Beyond Your Limits with Dr. Christine Jehu

129. WE'RE BACK!! The Climb to Self-Alignment and Beyond - a recap of 2023 & a look forward for the pod in 2024

• Dr. Christine Jehu

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WE'RE BACK!! Wowzers this episode was unexpectedly emotional. I open up about 2023 more of what has been going on behind the scenes personally that put the show on an unexpected pause. 

I haven't shared much, if at all, about my divorce on the show. I'm sharing some of that and the pain that worked to steer me onto a path of self-reclamation and passion rekindling. This episode isn't just a narrative of my past year's trials and triumphs—it's a heartfelt conversation about respecting the sanctity of privacy in tender times, the truth depression, and the necessity of carving out a sanctuary for oneself.

Turning a new leaf often involves confronting our deeply held beliefs about success and self-worth. The 29029 event this year taught me that the summit isn't always what defines us—it's the climb that truly matters. Bringing back my nickname 'CJ'  was a powerful step towards aligning with my true self. In this candid session, I discuss the significant emotional shifts that come with this realignment, the vital role of therapy for high-functioning individuals, and why recognizing our value beyond our achievements is a transformative insight.

I share the healing power of corrective emotional experiences within the therapeutic space and how an unexpected new relationship has taught me to navigate the confluence of joy and pain. Sharing of the evolution from merely surviving to living fully and now, towards thriving. I invite you to embrace the excitement of setting boundaries and balancing a vibrant life. And to cap it off, there's anticipation in the air with a top-secret project underway that promises to add another layer to our collective journey towards a life without limitations.

Journal Prompts from today's episode:

  1. What lights you up and how can you bring those elements into your weekly rhythm?
  2. In what ways and in what areas are you surviving in life?
  3. What would THRIVING in life look like for you?
  4. If you were thriving in 3 months what would that look like? In 6 months? In 9 months? By the end of the year? What tweaks and adjustments can you make to bring a shift to thriving?
  5. In what areas are you placing conscious or subconscious limits on yourself?
  6. What would it look like for you to take a step or two beyond those limits this year?


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Speaker 1:

What does it look like to live a life beyond your limits? Hi, I'm Dr CJ, a copy obsessed psychologist coach and your personal virtual mentor. Too many of us are holding ourselves back, placing limits on what's possible and believing the false stories in our head that say we can't accomplish a goal or a dream. Together, we will rewrite the stories holding us back, tackle barriers and limits and build an incredible foundation for going after our goals and dreams. I'm here to support you, to challenge you and to coach you through and beyond your limits. And a quick caveat while I am a psychologist, this show is not therapy or a substitute for mental health treatment. Please connect with a licensed mental health provider for those needs. Alright, are you ready to live a life beyond your limits? Let's get after it. We're back. Hello, my friend, welcome to a long overdue episode of Beyond your Limits. Ooh, we are here with some takeaways from 2023 and some updates for me and my life and the pod. And in the updates you'll not the updates in the takeaways from last year you'll hear why I have been on a bit of a hiatus an unplanned hiatus with the podcast. So, yeah, why don't we just get into it Like old friends talking over coffee, like we haven't been here in a while.

Speaker 1:

A couple of big things happened in 2023, and the main one I'm not really I don't remember if I have shared about it here on the podcast. I know I started sharing as a guest on some other folks podcast, but 2023, I got divorced. My divorce was finalized. The separation happened sort of progressively over time in 2022, but all of the legal elements happened in this past year and I made a really deliberate decision not to talk about it publicly for a number of reasons. One, my own processing and healing, but also out of respect for my ex. I will never speak publicly about my any part of the experience that doesn't pertain to me and my own experience. I am not going to speak about my ex. I'm not going to dish tea about you know what happened in the relationship, why it didn't work out. So if that's what you're here for, you are going to be sorely disappointed Because that's not my story to share, and so you know I just I want to preface all of that because I think I'll. I'll probably, yeah, yeah, I'll be sharing more about what the last 10 years of my life has been like. I'm going to try to be sharing about it in a more open and transparent way. And it's not. It's not it doesn't just have to do with my marriage and that relationship. Yes, that was a big part of it, but a larger part of it was the loss of my father and how that helped to sort of cascade all of the pieces that that were to come after it. So I will share that.

Speaker 1:

While the divorce was really sad, I never entered into a marriage thinking that divorce was a possibility or even an option, and I'm sad that that is part of my story. However, shifting away from that relationship has been one of the most healthy things for me in my life. There was a lot of myself that was lost and buried within the context of that relationship. That bled into other parts of my life. And so 2023, I started off the year with this hope of reclaiming reclaiming myself and my identity and coming back to know who I am ultimately as a person and find the things that light me up and build community in a really intentional way. And so I have said that divorce is probably the best thing that could have happened to me in the last year to help me make some really meaningful shifts and a reconnection and a re grounding for myself. And so that's been a lot of what has been happening behind the scenes with me and I'm going to go a little bit out of order on my outline here.

Speaker 1:

But a big part of what unfolded last year and mostly towards, I would say, in the second half of the year, after 29029 through the end of the year is I admitted to myself that I was navigating depression and navigating some pretty serious depression, and you know I'm a mental health professional. I treat people with mental health struggles and diagnoses and all of that and in some ways it it was sort of hard honestly to admit that that's what I was struggling with and it's been this compounding effect over time since the loss of my father and everything that's happened since then and being on my own again, living by myself, being out of my marriage, had yes, it was freeing and healing in a lot of ways. And on the back half of that, I think I shared last year that I was trying to figure out some things that were going on with my body right, some gut stuff that was happening and some changes in my body that didn't make sense, based off of how I structure my life right In terms of how I'm eating, how I take care of my body through movement and exercise and training, for 29029. The things that were happening within my body just weren't making any sense. And I was going to the doctor and getting all of these things checked out, like I got a freaking MRI and looking at all of these pieces and the blood work was coming back, quote unquote, normal and all of that and I was like what, what is actually happening here?

Speaker 1:

And in the back half of the year I literally looked myself in the mirror and was like you have to stop. You have to stop kidding yourself. You are depressed and you know this. You are qualified to diagnose people with depression. You are seeing and experiencing all of this firsthand. Admit it, admit it and ask for help. And so I made some appointments and got some interventions started, some medication, I found a new therapist and I'm shifting myself in a new direction and honestly, it's been hard to admit because I had been in survival mode for so long and when I entered into a space of only having to be responsible for myself and being in my space by myself and creating a home in a new and different way, it created a new sense of safety and my body has finally been able to say, hey, we are safe and we can repair now.

Speaker 1:

And so part of what's happened for me is I have gained a significant amount of weight, to the point where I look in the mirror and I don't recognize myself. And that's really hard to admit, it's hard to navigate on the day to day, especially when clothes aren't fitting or I feel one way in my physical body, the way I'm moving, the weights that I'm able to lift, the energy that I have, and then I look in the mirror and I don't recognize the person that's reflected back, let me say the physical person that's reflected back. I don't recognize her. And so I'm working really hard to be kind, be kind to myself, be kind to my body and allow space for healing to happen.

Speaker 1:

I recently had a excuse me a hormone assessment done with a friend who I met through 29 or 29, not in 2023, but in 2022. And we just recently had the results call and she said to me something really, really powerful that sometimes symptoms show up in the healing. Oftentimes we think when we're in the thick of things, that's when we're gonna see symptoms, but sometimes it's on the back half, when our body knows, hey, I'm safe, that we start to see symptoms. And so it's confusing, right, because maybe we're out of a stressful situation, the threats aren't there anymore. We think about that fight, flight or freeze response and being in survival mode. We would think that the symptoms are showing up then.

Speaker 1:

And I've been saying for most of the year that, as these pieces have been going on in my body and I didn't understand it and the doctors weren't finding a root cause, I just kept saying like I feel like my body is releasing and flushing toxins and just toxic experience out of my body. And in talking with my friend, she said it right Sometimes symptoms show in the healing. And she offered this beautiful gift to me in saying like, hey, accepting what you've been through, accepting where your body's at, and continuing to show compassion and provide space for the healing to truly happen, she's like that's when the weight's gonna go. And, mind you, there are some other components that we're working on to balance a few things, but it all comes back to those systems in my body that are meant to keep us alive and keep us safe and find homeostasis, and some of mine are just slightly off. And so there's.

Speaker 1:

I have such an opportunity to heal my body on so many different levels, and it's opened up a lot of reflection for me and an opportunity to be really honest about how I've lived in this body, how I've viewed this body and how I've treated this body. And as I'm entering into a next phase of life, because I'm turning 40 this year, there is an opportunity to be really real with myself and adjust and unlearn some of the ways that I have been taught or that I've adopted in what it means to be in this body and how to take care of it, and so that has been a huge, huge lesson for me in 2023. That is really continuing to unfold and carry into 2024 with a lot of opportunity to live truly live my life. I want to say differently, but it's not necessarily different. It's more in alignment with where life has taken me and where I'm moving now, and so, while that's really vulnerable and, in a lot of ways, really scary, I'm also really excited and hopeful for the opportunity ahead of me and the change that can happen within myself and for myself. So those are two big pieces of what happened in 2023.

Speaker 1:

A couple of other things that I'm kind of looking at my outline here because I went in a different direction than what I had planned. But I participated in 29029 again and there are episodes a little further back that share about preparing for that experience and what it was like on the other side. And the biggest piece that came out of that experience for me last year was challenging my own failure mentality and if you've been here for a while, you know that I am a person who embraces failure, does not think that failure is a bad thing. Right, we always have an opportunity to learn and I challenge you to think about growth and leaning in and being willing to take risks and it not work out.

Speaker 1:

And for myself, having completed or participated in 29029, two years in a row and not earning the red hat as I went in with the intention to do as an athlete and having a really strong athlete identity, that really challenged me and challenged part of my sense of self, challenged who I am as an achiever and how I see myself as an achiever. And it has really offered me the opportunity to frame up the success and the experience in that event differently and see who I was and who I became on that mountain the two times that I was on it and there was so much that shifted in me on the mountain this year, in 2023, that I don't think I'm fully seeing or appreciating until now. And even as I'm saying this out loud, like the emotions are coming up and the realization of like letting go of past versions of myself, allowing the opportunity for some pain to truly release and really look at who am I, outside of achievements, and part of one of the other big takeaways from 2023 was I went into the year with an intention, one to realign with myself, but also to not overfunction, because I had recognized that achieving excuse me, achieving had become a lifeline for me. And as I've processed my experience with 29.029 and 2023, I have faced the lesson and have truly come to believe that I am not my achievements and as much as I have said and tell other people right like you have value simply because of who you are.

Speaker 1:

I don't think I believe that for myself at the core. You know I used to joke when I would start dating women whose parents weren't necessarily on board with them being gay and I might be the first female partner that they had brought home or introduced to their family and they weren't quite sure how it was going to go, and I would always joke like, well, let me just bring my resume and show them that I'm not some screw up, right, that I have a lot going for me, and I would say it jokingly, but a larger part of myself believed that to be true. But here's what I can show you in terms of my achievements, what I've done in life, the degrees on the wall and less about this is who I am as a human being and this is the worth that I bring simply by being me, because those are the things that helped me get to where I am, to build that resume. But somewhere along the way, the connection with self got separated from the achievements. And, yeah, I don't know, it's just been such a beautiful welcoming and a belief. Truly believing that it's me, it's simply being me, is enough. And yeah, it's hard to say out loud, right, that that is a framework that I had for my life, but it is, and so I'm happy.

Speaker 1:

I'm happy to sit in this place because, honestly, it's freed me up. It's freed me up to be more creative. I'm carrying less weight on my shoulders and when I lead with the expectation, first and foremost, of being me, of bringing CJ to the table. It has started to shift everything and, honestly, part of part of this shift has been asking people to call me CJ and asking people to call me JHU, because that I recognized that when I felt the most myself and when I was feeling really connected to community, the people around me and the closest people in my life called me CJ and I looked around and nobody was really calling me CJ anymore and so I started to shift that and as people started referring to me as CJ and calling me CJ and seeing me as CJ, I started seeing myself that way and started coming back and realigning with who I am at the core and that has been really, really powerful. So, okay, I'm looking through this list and we've talked about we've talked about the divorce, we've talked about the participation of 29029 again how I'm working not to overfunction and this lesson and the true belief now that I am not my achievements.

Speaker 1:

I've admitted to the depression and what that means, and I found a new therapist. You all found a new therapist and I've spoken to this woman twice. I had a consult with her on the phone and I've had one in person session with her and I can already tell you that I'm really excited for the work that I'm going to be able to do with her. I've had a number of therapists in my life simply because of moving and needing to find different people, and I've had one therapist in the past that I truly felt connected to and felt, saw the deeper parts of me, but I had to stop working with her because I moved, I moved, and so I'm really excited for this new clinician and what's going to come out of it, and I have been able to be more honest about where I'm at and what I need right A lot of what I just shared with you and those lessons and being in a place where I'm going in for me this time I'm not going in because I'm navigating a relationship or I'm navigating a loss or here's this identified.

Speaker 1:

I mean, yes, there's the depression, but it's more about me and the deeper growth and work and connection I want with myself and the healing that goes with that. And so it's a different focus for me as a client going in, and I'm excited for it because I want a therapist who gets the high level that I function at, the drive that I have, and can meet me there and continue to challenge me. I think that's what's been missing with therapists that I've had in the past, and nothing against them. I know it's all about fit. I do this shit for a living. Sometimes I've been in the clinician side and I've been able to get a client to a certain point and then I'm like, hey, you need somebody else, you need something different, you need someone with a different skill set or just is going to be able to meet you with a different approach, and that's okay. And so that's where I feel like I'm at now and I'm really excited, really excited to do that work and I hope to be able to share that with you all a bit more openly as I go through the process this year and see where it takes me.

Speaker 1:

And so, part of all of this, I'm thinking about how I have been in survival mode for the better part of 10 years as my dad was diagnosed. Oh shit, this is the 2024 is. It will be 10 years. Wow, I just realized that in the moment. It'll be 10 years in October when my dad passed. So, yeah, we're going on 10 years of that monumental experience and a very clear like left turn in my life. And so my goal right now is okay, I'm recognizing that I was in survival mode and I have shifted in this in this past year to living, to truly living again, and I want to move to thriving. We don't go immediately from surviving to thriving. We have to work through this process, and so this whole year, I've been living again, being an active participant in my life, regrounding and being connected and engaged with the world, for, like my senses, my five senses have heightened and become more alive. I'm dreaming again and I'm building the life that I've always wanted, and part of one of the really incredible things that happened in 2023 is that I met somebody new and I have the most incredible partner that I could have, could ever imagine. She is one of the most beautiful and incredible people in the world and I'm. It has shifted so much for me. She's a true teammate, she challenges me and supports me. She's my number one fan, like I. Ah shit, it's just so cool. We have our, our values are so aligned, and our vision for life and family is so aligned that there is an ease and a comfort and a solid foundation that's being built in a way that allows us both to have gone from places of survival to then living again and doing some really important healing.

Speaker 1:

Within the context of our relationship and in therapy we have this term called a corrective emotional experience, where you come into therapy and you've you know, you've been experiencing something in your life that has been painful or traumatic. And through the context of your therapeutic relationship, you can have corrective emotional experiences where you come in anticipating a reaction or an emotional experience with someone the therapist or or within the context of group therapy um, there may be somebody in the group that reminds you of this. You know specific person in your life and so through that safe space of the, the therapeutic relationship or the therapeutic group experience, you have a new experience. That's similar, right Like you come in sharing, say you share, you were shared about the loss of a pet with your partner and the partner was like that's stupid and dismisses you and all of that. And then in the context of therapy, maybe you have a loss of a pet again and maybe you were scared to bring that in or hesitant to share that because of how you've been treated in the past.

Speaker 1:

But within the context of the therapeutic relationship you receive what you needed the care, the compassion, the support that then teaches you oh, wow, I can receive what I need. We call that a corrective emotional experience. So we've been having those, literally one right after the other within the context of this relationship, and it's been so healing and so life giving, and it's so incredible to be able to share values and a vision and a picture of the life that we've both dreamed of and both started to wonder if it was possible for our lives. And we were introduced to one another at a time when we weren't necessarily looking for something building a new relationship, yes, an interest in having a connection with another human in our life, even if it was a friendship but very quickly realized, wow, yeah, we both have things that we're working on and aren't necessarily at a point in our life where we thought we'd be ready to build a relationship and start to form a life with somebody, but very quickly realized that we couldn't not be in each other's lives. And it has just been the most incredible experience and, oh my God, I could just talk about it all day, but I'm not going to. So that part has been.

Speaker 1:

You know, I've been holding the both, and I think a lot of us often run from times in our life when we're having and holding two emotions and two experiences that seem to be at conflict, and I think our society and our world tries to tell us that we can only hold one and can only experience one at a time, and that's simply not true, because life is complex and we are complex beings and so holding the pain and the loss and the hurt, while also being deeply seen and loved and cared for and growing with someone, it has been like a I was going to say the yin to the yang, but there's, you know, that whole thing is like more about balance, but whatever, I hope you get what I'm saying that we've been able, we've each been able to hold both with and for one another, and that's just been so incredible and so, yeah, that's shit that that was 2023 in a nutshell, in a 30 minute nutshell. So where does that leave us? And and where? Where is that taking us?

Speaker 1:

And and I'm thinking in terms of the podcast how am I approaching this? I am going to lean into more than ever what lights me up in this podcast and what lights me up and share that through this podcast. I'm going to use some loose structure to allow myself not to feel boxed in and gives room to evolve. And I was thinking about, you know, when I started podcasting. Someone said stay in it. You have to stay in and you have to stay consistent because there's something that happens around the third year that transforms right and and I'm coming up on three years of doing this podcast I started in February of 2021. Yeah, I just just counted on my fingers like, yeah, is that really three years?

Speaker 1:

And you know, when I started this show, part of the show was me living in survival mode and me needing something that was mine, that was safe, that was structured, that I had control over, and it served me really well. But now it's time for me to evolve the show as I'm healing and so, in a way, it almost feels like a new beginning. I don't want to say like starting over, because we're not starting over. Obviously, we have three years of experience and content and time together, but this is a new. This isn't. This isn't CJ surviving, this is CJ living. And my hope in over the next year is that the transition goes from survival before shifted into living in 2023. And I want to start moving from living to thriving in 2024. And so part of that is leaning into what lights me up and setting some boundaries.

Speaker 1:

I'll be honest that I want to get back to a weekly cadence with this show, but I don't want to promise you today that that's what's going to happen, because, as I'm recognizing and I'm looking at my calendar, living means that I have less space on the calendar, and so that's going to take some adjustment. I'll be honest, I had, I took some extra time off at the holiday and one of my goals was to batch, record a bunch of episodes and get myself ahead, and that didn't happen because there were other parts of my world and my life and, honestly, my existence that needed to be addressed. There were parts of my home that I needed to take care of as part of this transition. There were parts of my home that I hadn't touched since my ex moved out and they needed to be cleaned up and they needed to be taken care of and brought into this next phase of me and of ownership. And so that's what I focused on over the holiday and living versus achieving, and so I'm going to ask you to have patience with me as we're in this living and living towards thriving. I want to get to a point where I can batch, record some episodes and have some things in the hopper, but that may take some time. Just based off of what's on my calendar right now, the season we're at with work it's basketball season, which means a lot of weekends I'm back up at school at games, and so there's a part of this that is new in that it is I'm operating no longer from survival mode, and so I need to figure out what that means in terms of creation, in terms of my time and my energy, and where we are with this part of my life, the podcast part of my life. So my plan is that I want to.

Speaker 1:

I really enjoy listening to podcasts that are recap podcasts of shows, and that may sound really silly, but I really really enjoy them and I'll be honest, a lot of the recap shows I listen to are around like the Bachelor, the Bachelor at Bachelor of Paradise, that type of thing. But you know I've also listened to. There was a podcast called Pants with Kate and Leisha who were in the L Word and for a while, on their podcast they were going back and watching early episodes and recapping it and sharing their experience and their memories and the behind the scenes and I just love that. And so there was a show that I watched. I think it was back in November. I kind of binge watched the first season of the show, special Forces, and I was obsessed with it. I literally couldn't stop watching.

Speaker 1:

And so back in the fall the second season came out, and so my plan for the next few weeks is to watch that show and recap it and bring in my insights as a clinical sports psychologist and as somebody who works with high performers and I'm in high performance spaces, and bring my thoughts and I hesitate to say analysis, because obviously it's just watching a show and I don't actually know those people and we're getting a very curated view into their existence and their experience on that show, but it's. I've found that my partner and I were able to talk a lot about the show and think about our own experiences as athletes and as high performers, and so I'm going to recap that. And so if you want to watch along with me, it's going to be really hard, I'm telling you right now it's going to be really hard not to binge watch it. So, anyhow, I would love for you to watch it alongside me and we'll try to release a recap once a week on Tuesdays. There are eight episodes in that series, and so I'm looking forward to doing that over the next few weeks with you. And then I'm also so hard for me to not tell you all of these details I'm working on another project as well right now, and it's with our favorite journaling, ninja Megan, and you will, at the end of this month, you will know what it is.

Speaker 1:

I promise you, at the end of this month, you will know what it is. If not the very end of this month, the first of February, I think you might. You will know what this project is. We're working on something, and you will. You're going to know when the first phase of the rollout of this project comes, and so I'm really excited. I'm a little bit scared because it's vulnerable for me, but it's also going to be really fucking cool. So, anyhow, I feel like I have I've blabbed enough of talking about what was happening in 2023, what was really happening at the end of the year, why I sort of fell off this podcast for a while, but then also what I'm excited for and where we're going, and so, as we do, I want to offer you some journal prompts to think about as we're fully stepping into 2024.

Speaker 1:

And oftentimes I feel like we are provided journaling prompts and it becomes a task to check off the list. So I want to, I want to challenge you to spend time with these questions and, as I was writing them, I may do an episode about each of these prompts and really dig in and maybe share some of my answers to it. But here are the prompts. First, I want you to think about what lights you up, right, what is it that really lights you up, that brings you alive, and how can you bring the elements of what lights you up into your weekly rhythm? Okay, there's so much here. I'm going to have to do an episode on each of these, because I feel like I could go and talk for another 10 minutes on each of these questions. So I'm just going to give you the prompts right now and then we'll do some digging.

Speaker 1:

The second prompt here is this is sort of multi-layered, but it's this idea that we've been talking about today going from striving to thriving. So how are you surviving in your life right now? Maybe what are those areas where you see that you are simply surviving and let me not say simply, because there's nothing about survival. That simple. So what areas of your life are you surviving in and what does that look like for you? What's the impact that surviving in those areas is having on you and the other elements of your life? And then, if we look at the other side of that spectrum, what does thriving look like for you? And you may say like I don't fucking know. But if you think about, if you, if you can vision cast and think about what would thriving look like in three months, in six months, in nine months and at the end of the year, right, if we started making some of those steps to move from surviving to living and knowing that that is on the path to thriving, what might that look like for you Three months, six months, nine months and by the end of the year? And as you lay those out, what are some of those tweaks and adjustments that you can begin making now to start that shift from survival into living, into thriving? And then the third prompt is in what areas are you placing conscious or subconscious limits on yourself, and what would it look like for you to take a step or two beyond those limits this year?

Speaker 1:

All right, my friend, thank you so much for being here and hanging in with me. I know this was a longer episode. There was a lot to share and, honestly, this was this was healing and therapeutic for me as, as I was talking at the start of the episode, things were coming up that that I wasn't anticipating and wasn't expecting, but I'm glad that they came. I'm really glad that they came and I'm glad that you're here with me.

Speaker 1:

If you can do me a favor, this, this podcast and this podcast community grows when you share and the energy that comes back and through all of us when you share these episodes and more people hear the message and engage with what we're doing here, that that helps. That is. That is the way that you can give back to this show. So I'm excited to be back. I'm excited to be in 2024 with you. I'm looking forward to recapping special forces with you, to dig into some of these prompts a little bit further with you and to share with you the top secret project that is happening. So stay tuned. I love you and we will talk soon.