Transforming the Good Girl, With Licensed Master Social Worker & Transformational Coach, Teddy Frank

Teddy Frank is a Licensed Master Social Worker, a Reichian Psychotherapist with a love for leadership facilitation and coaching in the corporate arena. Teddy works locally with scientists from Colorado State University that are looking at diversity, equity, justice, and inclusion within academia. Teddy works with collective trauma healing and ancestral healing, including her own, on what she names “The Hera’s Journey.” Throughout the recording of her Let Perfect Burn episode, I kept thinking, “She does THAT too?” Teddy’s passions are boundless, her convictions pure and fiery and her quest to understand and intuit humanity is unlike any other person’s I have experienced in my lifetime. 

Teddy grew up in a tumultuous and violent family where there was sexual abuse. But for Teddy, her homelife didn’t sink her, it activated her. “My awakening was at the age of 19 with the women’s movement. I mean, the feminist movement was in full swing. And I became a leader of grassroots community organizing, leading the whole on sexual crimes against women.”

Teddy is a healer by nature and so she couldn’t pass up the opportunity for us to be in dialogue together for this episode, creating a safe and grounded place for me to take a step toward. “I’m different than you, Tara, but you are also in me, and I am also in you.” We spoke about being a woman and a mother and that in society, staying good and staying quiet often leads to a wider acceptance. Daring to express pain and speaking truth to trauma rocks the boat, but it is an act that Teddy describes as ‘an awakening’ which is born out of “feeling the pain of not conforming, of questioning worth and value.” 

And what was so moving was that after speaking with Teddy, I started to realize that my ‘falling apart’ was something so universal to being human and that my strength to buck the norm of the ‘perfect woman’ was dare I say it, heroic. 

By the end of Teddy’s beautiful interview, I started using different words to speak to my mental health crisis, my hospitalization and my falling apart. 

“I am on the Hera’s journey, and I have had an awakening that has irrevocably changed my life.”

Highlights from Teddy:

"I remember five years old, my mother was very depressed. And I was sitting at the kitchen table across from her, and she was looking off to the side. And I looked directly at her and I said, 'Mommy, are you mad at me?' And she brought her gaze back, and she said, now finally resting in my eyes, 'No, honey, why would you think that?' And I said, 'I can't see myself in your eyes.' And in that moment, my five year old wisdom self said, 'My mom is not available to me.' And that's when we start to say, 'Okay, I need to take care of myself.'"

"So in a moment, our nervous systems get wired for survival and says, 'It's not okay to express my needs.' And so we develop these patterns that become the cracks in our psyche, the shadows in our soul. And that's what we then ride upon as nice girls, or as high performers in the world. Or, as you know, the sort of conforming to the female notion, which changes culturally but by Western dominant male standard says, 'You don't express your needs too strongly, because then you're aggressive. She's aggressive, she's angry.'"

Don't Miss a Beat.

My Website, Let Perfect Burn:
https://letperfectburn.com/

Follow my Instagram for news from me, Tara Beckett:
https://www.instagram.com/letperfectburn/

Connect With Teddy Frank:

Her Website:
https://www.humanenergetics.com/

Her LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/teddyfrank/

Transcript

Tara Beckett: 0:23

Hi, I'm Tara Beckett and welcome back to let perfect burn. My guest today is Teddy Frank, a Licensed Master social worker rakin psychotherapist, who has a love for leadership, facilitation and coaching in the corporate arena. Teddy works toward equity, justice and inclusion within academia as well as collective trauma healing, and ancestral healing, including her own on what she names the hero's journey. Throughout the recording of her episode, I kept thinking she does that to Teddy's passions are boundless, her convictions, pure and fiery and her quest to understand and Intuit humanity is unlike any other person's I have experienced in my lifetime. Teddy grew up in a tumultuous and violent family where there was sexual abuse. But for Teddy, her home life didn't sink her it activated her. My Awakening was at the age of 19, the women's movement. I mean, the feminist movement was in full swing, and I became a leader of grassroots community organizing, leading the whole on sexual crimes against women. Teddy and I spoke about being a woman and a mother. And that in society staying good and staying quiet often leads to a wider acceptance. Daring to express pain and speaking truth to trauma rocks the boat, but it is an act that Teddy describes as an awakening, which is born out of feeling the pain of not conforming, of questioning, worth and value. And what was so moving was that after speaking with Teddy, I started to realize that my falling apart was something so universal to being human. And that my strength to buck the norm of the perfect woman was, dare I say it heroic. By the end of Teddy's beautiful interview, I started using different words, to speak to my mental health crisis, my hospitalization and my falling apart. I am on the hero's journey, and I have had an awakening that has irrevocably changed my life.

Teddy Frank: 2:52

Welcome back, everyone, I'm Tara Beckett. And this is let perfect burn. And I'm really excited that you came back. And I'm very happy that you get to share with my next guest, which is Teddy Frank. And Teddy is a lifelong spiritual seeker. She loves people culture, the arts. She is a student of human behavior. And she's a practitioner of the continuously evolving integration of social justice, mythical wisdom, creativity, transformational coaching and group facilitation. And that might seem like a long introduction for Teddy, but I assure you she is every piece of these words. So Teddy, welcome. Thank you, Tara. And thank you for that kind introduction. It's exciting to be here. Yeah. Um, so Teddy, and I may or may not work, you know, we're doing a little experimentation. Today's episode, I might participate in conversation more than I usually do. Usually with let perfect burn. I like it to be about my guest. And Teddy's challenging me a little bit to say, what if we have more of a dialogue? And I'm like, you know, I'm freaking out. So the answer should probably be yes. Um, so, Teddy. You know, I would love for you to expand a little bit on your bio, just to give us a sense of, you know, what your day to day looks like? Or what does your professional and personal and spiritual life looks like at this moment? Yeah, absolutely terror. It's always great to build ground and build contexts. So by way of grounding. First off, speaking of ground I live in northern rocky mountains of Colorado, about two hours northwest of Denver, and at about 7600 feet, and this is where I live with my husband and our dog Tony. We moved from Amsterdam, where we were living in, in Europe in Amsterdam, when I was the Global Head of cultural transformation for Philips, which is, for those that aren't familiar, used to be a very big company is now much more focused on health care. And that was an incredible episode in my life. Living in Europe was fantastic. But you know, what's fascinating about the Netherlands is it is below sea level. So hence the having to come back up into the mountains. Even though I was born and raised in New York, I am a licensed master social worker, a Reichian psychotherapist, which means working through the body, what's often termed now these days Cymatics. And I apply that in one of my first loves group facilitation. And I do a lot of transformational leadership, facilitation, as well as leadership coaching, primarily in the corporate arena. And then I have a very robust application of collective trauma healing that I do, did for many years during the pandemic, several years, let's say, global groups for all of us experiencing that kind of collective trauma. And currently, my work is focused a lot on ancestral healing. And doing some work with people in Ukraine, who are obviously dealing with a very real and current war, and attempting to create some level of normality in the midst of a warzone. So that's kind of some of the work I do as well as an application with scientists, I love working in innovation. So I do a lot of work locally, with scientists from Colorado State University, that are looking at diversity, equity, justice, and inclusion within academia, and also some very cool innovations environmentally about creating healthy environments, particularly for marginalized communities. So that's just a little snippet of grounding. Hopefully, we're our listeners,

Tara Beckett: 7:33

who Yeah, that's amazing. And where I go from there is there's, you know, professionally, those are the things that you do, but there has to be a new passions that brought you to those places. So can you speak a little bit out, you know, how you grew up? Or, you know, how you became a young adult? And how you progress through to be all of these roles?

Teddy Frank: 7:56

Hmm, yeah, you know, and the older we get, the more we see the spiral in our hero's journey, or for us, as women our hero's journey, right? So let me speak just a little bit to this spirals, and to the way in which that integrates in my life now. So I grew up in a Jewish middle class, suburb of New York City Place Called nourish shell. And it was during that literal, I'm a baby boomer, right. So it was literally that boom of, you know, coming back from World War Two GI Bill, allowing people to buy houses. And I say, people, it was primarily to benefit white, white folks. And so that enclave I grew up in was really ruled by conformity. And I would say, my first awakening, if I look at kind of the call in the Harris journey, what called me was at that beautiful age of 13. When I looked around, and I said, you know, I am not down with these values here. It was also a war. It was, you know, the anti war movement, the civil rights movement. And I would say, Taro that my awakening at that time, was around social justice, because it happened that and I'll just tell a brief story here that one of the most seminal moments in the civil rights movement in this country was the murder by the Ku Klux Klan of three young men. Schwerner, Goodman and Cheney, Mississippi Burning is based on that story. And Michael shorteners mother was a teacher are in our school, Mrs. Schwerner Gus. So this happened before I turned 13. I was much younger. But somehow I knew that Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, who was another Jewish boy from Queens, and James Chaney, who was a local African American youth from Mississippi, they were down there during the Freedom Summer to help register black voters. And it was thought that if they brought a lot of white kids, you know, from colleges up north down to Mississippi, as part of this, that it would certainly gained national attention. But the organizers were well aware of the risks. And that event, the murder of those three young men started my awakening that then when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, really caused me to get very aligned with my sense of purpose. And I became a student, a lifelong student, really a black culture, which informs a lot of my thinking, and certainly the generativity of the music. At the same time, I kind of fell upon a bookstore in New York City, and found yoga in Raja Yoga and started practicing yoga. And then I was doing poetry and music, and I got my first guitar, started writing songs. So those threads, you know, social justice, creativity, you know, music, art, culture, and mysticism, is exactly what's been my life strands. And then of course, just to save myself coming out of a very tumultuous, troubled, violent family becoming a student of human behavior. So the next I'll just give you the neck that big spirals the awakenings was, yeah, the age of 19 women's movement, I mean, the feminist movement was in full swing. And I became a leader at the, you know, kind of grassroots community organizing level, leading the whole track on sexual crimes against women for the International Women's tribunal modeled on the Nuremberg trials in New York City, and then a representative in Mexico City, for International Women's here 1975, just to route it, and got exposed to what it really means to become empowered as a woman, cross culturally, which is a very different way of looking at things. And using my music in that regard. And then just for the sake of brevity, my next term, which is wild, and hopefully for our viewers gives us the sense that our participants are listeners that you know, life is so exciting, and sometimes comes in divergent ways. So that the experiences that form and shape our character can often be something that looks very, very different than how we might see ourselves. So I ended up in corporate America as a corporate leader. So I mentioned like leadership development by Woodstock friends, and you know, all these longtime friends of mine in the women's movement, were like, Teddy, really? What's up with that? So that, you know, that's just like the humor of life and fun journey. Yeah, that I left, as I mentioned, is about seven years ago, I'm in that cycle and bringing all those threads together in my life.

Tara Beckett: 13:58

Ah, I love that I love hearing your story and the idea of the spiral, right? And that how, yeah, you can in retrospect, you can see all the little pieces and that's, that's really cool.

Teddy Frank: 14:22

I have to say, Terry, you know, with respect to your, you know, podcast, and the whole notion of, you know, perfect and perfectionism that I've always admired people who are really clear, have a really clear path, you know, do their thing and then just evolve in that, you know, with no disrespect, more linear way. I am not one of those people. You know, I've never seen myself as one of those people because you No, because there's so much that the human body, the human instrument, and the human soul can encompass that it is a matter of integration and focus. But I just want to say something about that. And I'm really interested in hoping our conversation we can touch on what that means in relation to our internal sense of self, and self definition, as humans as women, in how we pursue our greatest expression of our essence in the world. And so you can hear from my journey, it's actually quite nonconforming, right. I love it.

Tara Beckett: 15:50

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting way to figure out how you become an advocate. And, for me, I became an advocate, because of my very small nuclear sort of falling apart and, and trauma that, you know, a lot of it revolved around COVID. But now I take my mental health experience, and I say, Hang on, there is no room to stigmatize this, there is no room to not talk to somebody about all the factors that were part of that sickness are that illness that needed medical attention, that should be given the same care and compassion as anyone else who walks into a hospital. And so I have shivers right now, because never in my life, have I felt so clear about the need for what I received, and also the absolute dismissal that it's anything less than human and brave, and I have no tolerance for it.

Teddy Frank: 16:59

Mm hmm. no tolerance for

Tara Beckett: 17:03

no tolerance for attempting to use it as a weapon. It's just not okay, you know, we don't take other kinds of illnesses or sicknesses or traumatic responses in the body as something that should be shameful. And unfortunately, the it's I think it's considered a shameful, shameful diagnosis or a shameful need for treatment.

Teddy Frank: 17:29

You know, it's so powerful and, you know, I'm sure you've heard the words apply to you brave, courageous, you know, independent, but it reminds me of Gabor Mateus work right now in Gabor Ma. Tei is, you know, very seminal leader in trauma healing, a doctor has deep roots in you know, in the European Holocaust, and he talks about the myth of normal, and that sense, and I think you No, I'm also reminded of Sylvia Plath, you know, the brilliance of the bell jar, and Virginia Woolf and Violeta Parra and often seen as Storni and Argentinian poet, women who came up against a norm, right. And I think this is really powerful to talk to, you know, as Gabor Ma Tei speaks about the myth of normal, what is normal, and that's when I say, and I feel as I talk about this, this fierceness this passion, you know, which you asked about, and as I listened to you, the fact of breaking open, cracking, breaking open, having moments or periods of time, where we fall apart, you know, Pema children with, you know, when things fall apart, and the wisdom of allowing ourselves to really embrace soften and include the cracks, the fissures, the pain, the shadow, the trauma of what we've experienced in the world, both individually as women, your experience around, you know, your family motherhood, being in a kind of a domestic experience, all of that is so powerful as a shaper for us as women, and then our collective experience at this moment in time of being born into a very wounded world, the wisdom of our ability to really pause, reflect, and include the grief, the terror and the rage. That can Power, our integration as self embodied self directed women. So I want to honor that and make some space for you, for everyone listening for the women who are feeling different, sometimes feeling the pain of not conforming, of questioning their worth, their value, and the terrible illness of comparing ourselves to others, and finding ourselves not worthy or not matching some false ideal.

Tara Beckett: 20:47

Yeah, and, you know, my greatest hope for both of my children is that they feel safe enough to come to me and say, Mom, I'm in so much pain, please help me. If they can do that, yeah, I've done the majority of my work. And I didn't have that available to me. I have wonderful parents. But I grew up in a kind of terror as a really happy really good kid. I just didn't have it in me to say what I was going through. And when I look back, and I look at all the little tick marks of what happened to me leading up to my hospitalization in September, I think to myself, because of that perfectionism, that you held it all together, there is no human being that would have been able to take all of that, and not have the same outcome of just saying, I need to let this all go, it's too much. So I think for me, the destigmatizing needs to happen is if people just would listen and say, What have you been through? You know, what did you have happened when you were a child? What did you have happen when you became a mother? What did you have happen, you know, with your partner, or your job, or frickin fucking COVID, I mean, all of these things, if we put them on our shoulders and expect to carry them without ever stopped smiling or taking a rest, like, the outcome is clear, and I will not live that way ever again.

Teddy Frank: 22:37

De stigmatizing the falling apart. Right? The the seeking of the resource of saying I'm not okay. Is, is actually a sign of health. Right? Correct. So when we're able to say, and this is, you know, I coach a lot of women in my practice, and a lot of very successful women, and the point at which I enter their lives, because you know, there's, there's always an attraction when we get much more intentional. So my, my way of working is to really enter somebody's life at one of those awakening moments, you know, in the spine, one of those moments of call, which is what you're describing, you know, that sometimes the falling apart is the awakening is entering the dark night of the soul. It's really looking at I'm in pain, and I'm not okay, because let's talk for a moment, Tara about what's normal. And where perfectionism comes from, in a way, right? Because that's the nature of your podcast. And it is also something I've deeply reflect reflected on in my life in the way of saying, we develop at a very young age from a nervous system perspective, a way to survive, right? So when something happens in our environment, and it doesn't have to be catastrophic. It might be but it might also be a kind of a low level hum of, you know, my mother isn't coming when I call or she doesn't feel like in my life. I remember five years old, my mother was very depressed. And I was sitting at the kitchen table across from her, and she was looking off to the side. And I looked directly at her and I said, Mommy, are you mad at me? And she brought her gaze back, and she said, now finally resting in my eyes. No, honey, why would you think that? And I said, I can't see myself in your eyes. And in that moment, my five year old wisdom self said, my mom is not available to resource me. And that's when we start to say, Okay, I need to take care of myself, which of course, it starts earlier than that, I need to be the one to take care of me and her, and everybody is one expression of, I've got to be the one in charge, I've got to be hyper vigilant, I've got to really now make sure that I don't express my needs, which I think is a huge illness in our society, and often is something that women do, I'm going to be the one who is the resource for others. But it depletes. It depletes us because it's actually an abrogation of natural law, which is I breathe out as a human co2, the earth breathes out oxygen, I take in oxygen as a resource. And the earth takes and co2 as a resource, like the most fundamental natural law is that we have reciprocal energy exchange. So in a moment, our nervous systems get wired for survival and say, it's not okay to express my needs. And so we develop these patterns that become the cracks in our psyche, the shadows in our soul. And that's what we then ride upon as nice girls, or as high performers in the world. Or, as you know, the sort of conforming to the female notion, which changes culturally but by Western dominant male standard says, You don't express your needs too strongly, because then you're aggressive, right? She's aggressive, she's angry, you know, angry? Yeah. Yeah, you know, she's angry, or, you know, you don't express your emotions, because then you become emotional, which is needed, right, which is sort of victime or not allowed. And so the range of expression, and it certainly affects males. I mean, this is not female only is so narrow, particularly in Western dominated society here in the US, let's say, is such a narrow range, that we have to either numb ourselves. Or if we become activated, then we do the on socially acceptable thing of expressing ourselves. And then where does passion come in? Where does art come in? Where does love Come in? Where does culture come in? Where does empathy and caring for others and standing up for justice come in? It comes in outside the norm, and we relegate it, oh, that's arts and culture, or that's, oh, that's politics or, and so what I'm saying is, the whole stigmatization of the falling apart is actually the emergence of our deeper expression of self and healing as a way of saying, hey, you know what, this ain't okay. And I'm not okay. And I'm gonna call it out right now.

Tara Beckett: 28:41

Yeah. No, that's amazing, like thinking about, you know, art or passion or love like that, it's actually should belong in that full gamut, right? Like that. That's where it's wrong. And awe that when it's getting me, that would make me really excited. I mean, I think when you're talking about a young kid, you know, looking back on my childhood, my sister's four years younger, and the story of her is that she gave no shits, she'd get in trouble. She'd go on one end, she'd go on one end of her bedroom, and she would run like bowl style, and then like head, like, throw herself against the door. And this would go on for hours. And my mom would say, I thought that like CPS was gonna get called. And then I would kind of look at that and go, Oh, that makes my mom really mad. And like, I'm not going to do that. I'm gonna go to my room, whatever I'm told. And sort of like self punish, and I'll stay good. Yeah, and from that point, I learned over and over again, you get a lot if you're good, like if you're so it just kicked off my whole sort of persona of the person who doesn't quite say anything and just keeps making sure everybody's okay the room is okay. If I've got enough things going on that are positive that people can talk positively about me. And now as an adult, I look back and I'm like, Damn, that girl had it going on, you know, four years old, she let it rip. Yeah. And that was awesome.

Teddy Frank: 30:17

Well, and that's a really poignant example, Tara of activation, which you're describing your sister, you know, she was activated, she was expressing no doubt for the family, those things that were not allowed, right, anger, whatever frustration and maybe anxiety, and then the numbing and absence in which you embodied, Oh, I better shut down. And just, you know, be that good girl. And, you know, I think that is such a human expression. For, for me, it manifested in my family, which was very violent, very violent dad, and very scary place to grow up. And sexually abusive place, it really comes down. And I think this is the connection and your story and my story, and anybody's story to safety. We have to, from a nervous system perspective, find some level of survival. And I have a beautiful teacher, Thomas hubo, who's a modern mystic. And he says something so deeply touching that, when we were in that situation, you may be witnessing your older sister, me witnessing my older brothers and sisters, my dad, my mom, whatever age is, that was very young ages, we felt it wasn't good to be here. It wasn't safe to be here. And so we went somewhere else and buy this somewhere else. It is often the numbing the absent seeing the pushing down of the fear, right? Because that's really the primary survival mechanism is fear. And then often disassociating. So this is what happens when we don't live in the body, is now we're going to use our minds as a way to control things and push down feelings in the body. So that's the split between the head and the body. And I think it's extremely dominant in so called white culture to assimilate. You know, it means to deny the body to deny the emotions, for example, growing up Jewish middle class, one of the things you know, that we were taught, and it's a very, very mundane thing, if you go to a restaurant, and you hear a glass break, right, somebody drops a glass a way to break the glass. The the directive is Don't look. Don't look is that's low class, right? So it's a class, it's a class thing. If you want to feel more, you know, more sophisticated, don't look, well, what does that do? It freezes the neck for one thing, because your natural tendency would be to look, your survival mechanism is let me see where the danger is coming from. You freeze your eyes, you have to freeze your shoulders in your body, and you freeze your response. And then you go through life frozen, and letting your mind override. So it's a it's a deeply patterned way of being, which is why I love the work I do, because it's about getting back in the body, and becoming more embodied to say, You know what, I'm afraid right now. It's what you want your kids to be able to do. Right is to be able to say, I'm feeling kind of anxious about this test tomorrow. Or it's a new class. It's September and Oh, you got you know, oh, it's a new grade, you know, you have all this excitement. Yeah, I maybe have a little social anxiety, even if a kid can't say that. Right? Yes, being authentic and real, and who we are what we feel, and allowing ourselves to be integrated physically, emotionally, mentally, using the beautiful brain that we have in service, of acknowledging how we feel, physically and emotionally, and then our spiritual sense of our greatest expression from our unique blueprint of how we enter the world and how we interact. relationally

Tara Beckett: 34:38

Mm hmm. Yeah. And what you were just saying about kids or children, I feel like I can buck the norms in my family of how I parent and that I parent, differently in a lot of ways. In You know, allowing extreme anger if my child's angry Yeah, as long as he isn't hurting anyone or hurting anything, it's like, it's okay to sit in this right. And I think it does come from that place of, to my best of my ability, I'm hoping to let them take something out, let the steam out, I guess before it explodes, you know, just based on my own personal experience, but I think sometimes that can get you a lot of looks, especially when you're in public, and you're acknowledging like, it's a tough moment, and I'm not gonna hurry us out the door. We're gonna sit with it. And then maybe when we can catch our breath, we'll leave, right? Yeah, it's just a little bit different.

Teddy Frank: 35:45

Totally. And, you know, I raised my kids, I love children. I've always loved children. And when I had my own children, I have two sons, who are now 31 and 33, almost 34, and almost three to their birthdays are coming. You know, the first thing is just, you know, that empathizing of what are they feeling right now? And I would say to my husband, you know, the first thing that I look at, if they're young and crying, are they hungry? Yeah, yeah. Are they tired? You know, assuming that they're not in diapers anymore, right? Those out then what else is going on? And what I found, interestingly, is my older son, I really had to help encourage his expression, because he became very accountable, very responsible early on, yeah, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful soul, beautiful human being who is extremely empathic, but not as expressive, right? He, he really holds. So it was allowing expression, my younger son was the reverse, like, he would, you know, well, and so allowing that expression, and then I found I had to really introduce calming mechanisms for containing, so completely opposite one encouraging full expression, and the other allowing the expression but finding a way to help calm and contain. So you know, I love what you're saying, which is you work with the emotional temperament of your child in a way that serves them. And we call it co regulates, right that if mom is okay, and it could be primary caregiver, but if mom is okay, then we become the safe harbor the anchor for our children. And that's true for us as human beings, we need each other. The older we grow, you know, in a way, the more in a sense, we become anchors for each other. And I just want to mention, that's collective healing is when we literally can become resources, and have and build the capacity to hold the pain of the world in pockets, right, in places that really move us whether it's female empowerment, which is a lot of the work, I think that you do. Gender violence, which is a lot of the work, I've been involved in anti racism, which is a lot of the work I'm involved in, to be able to also hold that suffering and pain, like your child having a meltdown. People are having meltdowns all over the world, and we're having collective meltdowns. So we do it individually familiarly. There's a whole ancestral lineage that comes into play. And then that sense of the collective where do I feel moved to be a hold a host, which is why I love your podcast so much, and why I encourage you know, your listeners to really not only you know, listen and support, but also extend if you feel that this is a place where you feel held, because you Tara are somebody who has opened a space for women to heal, and specifically around D stigmatizing mental health, mental illness, wellness, perfectionism, which is a kind of an illness, then spread the word, spread the word and really allows you to become a collective healing space.

Tara Beckett: 39:33

Yes, that's, that's the ultimate goal. You know, it's like, you know, and I'm, I'm writing my memoir, I'm hoping 2023 It's coming out Fingers crossed. And this and even social media, you know, it's all about for me, Hey, you don't have to keep doing how we've been doing it. Right. Like, I am a far better man. Other to my children after God going through a mental health crisis than I was, when they were born. It's just because at that point, I still couldn't tap into all of the resources that I had inside of me. I couldn't they were in a box, right? And so in a lot of ways, I don't think I could give my children everything that I had. And now I can say, unequivocally, oh, they've got 100% of me, that doesn't make me a perfect parent. That doesn't make me a perfect mother. But I am they're completely open and accessible. And just to say, you know, what, if you think you need to mother like a print Pinterest page? No. It's a lie. It's a lie. Yeah. So if we just started to say to mothers, you know, especially with my memoir, if, if somebody could pick it up, and an OB GYN office at their six week appointment, where they basically say, Thanks for shooting out the kid, see you later, you're cleared to have a penis inside of you again. And if they had my book, and to say, It's okay, if you're a mess, just because they said, you know, sort of discarded you and say peace out have fun. Like, you are allowed to say, I'm not better yet. I'm not there yet. I'm not connected to my child yet. Breastfeeding sucks, like, just to be able to say, use your voice new mothers, I swear to God, I didn't. But if you do, I've done my job.

Teddy Frank: 41:30

Yeah. Well, it's touching, as you say that, you know, and to really feel the isolation of new mothers and have the birthing experience often. One thing I would say from my experience is that women together are so powerful, that collectivizing, who we are as women, which is why I run the groups I run, and also move into this sense of separation is, in fact, a symptom of trauma. That is one of the deepest symptoms of trauma, regardless of how it gets expressed. And to recognize that So becoming unified ourselves personally, which is through therapy, through counseling, right, through support groups, and then being able to connect relationally. That's what I meant by CO regulation, in collective spaces. For women, to be able to do that with women, is an amazing healing experience. So I definitely encourage it's wonderful. You're writing your memoirs, you know, I continue to do my music, my poetry, my facilitation, my workshops, my individual coaching, because for me, healing is all about integration, and healing, separation with self and with others, and that really elevates our sense of wholeness and of uniqueness, and allowing ourselves to be us, which by nature, is different. I'm different than you, Tara. And you are also in me, and I am right. So in you. So it's the uniqueness and the connection. So hopefully, yes, just from our brief conversation together today, you know, your listeners, I mean, it elevates me to talk to you to see the light in your eyes, and the pain and include that in my experience of you. And hopefully, you know, your experience of me. As you Yeah, it's me in that for your listeners to really feel this is a healing space of integrating self and relating and connecting relationally with others.

Tara Beckett: 44:16

Ah, Teddy, thank you. And I've been so honored to have this chat with you this conversation and yeah, it does feel like I've never thought of the podcast that way. But like an opening of a door and saying, I want to hear from you. If you have a story that you'd like to tell, please reach out. Because that would be the ultimate goal that you know, we just keep this momentum of these voices coming. That would be amazing. And so I end every episode with the question of, you know, Teddy, what does let perfect burn mean to you?

Teddy Frank: 44:53

Hmm. I love that title. You know, it's really having In the incendiary fierceness of the passion as a woman to say, Fuck normal, the hell with conformity, and yet into that alive, vibrant, vital sense of essence, who am I, as a unique blueprint, an expression of universal energy that can become more and more who I was meant to be, who I was born to be, not who I was conditioned and conformed to be who I am on norm to be who I am, in all my re form, transform me. That's what needs to me, Teddy, thank you. Thank you and everybody, Teddy Frank. You know, there's gonna be information of how to check her out. And I have some personal friends and people I know that have worked with her and every single person is like, it was amazing. So definitely, you know, she's there. So, thank you so much, Teddy. Thank you, Tara. Perfect.