Ep #3: Feeling Stuck? Three Kick-Ass Tips that Help While Considering Divorce

After sharing the highs and lows of my past year in the previous episode, the natural next step emerged— getting three of my most powerful tips out to y’all.

For those who’ve been contemplating divorce and are feeling stuck, you’re not alone. It’s a very common theme amongst the women I coach and these three tips are here to get you moving forward in important ways.

So, what are these tips? 🌟

Tip 1: Invest in Yourself First and Always 

I delve into the profound importance of making yourself the priority. Break free from societal expectations and nurture your soul. Your most powerful asset? A healthy, fulfilled you.

Tip 2: Surround Yourself with Uplifting Voices 

Discover why the people you surround yourself with matter. From authors to coaches and friends, pay attention to those who resonate with your truth. Let their wisdom guide you on this empowering journey.

Tip 3: Play the Long Game 

Divorce can be daunting, especially when the brain clings to familiarity. I encourage you to look beyond short-term pros and cons. Consider the marathon of marriage and ask yourself, “Where do I see myself in 10 or 15 years?”


Tune in, absorb the wisdom, and take a step toward a future that aligns
with your truth.

Remember, babes, your journey is unique, and only you hold the key to
your truth. Until next time, sending love and courage your way! 💕🌟

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Ep #2: Into the Future We Go

Join me on a journey through time as we delve into the past and present in this second episode of The Stay or Go Podcast.

Recorded a year and a half apart from the first, these episodes mirror the ebb and flow of life, reflecting the unpredictability of our human experiences.

I’ll take you through the monumental growth period I unexpectedly entered after recording the introduction episode. Life threw challenges my way—some heavy, some transformative. From the passing of my mother to pancreatic cancer, navigating trauma in my family of origin, and confronting repressed memories, this past year and a half has been a tapestry of emotions.

In this episode, I open up a little bit about going back to therapy, the unexpected parting of ways with my best friend, and the profound impact of recent societal changes. From the Supreme Court’s denial of women’s bodily autonomy to advocating for speaking openly about child abuse, I dive into topics that matter to me.

Amidst the heavy, there’s also the unexpected joy of love. I share a little insight into the excitement and challenges of a newfound love and exploring the depths of a relationship and the lessons it brings.

Hit subscribe, buckle up, and embark with me on this wild time travel trip forward.

“Intro episode for the podcast, TAKE TWO!”

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Ep #1: Welcome to The Stay or Go Podcast

Step into this first episode with me, Britta Jo, your guide and confidante as I share an overview of what this podcast focuses on including:

  • breaking free from fear-based narratives around divorce
  • embracing your authenticity so you can live life fully
  • realizing how shame and guilt actually keep you stuck
  • rethinking affairs

and much more.

Later in the episode, I dive into my own story going from a deeply ingrained religious identity to the profound decision to divorce. I explain my goal to take an authentic approach in my epsiodes, peppered with a hint of irreverence, to create a space that is both nurturing and provocative for my listeners.

I want this podcast to be not just a space for the disenchanted in marriage, but a sanctuary away from all of the noise around considering divorce for those seeking profound self-discovery and empowerment.

Get ready to embark on a journey of dispelling myths, cultivating self-love, and navigating the delicate balance between staying and going.

Featured on the Show

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Processing Pain – 8 Steps to Help You Through It

When you process pain, you’re choosing to feel pain “on purpose.”

Say what?! Why on earth would you want to do that?!

Because here’s the thing, pain doesn’t go away when you avoid it. It just gets shoved to the side and then stews and festers there in the background. And if you leave it long enough, it can end up seeping out into every other aspect of your life so that your always creating this low grade unease and anxiety.

No, this is not how we live life anymore. The goal is to process and allow pain now instead of stockpiling it for later.

And you do that by actively letting it in instead of trying to escape the pain with pleasure (food, alcohol, media).

Here are eight helpful steps to break this process down:

1. Allow the feeling to be in your body. You can say in your mind “I am processing disappointment.”

2. Notice any desire to react, resist and avoid. Just let the desire be there without acting on it.

3. Acknowledge that this feeling is part of being human. Allow it to be there and notice the thoughts that increase it.

4. Write down your thoughts as they come up. Notice how they affect the feeling.

5. Don’t try to change your thoughts yet. You have to process the feeling first before you’re ready to think something different.

6. Own your pain and that you are the one causing it with your thoughts, and that is okay.

“I am responsible for this pain. I have created it with my mind. I can learn so much if I go in without resistance. I can meet myself intimately on the inside. I forgive myself for my part in this. I accept myself for who I am. I am not this experience. I am good. If I create pain with my mind, I can create relief with my mind.”

– Brooke Castillo

7. Invite yourself to let the thought that’s creating the pain go.

8. Repeat with every negative emotion that comes up. As you practice, you will get better and it will become easier.

As you start processing pain in real time when it first becomes activated, you will notice that you will have less days where you store up all the feelings and then explode three days later in a yelling and crying meltdown.

Just a year ago, I used to do this all of the time, but as I’ve worked on processing, I now catch the thoughts and feelings earlier when there’s just one or two emotions.

Instead of letting them back up (like old to-do lists or unanswered emails), I try to allow them in real time.

This is possible for you too! And the sooner you get started, the more life you’ll get to experience with this skill in your back pocket.

How to Change Your Beliefs

Your beliefs are what create your life. They are the lens through which you view the world and interpret reality.

So if you want a different life, than you have to start at the belief level.

If you try to change things with your actions alone, those changes will not stick. That’s why people can go on diets and lose 50 lbs but then gain it all back and more.

In those instances, core beliefs that are driving the overeating behaviors were not addressed and ultimately won out in driving the long-term behavior.

So what do you want to believe and how do you believe it?

There are 3 steps that can help you in changing your beliefs.

1. Find out what you believe now

What do you think about yourself? Your spouse? Your past? Your kids? Your future?

The thoughts that you think over and over again are your beliefs.

And what you believe is what you will subconsciously create.

You have to know what you are believing right now so you can see where you want to change things.

2. Decide what you want to believe

Once you’ve identified your beliefs and can see how they are creating your current reality, you get to decide which beliefs you want to keep and which are no longer serving you.

What would you like to believe instead? About your marriage? About yourself? About your spouse?

A word of caution here.

When changing old practiced beliefs, you want to select new beliefs that are believable for you. For example, if the old belief was “I can’t trust myself” and the new belief “I CAN trust myself” feels totally unbelievable, that’s okay. Recognize that your brain is rejecting such a big jump.

Instead, we use bridging thoughts to help us get there. Variations such as, “I am learning how to trust myself” or “I am experimenting with trusting myself” can help your brain move gradually to the new belief, “I CAN trust myself.”

3. Practice believing

Your old beliefs are just thoughts that you’ve practiced and told yourself over and over again, thus for the new beliefs, you want to do the same thing.

Like a muscle that you’ve never worked out before, building it up will take daily workouts at the gym. You do the same thing with a new belief.

Writing it down on a piece of paper and repeating it each morning. Setting it as a reminder in your phone. And most of all, staying aware of your old belief so that when it comes up, you can consciously replace it with the new one.

Our beliefs are changeable.

They are not set in stone.

You can create new beliefs to create a new life.

How Beliefs Create the Foundation for Your Life.

Beliefs are just thoughts that you’ve repeated over and over in your mind until they feel like truth.

Often they are thoughts you picked up in childhood while you were trying to make sense of the world and your place in it.

Your beliefs are what drive your life, and if you want to know what your beliefs are, just take a look at your life.

I like to visualize our beliefs as being the foundation of a house.

Here in Texas where I live, the soil is black clay and it is notorious for ruining foundations with its expansion and contraction throughout the seasons.

In a home where the foundation is compromised, the problems start out small.

A tiny crack on the ceiling, a door that starts sticking and won’t open and shut as easily as it use to, an uneven area in the floor.

Easy enough to overlook, but if left un-investigated, you can end up with tens of thousands of dollars of extensive damage repair.

Seeing the parallels?

In our own lives we have foundational beliefs that we’ve picked up, often unintentionally, from our culture, family, religion, schooling, etc.

We then go through life building the rest of our “house”- career, marriage, kids – on top of that foundation, and never think to check back up on it.

But then cracks start appearing in the ceiling. There’s more fighting in your marriage and less connection.

You notice the floor is starting to feel uneven. You wonder why you married this person in the first place. Life just feels so much more stressful now that you have kids and he doesn’t help out like you think a good husband and father should.

Doors start sticking and every time you go to close them you’re frustrated by the misalignment. You know something is off. Neither of you seem to be as happy as you hoped you’d be. You even see how those patterns in both of your parent’s marriages that you swore you’d never have in yours are ever so sneakily becoming a part of your everyday too.

These are the effects of un-examined beliefs.

When there’s an issue with the foundation of a house, no amount of WD-40, caulk, and paint is going to fix those cracks and sticking doors. You have to go back to the very beginning.

And trust me, you want to.

Cleaning up your foundational beliefs is some of the most important and life changing work you will ever do.

Pain is a Part of Life, But We Don’t Have to Fear It

For the couple of years that I was considering divorce, there were lots of moments of intense pain interspersed with brief respites where I’d think things were going to get better and change.

But the pain always came back around.

At the time though, I didn’t know enough about pain to be able to use it to look deeper at myself and start changing.

Instead, it was more like a black pit that seemed to pull me in deeper and deeper with each new fall down into it.

It became a bludgeoning force in my life that would set off a cascade of shame, fear, panic, despair, and hopelessness.

I was in so much pain, that I began to believe I WAS the pain. That something was broken inside of me, and I would never be able to escape it.

But coaching changed all of that.

It taught me that pain is created by my thoughts, and my thoughts are not me. They’re just sentences that pop into my brain.

It taught me that the pain was there to be felt and processed. To be stepped into and examined rather than locked away and buried.

And as I started to look at my pain, it led me to beautiful realizations.

  • That I wanted more in my life – more self-love, more joy, more presence.
  • That I wanted to have my own back and honor how I felt inside.
  • That I had dreams and desires I wasn’t acknowledging, and they were screaming inside of me to be let out.

Coaching gave me the tools to start making peace with the pain of life, and instead use it to feel more, go deeper, and evolve faster.

Now when pain comes up in my life, instead of running away and numbing and distracting myself from it, I usually get still and curious.

I know that there is something here wanting to be acknowledged, felt, experienced, and I now have confidence in myself that I can go there and come back deeper and more of myself than I was before.

How Therapy and Coaching Changed My Life

When you understand how your brain works, you can make it your greatest asset.

10 years into my marriage I was hollowed out and drained.

I was still functioning as a wife and mom, but it was more a robotic completing of the motions than something my heart was in.

I felt disconnected from my spouse and kids and most of all, disconnected from myself.

I knew that something had to change, or I wasn’t going to make it through the next 20 years.

I found a phenomenal therapist.

A woman who met me exactly where I was at and ever so gently started to question my beliefs about myself and my life.

She didn’t believe my story that I was broken and needed fixing.

She questioned the health of the interactions I was currently having in my relationships. And she helped me take the hard, terrifying look at what I was really feeling inside.

I unearthed patterns and concepts that I’d learned as a child that were still driving my life then, but that were no longer serving me. In fact, they were causing a lot of problems.

Thus began a two-and-a-half-year process to come back to trusting myself and allowing my feelings.

And then two years into therapy, I found coaching.

Coaching was where I learned the tools that allowed me to really get into my brain and untangle my beliefs about myself, my relationships, and my roles. This was the fuel on the fire I’d started with therapy.

With the cognitive component of coaching, and learning that everything in my life was being created from my thoughts and feelings, I was able to make huge changes in my life faster than I ever had before.

I was able to see clearly how I was yelling and freaking out around my kids because of the mental suffering I was creating for myself around my role as a mother.

As I processed feelings I’d stuffed down and changed my thoughts, I saw a dramatic reduction in my reactivity with my kids.

I identified deep beliefs about myself I’d picked up as a child that were hurting me. Beliefs that I couldn’t trust myself, I needed to make others happy to be loved, and my wants weren’t important.

With the tools I learned in coaching, I began to actually process and dismantle them.

I started to see myself differently. To love my humanness. To embrace my imperfections.

Thanks to coaching I was able to finally get clear enough to really love my spouse for who he was and to ultimately still make the decision to get a divorce.

The difficult eight months of that process were only made possible because of coaching.

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I went through it with more self-love, patience, and awareness than I’ve ever had before in my entire life.

I am far from being done with my life journey, but when I look back on the changes I’ve made in the past year, I am blown away at how coaching has accelerated my growth.

It has helped me be more decisive, intentional, focused, present, aware, and grounded.

I no longer see myself as the enemy, the broken human that needs fixing, but rather the master of my destiny and the dreamer of huge, beautiful, absolutely possible dreams.

This is what I want for all of my clients. And I know it’s possible.

I have watched clients in six months make the connections and shifts in belief through coaching that took me 2 years of therapy. The tools that I teach are life changing and empowering.

Once you understand how you’re brain works and what’s really going on in there, there’s no stopping you from changing whatever you want in your life.

People Pleasing

Lying to others and living with loads of resentment all to make “others happy” and “keep the peace.”

I can remember when I was about 5 or 6 years old, we were at the mall and I wanted a gumball from that huge group of gumball machines right in the middle of the aisle.

My Dad didn’t have a quarter at the time, so he gave me a dollar and told me to go into one of the stores and ask for change. He would sit on the bench outside and watch me while I did it.

As a relatively introverted child, I can remember really not wanting to do it, but after some convincing from him and promises that the store clerk would be nice, I bravely embarked.

After waiting patiently for what seemed like forever, the clerk finally turned to me and I asked if she could give me change, to which she replied, “I can’t open the drawer unless someone makes a purchase.”

And in that moment, my 6-year-old brain exploded in shame.

I remember running out of the store and sobbing to my Dad, just feeling like I was the stupidest person in the world for asking her to do something she couldn’t.

Thoughts like, “How could I have not known that?! I’m so embarrassed. My Dad lied to me. She didn’t like me. She said no TO ME.”

Such a small small thing, and yet it’s had a lasting impact on my life. Not because it changed me, but because it showed me a tendency in myself to want to never inconvenience others and always have everyone like me. Also commonly called “people pleasing.”

People pleasing is such a sneaky vice to have. It looks so pretty on the face of it.

You just “care about others” and want them to “be happy.”

But underneath there are loads of insecurity, unworthiness, shame, resentment, and self-judgment.

There’s so much walking around always on high alert for what others are thinking and feeling about your actions and words, and then intense shame when anything seems like a sign of disapproval or disappointment.

I mean, I’m a grown woman with three kids, and yet I still deal with this daily.

But here’s the thing, thanks to coaching, I’m learning how to stay with myself, own my truth, and feel whatever feelings come up.

Instead of rushing to abandon myself whenever I feel someone’s frustration towards me or disappointment, I’m learning how to hold myself and stay present. No need to bury my feelings in social media, Netflix, food, cleaning, or alcohol. I can stay present and curious about what my brain is doing.

And this is radically changing my relationships.

Because when you’re a people-pleaser, you lie to people to “make them happy.”

You hide what you’re really feeling and thinking, believing that this will make it easier on the other person.

But guess what, instead you create a false “you” that your partner than believes is you, and you feel the daily pressure to keep up the facade while simultaneously feeling resentment towards them for being the “source” of why you need the facade in the first place.

And it turns out, all of that crazy has nothing to even do with them! It’s all an inside job from beliefs that “you need to make everyone happy” and “never disappoint or let anyone down.”

Knowing this is an inside job is the best news of all, because if it’s an inside job, then you only need YOU to change it.

And believe me my friends, it can be changed.

  • You can learn how to love yourself regardless of what your spouse thinks about you.
  • You can learn to speak up and tell the truth and let others think and feel whatever they want about you.
  • You can learn how to feel any emotion possible, and not run away to hide in food and vices.

Just like building muscle at the gym, this is an emotional muscle you can build.

And it will change your life more than a great body ever will.

Look for the blog post next week, “How to stop People Pleasing” to learn more about how to build this muscle.