s what we end up going through. This is why a lot of people in midlife have their midlife crisis, they’re searching for meaning in life, and we can’t get meaning out there. We can get notoriety, we can get success, but we don’t get meaning, we get meaning from inside. So the heroine’s journey is very much about that internal journey. People call it the self-help journey or the personal development journey, but it’s really us working out how we interact with the world around us, what’s our part in this. And as we come out, we start to recognize, well, we disconnect from the feminine, we over-identify with this masculine, “I’m gonna get success and I’m gonna get my good grades and I’m gonna tick all the boxes,” and we sort of go into the way that society works, it’s about competition, it’s about comparison, and I’m gonna beat you. And we get to this level of success, and then we start doing our inner work.

[Dana] (35:51)
Yeah.

[Amanda] (35:51)
And that part is the heroine’s journey. Now another example that I use to really illustrate another side of the heroine’s journey, because yes, we need to do our own inner work, we need to go into those places, understand how we tick almost. What am I doing? Am I using unhealthy coping mechanisms, wine, drugs, shopping, sex, all of these numbing behaviors? Well why am I numbing and what am I numbing? Okay, let’s heal that and see where I end up. That’s all the heroine’s journey. It’s really going inward and learning our inner landscape, and then coming out and being able to marry our masculine and feminine together to be able to then come out as a more whole us, because it’s not about anybody else, it’s about us. So how does my masculine and feminine then work together

[Dana] (36:41)
Yes. Right. Gosh, what?

[Amanda] (36:49)
as a team within me, so that I can bring more of myself into the world.

[Dana] (36:49)
Mm-hmm. I love this. I just resonate with everything that you’re saying. I feel it within me as I’m listening to you. Definitely feel my masculine and feminine both and have for a long time. If anything, sometimes I feel like I tend to be more masculine at times than feminine, and it’s interesting, I really like everything you’re saying. Now our time is up, but I wanted to make sure that

[Amanda] (37:13)
Yeah. Yes.

[Dana] (37:22)
I know my listeners are thinking, “oh my gosh, this is amazing, I’ve got to hear more of what Amanda has to say.” Now what I have here is AmandaKate.com.au, okay, and I’ll make sure I put that in the show notes. So listeners, don’t worry, it’s going to be in the show notes in case you’re out running or doing something physical. Alright, Amanda, thank you so much.

[Amanda] (37:32)
Yes, that’s correct. Hehehehe

[Dana] (37:48)
This has just been, I feel like we could sit here, I could just listen to you talk, and because I really, everything you’re saying, I’ve seen it play out when I would have my patients in therapy, and I’ve seen it play out in people’s lives.

[Amanda] (37:50)
Hehehehe

[Dana] (38:03)
Everything that you’re saying, absolutely I resonate with, I support, I agree with, it just makes a lot of sense. Thank you for spending your energy and your time to come and be here and to share all this with Phoenix in Flame listeners and myself. Thank you so much.

[Amanda] (38:19)
Oh it’s my absolute pleasure Dana, honestly thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it.

[Dana] (38:24)
This is awesome. Okay, listeners, I know that you have heard things today from Amanda. You’re thinking, oh my goodness, this is just amazing. So you probably are thinking as well, I’ve got a friend or a coworker or a family member that could really, they really need to hear what Amanda has to say. Take this episode and put it on your favorite social media sites. Post it, whether it’s on Facebook or LinkedIn or Instagram or Twitter, whatever you want to do. Copy and paste the link in texting and email. Do whatever you want to do. Let’s spread the word. Let’s build our Phoenix in Flame community so we can come together and be stronger. I hope you have had a wonderful day, and I hope the rest of your day goes fantastically. I’m Dana on Phoenix in Flame.