Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele Taraba

About Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele Taraba

Love and Compassion Podcast-Where Gissele talks with everyday exceptional people who have overcome adversities and have wisdom to share.

Publisher

Gissele Taraba

Category

business · health & fitness · religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

29 Mar 2020

Latest episode

18 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

115 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   18 Oct 2026

   Ep. 114 – The Transformative Power of Kindness

   TRANSCRIPT Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. And if you’d like to support the podcast, you can go to buymeacoffee.com/loveandcompassion. Gissele: Today, we’re talking about kindness, and we have Cindy Rowe with us, who is a speaker, trainer, and kindness ambassador dedicated to transforming workplace culture through the power of kindness and emotional intelligence. As the founder and CEO of Cindy Rowe LLC and the Be Kind Crew, she helps organizations strengthen employee engagement, resiliency, and trust by creating cultures rooted in compassion and connection. Gissele: Cindy draws from more than 15 years of leadership experience across corporate and entrepreneurial sectors to bridging gap between organizational performance and human wellbeing. She’s also the survival of a traumatic brain injury and [00:01:00] personal loss. Cindy uses her lived experience to illustrate the measurable impact of kindness on wellbeing, retention, and organizational success. Gissele: She’s also the host of the Kindness Advantage Podcast. Please join me in welcoming Cindy. Hi, Cindy. Cindy: Hi. Thank you so much for having me Gissele: Oh, thank you so much for being on the show. I’m so excited to chat with you. I was wondering if you could tell the audience a little bit about how you got started in this work. Cindy: Yeah. So it was about 12 years ago, and like most people, we have, a hard season of life and I was in a very, very dark spot. This moment in time seemed to drag on and on, and couldn’t figure out how to get out of this darkness. And I was seeing a therapist, I was doing all the things and getting out in nature and trying to meditate. Cindy: Still haven’t figured that one out yet. But it wasn’t until I reached out to a friend and just [00:02:00] shared with him, I was like, my life sucks and I really don’t know what to do about it.” What people didn’t see, on the outside I was very happy-go-lucky, put on a smiley face, but they didn’t see what was happening behind closed doors. Cindy: And, my marriage was crumbling and I was working in a very toxic work environment and just, seemed to compound every day. And when I vented to the friend, he suggested I do an act of kindness. And I don’t know about you, but if you ever had a bad day, like that’s not one thing you think about. And I was pretty bitter and I was like, “Why would I do an act of kindness? That seems really stupid.” And he very insistent and he said, when you do something kind for somebody else, it actually takes away from you focusing on your problems.” And I let that sit with me for a little bit. I was very skeptical and I was like, I’ve tried everything, so I might as well give this a try.” [00:03:00] And I did. And it was about three acts of kindness that it took me to feel a slight shift. I started to feel happy, which I hadn’t in a while, I thought, “There’s something to this.” And I was approaching my 40th birthday and I thought, it be great to celebrate such a milestone birthday by doing an act of kindness every day for my birthday month?” Cindy: And so I set out to do an act of kindness every day for my 40th birthday, and it completely transformed my life. and i- in the moment I started just to feel better and I wasn’t dwelling on all the negative things, and I started to be more positive. But what it, that activity did, it built this core value in me kindness that I didn’t have before, and it really helped me for more troubles to come as you mentioned in the [00:04:00] bio, but that I didn’t know it was happening. Cindy: But I started to realize the importance of these small acts of kindness, and they were seriously very small, like writing encouraging notes on sticky notes and them when I did my errands, or buying a scratch-off lottery ticket and taping it to a gas pump, buying flowers and dropping them off at the nursing home, filling the carts at Aldi with quarters. Cindy: Just things that I could do as I was living my life. And, yeah, I went from being that bitter, dark person to, a very positive, happy person within 31 days. And yeah, it– that’s the, the whole moment it started, and it has snowballed ever since, I should say. Gissele: Oh, that’s amazing. That’s so funny. As you were talking, I was remembering a near-death experience story that I had heard, and the woman was… You know how you do the… from their perspective, they do that life review, and one of the things that she had [00:05:00] experienced was that she was shown a small act of kindness she had done for someone else, and she was like, “Out of all the things I’ve done in my life, why would you show me this?” Gissele: And then they show her the fast-forward, and that small act of kindness had such a ripple effect on other people that the person that she had helped was now helping other people, and that had a huge ripple. And so we think the- these acts of kindness are so small and not extraordinary at all. Gissele: We think we have to be the Dalai Lama, but the truth of the matter is all of these things have such a ripple effect, right? Which is extraordinary. Cindy: Yeah. And I’ve, since then I’ve done a lot of researching on kindness, and I have found so many important things that just make those simple kind acts, like you said, the, the ripple effect. one study that shows that one kind act actually has the potential to reach 125 people in just one day. Gissele: Wow! Cindy: you don’t realize that when you’re holding open the door for somebody or saying hello and [00:06:00] smiling. you don’t understand the true impact that it actually has. And when you have that understanding, it literally is life-changing for everybody involved. Gissele: Yeah, for sure. And I also wanna mention that the reverse also has th- the, a ripple effect, right? When we express anger to someone else, and then that anger kind of passes, passes on. It’s almost like I don’t know. It’s like a, a fuse that kinda gets lit. And so when we have a negative experience with someone, that kinda has a ripple effect too. Gissele: So think about the choices that we’re making every day and the impact of those choices, which I think are really critical. I wanted to ask you, ’cause you said that the kindness process prepared you for the next stage of your experience. Can you talk a little bit about that? Cindy: Yeah. So built that core foundation of kindness and I wouldn’t say that I was unkind prior to that. I just don’t think it was really top of mind, a, a priority of mine. And so [00:07:00] having create that 31 days of birthday kindness that core value within me, I started to live differently and show up for people differently. my problems didn’t go away after those 31 days. They were still there, and I just handled them a little bit differently. But the, I think the cool part about kindness is it takes action, right? And you can see something, but if you don’t act upon it, it stays the same, right? Cindy: So I started to notice more opportunities to do kind things for people and for myself. And as I was going through the whole process, I was in a terrible marriage and we ended up, And I was at a, a job I hated. I ended up leaving that job starting my own business, which I still operate today. And then shortly thereafter, I for divorce, or we filed for divorce. It was a [00:08:00] mutual thing. And I had started to go down that slippery slope again, right? And started to feel the heaviness of life, and I remembered the 31 days that I did, and I’m like, ” I can’t do that every month.” Cindy: Let’s be realistic. Cindy: And, but what can I do to keep flexing that kindness muscle, because that’s really what it is, and just keep it top of mind. And so I decided that every Monday I was going to do a Make a Difference Monday. That’s what I call it. And I was gonna be very intentional with my kindness on Mondays, that would be a way that I could continue this newfound superpower of mine in a more reasonable way, right? Cindy: And I say that because I think I did kind things every day, but when you focus and try to be very intentional with kindness, it is different. And so every Monday I was very [00:09:00] focused on I’m gonna do something somebody, in an intentional way, and that has really helped me continue the whole journey of this kind lifestyle, I guess I would say. And As I continued down my story, my path, I didn’t realize what was gonna happen to me. We don’t know what the future ever brings us. And think in that moment, 12 years ago, life was preparing me for what was to come. And, we can always reflect back, right? Gissele: Yeah Cindy: the beauty part of life is the reflection of where you were and how far you’ve come. there was a reason I called that one person and vented to him. We were not close friends. We were we were in the same network marketing company, and we had a lot of common interests. He lived in C- Colorado, I lived in Illinois. So we had never– I’ve never met him in person.[00:10:00] Gissele: Oh, wow Cindy: yeah, I’ve never met him in person, but I felt like he would understand where I was coming from. And for him to give me that advice and then for me to take it, and then take it one step further and do the whole birthday… But he didn’t tell me to do 31 days of kindness. He just told me to do an act of kindness, right? That the pebble that started to roll. And shortly after I got divorced, I was in a in a meeting for one of my business clients, and I was headed to another business client meeting, and I was in a terrible car accident. Cindy: And this woman pulled out in front of me, T-boned me, or I T-boned her going 55, 60 miles an hour, the cop said. And at the scene of the accident They were like you probably should go to the emergency room,” whatever. I didn’t have any physical thing wrong with me. And my ex-husband was a police officer, and I always know he’s like, ” [00:11:00] Always go to the hospital. Cindy: Always go to the hospital.” So to the hospital. Through the ER, they’re like, “You’re fine. You’re probably gonna have a headache but you’re lucky to be walking out of here.” Come to find out I was not fine. It was a few days later. I couldn’t remember words. I couldn’t sleep. I had horrible headaches, Gissele: Oh, wow Cindy: all these things. Cindy: And Called my primary doctor, and she’s “It sounds like you have a concussion. Just take it easy let me know if things get worse.” They got worse. I couldn’t walk straight. I literally would look at this and have no idea what it was called. I’m like, “You Gissele: Yeah. Oh my gosh, that must have been so frightening Cindy: Yeah, it wasn’t like brain fog. Cindy: It was like I literally could not remember words. Gissele: Yeah Cindy: And I end up going to a neurologist and being diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury six weeks after my car accident. This story is relevant because at that time I was creating my [00:12:00] business. I was a marketing consultant, and I had only had a handful of clients, my neurologist was like, “Every brain injury is different. We don’t know how long it’s gonna take for you to recover, But the one thing is you cannot work on the computer for long periods of time, like a half hour a day.” And I was like, “You gotta be kidding me.” Gissele: Jesus, you just left it. Yeah. Cindy: I like, I don’t Gissele: you just left the business, you’re starting a new business. Yeah, for sure. It must be terrifying. Cindy: a husband to help support me through this, and I was like, “Okay, this is great.” So I went back to my clients. They all knew I was in this car accident, but they didn’t know the new diagnosis, and I shared it with them, and I said… They were all on yearly contracts with me to pay me monthly, a monthly retainer to do their social media marketing. And I was like, “I don’t know how long I’m gonna be down. I will try my hardest, but here’s your opportunity to get out of the contract ’cause I wouldn’t feel right to take your money.” Not one of [00:13:00] them left me. They all ” We just wanna see you recover.” I worked with small business owners, like people that can’t afford a marketing person, Cindy: So were on my side. Cindy: They had my back. They were showing kindness to Gissele: Yeah Cindy: And it was a big light bulb moment for me that I had built my company with a core value of kindness as well, and now they were repaying it back to me. And that was such a, a cool moment. And of course, remained my, my clients up until the very end. Cindy: I ended up closing my marketing company at the end of last year. But I realized at that moment that there was more power to this kindness thing than I ever realized. The other part about this whole kindness thing was during my recovery And nobody ever shared with me about how to [00:14:00] take show self-kindness or do self-care. Cindy: I never had anybody talk to me about that. I’m a high achiever, high performer, go-getter. I go. And I had to, right? As a entrepreneur with Gissele: Damn Cindy: else helping me, I had to. But when this car accident happened, my life stopped and I couldn’t. And I was all focused on my recovery. I had to go to brain therapy, go to chiropractor appointments ’cause I had severe whiplash. Cindy: I was a mess. You couldn’t tell it from the outside. It was all internal stuff. And I knew that the way I could be the best patient was to listen to my body. And that’s hard for somebody that is always Trying to achieve the next big thing. So I– the biggest lessons I learned from my car accident was patience and grace for myself, and that took a lot of self-kindness. [00:15:00] That took me to, to understand that if at one o’clock in the afternoon I was tired, that I lay down and rest, that by doing that, I wasn’t lazy and I was simply recovering. And there was months where I had to take an afternoon nap, and I’m not talking 15, 20 minutes. Gissele: Yeah. Cindy: Was like a two-hour nap order for me to function when my kids got home from school so that I could prepare dinner and then go along with our evening, and I was already always in bed by eight o’clock anyway. Cindy: But that element of self-kindness came because of my car accident, and that, that was something, again, that I was not aware of or prepared for. It just happened, and I think it wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t do that 31-day activity, 12 years ago. So as I’m recovering, I also learn about boundaries, and that [00:16:00] was another for self-kindness is boundaries. Boundaries for my clients, boundaries for, my friends, boundaries for my cell phone. Gissele: And your children, yeah Cindy: of those boundaries today. my, cell phone goes on do not disturb and grayscale at 8:30 PM, and it might seem silly to some people, but for me, that allows my brain to settle before I have to lay down. And I– it’s a choice. I get to decide if I wanna respond to texts and I’m on some group texts with some women, and they like to get chatty about, bit before nine o’clock every night. But I get to choose, do I wanna participate in that tonight or not? And the grayscale part helps me to stop scrolling social media at night because I don’t need to. Cindy: And I put in other boundaries as well, but again, I wouldn’t have done those things had I not had that core value of kindness and knew that those boundaries were [00:17:00] really important to my recovery and for my wellbeing, as well as, the rest to not feel like I was being lazy because I needed a rest. Cindy: And today, my, my car accident was the end of 2018. My first day that I worked eight hours straight in January or February of ’23, so that was a really long time. Today, I still take what I call my recharges, probably the closest thing to meditation as I can get. But I will lay on the couch with my hands across my chest and set a timer for 25 minutes, and I fall asleep, great. Cindy: If not– But I do that almost on a daily basis, and I have zero guilt about it because refuels me. It recharges me, and it’s allows me to show up present for everybody in my life for the remainder of the day. That was just one thing that it helped me get through. the [00:18:00] other one that you mentioned a personal loss, and that happened recently. I was able to find love again and married pretty amazing man. We were married for 17 months when he died suddenly at the end of ’23, and it was Life-altering. Any loss is. If anybody has ever experienced a loss, whether it’s a, a parent or a family member, a child or or even a best friend, like it’s, it is life-altering. he was just 50 years old. We had our whole lives ahead of us that we were hoping to live together. but, God, the universe, whatever you wanna think, had a different plan and, it was hard to not sit in that grief all the time. But I truly believe it was and self-kindness that helped me get through the grief when I needed it the [00:19:00] most, and allow myself to feel sad and, grieve not only the person I lost, but the person I used to be that I’m no longer. Cindy: That’s probably one of the harder things that people don’t realize is that you’re never the same you lose your spouse. Even though we were only together for four years and one day, there was a very incredible bond. I was a changed person, but kindness got me through it. The other thing I wanna share too is he was one of my biggest cheerleaders and supporters of my speaking career, and was so proud of my messaging and that I was willing to step out and do something that I had a passion for that maybe wasn’t seen by others as a, a true way of living, and he always cheered me on. When he was in the hospital, I kept getting these [00:20:00] speaking engagements. I was like, “Oh my gosh, I got another one. I got another one.” And he was heavily sedated, so he didn’t– I don’t think he connected the dots or whatever. It’s not really relevant, but he passed on December 8, I had my– at that time, my biggest paid speaking engagement mid-January. I was like, “Okay, know how I’m gonna do this,” ’cause at that point I was still a, a mess. So I let them know, the event planner know that, what had happened, I was still committed to go and be there, but I just felt like they should know that my life has changed dramatically. And I showed up and I was prepared, but I feel like… he was definitely there with me, and I don’t know how many of you listening in signs but I was like, “I just ha- I just wanna get through this, and once I get to the car, I can cry. Get me through this.” And, When I was [00:21:00] doing the presentation, Scott, he was a, a jokester. We had tested the AV, everything worked beautifully until I went to go push the, the clicker and the screen and the projector like shut off, and then it turned back on. Cindy: I was like, “Okay.” And then I s- I was speaking, and then I went to go advance it, and it did it again. And I just looked up and I’m like, “Okay, thank you. I know you’re here,” type of thing. Got through it, and the woman that had hired me, she came up, she’s like, “Did you see he came? He s- he showed up for you.” Cindy: I was like, “Yeah.” I didn’t wanna cry, i, I share that story because if he wasn’t such a big cheerleader and supporter of my work, I think I would’ve passed on that. I think I would’ve not shown up and, or just tell him I couldn’t do it. But because he was such a big supporter of me, I like, I had to do it for [00:22:00] him, and that helped me get out of the darkness that time really focus on something else. Cindy: Again, kindness, focusing on something good, showing up, doing what I needed to do. Since he passed away, my speaking business has exploded. I can’t even explain it. And I speak about kindness. I speak about kindness in the workplace. I speak about self-kindness and work-life balance and so that is my core message. Cindy: But if I didn’t do that 31-day activity I believe I would still be sitting on the couch right now grieving my losses. I truly believe that, and has helped me get through some of the darkest times. When I feel sad, I go do a kind act. When I feel mad, off, I go do a kind act. When I miss Scott, go do a kind act. Cindy: It’s like is my backup plan [00:23:00] for everything, and it makes me feel good, know I do good, and I know I’m improving somebody else’s life, if it’s for a moment, and I’ll never s- see it, I won’t see that ripple effect, but I know I’ve shared a lot, but that I didn’t know what was coming for me in the future. But I believe there was a divine reason why called that person. They shared that idea of doing a kind act with me, and then I took it one step further, because had I not done that, I don’t think I would be here today. I wouldn’t be your guest. I would be… Who knows? Maybe I wouldn’t even on this earth, I just don’t know. But I know I’m here for good, and I’m here for a purpose and an impact, and kindness is my message. It has completely transformed and saved me Gissele: Thank you so much, Cindy, for sharing that story. And I know it must have been really challenging. But I wanted to point out some key things that you had mentioned, which is we think that [00:24:00] if we do good, then only good things are gonna happen to us. And so I think that’s a really important message to understand that it’s not about avoiding things that happen in our lives, whether it be loss or grief or whatever. Gissele: It’s about riding the wave, right? Not allowing it to sink us. And I think what you demonstrate to us is there are ways that by showing love and kindness and compassion for others, that we can get that back, and we can also find or tap into that, strength and love and support that we’re giving out. Gissele: From my perspective, we’re all interconnected it obviously comes back to us both positive and negative, right? And so I think that’s really important. I wanted to talk about or ask you about how did you handle the moments where the fear arose? Like you I’m a doer, right? Gissele: And I’ve been in the situations where, when you’re switching careers, where you’re not really necessarily knowing how it’s gonna pan out, and you having [00:25:00] a traumatic brain injury right after and having to, at times, give yourself what you needed in that moment, which is the ultimate act of self-love. Gissele: How did you address it when the fear came and said, “No, you gotta move. This business is not gonna succeed if you’re not constantly hustling,” and so on? Cindy: Oh man, that’s– It shows up every day, right? Cindy: I feel like The fear is always there. But Knowing that if I don’t take that rest, I won’t be the best version of me. And I think understanding that I’m on– especially as an entrepreneur it’s so hard to not compare yourself to somebody else’s journey. so you always feel like you’re 15 steps behind and that you’re never gonna catch up. And I think since losing Scott, my frame of mind has completely changed. I try to live more now for the present than [00:26:00] about what’s gonna happen five years from now. And as an entrepreneur, that’s huge shift in your brain because you’re always trying to about, “Where am I Gissele: Yeah, what’s my Cindy: And yeah. And I just, I can’t let the fear control me anymore. Don’t know about five years ago when I was dealing with the part of brain injury and trying to move forward. That helped me t- learn in the moment things because all I had. Unfortunately with my brain injury, I’m missing periods of time and that, that really sucks. Cindy: It sucks too with my children when they share stories with me and I’m like Okay. don’t remember. and that’s– it sucks, but I think fear’s always gonna be there. It’s important that you don’t let it control you. You focus on or try to remain present on what you need right now. [00:27:00] And okay if you have to take a breather. It’s okay if you have to take a rest. It’s okay if, like– There’s no need to panic when you are doing the best you can and living your best version of your life and giving to yourself and giving to others. Cindy: I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’m answering the question right. But since losing Scott, my perception of a lot of things have completely shifted. I don’t let it control me anymore. There’s– It still shows up every day, it’s okay, what do I need to do for me right now? do I need to do for those in my immediate circle so they know that I’m there, I’m a good friend, I’m a good support? Cindy: And what do I need to do today to be the best Cindy Rowe for my company and not stress about what might happen in three years from now? I can’t, like– And I was just sharing this with a friend yesterday about [00:28:00] October. October is a very busy month for speakers, and I’m not busy. I think I have two speaking engagements. And they’re like what are you doing about it?” I’m like I’m not.” I– It will come if it is. If not, it’s okay. I’m still gonna be okay. That wouldn’t have happened three years ago before Scott died. I would’ve been like, “I gotta do all this stuff. I…” It’s almost trust, more trust in yourself too, I think, and that gets easier as you get older. but when you have a great loss, I think your mindset changes a lot. What you’ll let ruin your day, what you’ll let control your being, I think Gissele: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You answered my question. It was really great. And it’s interesting we allow things like comparison when people’s experiences, like especially on social media, are so curated, right? You only get a snippet. You don’t get to see all of the sleepless nights. Gissele: You don’t get to see all the push through. Periodically you get people that say, “I’m a 15-year overnight success,” right? I- and tell you [00:29:00] about all the things that they had to go through. But most people are painting a curated picture. And so I love and appreciate that you are living in the flow, right? Gissele: One of the beautiful things about kindness that I have seen is that it’s almost signaling the universe that you have more than enough to give. It’s almost like this signal which is okay… ‘Cause when you’re in survival, you are definitely very self-focused. They’re l- you’re like, “How am I gonna survive? Gissele: How am I gonna live? If me.” But when you took it, take it out, it’s almost like you is done, right? You is taken care of. I can now focus my energy and attention on helping others. And so you start to care more for others. And it is a signal of enoughness, right? And the universe is “You’re right. Gissele: You have more than enough to give to yourself and others. Bing.” So I think that’s where you feel like you are right now. You’re in the point where you’re like, it’ll come, it’ll flow, and as long as you have that, maintain that feeling of I’m okay then things do flow. I’ve been on the other side [00:30:00] of that too where I had noticed that the universe was giving me amazing things, like a contract out of nowhere, this amazing teaching opportunity, and my mind was like, “Not enough. Gissele: Not enough. Not enough. I need more. I need more. I need more.” And then I got to a point where I wasn’t getting anything, and it was like, “Oh, shoot, that was more than enough. Would be grateful for a dollar at this point,” right? And so you start to realize how you, with your thinking, are attracting that sort of lack. Gissele: And so I think it’s a great strategy and a great way of actually, living in the world. Cindy: I love that, that you said flow. That’s gonna be– I’m gonna write that down. And then the flow. Gissele: Yeah, I wanted to talk about kindness in the workplace because, I know some people are like what does that look like? Does that mean that I just allow people to act crappy and bully and not do their work?” And so we have all these misconceptions about kindness in the workplace. Gissele: Can you share a little bit about what it means? Cindy: Yeah. [00:31:00] So the biggest misconception that I think people have, and when I speak with organizations, I start off this way. There’s a difference between being nice and being kind, and there’s a big difference of that within the workplace. So when we say a kind workplace, a kind culture, being kind at work, thoughts go directly to niceness. Cindy: Niceness is pushover, saying yes to everything, not like always sugarcoating things, avoiding criticism. Kindness is having those tough conversations. Kindness is making sure you give grace, having that positive intent, like people aren’t coming at you, trying to make your life miserable. Cindy: Like having that positive intent and doing things in such a way that people improve and grow. That’s not being soft or weak. It actually takes strength and courage to be kind. And I have people like [00:32:00] think about visually, was the last hard thing you experienced at work? conversation. Maybe somebody lied to you, maybe somebody sent you an email in all caps, right? It’s how you respond to that, how you react is really telling on how much kindness you have within. And to build a kind culture or to be a kind leader, you have to practice kindness yourself. It’s not something that can just be there. when you approach a tough situation, which everybody, wherever they work, whether they work for themselves or they work for an employer, you have challenging situations every day, multiple times a day. When you approach that with kindness, empathy, respect You will have a better outcome than if you just react to however you’re feeling. It’s our natural human instinct to react in what we’re given. So if [00:33:00] somebody’s yelling at you, pointing at you, calling you names, spitting in your face or whatever, in all caps, you’re just like, “Arms up let’s fight,” Gissele: Defense Cindy: you get defensive. Cindy: But if you just take a breath and you’re like, “Okay, something else is up with this person. Cindy: It has nothing to do with me. Let’s figure this out together.” Up with that empathy, showing up with that kindness, showing up with that respect, and just finding out what the root cause is you’re gonna get a much different end result when you do that. And I share ideas of what kindness might look like at work, and it’s not bringing the donuts and coffee, although everybody loves that, right? Gissele: yeah. Pizza day Cindy: It’s like recognizing when somebody does something well the moment, not just in their annual review, right? And I share, like I, I had this sticky note idea, right? I do sticky notes all the time. Everyone– I travel a lot, [00:34:00] so I just write inspirational notes on sticky notes, and I slap them in bathrooms and mirrors anywhere I go. If you are flying and you open up the menu, you might find one of my sticky notes you know, just to brighten up your day. I shared that idea. was a couple years ago. I shared this idea wouldn’t it be great if you just wrote down on sticky notes what you witnessed in your team in a day or in a week, and you shared it with them in the moment? And “Thank you so much for showing up on time at the meeting. I love how you always bring the great energy to everything you do. Thanks for pitching in, when the, we were all in a time crunch,” or “I appreciate you answering the phone, when I couldn’t get to it.” Stuff like that. Cindy: Little things. Those little things. So I shared this at a conference, and a woman just recently reached out to me and said, “I took your idea of the sticky note.” And she said, “My team of six was had very low morale, like everybody [00:35:00] hated coming to work, and I decided I was just going to notice things and appreciate them a sticky note.” She’s like, “It didn’t cost any money, and so I could do it,” right? And so she did it, and at first the, the employees were like– or her team started rolling their eyes, thought it was really stupid. Then they started keeping them, and she’s like, “Okay.” So she kept doing it. Then they started doing it for each other. Cindy: And she said, “My team of six, my small team of six, changed over a period of time.” This wasn’t overnight it was over a period of time. She had another team leader come to her and say, “What are you doing? And how much money did you get for this? Because your team having fun. They enjoy work.” Cindy: And she’s “It was a sticky note.” And the, the other person was like, “You gotta be kidding me, right? It was so easy as that.” So recognizing, showing recognition, appreciation know, showing respect, and that seems really common [00:36:00] sense. But again, when you’re overstressed, overworked, you’ve got 15,000 things happening, you don’t think about that. Cindy: Just tell somebody “This needs to be done now,” instead of, “Hey, I know we’re all super busy but this needs to be a priority. you help out with this?” Like just shaping it a little bit differently, up with candor, asking for feedback. The other thing that I share a lot, especially with political climate that we have here in the US is valuing the views of others, even if they’re not like your own. That’s kindness at work. And this goes two different ways. You can believe that, and I can believe this, and we can still work together. It doesn’t have to change how we come together and collaborate at work. The other idea to this valuing the views of others at work is that we work in very diverse workplaces. We have old, young, different cultures even different, sexual [00:37:00] needs, I don’t even know how to frame that. But if you’re all sitting at the table a meeting asking people for their ideas and opinions about something, and let them share, that doesn’t mean you have to utilize them. But if you have a new employee that’s 20 years old, an older employee that’s 62, you’ve got, You know, somebody from, a different country, somebody that grew up in a different religion. You have all these different backgrounds. Somebody that is now in HR that used to be in finance, like, and you get to hear their ideas. You’ll never know what kind of cool things will come up. And the beauty about that, being able to openly share, is now they feel like they’re valued you listen to them. don’t need to even s- you don’t even need to use the idea, but for the fact that they get to share, kindness at work. Cindy: So it is a little bit [00:38:00] broader in a sense than what most people think about when they hear kindness at work. It’s having those tough conversations when somebody is not working to the best of their abilities or they’re falling short in their duties. It’s like, have this conversation. Do you need more training? Cindy: Do you need less work so you can figure this out? do you need more time?” And that takes a very strong leader to do that. And these are not soft skills. These are, that really impact performance, retention, psychological safety. The research shows that this is a no-brainer for success for organizations, and that’s why I’m super passionate about it, because it really just, it starts here. You don’t need a huge budget. It’s just you’ve gotta be mindful, and you’ve gotta decide that you wanna lead in a kinder way. And when you do, impact, that ripple effect, it’s huge. Huge for [00:39:00] organizations. Gissele: I just wanna acknowledge something that you said that, I love the way you speak. You’re so gentle in, something that you said is so critical, which is people just wanna be seen And it’s so important. Don’t we all just wanna be seen? Weren’t we all just struggling to be seen by our parents, by our family members, Gissele: And so seeing someone, just the act of observing and being and acknowledging their presence goes so, so far. It’s so important. And so it has that impact of oh, somebody sees me. Somebody sees the little things that I’ve been doing and acknowledges me. It has an extraordinary impact. It’s something that I had done myself with my own team when I was in the workplace, and it’s amazing how much people give you 110% just by, by being acknowledged that they’re worthy of something. Gissele: The belief that everybody wants to do a good job it’s really critical. The other piece that is a little bit more challenging for people is the idea of having challenging conversations. SoI [00:40:00] used to be a director at a children’s aid society. I was in quality assurance and managed large and small teams for over 20 years. Gissele: And one of the things I noticed is people don’t like to have difficult conversations, and they really struggle because we have not been trained how to hold the difficult feelings that come up. We have been taught to suppress the difficult feelings to move on from them, to not allow them to be. Gissele: But until you can hold those difficult feelings for yourself, until you can show them kindness, and be okay and allow yourself to release, you won’t be able to do that for someone else. and so when I teach my students because I had noticed sort of a correlation between that and the school system, as diverse as school systems are, some school systems really value the there’s one right answer. Gissele: And so kids learn there is one right answer, and therefore a diversity of answers aren’t welcome. There has to be a right answer. So some of [00:41:00] my students that I teach at the university, they come in expecting a right answer. They’re like, “What’s the right answer?” And so I’m like, “There’s no right answer,” and it makes them so uncomfortable. Gissele: So one of the exercise I have them do is actually they have to tell me what they feel strongly about. Let’s say they’re like for, like pro-rights. And so they’ve gotta go to the other side and actually research the other side, the other perspective. And I do it the research, not interview or conversation, because that could be triggering for them, and so I walk them through the process. Gissele: But I get them to research the other side to understand their perspective ’cause I s- I’m teaching them research, so you’ve gotta be able to, as a researcher, see and understand what their arguments are. And it’s amazing how some students they can’t the, the dial can’t move, and I’m like, “Okay, this is the most they can give.” Gissele: But it is a way to get them to practice listening to other views without fearing that they’re going to be [00:42:00] commandeered, that their own views are gonna be changed, ’cause that’s their fear. The fundamentally is “Will my views be altered? Am I now gonna be, thinking this way, and what does that mean?” Gissele: And, they don’t like the uncertainty. And so I get them to view the other perspective, and it’s been re- really interesting, a really interesting perspective Cindy: That’s really cool. I like the, the tactic there. Gissele: because some students haven’t had the training, and I also teach them compassion throughout the year, like I give them practices that they can do. Gissele: Because we haven’t been taught to sit in those uncomfortable conversations, people don’t want to hold that, and that really is the struggle. And I go back to what you had mentioned about we think that compassion is going to be, oh, we’re just gonna allow things to be. It requires strong boundaries, and it’s difficult to have strong boundaries and say, “I’m gonna listen to you, but I don’t have to change my mind and I don’t have to change your mind,” but that can feel really uncomfortable. Gissele: what do you suggest to workplaces that may be struggling with those difficult conversations as [00:43:00] a way to get people to move closer together? Cindy: Yeah. So of the activities that I’ve done with organizations when I’ve worked with them, one-on-one, is taking a common so whether it’s whatever workplace common issue that they have, and then let’s break this down on how we would have this conversation with an employee versus, the, the team lead or the manager, and how would you approach it normally? And then how can we approach it after they learn some of the, the qualities I have framework for kind leadership and see how it changes. When you have the difficult conversation, most times you’re just sitting across from them, you’re in a power move. That is already intimidating, so is there a way you can sit side by side? Even having that change will help relax the other person. They won’t get [00:44:00] defensive right away. They already know they probably messed up or screwed up, or there’s a reason that there’s this conversation. We’re not dumb, right? There’s– they’re wise enough for that. But then don’t start it off with, “This is what you did wrong. Cindy: This is what needs to be fixed.” Say, “I really appreciate how you…” S- we call it a softening statement. I don’t know if you’ve heard that before, but… And it’s not like patting them on the back and then slamming them with the negative, but it’s like within that same situation, is there a way that you can soften it as you approach the real issue? “I really appreciate that you’ve put a lot of time and energy into this project. However, we’re getting close to the deadline, and it’s nowhere near the deadline, and we need to fix this, because if we don’t, then that causes X, Y, Z.” So you’re saying, “Hey, I appreciate that you’ve done this, but you’re taking too much time,” and that’s the real issue, right? Cindy: We’re not gonna finish the project. Now that they know the issue, them for their feedback. Like, [00:45:00] how can they help solve this problem? You’re not solving, as the leader or the manager, you’re not trying to solve the problem for them. Allow them to have some feedback into the real issue, because maybe they’re like, “Hey, I’ve got five other projects, and I’m doing the best I can, and you tell me I have to leave at 5:00 PM because of work-life balance,” or whatever Gissele: Yeah Cindy: The… giving them that opportunity, and now of the leader or the manager coming in with perception of the situation, they have a better understanding of what that employee is actually dealing with, now you can collaborate together. The beautiful part about that is you’re allowing that person to be heard and seen and not just disciplined, right? Cindy: And you’re not having that power move as the manager or the, the leader. The other thing is, does it have to be solved that moment in that meeting? Can you take a [00:46:00] breather? Can you say, “Okay, now that we all understand what is, the full picture, can we come back in an hour or maybe tomorrow morning and have a deeper conversation when we have time to process everything and we can breathe a little bit?” If time doesn’t allow, like can you give a 10-minute recess type of thing, because humans, we need time to process what just happened. And as you said, be with the emotions, right? Because what if that employee already feels terrible? Like they, they, again, having– focusing on people not up to up your life and, ruin things for the organization. Cindy: They have positive intent. They already know they’re messed up. They know they’re gonna miss the deadline. They’re feeling pretty crappy about it anyway, and now you’ve pointed it out. But with the discussion, there might be a solution where they don’t have to handle it all on themselves. So sit with that for a minute, both sides, and then you can come [00:47:00] back say, “All right, so how should we solve this together?” it’s not a me against you, it’s a we, it’s a we problem, and as a leader, it’s always a we problem. It’s not their problem. Gissele: Yes. Cindy: It’s probably more your problem than theirs, if anything. It just helps build more collaboration. It helps build more trust. It helps build this open communication, and those things are so important when you are building kind culture or in a– it’s one of the things we talk about in being a kind leader, some of the traits. Cindy: And those difficult conversations, if they happen more often before they get to the critical point, it would make everybody’s life a lot easier. So we should not avoid them. We should not push them off. I’ve had several conversations in my career that should’ve been brought to attention way sooner, and I share that. I had my nice leader, she, at my annual [00:48:00] review, told me I was doing a great job, I was like, “I was proud of myself,” right? And then three days later, I was fired. I wasn’t doing a great job, but she couldn’t have the conversation with me. Turns out I w- I had to turn my projects into her before she turned them into somebody else. Cindy: She would fix everything then submit it. So this whole time, I think I’m doing everything right, and I’m not. And she would’ve just had a conversation with me, maybe I needed more training. Maybe I needed a little extra time. Maybe I needed something pulled off my plate so I could focus on this. I have no idea. But I always share, I’m like, “I’m pretty sure she lost out on a great employee,” because I really was trying hard Gissele: Yeah. Yeah Cindy: thought I was doing great, but she didn’t give me that opportunity. Gissele: Yeah, Cindy: And I’m Gissele: the leader’s Cindy: often- Gissele: It does. It’s the leader’s inability to be able to hold that difficult s- the suffering of somebody else, right? Because they can’t … if you can’t do that for yourself, you can’t do that. And I was … Oh my God, [00:49:00] I can’t tell you the number of times I saw work plans where first of all, they were not clear. Gissele: I’m like, try- what are you trying to say? What is it exactly you want the worker to do? They’re so evasive ’cause they don’t wanna really say. And during an evaluation should not be the first time where you’re hearing there’s problems. There should’ve been conversations along the way that there was a problem. Gissele: So like you said, so the people can have the opportunity to turn the boat around, right? To improve or to maybe tell themselves that maybe this job isn’t for me. But if you’re not honest, and then people then s- get pigeonholed. They’re like, “Oh, that’s a good worker,” or they’re not a g- a, a good listener or, they’re messing up all the time. Gissele: But we haven’t had honest conversations about what the real problem was, and people weren’t given an opportunity to really, really understand what’s going on for them, which is why I love your approach. It is based on so much curiosity, right? It’s based on, it’s based on giving the benefit of the doubt. Gissele: And you had mentioned to me if [00:50:00] I had heard that before. We talk about the happiness sandwich. Have you heard of the happiness sandwich? If you’re giving bad news, you’re like, you start off with a positive, and then you give you have the difficult conversation, and then you end on a positive, right? Gissele: And I learned that the hard way ’cause I used to be in quality assurance, and my thing was because of where I, how I was trained, I, we would just come of “This is where you’re failing. This is where you’re not meeting the mark,” da, right? Gissele: Anyways, based on people’s reaction, you’re like, “Ooh, that’s not going down so well.” And so you’re like, “Oh, I gotta do this differently.” What are your thoughts on forgiveness in the workplace? I think this is a really important topic that it’s not often talked about. But yeah, I’m curious as to your thoughts. Cindy: I think forgiveness, period, is such a hard thing to do, and it’s– And, I don’t know about you or your listeners as, as far as faith-driven, but I did hear a pastor share with me years ago, or share with the church, years ago, that forgiveness is more for you than anybody else. Cindy: [00:51:00] And that has changed me in so many ways because I never saw it that way. If I forgive somebody, that means I’m letting them get away with whatever they did wrong towards me. But it’s not. It’s healing a piece of your heart. And I think in the workplace, that still rings true. They could still have messed up, you down, dropped the ball, whatever. By you forgiving them, saying, “I can move forward, and we can still together.” They already know the issue. They already know what they did, the forgiveness allows you to able to move forward. If you don’t have forgiveness in the workplace, then I think you just stay stuck, and there’ll just never be that or going forward. Cindy: And that’s not to excuse their behavior. It’s just like in the outside world. If I forgive you for cheating on me or whatever, that hasn’t happened, thank God, but that doesn’t mean I excuse your [00:52:00] issues. It means that I have healed that part of me, that I’m not gonna no longer let it control me. Same thing in the workplace. If somebody lied or threw you under the bus, that’s happened to me totally took my idea and ran with it. If I didn’t forgive them, there’d have been no way I could continue to show up and work with them. they knew what they did, and the end result turned out just fine. Cindy: But, like- They also had to earn my trust again, and that’s really hard. Gissele: Yeah, for sure Cindy: it depends on, obviously the act that had happened, but I think forgiveness is important enough if you want to continue building a strong team, strong relationships within the workplace, collaboration. Cindy: If you don’t have that forgiveness, it won’t happen Gissele: Yeah. I completely agree. One of the things I noticed in, which is why I love what you said was it wasn’t so much what we did. Sometimes you needed to let go of [00:53:00] people. Sometimes you needed to fire them. Sometimes they needed to have accountability. But it was the energy behind it. Gissele: You can have the energy of “This job isn’t for you. We love you. Go with God. We might give you… ‘Cause we might end up having to go through this legal stuff. We’ll give you a comfortable package. Go find your life dream,” right? E- even if they did something wrong and say, “You know what? You didn’t know any better. Gissele: You thought that this is what you needed to get. We don’t hate you. We don’t need to punish you. We just no longer need to have a relationship, so we need to let you go.” It’s the energy behind it. Or you can do it with resentment, and that’s what I saw in the workplace. It was like, not only did we wanna fire people, we wanted to punish them. Gissele: We wanted to resent them. We created stories. Even after they were gone, they’re like, “Remember that person that used to w- do this and that?” It’s all of this, and we are holding that in our hearts, that resentment, that hate, that, that need to punish. And so what you’re inviting the listeners to do is just [00:54:00] can you release that yourselves from that place? Gissele: That doesn’t mean you are like, “Oh, that behavior was okay,” or that they don’t need to stay, continue to stay in the workplace without some accountability. But it comes from a place of love and kindness and compassion and curiosity, not from the need to punish and hate and separate and isolate, right? Gissele: Yeah. Cindy: Yeah. It’s– That’s right on point. It’s that, yeah, that the energy is exactly Gissele: Yeah. So the behavior doesn’t have to change. This person might have to get terminated. or they might have to get some accountability. That is okay. That, that it’s an opportunity for growth and learning. But it, we don’t have to hate them through it. We don’t have to desire to punish them through it. Gissele: We don’t have to drink the poison so that they die, right? We don’t have to do that for ourselves, right? Even if you can’t find it within yourself, y- just be willing. So a couple of more questions. What is your definition of self-love? Cindy: Man that’s a really good [00:55:00] question. I feel like being honest with myself and true to who I am and not try to be anybody other than authentic Cindy the truest form of self-love for me. I compare myself a lot to other people and, it can be really challenging and harmful to yourself when you do that. But knowing especially s- what I’ve been through, I have– I had a really great grief therapist and I was really having a hard time of this new Cindy, I really liked the Cindy with Scott. Cindy: And she’s like she doesn’t exist anymore.” And I’m like that sucks because I liked her.” So trying to re-love myself of who I am now without Scott and who I will become, as I, I move through this journey. It’s appreciating everything that made me who [00:56:00] I am and just, being okay with that, right? Cindy: I am not perfect. I am– I still have really challenging days. There’s da- I am called the kindness queen in my community, and I absolutely hate it because there’s days where I don’t feel so kind, right? And it’s I can’t go out in public ’cause if… But no, I’m like, “I’m human, so it’s okay.” Give myself grace, give themself grace, whatever. But yeah, self-love I think is just Being true to who you are and loving yourself through that, and knowing that I’m doing the best I can and I’m showing up for myself how I’d show up for my best friend, or my daughter. That’s I think, to me Gissele: Beautiful answer. Cindy: that Gissele: Yes, it was such a beautiful answer, and you also brought up something really important, is that we think that we have to be perfect at kindness and compassion and love. But like you said we’re in– we’re having this human experience, and we mess up, and [00:57:00] it’s really just about the choice. Gissele: What choice am I gonna make in the next moment? And okay, I messed up, but what am I gonna continue to choose? ‘Cause love and compassion are a choice, right? Like curiosity is a choice, and kindness is a choice. All of those are choices. Last question: Where can people find you? Where can they work with you? Gissele: Where can they listen to your podcast? Cindy: Yeah. Anywhere on social. Just in Cyndi Rowe. No, I’m on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, the things. I have a website thecyndirowe.com. That’s T-H-E cyndirowe.com. and then my podcast is The Kindness Advantage Podcast. That’s on all platforms, YouTube, or you can find it on my website as well, and you’ll be a guest on my show, and I’m really excited about that too. Cindy: And yeah, I work with all sorts of organizations. I don’t do one-on-one coaching or anything like that. But even if you find me and you’re struggling with something a way to approach something, I– like, just [00:58:00] inbox me and just say that you heard me and you want in, insight or advice on how to approach it. Cindy: Way… I have such a giving heart, so I will help however. But on my show and on my socials, I share part of my journey, but I also just share easy ways to incorporate kindness into your everyday personal or professional life. And it’s a, a true passion of mine, and I, I don’t know. Cindy: I think that’s– this is what I’m supposed to be doing. And so Gissele: Yeah. Cindy: to be loud and proud about it. Gissele: Yeah. Thank you so much, Cindy, for being on this show and for sharing your wisdom on how to have greater kindness for ourselves and other people, and definitely in the workplace. And thank you to everyone who tuned in for another episode of Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele. See you soon

2. 

   6 Oct 2026

   Ep. 113 – Creating Healthy Boundaries to Heal Ourselves and Our Lives

   TRANSCRIPT Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. And if you’d like to support the podcast, you can go to buymeacoffee.com/loveandcompassion. Today, we’re gonna be talking about healthy boundaries, and Our guest today is Nina Tiara, a self-growth coach who helps women stop over-functioning, set healthy boundaries, and reconnect with themselves. Drawing on her own journey of healing and personal transformation, Nina brings a no-nonsense, honest perspective to personal growth. Her three pillars are processing emotions, understanding core programming, and creating healthy boundaries. Please join me in welcoming Nina. Hi, Nina. Nina: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to share the wealth of information I have in my lived journey. Gissele: amazing. Thank you for being on the show. Can you tell the audience a little bit about how you got started in [00:01:00] this work? Nina: How did I get started? That’s interesting. I had an arranged marriage, and in that arranged marriage, actually, the arranged marriage had nothing to do it. It was just more stressful. What really happened was, as a child, I had a lot of programming. I didn’t have any boundaries in my life. I didn’t know how to process my emotions. they say a child, when they’re young, from age, I don’t know, from the day they’re born till seven, I think, the age is, they take on programming. So basically, my parents, whatever they knew, they passed it on to me. But me being a very sensitive nervous system, I absorbed it. I internalized it. And I didn’t have anybody to model anything different. My sister was younger, my brother came 10 years later. I didn’t have any cousins or anybody. That’s just the way it was in my environment at the time, okay, when I grew up. So then as I got older and when I got into a marriage at 21, I had more responsibilities. I ended up having a host of symptoms: depression, anxiety, insomnia stomach [00:02:00] issues. I had a lot of symptoms like that, and there’s a lot more I could go into. But I had a lot of symptoms that are coming up, and I was looking for help everywhere. I was going one modality to another. And then 2006, I met a woman who’s a woman’s health coach and naturopathic doctor, and I started working with her. And, she basically said a few things to me. You’ll become symptom-free. You’ll live the life you want. Your children become like you. You’ll find your soul purpose.” At the time, it was just … I was like, “I wanna get, work through these symptoms.” And what I thought was, like, maybe a few months’ journey ended up on a, from 2006, I would honestly say October 2025, I still remember it clearly what happened. Everything, like all the jigsaw puzzles just connected. I really started in tune with my emotions and having boundaries in October 2025. And that’s how I ended up finding my soul purpose after 20 years of work with her, healing myself, and that’s how I found a soul purpose to support [00:03:00] other women that are going through, And I still see it and no judgment ’cause I was there too once Most of us as women, we know how to feel, but we don’t know how to process emotion deeper. So I help women process their unprocessed emotions, feel them, and then I help them look at their core programming, ’cause that’s huge. Those in- two interact. And once we got that sorted out, then we can go deep into helping you create effective and healthy boundaries. All three of them connect together. Gissele: That’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing your journey. And I agree with you. Many of us that had programming from, parents that might have had their own intergenerational trauma and their own issues, and so we tend to hand that down. But the good news is we also tend to hand down compassion and love, and you can have that intergenerational health, which is important. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you recognized you did not have healthy boundaries. Oh. Because in this society, I think that we’ve been conditioned to [00:04:00] overgive, and so to not overgive may seem like an odd thing to do. How did you realize you didn’t have healthy boundaries, and what helped you shift ? Nina: So when I was doing the work with my practitioner, like I, I was already a very highly intuitive empath. I didn’t know this until I did my journey. So I was already thinking when things were happening, this isn’t right. They can’t treat me like this. But I didn’t know it was boundaries. And when I started, people can’t treat me like this, right? In general or the s- stuff that was happening in my life. And it wasn’t until I started on the healing journey, I realized through processing emotions and then doing, and looking at the patterns where it was all coming from, that I was really not taught anything about boundaries. It wasn’t… My family didn’t have it either. Basically, I was living on autopilot, and that was through shifting through my emotions, looking at my patterns. I realized that… And I used to think having boundaries was guilty and shameful. I can’t do this. W- but then I realized the way people were treating me people will take [00:05:00] advantage of you. I’m sorry to say this, but even your family. And there’s nothing, no shame or any guilt around it. And I learned that people were taking advantage of me for my kindness. I was an overgiver, and being an overgiver was a reason I had all these health issues because I was go go. There’s no way this nervous system, I call it, or body can take the amount of stress that I took. It’s a miracle as well because some of the things that were happening to me, like I was actually having mini seizures. I didn’t know this until later- Oh, wow … as I was healing. At night. Yeah. So now that I’ve healed, I notice that not feeling your emotions on a deep level and not connecting to your core programming, meaning patterns as well, where did it all come from? Can you understand boundaries? If I told you right away, and you’re coming as a client to me or a friend, “Hey, do you have boundaries?” They’re gonna look like They’re gonna be so dumbfounded because if they don’t know boundaries, if they haven’t done the other two steps, feeling their emotions and [00:06:00] looking at where it all came from, understanding their upbringing, their subconscious programming, they’re not gonna understand boundaries. So that’s when I realized that when I started doing the work that I was… All this stuff, I started connecting dots. I remember when my mentors taught me, told me to connect the dots. That was the hardest thing. I was like, “Connect the dots.” That took me a long time. And once I started connecting the dots and now I have simpler, more prompts and tools for my clients. I feel my mentors were very hard on me. Maybe that was my journey. But I know depending on where my client is, I want them to learn to process their own emotions, how to get to the boundary parts. But I found my mentors were very hard on me. Maybe that’s, that was my journey, right? But yeah, that’s how I realized that through my own healing journey, The way my stories had flowed, the things that happened in my life, I didn’t have any boundaries, and that’s why they happened Gissele: Yeah. Yeah. That’s very interesting. I wanted to go back on the the comment you made about [00:07:00] kindness. And I think it’s often a misconception that kindness is over-giving, and it is not. Because the kindest thing and the most compassionate thing you can do for yourself is have healthy boundaries. Because I don’t feel like other people want to violate our boundaries. They don’t wanna do hurtful things. They just do it out of ignorance or fear. And so the kindest and most compassionate thing you can do for yourself and others is have healthy boundaries. But we have been taught that over-giving is kindness. We have been taught that putting others first is kindness, and it is not. That’s why in the Bible… I think it’s in the Bible, they talk about love your neighbor as yourself, right? And so in order for us to be able to give to others, we have to be able to give to ourselves. Nina: 100%. And I actually had a aha moment, ’cause I visited somebody on the weekend that I hadn’t seen for over a year, connected to my past. And it was interesting. She brought up some stuff, and I said, “Wow.” She was absorbing that. So people were [00:08:00] seeing it because they had boundaries, or they just didn’t sit right with it. So she shared with me, like, when I was in that place, in that family, or in that system or environment, what her perspective was. I’m like, “Wow.” And so going back to kindness, I had to do more journaling that day when I got home. Actually, I was doing it last night. I was like, “Wow, do I be mean to this person and totally shut them out of my life because they are part of my life?” But I had already done this work, so that kindness part was healing myself further because this person is gonna be part of my life as long as I’m around, my children are around, and I will be connecting with them somewhere as I have grandchildren, all that. I f- I thought I had to heal that part of me, right? So yeah, the kindness is… Once you start loving yourself and you start feeling your emotion, you start understanding what happened to you it’s gonna take time. It’s not… Because first it’s gonna… It’s not gonna feel so good. I gotta be honest. This work does not feel too good. But it’s not a quick [00:09:00] fix. And, you’re nodding your head. You agree . It’s not a quick fix. I don’t… I remember when I was doing the work, my mentors did not tell me it was gonna be hard. Because had they told me, “Oh, you’re gonna feel like crap,” I may have not done it. Seriously. I tried to get out of it a couple of times. She goes yeah, but your symptoms aren’t gonna go away.” And I’m like, “Oh, shoot. That’s what I’m here for. I wanna get better.” So going back to kindness, I think that you develop that kindness muscle as you heal yourself. You understand those people were a mirror to your healing, to your deep- understanding yourself. And you know what? You’re still mirroring. As, even as you heal… I know, I’m looking back, some of the stuff that’s happening, but it’s just flowing through me. As you heal, the healed version, people are gonna be triggered by you. So first you’re the unhealed, people reflect. You don’t have boundaries people are gonna treat you that way. So once you have the boundaries, you develop that kindness, people are gonna be kind to you, and their kindness may look like they don’t call you [00:10:00] anymore. That’s okay. Yeah. A- that means they’re not supposed to be in your life anymore, right? I’ve developed that kindness muscle now. But Women are shunned for their emotions and having boundaries. and I do not bash men at all, because everybody’s unlearning. Okay? Yeah. Once we learn it for ourselves, we treat the other person way better, whether it’s male or female. But going back, it’s a belief that we have to be kind, right? But kindness at the expense of where we’re hurting ourselves, no. Then that comes people pleasing, right? So I think on my journey, as I healed, I mirror to others that I’m not accepting that behavior, and it’s just been a ebb and flow. It… I’m just mirroring, and I’m sure you’re mirroring with other people you connect with. So I think that’s how I developed my kindness muscle. Yeah. Gissele: Yeah. So you mentioned your culture and how it influenced your ability to have healthy boundaries. How can you still… respect your culture and at the same time do something that might [00:11:00] support yourself that may not necessarily align? Nina: That’s a good question. I think when I look at… I don’t think it’s just a culture, it’s a family system. So we- … can name it as a culture. You’re in that environment. That’s where you grew up. That’s where you were born. That’s how they were programmed subconsciously. They’re not being bad parents, but you know what you know, right? Yeah. So they keep doing the same thing, it’s like they always say, teaching a dog a new trick. And to ch- shift that programming, or the, they also call it neuroplasticity, to change it, it’s a lot of work. It’s not a day’s work. And it’s also depends how much are you willing to do the work every day. Because I can be your guide, but how much are you willing to… I love learning. I could sit there and journalize and come to a conclusion within minutes. I connect dots really quickly. So when you go back to the culture I think understanding where I am at the level, that was their level of consciousness . And I saw that through my family, how my father started [00:12:00] treating me when I first separated in 2012 to divorcing 2015 to now how my family was treating me. I could see that. Sure they said a lot of things. “Oh, she’s doing this to culture. She’s leaving.” But once I shifted myself, and the biggest fear in a culture or even a system it wasn’t too long ago divorce was shunned even in other communities . Yeah. It’s not just my culture. In the white culture- … or Chinese, whatever, it’s… At the end of the day we’re all one under this umbrella. But we have these names. It was shunned Upon. And people worried about what happened to your children. But what I learned in going back to when I was doing the work, she said, “Your children will become like you.” I actually saw that shift with my children, I would say more so in the last five or six years when I shifted. And I was shifting. My older one’s a very old soul, and I have a different relationship with him, the firstborn, and I have a different relationship. Now it’s all good, but differently. But with the younger one they’re only five years [00:13:00] apart, but he would make co- little remarks here and there as I was doing the healing journey. “Oh,” just little remarks and I would like okay.” “Are you going to learn that now, Mom?” And I’m like I think he knows. Yeah, he’s a s- he’s a old soul.” And as I’ve healed I have an amazing relationship with my two boys. Yeah. So going back to the culture, that’s all they know, but you shift yourself. And shifting doesn’t mean I’m gonna be mean to you now, but I’m gonna have boundaries. And boundaries are self-love. You actually have better relationship with people, first with yourself because you’re in control of your time, you’re in control of your environment, you’re in control of everything around you. And also the people you shift, and then you decide who do you want to be with. Andyou’re gonna have to have different boundaries with different people because you’re able to decide, oh, this person operates this way. Not in a mean or a manipulative way, but that’s how kindness and compassion or boundaries are gonna work with them. Yeah. Gissele: Definitely. I’ve observed that in my own [00:14:00] life. I wanted to comment on what you had said, which I think is so important for my listeners to understand, is that this journey is not an easy journey. It’s simple, it’s not easy, which means you have to be willing to face those difficult feelings. You have to be willing to sit in the muck, to sit in the fears, and to constantly or daily show up for yourself. And that’s why, you mentioned, you’re like if they had told me how hard this was gonna be, I probably wouldn’t have done it.” That’s probably why they didn’t tell you, Because if somebody tells you, “This is gonna suck,” we are taught to avoid pain. We are taught to move away from difficult feelings, but it is through the feelings where the healing happens. I know from my own journey, there was many years where I… My journey could have to healing could have been a lot faster, but there were some things I wasn’t ready to face in that time. So I still kept taking baby steps, but I was like- … “Okay, I’m not ready for that yet. I’m, I’ll do whatever.” So I’m curious as to [00:15:00] what helped you keep going in the face of-… the adversity and the challenges you faced in your healing? Nina: Oh, what kept me going? I’m also a kind of person when I start something, a course or any kind of thing, I love learning, so I keep on the route. But what was interesting with this lady or the modality I did, it’s called biotherapeutic drainage. Not many practitioners do this, but she was also same culture, about 10 years younger than me, and she was just… She embedded in me those four things. You become symptom-free. You’ll live the life you want. Your children become like you. You’ll find your soul purpose. So as I was stepping in one step, I saw ebbs and flows of the journey where a year … So from 2006 to 2010, I was completely fine. I had energy. I was still on autopilot, but I still saw the energy coming. But I was still not 100% well. I still hadn’t learned how to feel emotion. And [00:16:00] then I had my heating crisis, which was 2010 or 2011. That was hard, ’cause all of a sudden I felt well, and then I crashed with deep depression. It wasn’t just deep depression. I crashed with … ‘Cause I had irritable bowel syndrome, and everything that I had came to the surface, right? So now I’m actually connecting more dots. So it came to the surface. I think what kept me going on, because there were times I felt better and there were times I didn’t, and I finally connected the dot that, yeah, your body that wasn’t felt at that time when you’re going through that situation or a problem and you don’t feel it then, it has to come out. That took me a long time to understand. And I, in the back of my head, I would say, “This woman’s crazy”, and I would swear at her. I would never do it in front of her, but it was in my head. I’m like, “Is she nuts?” I’m not … I would question it continuously. And I think that was the biggest thing, that I had that resistance. If I don’t, now I’m gonna have to … Okay, I’ll [00:17:00] tell you. A situation that happened yesterday. I was coming down the stairs and I was putting on my jacket and about to go to the gym, and I hit this funny bone on a edge of a corner. Oh, my God. Did it hurt. old Nina would’ve screamed and yelled and She breathed through it, and because she breathed through it, she had less adrenal hormones that came up. She had less cortisol that got pumped out. Everything. I breathed through it. I’m not saying it didn’t hurt. I breathed through it, and I was fine. Sure, it’s sore. I gotta get to my massage therapist soon. It’s still sore. But that’s how I, I think I had a lot of resistance, and that resistance only created a lot more adrenaline in my body. And I also, I forgot to mention, I lived in a fear state most of my life. Okay? So having lived in fear state, I already had a lot of adrenaline. Of course, I had insomnia. ‘Cause your body the human body is just amazing, and I got to learn that over 20 years. And I’m still learning [00:18:00] it, and you, I can see you’re shaking your head smiling ’cause you agree with me, right? And it’s just a miracle. It’s like even after my parent, both my parents passed in the last year, and I started looking into … Afterlife, and I always… My mentors always said we’re multidimensional, and you know what? We are. So that kind of work is being mirrored to me now, and I’m like, wow. Why are people afraid of death? And actually on my mom’s anniversary, ’cause my sister had mentioned I know it was August, but I didn’t know exactly when. And it was just in August 18th, I think it was. At that night, in my sleep, I think it was early morning, I remember I had a phone call. I picked the phone up, and I said, “Hello?” And it was my mom on the other end, and I said, “Hello,” and the phone went dead. So I was like, yeah, that had a profound effect on me. So there are, there is something. This body, yeah, we’re not gonna be in it. It does disappear, but there definitely is something beyond us. We don’t know exactly what it is. So ’cause I always think we came [00:19:00] here. we came from somewhere. We’re not just gonna go air. So yeah. So that’s very interesting. So people not doing it. And that’s people’s own journey, ’cause I was scared of death very bad. And now I’m living more in the moment, and it’s amazing, yeah. Gissele: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I wanted to go back to, you mentioned the body symptoms and unfelt emotions connection. I was wondering what tips you would have for someone who is having… experiencing body symptoms- and wants to get to the root of the actual feeling. Like, how do we invite ourselves to feel those feelings when it’s just showing up as a physical symptom? Nina: Okay. First, you wanna make sure you do see a practitioner, okay? D- I’m not against it, ’cause I worked with a doctor. I still do. Get my- Right get their blood work done. Get that all done, and make sure that’s… ‘Cause sometimes low iron can contribute to you feeling tired. when someone tells you meditate, and you’ve got all these symptoms, I’m sorry, you are not going to… i- there’s no way you’re gonna [00:20:00] meditate because your mind is “Oh, my God, my stomach hurts,” or, “I got heart palpitations.” I- you’re already in a fear state, okay? So start with five minutes of journaling every day. I love my me time. I have lots of it . But sit five minutes, ’cause most people are running on autopilot. That’s just what they’ve been taught as when they were younger. So sit with yourself just five minutes, whatever you have, five minutes and just sit there Feel what’s going on, feel underneath your feet, feel what’s around you. Touch, feel. Try to get out of that mind and journalize for five minutes. And maybe just sitting with yourself five minutes and slowly working towards journalizing. That’s one way of doing it. Okay? Another way with your emotions, and this might be hard for someone at first, because I didn’t get it just recently and I’ll share that with you later how I got there. That’s sitting with your emotions. I read about sitting with your emotions. My mentor talked about sitting with your [00:21:00] emotions. I think I listened to every podcast. So I had a situation, even though I’d done all kinds of healing, to get to the the root emotion. And every’s gonna have a different journey. Okay? So I don’t want people to be afraid, “Oh my God I don’t have 20 years.” But in those 20 years, I was still living life. I was still raising my kids. I was still going to work. It may not looked exactly… People probably thought I was a bit crazier than normal, but that’s okay. I don’t care, because I know… Yeah, they probably thought, “Why is Nina having so much anxiety? We didn’t see her this way.” Because before, it was suppressed. There was six months I used to fight with my parents. I used to call them to fight with them. They go, “Why are you fighting with us?” Because I, and I didn’t know how to contain myself at the time because things were coming up, right? So going back to how to feel your emo- is sit with them. I literally had two years, I’m not kidding you, I didn’t even know I had anxious attachment style. So there was a relationship, in my life, a male. And this person came in my life, I don’t know yet, specifically came into my life in [00:22:00] 2023 to show me I had anxious attachment. And in that anxious attachment, so this went on for two years, and then a friend of mine says to me, “Nina, this is getting ridiculous. Do you not have respect for yourself?” It’s… She goes, I see so much healing in you, and this is happening.” I said, “I don’t know, I would text and I would like…” And finally I go, “Okay.” A light bulb went on. “Sit with yourself, Nina. You’re going to plop yourself on a couch and you’re gonna sit.” So literally I sat with this April. May or April. I sat with it. Literally- … every time the urge came to text this person or connect with, ’cause it was a dopamine hit I would get. Gissele: Yeah. Nina: I was like, “Oh, he text- … she texted me,” or, “He texted me. This is great. We’re connecting,” right? But what I didn’t know where it was all coming from, and once I sat with it, I started to feel more healing. It wasn’t about the, about connecting with this person. I realized that anxious attachment and where it was coming from, and the other emotions [00:23:00] below the anxious attachment. Boundaries. There’s so much that came underneath the anxious attachment. Why was I doing that? More self-love, more kindness for myself, and seeing that the other person as well is dealing with stuff, they might have… And I don’t like labels, but apparently there are labels, there are things for secure attachment. But through that I learned, I think that person is avoidant. But I don’t wanna do that, because they’re on a healing journey, too. We all are. So that helped me get into secure attachment, and actually this person is still in my life, and it’s interesting. And so yesterday was, like, another, I noticed this person had liked all my Instagram posts. I’m like, the old Nina would’ve said, “Oh, I think things are, coming apart.” And I’m like, “No, Nina. Sit with it.” And it was a different kind of sitting with it. I was a lot more relaxed. I was like, if this person stayed in my life as friend or whatever, I’m open to it. But I am not over-giving [00:24:00] and over-pleasing anymore, because it’s not doing me any good. I don’t like pen pal relationships anyway . Texting is huge, and we start playing mind games, right? So those are- Yeah … two ways of healing, journalizing and sitting with your emotions, right? I know people read books. I did a lot of book reading. But until you actually start embodying these tools… And, workshops are great ’cause they give you a sense of, “Oh, okay.” But I remember when my coach, it was interesting, going there, doing all the book reading. I used to keep all her notes. Everything she emailed me I would have in a file. So I think it was around 2010 or ’11, all of a sudden I couldn’t find her notes. I was like, “Where did they all go?” ‘Cause I would refer back to them, right? They were gone. Yeah. And I told her. She goes, “‘Cause you don’t need them anymore.” So yeah, so it’s like embodying it. If I hadn’t actually tested this out, I still test myself in certain things, not in a bad and manipulative way, but from my kindness, my learning, right? Instead of jumping to conclusions, ’cause that person may not be thinking that at [00:25:00] all. So yeah, so journalizing is a first step, sitting with yourself, going for a walk, just being in the quietness as well as sitting with yourself if you can do it, is … I think it is a bit of a advanced technique depending on how much, what is actually you’re trying to heal But someone could try it because, but then they might feel uncomfortable with that, whatever that emotion is. I don’t know. Mine was that wanting to chase that person. Why aren’t they texting me back? Why aren’t they connecting with me? So it depends on what their situation. They can try sitting with it five minutes, and as they’re sitting, journalize. ‘Cause your subconscious will load into the conscious. I learned this in 2025 and had done so much work in 2006, right? So it’s a journey and everybody’s brain processes things differently, and I’m able to connect right away and say, “Okay,” so within a few sessions, okay, they lear- they’re a different learner. Everybody’s a different learner and I know we can go with this topic for hours and hours. Reflecting back to my younger one, he was told [00:26:00] that he would not graduate with a proper grade 12, and I’m like, “No , he’s just a different learner.” And the kid has outdone expectations that I had. And only I know as a mother what he was going through because I was also struggling. he’s just thriving at 27 So those are two techniques, and then people can shift and play with them. … But as someone starts working with me or somebody else your body always gives you information. I find for me now that I’ve gotten so in tune with myself, even yesterday I was feeling, oh, I was having a temptation. I had ice cream. And Nina decided to have three scoops. Guess what? It didn’t sit with me and I was like, “Okay, why is this happening?” The next day I clicked in one, I’m lactose intolerance. There too much sugar all at once for your nervous system to deal with. And your blood sugar spiked, it’s gotta get rid of it somehow, right? Yeah. So yeah, you become … Once you do the, learn the tools, you learn how to process your emotions and get into the patterns and then have the [00:27:00] boundaries, you’ll see as you shift, your body’s gonna tell you, “Oh,” like my body will literally go nauseous if there’s a deep emotion for that situation, it’s gotta release. It will literally, I will feel the nausea. I’m like, “Oh, that’s it.” And then slowly my brain kicks in. I’m like, it’s done. It’s healed.” Gissele: Yeah, thank you very much for that. That was really helpful. as a person who’s sat with her own difficult emotions, I know how dynamic it can feel, right? And you just have to breathe through it, and there is a level of courage that is required. And I also really appreciated that you mentioned it’s a journey. It might take somebody six months. It might take somebody 20 years. Oh, I’m still learning … yeah it’s a journey. I’m still learning. And it’s not linear. It’s like it has ups and downs. Like you do great and then you think, oh my gosh,” and then you take a step back, and then you move five steps forward. And so it’s a journey. So once… I think once we stop judging ourselves as to what it should look like, I think we can do a lot better. We- There’s the key. Nina: [00:28:00] Judgment. Judgment. Gissele: Yeah. Nina: Yeah. Judgment is huge. I still find myself judging. What am I judging? And I have two rules in life: as long as I don’t kill anybody or hurt anybody, I’m good to go. Why am I judging myself, right? Gissele: Yeah. Yeah. Nina: Yeah. Gissele: Yeah. I found in my own journey that I had a lot of expectations about what it should look like- And then how fast it should look like. And what I’ve learned in my experience is really it’s not what we expect. It’s- … really about allowing and surrendering and releasing. Ah. So what role has surrender played in your experience in helping- Oh, I Nina: love that Gissele: question your healing? Nina: So surrender actually happens. People talk about surrender. For me, surrender, ’cause… it was- isn’t taught because the world is on autopilot. They don’t believe that we actually surrender and let life unfold, right? Yeah. So slowly surrender, and I would think the deeper surrender came after releasing my anxious attachment. So that’s a great question, how that flowed well into releasing that surrender. I think it came after I realized my anxious attachment. I released it and worked around that, journalized, and sitting with it, [00:29:00] whatever worked for me. And I learned- That I was still too much in thinking how things are gonna look like in the future, how my business is gonna look like. Am I gonna find a relationship? All that, right? What I learned was once I stopped doing that, that, Eckhart Tolle talks about that space in between, right? I started to become more present. I’m a lot more present today than I was a month ago. And it’s so easier to stay there now because I know being anxious is not going to resolve it. And actually releasing … Another tool that I learned is we … I don’t know if men do it, but I know I, as a woman, we do it, or as I talk to women is, we start playing … This is only released through anxious attachment. We start playing stories in our head. Okay, he did this, she did this. Why did they say this? When you can soften those stories or Every time a story comes up, bring yourself back to the present moment, and not get caught up in the story in the loop. Once you stop doing that, you’ll [00:30:00] find you can start living in the present moment. It … You have more what do you call it? Mental space. You have more mental energy. You have more physical energy because you’re not in that… I noticed that right away. You sleep better, so many things. I used to have a lot of tension here in my head and like pressure here. And so I went to my eye doctor. It’s a good example of it. And I went to… I still get it on and off, but I I got it from my father. ‘Cause my father, when he was angry he would, he would get a lot of tension. So I would tell her, at certain points my feeling and programming, correcting all that, I would tell her, my eyes feel really weird.” And so what it was, we pick up even gestures that our parents have. So I picked up that gesture, and then later it’s diagnosed as ticks, right? It’s actually what’s going in your life, unprocessed emotions, patterns, and all that, right? And not knowing who you are. So actually going back to that, so I had this pressure. So once I released the anxious attachment and the stories [00:31:00] I’d created I felt that pressure went down. I gotta be careful with screen time and all that. And, we do get… We’re gonna have some sort of stress. But now I’m able to connect so quickly. Okay, am I bringing a story around that or am I just letting it flow and living in the present moment? I found I have so, I’m so much more relaxed around my eyes now. I don’t get that pressure. If I do, that’s okay. I don’t judge it as much as I used to. So yeah, so- Going back to surrender, once we start becoming aware that I was creating stories around everything, I found that space to surrender, and I found some of the things that have been happening in my life, the things that have been showing up after releasing surrender, and I find I wasn’t surprised some of the things happening right in my life because of the surrender, yeah. Gissele: Yeah, definitely. And surrender is such a beautiful strategy that you can use. And I have found in my life that the more I surrender, the more things come or, you know- Isn’t that amazing? things get better. Yeah it’s very [00:32:00] paradoxical. It’s almost if you don’t care about it, it comes, but if you do, you cling to it for dear life, it’s like it repels. It completely repels. And I’m like, that is so interesting. It’s very interesting. Nina: And I’ll tell you a very Gissele: interesting Nina: story. Yeah, of course. I’ll tell you a very interesting story on that, on surrender. So I’m also a caregiver on the side. As, as I move through my business and give it up once I start, working full-time there. But I love this caregiving job. I find the elders teach me so much, ’cause my… I worked in healthcare for 20 years before I, I started doing this, ’cause I didn’t wanna work in an office environment as I was launching my business. So I had this running joke, and I said, “Yeah when I, either the man… It’s just a running joke. It means nothing. I said, “You know what? Either he’s got to own a jet or charter me a jet, or he’s got to be able to fly me first class.” And I told my friend this, and one of my clients, all of the, all the father, the daughter, the son-in-law, the daughter-in-law, they’re all pilots. They’re all pilots. Gissele: Oh, Nina: So once you surrender, your subconscious, you change all your [00:33:00] programming and process your emotions, and surrender’s huge. You find the things. The subconscious is so deep. Sometimes I wonderit’s like a deep hole. The more you go into it… i’ve- done a lot of it, but some of the stuff that still comes out, I’m like, “Wow, I didn’t know that was there,” right? So I don’t know why. Gissele: Yeah. Yeah. It’s definitely very interesting when you observe sort of your mind. I remember many moons ago I was meditating. I’ve been doing this self-love and self-compassion- … in, in the work that I do And I remember when I had, transitioned into creating a new career, and I was really struggling in terms of trying to force things to make things happen and all of these things- and, working on living my dreams, quote-unquote. And so I’m sitting in meditation, and I remember hearing myself basically “I don’t think I deserve… i’m not worthy of making it happen, that I’m not worthy of my dreams.” That’s what it was. And I was like, where did that come from? That was… I was so shocked because I was never [00:34:00] actually the kind of person that was consciously mean to myself. We talk about that inner critic. You’re like, “You loser,” like- … stuff like that. I’ve never talked to myself that way. But actually having the belief that you are not worthy of living your dreams is also negative self-talk, right? And so- 100% … it was interesting to me when it came up, to actually examine and look at some of these beliefs, right? Anything that comes up, like the belief that life loves you. Do you truly believe that life really loves you? Do you truly believe that you are loved by the universe, right? And sometimes these thoughts, you’re like, “Wow, do I really believe that? And has that really shown up in my life this way,” right? And so that… It’s really interesting to, go deep with yourself and be present with yourself and try to understand and- And you’ve Nina: got to change it. You’ve got to… you have a belief there, you’ve got… Y- you can’t just surface it because… You can, and that’s called bypassing. So you bypass it. Yeah. But if you really wanna change it, it’s gotta become a new way, embodiment all across if you want [00:35:00] your life to shift. you really gotta start embodying it. Use those tools. It’s like changing that neuroplasticity and then you know what? Things will start. The universe… I know they say the universe also hears if you don’t… You can fake it till you make it. That’s part of it. But you’ve got, your actions have to align to get where you are, and your emotions. It’s what you feel, your thoughts, feelings. It’s all connected if you want to make your life go a certain… And then you end up getting- It’s like a flow. Now I get so many synchronicities. now I look back at my coach, what she say, “You’ll find your soul purpose.” Now I think I’m understanding, oh, okay, the way my business is flowing, that, oh, my soul. She say, “You’ll find your soul tribe.” And at the time I was dumbfounded. Now, I, as I’m going deeper into my business, I’m like, okay, let’s see, ’cause I’m doing some advertising and some marketing. Let’s see whose marketing the kind of women that register. I put my flyers and marketing material everywhere. It wasn’t [00:36:00] to one culture, but everywhere. And let’s see the kind of people that gravitate towards my work. And, I create that soul tribe, ’cause I’m sure she had them. She had all kinds of people come to her. It wasn’t just cultural. But- Gissele: Yeah … Nina: it should be interesting how that works out. Yeah. Gissele: Yeah, definitely. And definitely. And so going back to the sitting with difficult emotions, I know that y- you had mentioned this as well is that the… Probably the biggest one has been the fear of death, right? Once we overcome the fear of death, I think a lot of people will release that anxiety. ‘Cause, I really liked what you had said earlier. Yes. When we’re in that anxious state and our mind’s constantly going, you can feel physically tired. Some people are like I didn’t do anything today. Why do I feel so tired all the time?” But if you have anxiety and your mind is constantly going, you literally feel physically tired because you are using the brain- Your thoughts are making you tired. Yes. It’s energy. We’re all energy. Absolutely. Everything’s energy, yeah. Yeah. And so sitting with my understanding of [00:37:00] death and my… the viewpoint of death has really been probably re- a really interesting journey in terms of how we view death and getting past the point of death. I love NDE stories and thinking about what do we really know about death? But it wasn’t until I was willing to and able to explore it that I was freeing myself from that belief that I am this body, and this body is the whole thing. ‘Cause the more that you believe you are a physical body, the more that any changes will have a negative impact on your wellbeing. You’re like, “Oh, my God, that can’t be,” or, “I can’t age, I can’t die .” And so the more you realize, oh, I’m not this body. I have a body, and a body I love. 100%. And I am more than this body really goes a long way to free you. Can you talk a little bit very quickly about your journey with death? So I, Nina: so I… Th- that’s interesting. So I think having learned to heal myself, my emotions, and then, again, I’m gonna go back to the core programming, the patterns- … and shifting the boundaries, all that. [00:38:00] Learning me and who I am in this body, because everybody’s got a different soul, right? Yeah. I think on that spiritual level- That’s where I learned that to love myself and learn about me. And as I came out of fear state and started feeling and just started flowing with life, all these synchronicity started happening. Some of the synchronies I should eventually maybe write a book on synchronicities. Some synchronicities that I had were amazing, and I know Deepak Chopra talks about in one of his books, I know it’s a small paperback, and basically he talks about synchronicities are your connection with God. And the amount of synchronicities I’ve had And some of the things that have shown up oh God, I could… Some of the things, people have shown up at the right places and I’ve had money come in like money showing up that much I needed left in my bank account to help pay for something, that’s when as, as, as I started learning about myself, it gave me more deeper trust in the [00:39:00] universe. And when you have that deeper trust, you realize we’re not just a body. We came from somewhere. You start investigating more. Those kind of stuff starts coming at you through social media or whatever platform you use. Or those kind of people start gravitating towards you. They come in your life and you start “Yeah, that’s… that makes sense. We’re not… We c- we didn’t know where we came from. We have no idea, but…” And everyone, we came from… And my journey was on a cellular level. So bi-therapeutic drainage is the modality, but it’s all on a cellular level, how your cells turn and how you can shift your cells and how we were born from two cells. I just got to get so interested ’cause I got healed myself. I just got so interested in it and I started looking more into it. I haven’t gone to any workshops. I haven’t read any books yet. But just what I’ve connected with on social media, hospice nurses, and my own journey go deeper. I’m like, this really… We weren’t scared to be born, [00:40:00] so why is there such fear of death? And then having my parents pass away within a year of each other. My mom was sick, so we knew. But with my father, and I think I also had a different relationship with my father. And each child has a different relationship with their parents and siblings. So seeing my father pass away so peacefully , and even at his funeral, my sister was saying, “Dad doesn’t look the same,” and I… And then I learned that her perception, where she’s in her level of conscious in her life journey, that’s where she’s at, right? Her development. My father looked so peaceful, Gissele . I can’t tell you how peaceful- … he looked i, in the casket. He looked like himself. He glowed, and there’s some people I’ve, I haven’t gone to too many funerals, but some people don’t look like themself based on how they passed away. Their skin color changes. And no judgment at all. I’m just observing on that topic. So there definitely is something after [00:41:00] death. I do believe it, ’cause you can’t just die and all of a sudden- people say you turn to birds. I don’t believe that. I think you turn into something non… It’s okay. Everybody’s got their stories. I believe that one too, once too. So I think what’s… it… You… We don’t know. We don’t know the unknown. So why fear the unknown? What’s interesting… It’s sad when someone passes away young. Gissele: Yeah … Nina: that’s very sad. I really I can feel that, right? ‘Cause they didn’t get to live out their full journey, especially have, they have young children. Their children get, didn’t get to know them. There’s a lot there. Full compassion there. And I’m sure there’s a reason behind that as well, right? We don’t know. Only they would know if they went deeper into their own healing, right? But there is- … something beyond death. There has to be. and that’s where surrender comes in. I think you get to live your life without fear of death, and when it comes, you’ll embrace it I’ve come out of deep fear state, and now I, I talk about love and compassion, kindness, and I know some people think just crazy. It’s [00:42:00] okay. Call me crazy. But that’s okay. We’re all, at different points of our journey. But yeah, there’s something… there’s gotta be something more beautiful after death. I don’t know. I’m in more surrender- Yeah, for sure … right now than ever. Yeah. Gissele: Yeah. Thank you for that. A couple of more questions. What is your definition of self-love? Nina: Self-love is first being able to- And I only can relate to my own journey, right? For me, it was releasing all those unfelt emotions and then getting- … to the underneath of them and having boundaries. But if someone didn’t have those conditions when they were born, can you imagine… I was talking to my brother, I get these little stories, insights, and, we were talking about it last time. I think it was last summer when my mom passed away, we were talking about it, and I… He goes, if we didn’t have this conditioning,” my fa- my brother probably had a little bit, and he goes, “We could’ve been anything.” He goes, “I could’ve been a doctor.” I go, “Me too.” The, how s- our conditioning affects our self-love, and then we gotta go through and work through it and [00:43:00] heal. Not saying- … Nina: If you heal it at 50 you can’t be a doctor, but then you may not wanna be a doctor, right? So I ended up- Being a coach . So I think self-love came deeper through me through my own healing journey and learning about myself, and then I learned to love myself and have deeper compassion for other people because I’ve healed. I’m like, God, imagine what they’re going through, because- Gissele: Yeah … Nina: they haven’t done the healing or they’re not, as aware as I am today, right? But I’m also looking at children that are being born today. They’re a lot more, depending, ’cause if parents have less conditioning, they may still have conditioning, but they’re a lot more self-aware of how to raise their kid. They may be doing it fake it till you make it. I don’t know. They may be reading books, they may workshops, or they could have family friends that are also helping out with the kids. I don’t know. Or they’re going to daycare and they’re learning different things. But all of it’s making a difference. I’m seeing it with, kids that are being born today. They’re different. They’re smarter, and their [00:44:00] parents, their family, they’re questioning it. Oh my God, my niece’s two-year-old. so smart. all of it’s a blessing. You can’t change your parent. That’s what they were born in. That’s what they were struggling with as well. But yeah, I mean I learned at a different journey, but these kids that are born now, imagine what they’re going to be. They’re gonna be cool. They’re gonna be rocking it. They’re going to be doing some amazing things out there Gissele: Yeah. Thank you very much. Last question. Where can people find you? Where can they work with you? What do you wanna share with the audience? Nina: Okay. So like I said, if someone may gravitate towards me, that’s great, but I’m not the only person that can support you. There are other coaches out there. You can reach me on Facebook under Nina Thiara. The last name is spelled T-H-I-A-R-A. You can reach me on Instagram under Nina Thiara. I also have a Meetup group. So that Meetup group runs in the States and in Canada. It’s just meetup.com, and there’s… it’s called Becoming You, okay? So it’s under there, and I’ll share the link in there. And I host a weekly meetup every [00:45:00] Thursday, and that’s complimentary. I also offer a 45-minute complimentary discovery call, https://www.facebook.com/nina.thiara.16/ https://www.instagram.com/ninathiara/?hl=en https://ninathiara.as.me/?appointmentType=90790127 https://www.meetup.com/becoming-you-stop-over-functioning-reconnect/events/316144626/?eventOrigin=home_next_event_you_are_hosting you can share what’s, what you need support with. We can see if we’re a good fit to work together, and then go from there. So those are some of the ways that you can reach me. Gissele: Wow. Thank you, Nina, for sharing your wisdom with us today. Yeah. Thank you to everyone who listened to another episode. of Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. If you loved this episode, please share it far and wide, and we will see you soon. Bye.

3. 

   23 Sept 2026

   Ep. 112 – He Almost Became a School Shooter then Someone Saw Him. The Power of Being Seen.

   TRANSCRIPT Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. And if you’d like to support the podcast, you can go to buymeacoffee.com/loveandcompassion. Gissele: Today, we’re talking about compassion and mental health, and our guest today is Aaron Stark, who once came dangerously close to committing an act of violence as a teenager, but his life took a traumatic turn. in his viral open letter, I Was Almost a School Shooter, and the subsequent Gissele: TED Talk that brought national attention to his message of compassion and mental wellness. He’s been featured across media outlets and now speaking nationwide, including to schools, law enforcement, survivor groups, the FBI. Aaron works to help people reach those in deep crisis to remind them that they matter. Gissele: His mission, prevent future tragedies by sharing the power of connection and [00:01:00] hope. Please join me in welcoming Aaron. Hi, Aaron. Aaron: Hey, thank you for having me Gissele: Oh, thank you so much for being on the show. I would really love to hear a little bit about how you got to the point where you were so close to committing an act of violence. Gissele: I was wondering if you could share that with the audience. Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. I first off, thanks for having me on. And anybody listening, I know this gets pretty intense really fast, but I promise it ends in a very happy spot. I was raised in a very violent, aggressive, and criminal household. My first five years of life was kinda like a Stephen King movie. Aaron: My, My, birth father was the most vicious and violent person ever. Chased us across the country, and he was we basically were hunted for the first five years by one of the most abusive people you can imagine. And then after my mom left him, got with my stepdad, and it went from a Stephen King movie to more like Scarface. So it was crack cocaine and crime and stealing and robberies. We lived a very nomadic life, so I moved usually between Oregon and Colorado, bouncing between the states. And I went [00:02:00] between, to between 30 and 40 different schools. I was at a different school every couple of months, and I never attended a school from beginning to end of a school year, ever in my whole life. And along the way, my criminal family was extremely unstable. I have an older brother who’s two years older than I am, and he became the de facto man of the house. So he had to be… Like, when we’re seven and nine years old, and my parents are– we’re getting evicted because they’re drugged out and doing all their crime. And they’re at a bar, they’re not even there while we’re getting evicted. The, the sheriff’s are at our house throwing everything into the yard. My brother’s the one that has to, at nine years old, scramble to find us some place to be, and I am one of the things that he has to find some place to put. I am, I’m not useful . Aaron: He was a very gearhead kinda kid put stuff together, fix stuff. I had a lot of intellectual loves, so I loved books and music and studying science and history. I loved all that, but that wasn’t useful to the [00:03:00] crackheads when we’re getting evicted and things are breaking. My brother was more utilitarian. And so growing up, we adopted that identity. I became the burden. I became the thing that needed to be solved. I became the problem. And I was fat. I was dirty ’cause I didn’t have any clothes. I was smelly. And I really, early on, I’m talking three, 10, I wa- I Really internalized that something is wrong with me, that I’m the broken one, that I’m the thing that’s wrong. And I started, because I was always going to a new school, I would always have a different group of bullies at the different schools. And I developed this tactic that you’ve seen movies where the guy in j- goes to prison in the movie, and he goes up to the big tough guy, and you fight the big tough guy in prison so you can establish your Aaron: pecking order. I would do the reverse of that, only I would go to the most popular kid in school and insult myself to him to put, I kn- I know I’m at the bottom. You don’t have to beat me down to get me there. I know I belong at the bottom. And it… I just really internalized that [00:04:00] something was wrong with me, and this is all before even the age of 10. And by the time I’m 12, 13 years old, my parents, they are heavily in the grips of a crack binge, and I’ve started self-harming. I’ve started cutting myself really bad, and it started as a way to regulate the emotions. My life at that time, I describe like it’s like living in a mosh pit. If you’ve seen a big heavy metal concert, you see the big swirling mass of people slamming into each other. That’s what my life was like at the time. I didn’t really have any control over the damage and what I was doing. I just went along with the violence. And I knew that I was the broken one, so I started to insult myself more than anybody else could, which made me then also start being a bully to everybody else. Aaron: I w- I became really toxic, like ins- inward and outward. I just I was… My– Everything I was saying was reflecting the inward hatred that I had. I was becoming just a toxic little mean, angry, vicious kind of kid. And the [00:05:00] self-harm kind of would calm and regulate that at the beginning but it quickly spiraled into more serious self-harm. Aaron: I’m cutting myself deeper, more and more blood. And I became homeless around th- thirteen, fourteen years old. I couldn’t take living at home with the crackheads anymore. So I would bounce from friend’s house to friend’s house and kinda burn out relationships. And at first I’d be able to stay at a house for a week, and then I’d be able to stay there for a couple days. Aaron: But by the time I’m fourteen, fifteen years old, I can’t stay at my friend’s house for more than an hour or so ’cause if I stand up off the couch, his mom has to clean the residue of the stain that I’m leaving ’cause I’m so filthy and I’m so dirty. And I gathered a group along the way, around fifteen years old, of a group of kids that I called Disaster Groupies. They were a group of about fifteen or so kids that kinda lived vicariously through my darkness. My friend at the time, I was at, partying with this one buddy who his dad paid the rent at the house, and his dad bought all the food at the house, [00:06:00] but Dad didn’t live at the house. Dad was living with Dad’s girlfriend. So the house became like a teenage flophouse. And so this house became a bunch of depressed kids navigating depression without adult supervision, and it was like how far can they push us off the edge to see how far they would go. And I was kinda like a, a evil unicorn in a way. Like a piñata of pain. Aaron: Smack me and see what kind of stories can come out. Because I was, at this time, from about fourteen to sixteen, I’m living basically three lives at once, where for a– I’m 90% homeless because I’m living at this house, but m- all my stuff is still back at my mom’s house, but I can’t be there for any length of time because it turns into violence and anger and beatings and… So I’m only at that house like maybe an hour a day. So I go there, get my stuff, grab some stuff and recharge. And I had to get out because of the– I– Immediately there’d be violence. But in that hour, I’m reminded of how absolutely worthless I am and how nothing I am and how at the bottom of everything [00:07:00] I am and how I don’t belong anywhere. And then I go to this Disaster Groupie house, and I would kinda use that pain as a party favor. The more outlandish that my stories of abuse were, the more I could entertain these kids and where I could get some weird kind of social status that way And then for just a couple hours a day at the end, I’d go to what is the only good kid in this story this kid that I met when I was 12 and he was 10. Aaron: His name’s Mike. Remember, I’m gonna tell you a little bit about him now ’cause it’s a good point to bring him in. Mike, he lived at the opposite end of one of the blocks that we moved to one day. My parents had a habit of moving to the same neighborhoods multiple times. So we would go live on like a 10-block radius in Colorado, and then like another, like two town radius in Oregon, but like 30 places in each place, and so we, I was living like a block away from, or a couple blocks away from him, and we met at a comic book shop playing the original Mortal Kombat 1 video game in the arcade. See exactly when this is happening. And so we met, we bonded over deep [00:08:00] conversation and comic books. I had a love for superheroes, and I loved science, and so did he, and we just immediately bonded. Aaron: I went to his house, pretty much never left for a week. And so like I, whenever I was in Denver, his house was like my home base. I knew I had some place to be. I memorized his phone number. He lived the total polar opposite life that I had. He had a very well-off family, very well-to-do, very peaceful, lived in this big four-story house. They he would write a Christmas list and get the things on his Christmas list, which blew my mind. I didn’t even know you could do that. I, that was an amazing thing. And so he became like the good spot. So by the time I’m 14, 15 years old, I’m filling up my reservoir of hatred at my parents’ house, then using that, that pain to entertain everybody at this, this groupie house. Then for a little bit of time, I get to be a normal kid over at Mike’s house. But his mom was the one that had to clean the stain when I stood up off the couch, ’cause I was starting to leave residue. Couldn’t stay there anymore. And that’s kind of the stasis for about a year. Okay? That kind of stays my life for about a year. [00:09:00] And then that ends in a big explosion where the, the party house, we’re having this big, it’s one of the kids there having a birthday, so of course someone in this group has a band. And so there’s a band, a few high school kids playing on one side. I had a day job working at a pizza place, and my manager of the pizza place was an LSD dealer. So I got a whole bunch of LSD, had a whole bunch of kids tripping acid in the house. So there’s like 15 kids tripping acid on one side. Another other side, all these kids partying. Knock on the door, parents are there, party’s over, everybody has to go home. They all have homes to go to. Everybody else gets to go home. I don’t have a home to go to. My parents at this time are in the midst of the worst kind of grips of the crack epidemic. And so they are digging through the carpet looking for crack rock at this stage. And so I didn’t have anywhere to go to. And so my last resorts, when I didn’t have anywhere else to be at 15, 16 years old, I could either stay i- if the weather was good, I would go to this [00:10:00] field behind this restaurant named Casa Bonita. Aaron: Which if you ever seen the TV show South Park, they actually did a whole episode on Casa Bonita. The guys from South Park bought the restaurant. It’s this big pink Mexican restaurant with cliff divers and the guy in the gorilla suit. It’s a crazy thing. It’s really what the restaurant’s like. But behind that, there was a field. And in this field, there was a little dip in the field. And if I laid in it, you couldn’t see me when you were driving down the street, so it didn’t look like there was a body there. So if the weather was good, I could like urban camp and go sleep in the field. But if the weather was bad, I would go to Mike’s tool shed, because his I couldn’t stay in his house. Aaron: His parents were storing a big recliner chair, like a La-Z-Boy style chair in his tool shed, and I would go there and stay. And so At, after this party ex- ends and everybody has to go home, I end up in Mike’s tool shed ’cause it’s raining. And it’s late at night, it’s 1:00 o’clock in the morning, and I’m cutting myself so bad that there’s a big pool of blood on the ground underneath me. And I think to myself, “I gotta get some help or I’m gonna die. If I don’t do something, I’m gonna die.” [00:11:00] And so I thought over the years, one of the reasons why we had to move many times was Social Services. They tried to investigate a couple times, so I figure I’ll call Social Services on myself. May- that they, I’ll call the state, that maybe they can help me.” And so when Dawn came, I knocked on Mike’s back door and borrowed a phone book and some bus fare from her, from Mike’s mom, and I called Social Services on myself. I set the appointment for that afternoon. And it was Dawn when I called. It was like 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon when the meeting happened. And by the time I got to the meeting, they had contacted my mom, and she was there too. And so we sit at this table, this big round table. On one side there’s counselors, on the other side there’s me and my mom. And they say, “What are we here for? What’s the reason for this?” And I pull out a bloody ra- a razor blade, a box cutter style razor blade with fresh blood on it. Aaron: I throw it on the table. I lift up my arm with fresh cuts on it. I say, “That’s what I’m here for. I feel like I’m nothing. I feel like I’m worthless. I feel like there’s nothing left of me at all.” My mom, who [00:12:00] was the most practiced liar I ever knew in my life she tells them, “Oh, it’s nothing. He does this all the time. Aaron: He just does it to get a rise out of people. He just does it to get attention. It’s no real problem. We can take care of it.” Which these days I find really ironic because, yes, I was doing it to get attention. Somebody please see me screaming out in pain. But that wasn’t what she meant, and so they sent me home with her And we get a couple blocks away from the place, and she turns to me with this really evil look on her face and says, “Next you, next time you should’ve done a better job, and next time I’ll buy you the razor blades.” Aaron: I’m like, “O- okay. You think I should’ve done a better job killing myself, and you’ll help me next time? All right.” So up until that point, I was I was a shy, sweet kid, and I used this darkness as like a costume. If I wrap the darkness around me like a blanket, it was sharp and spiky and it’d keep everybody away, but it would keep a couple people that agree with me close, but it was a costume I was putting on. I was into musicals and comic books and s- and history, and I would read. Like when that party group, we were partying with that, those kids, we would trip [00:13:00] acid and I’d break out the complete works of Shakespeare. We’d all pick a character from a Shakespeare play and we’d act out Shakespeare all night long tripping acid. Aaron: I was that kind of kid. And, but sitting in that car with my mom telling me I should’ve done a better job killing myself, I just go straight into that dark. You think I’m a monster? Okay, I’ll show you what a monster is now. And that set me off on a nine-month process of what I call scorched earth, where I went on a conscious effort to destroy any positive outlook of myself. Aaron: Anybody that had a positive opinion of me, I was going to break it. And I was saying the most disgusting, sexist, racist, vile things, not because I was racist or sexist, just because it offended the person I was talking to. If it offended you, I was going to go there, and I didn’t have a limit. I was going to cross yours. So I didn’t, it didn’t really matter what I was saying, I just wanted to offend. And in that process, I would steal and lie and break every friendship I possibly could. I [00:14:00] went into every family member I could and gathered all the pictures of me that I possibly could from their photo albums, put them in a big pile and burned them. I was trying to annihilate my past. And I even t- went to Mike’s house and took two of his long boxes of comic books and went and sold them at a comic shop, stole them from him. Aaron: I was trying to break that relationship too. And so at the end of that After nine months of solid social destruction, I am alone, and I’m in that field behind Casa Bonita, and I’d been staying in that field for about a month. I had been avoiding the police during school hours because if they– I didn’t want them to arrest me for truancy, and I was surviving by stealing free samples from the grocery store and dumpster diving from the store at the top of the hill. And I woke up one morning in the snow, and I hadn’t– I was wearing wet clothes. I hadn’t changed my clothes in weeks. I hadn’t taken my shoes off in weeks. My feet were just rotting off my body. I was in horrible shape and woke up in about two inches of snow. And it was so cold [00:15:00] that the walk, the two, three block walk to get up to the store at the top of the hill, I could barely even sh– I couldn’t even move. Aaron: I could barely breathe. My arms wouldn’t work. My legs wouldn’t work. I get up there, and I’m washing my face off in the bathroom trying to get, start my day, and I couldn’t even recognize myself, and I think, “I gotta do something or I’m gonna die.” And last time when I warned them I was coming, they brought my mom in, so I’m not doing that again. But across the street from the school that I’m nominally at, quote-unquote at, was a building that said mental health. And I didn’t know what it was for, but I knew the sign said mental health. And I, I– Last time I warned them I was coming, they brought my mom in. I’m not doing that. I’m just gonna go in there cold. So I went in there, and they had me meet with this young woman. She was in her twenties, I think. And I don’t really remember much about that conversation. It was a counseling office, but I don’t remember what, much of what she said because all I remember is the very end where she said, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do. Aaron: I can’t help you And as I stood on that porch, that’s right there is where my brain snapped like a [00:16:00] mirror. I really felt like shards of glass snapped in my head. And a couple things happened right in quick succession immediately it was like, like crash bang. Couple things fell in my head. And the first thing was I found out what happens when you go to the very bottom of that mosh pit. All the violence goes away, and it gets really quiet, and it gets really still, and all the emotions fade because there’s nothing left to lose. What are you gonna do? You gonna shoot me? Okay, I’m gonna die. Aaron: Or are you gonna put me in jail? Okay, they’re gonna feed me. I don’t have any more down to fall to. And right then the, my plans crystallized in my head. When I was hanging out with that disaster groupie house, when we would sit and hang out and talk about things, we didn’t talk about normal subjects. Aaron: We wouldn’t talk about girls or sports or movies. We talked about mass murder. We talked about, “So if you’re gonna kill 10 people, how would you do it? If you’re gonna shoot up a school, how would you do it?” And at the time, it was just again, it was a bunch of depressed kids navigating depression without adult supervision, and there we didn’t have any [00:17:00] guardrails. But functionally, it was workshopping mass murder. And so I had already worked through all the plans. I had already worked through all the details. We’d already discussed every detail of the plan that I wanted to do. So I was either going to attack the school food court and kill as many people as I possibly could, or go down to the mall and sh- and attack the mall food court, kill as many people as I possibly could. And I knew where to get a gun ’cause this was mid-’90s. This was gang banger era where y- people still brought guns to school on the regular. There was a group of gang bangers that hung out next to the ROTC building that bought and sold drugs for my family on the regular. And so they knew I had access to drugs. I knew they had access to guns. And so I went up to them like, “Hey, can you get me a gun? Hopefully one that shoots a lot of bullets.” The guy’s like, “Yeah, sure. Get me an ounce of weed.” Now, that’s not like it is today where you go to a store, show your ID, whatever. This is in the mid-’90s. It’s 300 bucks of illicit narcotics. But my family were drug dealers, and when I was out on the streets partying and all of this and doing all this crazy criminal violence that I’m doing, my brother joined into my [00:18:00] family’s flock . So he’d turned that into his flock house with all of his druggie friends and started doing drugs and partying with my parents. And so I just went to my mom’s house, and my brother’s buddy’s sleeping on her floor with multiple ounces bagged up in his pocket. I just stole an ounce out of his pocket and took it to the guy. And I’m like, “Here you go. Here’s an ounce of weed.” He’s like, “Okay. Give me three days. I’ll have that for you.” And so I was set. In three days’ time, I was gonna get the gun. And I had no reason to believe I wasn’t gonna get the gun. The guy had followed through with everything else before. It was just a deal. And so In that three-day time, something changed. I didn’t realize it then. I didn’t know what I was going through then, but looking back, I think I was saying goodbye. I was in a much more calm way going to people that I had relationships with and closing off friendships. I went to my ex-girlfriend’s house and said, “Thank you for letting me sleep in the gravel outside your window.” I was giving away all my comic books to everybody. If I saw– At the time, I was stealing a lot from the stores. Aaron: So I would go to a Safeway, and I would steal a whole stack of [00:19:00] comic books. I would walk down the street, and the first kid I saw, I would just hand it to him. “Here you go. Take all these.” And I didn’t– I was giving away everything that was mine. And in that, I went to Mike’s house. And when I knocked on Mike’s door, I was in tears. I didn’t tell him what I was there for, and he never asked. He just brought me inside. And sorry for the language, but I’m gonna use one Aaron: curse word Gissele: go ahead, Aaron: But he brought me inside, and he, he– only thing he would tell me was, he would tell me, “You’re a good kid in a shit world.” It’s all he would tell me over and over again, “You’re a good kid in a shit world.” And Mike didn’t ask me what I was there for, but Mike knew intimately the hell that I was living in, okay? ‘Cause Mike was my friend. Mike was my best friend. And this was between the age of sixteen and seventeen. A couple months previous to this, on the night of my sixteenth birthday… At the time, I’m– Now I’m living like three blocks away from Mike in another house. And on the night of my sixteenth birthday, my mom beat me bloody and kicked me out of the house, ripped my shirt off my chest and ri-ri-scar-scratched my [00:20:00] face. I had blood going down my cheek. I didn’t have shoes on. It was just– I was just wearing pants. I end up w- going down to Mike’s house, and he br- brings me inside, and I’m sitting at his kitchen table, bloody, beaten, and his mom comes in and is “What’s Aaron doing here?” Mike’s like, “Yeah, his mom just kicked the shit out of him, kicked him out on his birthday.” So my sixteenth birthday party was Mike’s mom with a brownie on a big plate with a big red table candle stuck in the middle of it singing Happy Birthday. So Mike knew intimately the hell that w- what I was living with, but he didn’t ask me what I was there for. Aaron: He never asked. He just kept on telling me, “You’re a good kid in a shit world.” And I stayed with him. He gave me some food. He gave me a shower. It’s not hanging out with a friend that saved my life. That’s not what did it. It’s that when I knocked on Mike’s door, I wasn’t a person. I wasn’t there to hang out with a buddy. I was a walking ball of nothing ready to explode. I was a void. I wasn’t even ignored. I was erased. I wasn’t there. I was there to say goodbye and write the [00:21:00] last line on my book and close the chapter and be done. And he brought me inside and showed me I was a person. And when you’re treated like a person, when you feel absolutely inhuman, it can change your entire world. You’ve heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where you need to have the base needs, then you can want, then you can aspire. I had fallen so far off that cliff that he put the base needs back on the bottom shelf of my existence. It wasn’t hanging out with a buddy. It was like, “Oh, I can enjoy food.” I can like something. It was that granular. And it, he gave me enough of a frame shift. Up to that point, I couldn’t even stay at his house for an hour or two ’cause his mom had to change the thing. I think he just went to his mom and said, “Aaron’s not leaving.” ‘Cause I stayed with him for about a week. Aaron: I didn’t go home. And he gave me enough of a frame shift that even though the violence at home was still the same, the chaos at home was still the same, all of that didn’t change. I was able to basically take a breath and experience what I believe alcoholics call a moment of clarity, [00:22:00] where you were able to just reassess my humanity for the first time in years, where I’m lost in this tsunami and this chaos and all this violence. Aaron: I’m able to put my feet on the ground for the first time and take a breath. And it was like rolling the clock back on my humanity, and it was really powerful. But again, it’s not like a light switch flipped. It’s not like, Aaron: ding, oh, everything’s better. I stayed with a friend and everything’s great, the, the violence was still the same. The chaos was still the same. My internal emotions shifted enough to where it changed. But over the next couple of years, my depression spun back up again. I, almost immediately after that incident, my, my emotions turned inward. I became remorseful and ashamed of what I had planned, and it became much more inward depression. Aaron: But again, at a normalized level, normal human level, okay? But this was between 16 and 17. I’m gonna fast-forward slightly for this next bit to the night of my 19th birthday, okay. On the night of my 19th birthday, I’m planning on committing suicide because I had, the depression had spun up again. I got tired of being the burden everybody was trying to solve. [00:23:00] I got tired of being the problem everybody was fixing. But I didn’t tell anybody my plan, nobody at all. I didn’t tell anybody. I had stolen a big bottle of pills from my mom, big bottle of pills. I got a big bag of cocaine from my mom, and I had a copious amount of LSD that I bought off the streets. I had a large amount of narcotics, way more than were gonna be needed to do the job. And my goal was to have as normal a day as I possibly did, and then at the end of the night, take all those drugs and die by suicide in that field behind Casa Bonita. But in the daytime, I wanted to be as normal as I possibly could, so I went to Mike’s house, ’cause he was my best friend. So wh- when I went to Mike’s house, Mike is a social person of himself. Aaron: He has a social circle all of his own, and one of this group, people in the circle was this girl named Amber, okay? Amber was always super nice to me. He, Mike went to art school, so a lot of his friends didn’t like me so much, ’cause they were a bunch of yup- yuppie art snob kids, okay? But Amber was always super cool to me. Aaron: We would go over to Amber’s house. We’d watch a movie. We’d listen to music, whatever. She was always really cool to me. So when I went to Mike’s house that day, he’s like, “Hey, we’re gonna kick it at Amber’s today.” And I [00:24:00] think, hey, that’s a great last day. I’m gonna go have, spend time with my two favorite people, and then I’m gonna go back to this field and end my life, and that’s a great way to end my existence. And I get there, and that’s not what I walked into at all. I walked into a surprise birthday party for me with Amber, with about 15 people singing Happy Birthday. Amber had baked a blueberry peach pie, put up a bunch of decorations. I walked past them, dropped all my drugs in the toilet. That’s the last time I ever tried to kill myself But you know why I love to tell that story? Because when we left Mike’s house, there was no party waiting for me. Mike called ahead and said, “Hey, I got Aaron in the car. It’s his birthday today.” Amber already baked the pie. She had already had friends over. But they knew, they were artists. They had about 10 minutes. They made a bunch of decorations. Aaron: They threw it up on the wall. I walked into a surprise birthday party for me that my buddy literally made in 10 minutes, because her friend, she knew her buddy was having a birthday. That changed me fundamentally to the core of my being and altered every facet of my life, just because my buddies knew I was having a birthday. And so you never know what little bits of kindness that you could do that can completely change someone’s existence. [00:25:00] And Amber and Mike are still my best friends to this day. Amber is, Amber Mike is my kids’ uncle. He is the uncle to all my kids. And Amber, I I’m proud to say that at my second TED Talk, I was able to tell that story, and then be able to bring Amber up in Aaron: public and thank her on stage. Aaron: So if you watch my second TED Talk, you’re able to see Amber. She comes up on stage and hugs me. Gissele: Oh Aaron: she brought me a blueberry peach pie to the event. Gissele: Nice. That’s amazing. I just wanna start off by saying I’m sorry that you had to hold so much when you were so little. Aaron: Thank you for Aaron: that. I, looking back at my life, I don’t regret any of it bec- even the worst parts of it, because it made me who I am today. And the proudest thing of my life is that today I’m a father of four with two beautiful grand babies and four wonderful kids and a beautiful wife, and Aaron: I’m not starting a family business. You’re not gonna have this story from my kids. This is… They’ve all went to the same school. We’ve never been evicted. They’ve never been beaten. They’ve never… I’ve- no drug problems, none of that stuff. This is w- And [00:26:00] my kids, I’d, I use what happened to me as exact examples of how to raise my children. I just do the opposite of what happened to me. And it works every time. I say, “I’m, I love you so much it’s annoying.” I’m at every game, I’m at every event. My house is the w- my, I’ll come home from work and my house is full of teenagers, and I might know two or three of them, and if they’re sleeping over, that’s totally fine. Aaron: Go ahead, have a night. I won, and my family didn’t. My stepdad died in a pool of his own filth a couple years before I started talking, and I, he literally went to the bathroom and had an aneurysm, collapsed, and my mom yelled at him from the living room how messed how worthless he was while they were having a drunk and drugged out fight. He laid in a pool of his own filth and died in the bathroom. Really can’t think of a more fitting way for the guy to end. And then my mom died alone in a crack hotel. And right now downstairs as we talk, I got my one-year-old grand baby downstairs playing with my son right down there, and his name is Hercules, and he is the best little buddy. So yeah I won every, every bit, [00:27:00] so I don’t regret any of my life. Even the hardest parts. The… I don’t want anybody to ever have to go through the life that I had, but if I can use anything that I went through to help anybody else not go down that path, it doesn’t cost me anything to talk about it Gissele: Yeah. I think you won because you were willing to because you stayed on board. So I just wanna commend yeah. There was so much to hold for such a little person. It was just, yeah, this world. Aaron: it was really hard on my brother. It was hard on my brother too. We both adapted in in, in different ways. He spent a long time in his life with substance abuse problems and with anger issues, and Aaron: But I– from what I hear, he’s in a better place now. We don’t have, we don’t have any contact these days. Aaron: But yeah, it’s, Gissele: Yeah. Aaron: is Gissele: I just wanna start by saying that I feel like the adults in your life failed you and every single one of them. other than, Aaron: Mi- Mike Amber, Mike’s… Aaron: mom. Gissele: Yeah, Mike’s Aaron: mom. Aaron: Her n- name is Paula. Gissele: Oh, Paula. Gissele: I feel like e- even especially social services it’s their [00:28:00] responsibility if you’re a mental health provider. Gissele: I’ve worked for Children’s Aid, and I also am a, a trained therapist, so I know that as the system, we failed. We absolutely failed you at every turn, and the only saving grace was another child who saw your humanity Aaron: They failed me from the beginning. When I was in grade school, I took crack to school for show and tell one day. Not because I was trying to get help from a counselor. I literally took it to show and tell because it was the fun Aaron: stuff my family was, Aaron: doing. Gissele: yeah. And Aaron: and that got… That literally didn’t even get any response. Aaron: Not only did it not get a response, but when I got home, I got beaten for it. So it was like, like, anti-response. And to top it off, one of the places where my parents were getting their drugs was from the cops. My stepdad had a connection with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, and they had a cop that was stealing evidence from the evidence locker and coming and re-rocking it up at my house. Aaron: So I have memories of a fully kitted up armed officer smoking [00:29:00] crack rock on my couch Gissele: Wow. Aaron: Yeah. Aaron: Yeah. Gissele: Yeah, as I said, every single adult… and the reason why this conversation is so important, because there’s so many kids that fall through the cracks. You said there was a group of you who were depressed, who were alone and isolated. And then we wonder, and then we blame, we scapegoat the kids and say, “Oh, this kid had a mental health problem.” Gissele: Where were the people? There were so many different opportunities where you could’ve been supported. Aaron: And Gissele: yeah, Aaron: I think we’re hitting that, I think we’re hitting that in large right now. The amount of kids that these days are f- are searching for that support and finding it in the most toxic places possible. The… what I think that we’re facing as a whole, the biggest problem we’re facing right now is the dismissal of the internet world as a viable communication mechanism. The, the phenomenon of you have, let’s take you have a kid in the bedroom who’s playing on their computer and you have the helicopter parent who’s sitting in the living room playing on their phone playing Candy Crush. [00:30:00] The helicopter parent yells back at the p- at the kid, “You need to get off that computer and go out and meet a friend. Go out and touch grass.” And the kid’s saying, “What do you mean go out and meet a friend? I got 1,000 of them watching me on stream right now, and they just all heard you tell me they’re not my friend.” That kid’s not gonna pay any attention to what their parent said. They’re gonna find their support from all the online people that are giving them the acknowledgement and the reception that they’ve been craving. ‘Cause at the heart of it, I believe, and I know from my own experience, what I was really craving was someone to tell me that I belonged, someone to tell me that I matter and I deserved to be there. That I’m not… I used to ask people when I left a room when I was in middle school or high school, I would leave a room and I would say, “Hey, do you remember me when I’m gone? When I leave the room, do you remember that I was here? Because I feel when I leave, it’s I’m all the way gone. Nobody even pays attention when I’m out. Do you, did I leave any kind of impression?” And to have that, we have a whole society of kids right now that feel that way, that have, that are, feel dismissed and ignored and pushed to the side and it’s, I call it the negative social economy. Because [00:31:00] they’re craving that, that validation and that acceptance, and they’re finding it by being the worst for people, you can see it in, on, in real term time on X. People literally get paid for negativity. Gissele: Yeah. Aaron: And- Gissele: Yeah. And that’s and like kids that are vulnerable specifically are preyed on by people ’cause they use the rhetoric of belonging. Like KKK groups hate groups human trafficking, all of those groups use belonging as a way to get to, to enroll kids in doing negative things. Gissele: So really the point of this conversation is to say, especially as adults, we are responsible for our children, and not just our own individual children, for all children. All of society’s children are our children. Aaron: Precisely. Aaron: take you have the kid who feels like he’s a monster like I was. Let’s take me from then, transplant him to today, okay? 16-year-old me. You feel like you’re a monster, you feel like you’re worthless, you feel like everybody pushed you aside. Aaron: Then you find this group that says, “Oh, no, I see you. I see the best, you’re the best [00:32:00] monster you can be. Those guys over there that say you’re terrible, they don’t see the real you at all. I see the you, and you can be an even better monster. If you do this, you can be even better at it. They don’t see you whatsoever. Aaron: You can come over here, be the best monster you can be.” And that’s how we have incel subgroups and X, and we have all of these negative subcultures. And the, problem that we face from on the adult side is it looks like it’s unconnected islands of negativity, Aaron: where it looks like there’s Reddit and there’s X and if you try to squash one, then… Aaron: or even ideology. Let’s say that it’s Christian nationalism or it’s racism or it’s whatever. They’ll go to the ideology and say, “Okay you shouldn’t be racist and these are the reasons why you shouldn’t be racist,” and they squash the ideology. The kids in that group, the ideology’s not the point. The ideology is the membership card to get the group. Aaron: The group is the point, the belonging is the point, the acceptance is the point. And so you could squash the ideology, you could squash the website, they’re gonna shift and go to the next one that b- they agree with too, because the ideology isn’t important. You [00:33:00] can’t stop extremism by fighting against racism, because the racism isn’t the thing, it’s the membership card to get the extremist group that likes you. And the if we don’t try to start fighting it at the base of giving these kids another way that they can belong. Aaron: Stop telling every kid they don’t live up to the standards. Let’s play devil’s advocate, okay? Let’s say that you are 17-year-old guy, ’cause 90% of the time this is mostly a male problem. It does happen with women but I’ve seen… I deal with a lot of these on a one-to-one level, and almost everybody I deal with is a man dealing with extremeism Gissele: Ya. Aaron: And let’s say you’re this guy, and you are trying to do what the normal, regular society tells you is what’s good, okay? So you’re getting a job, you’re going to school, you’re living your life, you’re trying to be nice to everybody, and you cannot get to where you’re good enough. Everywhere you s- try to be good, you’re fighting against centuries of old history, repressed past. You’re fighting against the stereotypes from before. You’re fighting against the fact that [00:34:00] in the ’50s people were racist to other people. You’re fighting against the fact that now that you’re, because you’re a white kid, you grew up with the privilege of being a white kid, which white privilege is legitimate. Aaron: That’s a real, it’s a Aaron: real phenomenon. But let’s take the, the social dynamic of that kid who’s in that spot right now, okay? You, even if you’re trying to get really good, you cannot get good enough to overcome the centuries of baggage that you have and the centuries of overhang. That are, are hanging over you like the sword of Damocles that might just slide down and kill you. But if you mess up, if you be toxic, you get full acceptance. Y- all you have to do is tell these guys to go fuck off, and you can completely join the group. Just be mean to them, Aaron: and you can come join the group and we’ll be, we’ll like you just fine. And then that does, you don’t have the baggage, you don’t have the stereotypes, you don’t have any of that because you don’t… Aaron: You can create an identity and become that identity in the group. And that’s really all anybody wants to be. And the good side, you’re craving to do that too. You want to create an identity. I want to be a writer, I want to be a speaker, I want to be a father, I want to be… I want to work [00:35:00] at a, a auto shop. Aaron: I want… Whatever anything you want to do. You want to be you. You want to be the funny nerd guy, you want to be the mechanic guy, you want to be the jock. You want to be, do what you want to do. Aaron: But you want to be able to be content in that, and not be continually attacked because it’s not sufficient. And I can say this as a, I am a dyed in the wool liberal, I am very much a progressive all the way, and we have shot ourself in the ass Aaron: by making it so difficult for anybody to achieve comfortability. Just to not have to keep getting better. Let Aaron: us just be now. Aaron: Because the other side, that’s what they’ll, that’s the whole thing they rely on. The, the t- the two sides the left and right, I don’t see them as political sides. I see right now we have a intellectualism and self-absorption versus anger and self-victimization. Gissele: Okay. Yeah. I see that. Yeah. Aaron: Those two sides can’t conflict. The, the one side gets super intellectual and [00:36:00] hyper-focused on intellectualism, thereby gets self-absorbed into their own ideas and their own thoughts and dismissive of anything that doesn’t rise up to that intellectual standard. Aaron: Okay? And they think that intellectual standard is open because all you have to do is read enough and you can be part of the group. But If you don’t read enough, then you’re not part of the group, and that’s an error in the sentence. And so then you Aaron: have this other group that entirely relies on, “These are people who are doing it to you. These– They’re going after you. They’re gonna damage you. They’re coming after your business. Aaron: They’re assaulting you.” It’s all about self-victimization, and the people that are victimizing are the people who are dismissing you out of hand. Aaron: And so neither side are talking to each other at all. They’re falling farther and farther into their silos and farther into either we have to acknowledge the centuries of oppression, and we have to fix all these, these things, and we have white– we have baggage of white privilege, we have baggage of women, we have baggage of Black, we have all the immigrants, all these things that we have to overcome the baggage of. While the other side is saying, “Look, they’re putting all this baggage on us. They’re making us carry all this baggage. Why do we have to carry all this baggage?” And at the heart of it, we [00:37:00] don’t really have to carry all the baggage, and if we didn’t focus so much on all the baggage and we focused on now, today, being happy right here and making a better world for tomorrow off of today, then neither side would have that to fight against. Aaron: We wouldn’t have to have the baggage that we’re fighting against that are crushing this side or the baggage that are making us ignore everybody on this other side. Gissele: Yeah. And I think your story really emphasizes that what we really need is to see each other and to be present for each other. And that y- you didn’t need years of therapy. I’m not saying that you didn’t use it, I’m just saying what made the connection for s- when you were so in such a bad state, the willingness of one person to see you and to acknowledge that you are worthy. Gissele: And that’s what every kid needs and deserves. So why aren’t we doing that? Yeah. Aaron: Yeah. Yeah. Why aren’t we doing it, and Aaron: why are we outsourcing it to everybody else? Gissele: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Aaron: And then here’s the other [00:38:00] phenomenon, and this is an adult phenomenon that is happening almost exclusively with the adults. We lost perspective of the internet, and oh my God, is it horrible. Because when the internet first happened, we told everybody, “Be careful, because that cute 16-year-old girl you’re talking to might be a 40-year-old man. Aaron: Be really careful, because that guy, that cute girl you’re talking to might be a guy in another country.” And we forgot that. And now somehow everybody we’re talking to on the internet is somehow right next to us and is a viable source that is completely knowledgeable right next to us, and maybe not some group in another country who’s just trying to pump us full of anger and hate and disinformation, and just trying to use the fact that our social media is completely open to everybody around the world to get people to disagree with each other. We’ve lost, we… Now everybody’s an adult, and everybody should be listened to, as opposed to, “Be careful, ’cause that person who’s there, that might really be a grownup.” Aaron: Now we just assume everybody’s a variable expert. No. Gissele: True Aaron: W- we just on every social media, every comment stream, there’s always the person and then ev- everybody’s commenting about the stuff underneath, and everybody acts like they’re the, the subject matter [00:39:00] expert. And I watch in real time things like, let’s take something that’s semi-political but mostly non-political, ’cause rational people just don’t think this way. The weird push to remove the 19th Amendment, the weird push right now to remove women’s right to vote, okay? It’s a very fringe political opinion, Aaron: not really adapted to by ma- mainstream people, not on the large scale at least. Aaron: But the push to do that, on social media it really appears to me that the ground level push for that seems to be coming from places where women don’t have the right to vote. It just, Aaron: It really, feels like that conversation is coming from areas where that’s the reality. And, we don’t have the perspective of it, so we think it’s the guy that’s sitting on the house right next to us, Aaron: And the, and that’s entirely an adult thing. ‘Cause the kids who are on social media, they know this. The k- the teenagers who are involved in this, they know. They can tell who’s a bot farm, they can tell who’s a troll, they can tell who’s, w- who’s faking it. They can tell who’s Googling all their answers who’s just AI. Aaron: They’re [00:40:00] fluent in this. But the adults, anybody over the age of 30, we got phones as a to- as a toy. When we got phones, it was a toy. Every, every couple of week we had a new phone. We had the flip phone, we had the Razor phone. We had, we blinged it all out. We bought the ringtones. we paid money for songs to play on our phone when it rang. Aaron: Like, all of this stuff. Aaron: Kids these days, it’s not the case. My daughter, my 15-year-old daughter, her phone is not a toy, her phone is a tool. Everybody in her class has the same glass brick. It might be a slightly different colored glass brick, but it’s the same glass brick, and they all do exactly the same thing. They all, none of that is a toy, it’s a tool. And their friends are on it, but so are their enemies, and so are their school assignments, and so is their paycheck, and so is their route to work, and so is all their daily life is on that phone Aaron: And if the parents only look at it like it’s a toy, we play Candy Crush, we send our, we do our Facebook, we send our pictures, it’s a toy, then we’re missing the iceberg of it being a tool that is being completely [00:41:00] utilized by that negative social economy I was talking about. Because that phenomenon of social media where everything’s gelled together and everybody’s having the same talk, is utilized in extensively by the social, by the negative social economy to gather people in, into that belonging, ’cause there’s always a subgroup that agrees with you. No matter how fringe your opinion is, there’s always a subgroup that’s gonna agree with you. And they, the they use that to attract them. There’s a guy that I’ve worked parallel with, we’ve only come in contact a couple times, but his name’s Christian Picciolini. If you haven’t reached out to him, you should, he’d be a great guest on your show. Aaron: He was a former head of the white hate movement in the ’80s, and he actually has a TED Talk as well, and a couple books. He, it was his music that Dylann Roof was listening to when they shot up the church in Charlottesville. ‘Cause he was the lead singer of a white hate band, so his music was in the earphones of Dylann Roof while he’s shooting up this church. And Christian talks about potholes, talks about what got him into white nationalism, is that he was standing there smoking a joint one day, and I might be paraphrasing so if I get the story wrong, sorry Gissele: yeah, [00:42:00] that’s Aaron: but he was standing at at a, smoking a joint one day and some guy walked up to him and pulled the joint out of his mouth and said, the people who give you this are the Jews and they’re trying to keep you down.” And it was like he’s found the pothole. He found, the guy found the spot that Christian was lacking and got him into white hate. Aaron: And they try to fill in that belonging. They fill Aaron: in the holes of belonging. Aaron: And which it all boils back down to- Gissele: Yeah. And again, going back to your story another one of the dangers of social media in particular, and even the phones, is that there’s no face-to-face contact, no community, right? The more you get to know them, the more you get to see how wonderful people are. Gissele: But when you’re behind a screen, there’s like a barrier between us, right? And so Aaron: Oh yeah Gissele: I don’t know if Mike would’ve been able to make that connection if you were connecting online, right? He needed to see you. Yeah. Go ahead. Aaron: That is such a, that is such a real thing because what is it? Parasocial relationships is the term for it where the idea who the social media person is or the i- the person is on the internet, and you get [00:43:00] like a YouTuber that you’re c- that you’re watching all the time, and you can message with them occasionally, and you get that weird parasocial relationship. And I agree, I think people need to have more of a concrete relationship. But I think that there’s a midpoint between that where we could have that connection on the internet and just be able to utilize it more. But yeah, I think that today if I were to be transported to today I would be horrified at to what would possibly be out there. Aaron: Because not only would I have a harder time reaching the, getting for help, but how many of my schools would have thought that I was a threat and turned me into a cop before I ever did anything wrong? And let’s take it on a level of the kid in the school. If I’m going to a school and I got 10 bullies, okay? Aaron: There’s, at any given school, let’s say there’s 10 bullies at the school. There’s probably three or four other kids on the other side that kind of counterbalance. “Oh, no, you’re all right. Come be with us.” They’re not ex- There’s more bullies always, but there’s a little bit of a counterbalance. If in that school a teacher or an administrator says that kid’s a threat, there is no support. You are done. You [00:44:00] are wiped out socially, entirely. There, you are, you might as well just go out. You are finished. And that’s what happens writ large these days. Now the whole administration will peg out that kid’s a threat.” If you only see that kid as a threat, that’s all he’s gonna be. Like, you’ve, you’re, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Learn the kid, tell the kid what, figure out what they like, because they will find support. When, I’ve seen firsthand of schools and school districts that are offering what they think are menus of assistance. They’re offering lists of checklists and journals and counseling sessions, and all these different systems that the school district thinks that they’re offering to help the kid. And to the kid in the dark, that is not a list of help. That is a group of landmines to navigate around to see who actually is going to help me and who’s gonna blow my world up. Aaron: Because that guy said he’s gonna help, and he turned me into the cops. That guy said he’s gonna help, but he molested me. Does your help or does your help hurt? You say you’re gonna help me. I don’t have any way to tell if you’re gonna help me right away. How, does your help or does your help hurt? And I I don’t have a way to say that right away. I don’t have a way to determine that, so I have to test [00:45:00] you. You say you’re gonna help me, okay, cool. I come up to a two. You stay there. Cool. How about out of five? You can take me at a five? All right, cool. How about out of seven? I wake up at a 10 every day. That’s where I start my day is at a 10. If you left at 7:00, leave now. I don’t even need to talk to You You took me at a 10. Cool. Good for you. How about out of 12? How about out of 15 next week? ‘Cause stuff gets hard and stays that way, and people say they’re gonna help, and then they disappear. Can you really help? Are you gonna be there, or are you gonna disappear? ‘Cause everybody else does. But if you can be that person that can stay there, be like my… protected, be the island of normal in my, in the ice ocean of chaos that never broke, that never crashed down. He, no matter how many times my waves slammed against him, he never broke down. And if you can do that, eventually not only will I lower the levels back down and go back down to a five, back down to a two, then I’m bringing my friends to you, ’cause you’re the trusted one. Now I can trust you to navigate, ’cause that guy, can I trust that other person over there? Because it’s all it’s these kids are carrying the sum [00:46:00] total of human knowledge in their pocket. They have every book ever written, every encyclopedia ever made, every video ever archived in the glass brick sitting in their pocket all day long. And they’re gonna fact check every adult every minute of the day. And if we don’t give them the b- the credence and the credibility that they can do that, they’re gonna find their support and they’re gonna find their credibility somewhere, and they’re gonna tap us on the head and say, “Oh, that’s okay grandpa. Aaron: Go watch your sports ball. It’s all right. We’re go over here,” completely ignore us and walk right past us and live their lives Gissele: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I really appreciate you talking about how a young person thinks, because I- I’ve seen it when I used to work in the field of child welfare. Behavior is language. These kids would have this extreme behavior because they were suffering. They can’t be like, “Oh, I’m suffering.” Gissele: Sometimes it wasn’t even safe to do that. And what I wanna also point out was that what I heard from the young people when I worked within the field is the peace, the love, the attention didn’t feel safe. You don’t go from zero… you don’t go from an environment where it’s extremely [00:47:00] abusive and you’re like, “Here’s a foster home that’s gonna love you. Gissele: Oh, okay. Woof, I can rest now.” Aaron: No, it Aaron: feels completely alien. And n- and not only that, but on the, on that communication level you were just talking about, let’s… If you are raised in violence and aggression and anger and hatred, and your internal monologue is anger and violence and aggression and hatred, and all your friends speak the same language because they’re dealing with their own a- anger and hatred, and you’re the outcast from everybody, so you’re getting pushed further into the edge, then you’re expected to walk into the counseling office and sit down and say, “Oh, I’m feeling emotionally dysregulated today.” Aaron: No. You’re gonna say you feel like shit ’cause you feel like shit. You’re gonna s- use the words and vocabulary of your depression, and we dismiss them out of hand as soon as they do, as soon as they try to be honest with us. Which is the other, which is the f- the other question they have to ask: How honest with you can I be before you recoil in horror about my daily life? Gissele: Oh Aaron: C- can I be honest with you about my daily existence before you recoil in fear and judge me for it? not a plan, not an attack, but can I tell you about my [00:48:00] morning? Can I tell you about what happened to me today before you judge me and walk away scared and act like I’m some fragile doll that you can never touch again? Aaron: Or that I’m broken and need to be fixed immediately because it’s equally depersonalizing to be broken as it is to be a monster. If you’re trying to fix me, it’s the same as you’re afraid of me. Neither one of those are a person. Aaron: Neither one of those connected with me, Aaron: I do have suggestions, though. Aaron: If you’re trying to connect, let’s say you have that kid in your office, and you’re trying to reach across to him and you’re trying to connect with him, but you’re trying to reach through that shell. I have two methods. One of them is quick and not as effective. The other one is a little more involved, but way more effective, okay? The first N not quite as effective way is, in the room, do something that makes you a fallible human. Something that ma- make some kind of stupid mistake. Nothing that’s gonna violate procedure or process. Nothing that’s gonna break your rules. But play a silly song, spill your coffee. Do, do something that makes you a person that has a job that can make a mistake. Because if I walk in and you’re just counselor and I’m just student, [00:49:00] we didn’t ever have a conversation. But if I walk in and I know you have a job and you work as a job as a counselor, and you know I have a job as a student, and I work my job as a student, then we can meet as people. We both work– woke up today, put our pants on, took a poop. Aaron: We both do this. I say that all the time to cops, all the time. Everybody in this room pooped. Aaron: If you didn’t poop yet, you will later today. Aaron: It’s the great it is the great attractor. Ev- it’s the great equalizer. Everybody pooped. No matter who you are, you either have yet or you will later. Aaron: Somebody you will poop today. And so if you s- you, if we can see that, then we can normalize our interaction. Then at the very least, I see you as a human, you see me as a human. You’re not just your status, I’m not just my status. We can talk. Okay, that’s the quick and dirty way. The more effective way is take something to them that they like that they didn’t bring to you first and show them that. So for me, it was comic books. For me, I loved comic books. I was a huge superhero nerd. I would read X-Men. I would have my nose buried in comic books the entire time. [00:50:00] If I ever had went to a school and someone sat down next to me and said, “Oh, Nightcrawler? You like Nightcrawler?” Hold on, you like comic books? Aaron: X-Men? You know who Nightcrawler is? Oh, dude, you’re my buddy. You’re– I can talk to you. Which is very different than sitting next to me and say, “You like comic books? You like X-Men? Do you like Nightcrawler?” That’s breadcrumbing. Then you’ve got a questionnaire. You’re just pulling stuff out of me. But if you went two steps in, now I have to ask you, “You like comic books? You like Nightcrawler?” Okay, you’re my friend. That short-circuits all of that test, all of that testing level. Now you’re immediately the, my trusted person because I speak your language and you speak mine. And we can both communicate. And with that, now I’m talking to you to see if that other guy’s okay. Now, instead of testing you, you’re my judgment to call to see if that other person needs to be tested at all. Like that, you can see it short-circuit immediately. Like these days, do it with anime, do it with a comic book, do it with a cartoon, do it with a sci-fi movie, do it with whatever. Aaron: D- if you really need to, do it with an obscure German philosopher. If the kid’s really into Herbert Marcuse and [00:51:00] getting really deep into that philosophy, find something out about it and ask him a question about it. They, it’s important that they didn’t bring it to you first. Because then it shows that you care, shows that you engage. Aaron: It’s, but again, shows that they belong. And if they belong with you, they can open up with you, and then it can go forward, then they’re bringing their friends to you Gissele: Yeah. I think one of the, the challenges I don’t even wanna use the word challenge, is that people don’t do the work of getting to know, like especially in the school system, like a lot of kids are just like numbers. Like we- we’ve we’ve created systems that are so dehumanized, and part of that I think has to do with we really Gissele: Like you were talking about the intellectualism, and so one of my jobs is I’m a prof at a university, and what I teach students is, like they had that viewpoint of like the research has to be the unbiased and independent? That sort of spilled into everything. It spilled into our therapy. Gissele: It spilled into our workplaces. But one of the things I learned as a director of HR is if you can’t feel your feelings, [00:52:00] you can’t hold someone else’s. So if I’m not un- if I can’t sit with my uncomfortable feelings and hold space and have compassion for myself, I’m gonna need you to get ahold of yourself so that s- because I won’t be able to hold it. Gissele: It just doesn’t work, and s- Yeah, go ahead. Aaron: I– someone asked me a question one time a- that was really related to that after one of the conferences. They asked me, “So you talk about how I need to be there and not be the, not shift when they’re testing me. What if they’re saying stuff that scares the hell out of me? What if I’m sitting there legitimately scared?” Aaron: I said then be a human. Be scared. Tell them that you’re scared. Tell them what just happened.” The, it’s not about being pr- a real friend isn’t glad-handing. A real friend isn’t blowing smoke up my ass telling me everything’s gonna be great. A real friend calls me on my stuff and says, “No, all right, dude, that, yeah, you’re doing great, but knock off that stuff. Aaron: Whatever that was, you need to stop that, ’cause that was being a dick. You need to knock that off.” A real friend calls you on your stuff every time. And so if in the session, if the person scares you, be like, “Dude, what just happened there? I just want you to know that kind of freaked me out. I’m a human. Aaron: You’re a person, too. I’m giving you respect. [00:53:00] I’m not gonna just smile and act like that was okay. Whatever just went down there, we need to address this, ’cause it scared me Aaron: there.” And the engagement you’ll get from the person across from you, the immediate respect that, “Oh, they’re not just smiling at me. Aaron: They’re not… I’m not just vomiting. I’m not using my pain as a party favor to vomit all my abuse onto you so that I can get you out of my hair, so I can check off this checklist that I needed to see a counselor.” Gissele: Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s connecting human to human, and what you’re saying is so fundamental, so I don’t want my listeners to miss it, which is you have to show that you’re a flawed human, too, and that you see whoever is across the table as another human being, right? Gissele: And we often get so scared, and we run to “Oh, there is a potential danger,” whatever. Gissele: We miss that some of these, these are children. These are young people. These are human beings. These are Gissele: individuals. And so we don’t connect heart to heart anymore, and the only thing that’s gonna save us, from my perspective, is if we go back there, is start to see each other’s humanity and see each other’s [00:54:00] being-ness, and to see the worthy of other people, regardless of what the outside looks like. Gissele: Yeah, on the outside, it, your behavior looked terrible, but if people weren’t able to see beyond that and to see the kid that loved comics that, that geeked out, that you really just wanted to be loved and seen, Gissele: y- this would be a very different story Aaron: Oh, entirely. Yeah. And it’s that everybody wants to be held and told that we’re okay. Aaron: I really believe that. I believe at the heart of it… It’s, so it’s a line from that movie, The Wedding Singer, from Adam Sandler. They’re standing at the bar and he’s “I,” at the art of it, “I just want someone to hold me and tell me that I’m okay.” And I really do think that’s the truth for everybody. Aaron: And if we’re finding it from the worst places, then you’re gonna be the worst person. If the only way that someone’s gonna tell you that you’re okay is by being bad, then you’re gonna be the worst person. And we as grownups, we’ve dismissed our emotions. We’ve turned that, like you just said with the the study and the res- research and everything has to be codified, we’ve made that writ large among society. We can’t even do a video game [00:55:00] re- review these days without that. There’s a video game that just came out, this is completely tangential, but it Gissele: Yeah, yeah, Aaron: a microscopic level. There’s a video game just came out, they call Wolverine, okay? It’s a comic book video game. I love it. I just bought it. The, the discourse about it online is so granularly nitpicky that it’s like in this one section, if you’re driving the motorcycle, you does- you can hit the rail and it doesn’t actually make him die. Aaron: Who cares? It’s a video game of a guy with claws. Who cares? We don’t need to have reference studies and have everything exactly detailed and have it precisely. It’s a fricking video game, dude. Gissele: they’ve never seen Pong. Have you seen, I had the first Atari and it was literally a line and a circle. Like line and Aaron: Exactly. Exactly. And w- I not only had a P- Atari, but growing up on the farm up in my grandparents’ house, we had stick and ball. Aaron: So it’s like come on, dude, it’s… Yeah, exactly. Like it’s a video game, dude. Like you don’t need… But the, but because we’ve gotten so hyper intellectualized and hyper focused, we w- we nitpick everything. Aaron: Which is honestly, that hyper-focused intellectualism [00:56:00] is a tool that the negative social economy uses writ large. It’s one of the things that I warn the national law enforcements about as much as I possibly can, because it’s one of the biggest tools they use to section off people away from normalized society into that, that extremist exclusionary group, is they take, they’ll they, again, they seek the people who are looking for intellectual validation, who somehow, most of the time have social affectations that cause them to have struggles dealing with people, talking, dealing with dating, that kind of stuff. Aaron: A lot of social problems affect-wise. And then they’ll get these kids, and online they’ll give them the opportunity to become an expert on something that nobody else cares at, at all. But if they can become an expert on it, then it gives them an hyp- a hyper-focused intellectual superiority. So the example I use all the time is that if you ever… For the people in the s- in the threat assessment world, there’s this [00:57:00] guy named Herbert Marcuse, who’s an obscure German philosopher from the 16th century. Now, he really was a German philosopher. He really did write a bunch of books in the 16th century about socialism yada. Aaron: Nobody cares about him these days. He has no impact on the regular world. However, because he’s real, because his books are real, because they’re tied to socialism, if you get someone who’s hyper-focused on that, you can tie, you can go read his writings and tie directly things that might potentially be happening with today. Aaron: Like it’s like this Illuminati-style conspiracy thing, okay? And it has that l- just enough of a granular bit of truth to it, because he really did write these books, and it really was there, to have that through line. Aaron: So you’ll find kids that are hyper-focused on Herbert Marcuse, and if you ever hear that name, if you even hear that name, that kid is so deeply connected to that negative social economy, that the only intellectual validation he’s getting are people that tell him that he has to be really smart about this because A, people don’t want him, women are gonna hate him, normal society’s gonna hate him. That is a kid who’s right on the pivot point of darkness right there. [00:58:00] Because it is, they use the more obscure it can get and the more it can tie into anything that, to go back to that intense victimization, to tie into that, to make you feel like you’re the one that’s slighted, but now you have something that the other people don’t have. And that’s how that, that’s literally the origin story for the incel subgroup Gissele: Yeah. And, I like to think about, like, when I see these kinds of groups, the first thing that I get really curious as to what led you to this point? What didn’t you receive? Like, where did we fail? Because as a society, we’re all responsible for one another, and we think these things happen in a vacuum, but we’re constantly co-creating things. Gissele: And this is how I realized I was looking at the systems ’cause I was a big, “Oh I’m gonna change these systems. Look at me, the hero of, of child welfare.” But when I started really looking at all of the systems we’ve created, and then I looked at myself, and I’m like, “Oh, that’s how I behave.” Gissele: When I see someone who is hurtful, I want them punished. I want them the hell [00:59:00] away from me. I wanna separate, isolate. I wouldn’t want them anywhere near. And I said of course these systems are gonna reflect me. That’s how I behave, so in order to change that, I have to change myself. I have to care about other people. Gissele: I have to get curious about other people.” And- Aaron: I think that maybe at the heart of it, it boils down to that the internet and social media and modern society as a whole gave everybody main character syndrome. It made everybody think that we are the center of the story, Aaron: and we are with the pivot that it revolves around, and life is not full of main characters. Aaron: This is an ensemble. Gissele: Yes Aaron: We are all part of the troupe, and sometimes you’re gonna play a bit part, and sometimes you’re gonna be the main character, and sometimes you’re gonna be scrubbing the floors after the show. And Main character syndrome writ large is what’s happening with this. Aaron: Everybody thinks that because we have social media and we can get our likes, we can get our validation, we can get our attention, that somehow that’s causing all of our world to spin around. And now we can get– We, because we have every book, we think we’re the expert in everything, and now we can fact-check everybody. Aaron: We can– [01:00:00] We’ve removed the ability for objective intelligence, and now everybody’s the expert on a granular level, and it’s because of main character syndrome. Everybody thinks that we’re the star of the story, but we’re not. We’re not the star of the story. We are part of a group. We are i-i-in an ensemble, and if you think you’re the part, you’re the star of the story, all it’s gonna do is make you shoot yourself right in the foot as you grow up, as you get older. Because growing up the reason why we have things like the Hoover Dam and the highway system and why slavery ended, let’s get all the way back, is because people thought collectively, ’cause people thought that we were all part of this group together, and we’re all gonna be doing this experiment together. Aaron: We’re all part of this big American experiment. We can move forward with progress, and yes, it wasn’t perfect to begin with. We can get there eventually. Gissele: Yeah. Aaron: And main character syndrome is splitting us apart to a point where everybody thinks that we, everybody aggressed next to them is the villain Gissele: Yeah. Oh, that’s what… It’s a great point. It’s a very important point in terms of the importance of community and [01:01:00] how, we’re all in this together, Gissele: Not only do we have that character syndrome, Gissele: We believe that we have to be this, these extraordinary people if I’m not the fame m- musician or whatever. What you showed us with your story is that everything and everyone matters. A small act could mean a pivotal change in your history and the history of the people you would’ve impacted. Gissele: And so how we show up every single day matters, and how we show up for people matters. Yeah. Aaron: And we need to– W- my main message is always we need to give love to the ones that we think deserve it the Aaron: least because they need it the most. Not the ones that deserve it the least, because nobody deserves it the least, Aaron: but the ones that we think deserve it the least. If I look at you and I think that you don’t deserve the love, you’re the one I should be giving more love to. Gissele: Yes Aaron: something is deficient in me that I’m not able to give that love enough o-off the bat, because I– we all deserve it. We– There’s, there is nothing… When I came out with my story, I wrote my Facebook post the, in twenty [01:02:00] eighteen that kind of went viral, and it went everywhere. And then my local news channel did a story on me. Aaron: That got seventeen million views in a week. Okay? And within the first couple of months of my story, I got hit with messages from all over the planet, and it was literally every country that I can name them. India, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sweden, Australia, North America, South America, everywhere. And I got diaries from thirty thousand people that were– It wasn’t just, “Hey, that’s cool.” Aaron: It was, “Hey, that’s cool, and here’s all my story. Here’s all the pain I ever went through. Here’s all the abuse I ever suffered.” And I got that from people from every walk of life, and it was really profound to me that I saw that there wasn’t any difference in– don’t, I really don’t think there’s any difference in the pain that, let’s say, a model feels when she’s throwing up in her cup before her photo shoot and what I was feeling when I was about to shoot up at school. That I don’t think that’s different. It’s self-destruction. It’s I’m not good enough inside, I need to break myself to fit my own world. And I saw the similarities in the stories between the kid in Detroit who told me that he couldn’t talk [01:03:00] about his bullying because the kid in his town would kill him, and then the kid in Pakistan told me he couldn’t talk about his bullying because the kid in, kids in his town would kill him. Exact same message from the to-totally opposite ends of the world. Wholly opposite lifestyles, very different social upbringing. Same message that I’m not good enough inside. People hate me because of who I am, and I need to get– I have no way to express my depression. That maybe we need to talk about it more. If there’s one thing I can give to this, it’s the, the space to be able to for men and boys and women and anybody that feels like they don’t have the ability to talk about these emotions, to get up and talk about it and be open with their feelings. I’m a big, hairy dude crying on stage talking about feelings. W- when I was growing up, that used to get you abused and ridiculed. Aaron: Now, you’re old enough to remember. Do you remember the TV show The Honeymooners? Gissele: Yes Aaron: Do you remember what the main joke was on The Honeymooners? Remember what the main laugh line was for the Honeymooners? Gissele: Alice. Is that the one? Yeah, Aaron: To the Moon. Alice. One of these days, Alice.” Aaron: Bang, zoom, to the moon. The first joke of the first [01:04:00] sitcom that we had was that he’s gonna punch his wife in the face because she won’t stop talking. And it wasn’t that she was gonna be in danger of getting punched. It’s that she was always in danger of getting hit if– and he was always about to hit her, and we thought that was uproariously hilarious. We thought that was, that was– That won awards. It was the best sitcom of its age. And growing up, I watched it on TV every day when I was growing up as a kid. I bounced around from battered women’s shelter to battered women’s shelter. Why do battered women’s shelters even exist? Why are they even a thing? In my opinion, having lived in them, battered women shelters are there so the woman has someplace to run so the guy can keep the house. ‘Cause the whole time I’m running from shelter to shelter, my dad got to stay home So we went from a time when domestic violence wasn’t just ignored, it was ridiculed. Where I sat and watched my mom in counseling offices, and the counselor’s telling her what’d you do to make him hit you?” Aaron: We went from that time when abuse and neglect and domestic violence was just the norm, to [01:05:00] now that’s not the case. And now I can talk about it on stage, and I can cry, and people get so- you can accept it socially. Aaron: And now we can have discussions with people about the, their deep feelings, and that kid in the dark can actually come in and open up about whether or not he wants to hurt himself or someone else because there’s someone might actually listen. And so we’ve come a long way. We have a long way to go, Aaron: but it does give me hope that we’ve come so far in just the 47 years of my life that maybe me talking about it can help the next person talk. ‘Cause the, the most powerful moments to me come from… People tell me that what I do is brave, and I bristle at that all the time, ’cause bravery is acting in the face of fear, and I’m not afraid of my life at all. It’s my life. I lived it. I won. I beat it to death with a shovel. I buried it in my backyard. Aaron: I beat it. The ones who are brave are the guys like… After this event that I gave in Wisconsin, we were having this, this poker area, okay? It was like this charity poker thing. Bunch of cops. It was police officers, law enforcement social workers, FBI, big law enforcement conference. So [01:06:00] these guys are all around doing this poker stuff, and I had just given my talk and made everybody cry in the talk. Aaron: I make everybody cry all the time. And so as I’m walking through this poker area, this dude comes walking up to me, and he looks like a old grizzled cowboy, like almost like Sam Elliott. Just like he’s seen the shit. He’s the guy that’s been through… He’s had guns pointed at him many times, that kind of guy, okay? Aaron: And he comes walking up to me with tears in his eyes, and he’s stuttering. He’s like, “Sir, I can’t…” And I can tell he doesn’t want a hug. He’s not a hugger. So I put my hand on his shoulder. I said, “Sir, it’s all right. W- you’re okay. We can talk about it.” And he looks up at me and he starts to cry, and he’s like, “Sir, my, my son, he tried to commit suicide last year. My partner, he committed suicide.” And he looks up, and I see this guy who has seen more hell than I’ve ever seen in my life. I see him look around a room of his peers, and I see fear in his eyes, real fear, because he’s about to cry in front of his coworkers. And I see him he probably had never accessed fear in his life ever, and this guy’s walk, looking around, he’s in a perfectly safe [01:07:00] space around a bunch of his coworkers, a bunch of his friends, and he’s, he has death fear in his eyes ’cause he’s about to cry, and he does. Aaron: We end up hugging. He ends up giving me a q- big cry right there. We end up hanging out for the next couple hours talking. To me, that is bravery. That, if I can make that happen, it’s worth everything. Because if that, if I can let that guy access his emotions or help that parent who lost their s- kid in a school shooting figure out some way to understand the, the idea of what was going through that head- If I can give them even one second of hope, then I’ll keep on talking till they don’t have a voice Gissele: Yeah. In- incredible. I just wanted to say that, going back to… I think we need to acknowledge how we have socialized boys and understand how that has impacted. Gissele: When I think about, like, how boys were socialized around my time before my son’s time, we have socialized boys in a way that anger’s the only acceptable emotion and sex is the only acceptable way to get closeness. Aaron: Yeah, Aaron: [01:08:00] Not only is anger the accepted emotion, anger is a currency. Violence is currency to young boys. Aaron: Vio- it’s, it literally when you’re growing up, if you are pre-10, violence is money. Because you can be ugly, you can be dirty, you can be smelly, but you can break something, then you can exist. If you can beat somebody up, then you’re fine. Gissele: Yeah. Then you have power. Aaron: Then you have power. Then you have power, you have status. Aaron: Yeah Aaron: And we’ve– and then we dismiss and say that any feeling of emotion is weakness, and I defy and challenge any of those macho guys to do what I do one time. You think what I do is weak? Aaron: You think crying on stage is weak? Get up and do it once. Show me how strong you are. Get up on stage in front of… I get up in front– I’ve spoke to the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit with no slides, no script, no f- no backing, and then took live questions for two hours. Go do that. Tell me you’re strong. Go Aaron: let the, the premier investigators in the country interrogate you and then find a scab and peel that back and poke and prod there some more till they find more blood, and then tell me you’re strong[01:09:00] Gissele: A- and it takes extraordinary courage to love. It takes extraordinary courage to have compassion in the face of people that are hurtful, the seeming enemies. And definitely, we really need to think about how we have nurtured boys to not accept nurturance except through sexual contact, and then wonder why kind of our world looks this way. Aaron: Yeah. And that sexual contact, that’s an, a very that’s a very important point you brought up, and I just wanna touch on that just a bit Aaron: more because the fact that we’ve monetized sexuality for men, like that’s become a commodity, and that fact not only makes me terrified for my daughters, but it, I see it in the vilification of male therapy and the dismissal of w- female autonomy, and all of that, it’s… I have my own theory on this. I personally believe that a lot of that is based on what I mentioned earlier of an outsource group trying to push negativity into the culture, and I personally believe, after [01:10:00] watching this in real time, that there is a group online that just wants to break stuff, and they don’t really care what sides you’re on. Aaron: They’re not ideological. They s- flip sides willy-nilly. They just want to break whoever’s in charge. And right now, their focus is on men’s emotions. There’s literally podcasts that have been going out for the last couple of months about men don’t need therapy. Men, no man needs therapy. All you need to do is just you go out and work some more. Aaron: Just get out in the field and do some more work. No, dude, that’s literally how my grandparents ended up killing themselves afterwards. That’s why shell shock and stuff happened after World War I and World War II, because we didn’t address any of those Aaron: emotions. That’s why my father, that’s why my father was a vicious, violent monster. Aaron: He was a Vietnam veteran, and when, before he went to Vietnam, he would seem to be okay. When he was in ‘Nam, he watched his buddy get his head ripped off of his shoulders right next to him when he was shooting he was a gunner that was shooting rockets into Cambodia off the s- off the boat, on a secret boat. Aaron: Wasn’t even supposed to be there, shooting rockets into Cambodia. Then he comes back from that and is the most vicious and violent human you can imagine. And yeah, because w- we would, nobody would accept his emotions. And [01:11:00] that’s not to dismiss any of the depravity Aaron: the man did. But I understand, i, it’s not an excuse, but I do understand where the origin came from Gissele: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. Just w- thank you for everything that you have talked about today and demonstrating us the transformative power of love and presence and being seen. Just one more question. Where can people find you? Where can they work with you? Where can they find your, all your information? Aaron: I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Facebook, I’m on Instagram. I, I will go and talk to anybody. My email is aaronstarkauthor@gmail.com, so if you wanna email me, go ahead. I speak all over the place. I have– My next one actually is in two weeks. I’m speaking for the Colorado Co-Responders Conference, where I’m gonna be talking to all of the law enforcement, social workers, school administrators from Colorado. And yeah I will talk to any audience any time because in my opinion, like I said, if me doing this can help someone not go down my path and not become me, then it’s absolutely worth it. So thank you for giving me the chance to talk today. I Aaron: really appreciate it. It was such a great conversation. Gissele: yeah. Yeah. [01:12:00] Thank you so much Aaron: just give love to the ones we think deserve it the least, ’cause they need it the most Gissele: Yeah definitely. Such an important message. And thank you to those who listened to another episode of Love and Compassion with Gissele and if you love this episode, please share it far and wide and see you soon Aaron: Thank you, Gissele.

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• Karen Bluth
• Iona Sky
• Rashi Nayar
• Deidre Harris
• Larry Rosen

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