265. Go Regulate Yourself: Reinvention, Cancel Culture & Finding Your Voice With Brianne Roberge
265. Go Regulate Yourself: Reinvention, Cancel Culture & Finding Your Voice With Brianne Roberge
Sometimes the universe sends a pebble.
When we ignore it, it sends a rock.
And when we continue building a life around other people’s expectations instead of listening to ourselves, eventually it may drop an entire boulder into the middle of everything we thought was keeping us safe.
For writer and Go Regulate Yourself podcast host Brianne Roberge, that boulder arrived in the form of a devastating and deeply public business collapse.
After years of working as a nurse, health coach and business owner, Brianne attempted to rapidly expand her company. She hired more than 20 staff members and opened four clinic locations, but the expansion quickly became unsustainable.
The business failed. Brianne and her husband lost their assets. Employees were laid off, vendors and leases could not be paid, and the consequences unfolded publicly throughout her local community.
Then came the online backlash.
Brianne found herself at the centre of an attempted public cancellation. Her name, photograph and story were shared throughout local online groups. She received hundreds of comments, messages and emails calling her a fraud and an imposter. Some escalated into anonymous death threats.
It was a catastrophic loss of financial, professional, social and physical safety.
It was also the beginning of her return to herself.
When External Validation Builds the Wrong Life
Long before the business collapsed, Brianne had learned to organize her life around other people’s needs and opinions.
Growing up in an abusive environment taught her to people-please, remain quiet and seek safety through approval. When it came time to choose a career, she pursued nursing because it was considered respectable, reliable and financially secure.
But nursing was never the dream.
Brianne had wanted to become a writer since childhood. She wrote poems, family newsletters and stories on her grandparents’ typewriter. She even transformed a Grade 9 science project into a choose-your-own-ending storybook.
Writing had always been there, quietly tapping at the door.
However, the need for external validation kept leading her toward choices that looked impressive from the outside, even when they felt disconnected from who she truly was.
The collapse forced Brianne to confront a painful truth: many of the decisions she had made were not actually for her. They were attempts to prove her value, earn approval and construct an identity that other people would admire.
The universe had already sent the pebbles and the rocks.
The business failure became the boulder she could no longer ignore.
From Nursing and Coaching Back to Writing
In the years following the collapse, Brianne began dismantling the identity she had spent most of her life constructing.
She walked away from her nursing licence, hung up her scrubs and eventually left coaching behind as well.
Without the familiar roles and credentials that had previously defined her, she entered the uncomfortable space between identities. She knew she wanted to return to writing, but first she had to develop the confidence to use her actual voice.
That meant becoming more raw, unfiltered and unapologetic.
It meant writing what she believed instead of carefully constructing content around what would receive approval.
It meant allowing people to misunderstand, disagree with or dislike her without treating their reactions as evidence that she was wrong.
The destruction of her old identity created room for the writer who had been waiting beneath it.
The Meaning Behind Go Regulate Yourself
Brianne’s podcast, Go Regulate Yourself, was born directly from her experience with cancel culture.
During the backlash, people called her fraudulent, dishonest and terrible. Eventually, she realized the deepest problem was not simply that they were saying these things.
The problem was that she believed them.
As she began healing her need to please everyone, Brianne discovered that healing did not necessarily make her endlessly gentle, agreeable or easy to digest.
It made her honest.
She no longer felt obligated to prove that she had a good heart to people who had already decided otherwise.
The title Go Regulate Yourself holds two meanings.
First, it is an invitation to take responsibility for your own healing. You may not be responsible for everything that has happened to you, but you are responsible for what happens next. You have the opportunity to care for yourself, face your wounds and decide what you want to create from what you have survived.
Second, it is a boundary.
You are not responsible for regulating everyone else’s emotions, projections, opinions or triggers. When someone attempts to hand you their unprocessed feelings and insist that they belong to you, you are allowed to put them down.
They can go regulate themselves.
Using Social Media Without Performing for Approval
Before the collapse, Brianne approached social media through the lens of people-pleasing.
She rewrote posts repeatedly, tried to predict what version of her people wanted to see and worried constantly about being misunderstood or offensive. A single negative comment could send her into guilt, shame, fear or frantic overexplaining.
Today, she shares what feels honest and resonant.
Ironically, releasing the need to please everyone has helped her content reach and connect with more people. Her unapologetic writing gives others permission to recognize their own experiences inside it.
She has also developed a different relationship with negative comments. Instead of automatically treating criticism as proof that she has done something wrong, she sometimes responds with curiosity, reflecting the commenter’s reaction back to them.
Occasionally, this ends the interaction. At other times, it creates a deeper conversation and even invites the person to reconsider their original response.
Brianne is no longer using her voice to avoid rejection.
She is using it to tell the truth.
Look Beneath the Logical Problem
Brianne closes the conversation with a powerful embodied reflection inspired by an unexpected massage experience.
She arrived at the appointment with lower-back pain, but the massage therapist barely touched her lower back. Instead, she worked on Brianne’s glutes, hamstrings and surrounding areas.
As those areas released, so did the pain in her back.
The experience became a metaphor for the problems we encounter in our lives.
The place where the pain appears is not always the place where the problem began.
A recurring argument about money may actually be rooted in scarcity, safety or worthiness. A creative block may be connected to fear of judgment rather than a lack of ideas. A social media problem may actually be an external validation problem.
Instead of repeatedly attacking the most visible symptom, Brianne invites us to become curious about the deeper wound, fear or belief driving it.
The real transformation may begin somewhere entirely different from where the pain first appeared.
The Courage to Answer the Message
Brianne’s reinvention was not neat, private or painless.
She lost the life she had built, faced intense public criticism and had to release identities that once provided status and security.
But beneath the wreckage was a message she could finally hear.
She was never meant to spend her life proving herself through a role someone else had chosen for her.
She was meant to write.
This raw and unfiltered conversation explores cancel culture, public failure, shame, nervous system regulation, people-pleasing, external validation, social media, boundaries, identity transitions and the courage to rebuild a life that genuinely belongs to you.
Because sometimes the boulder is not the end of your story.
Sometimes it is the force that finally knocks you onto the path you were always meant to walk.
Links Mentioned
Connect with Brianne
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Transcript:
Kayla: Welcome back to another episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior podcast. We have another guest interview coming in hot, and today's conversation was honestly one of the most inspiring and genuinely fun conversations I have had in a while. In this conversation, I'm joined by Brianne Roberge, a writer and the host of the brilliantly named Go Regulate Yourself podcast.
As you might imagine, this was a raw and unfiltered conversation, and we talked a lot about what happens when the life you build around other people's expectations collapses, and you finally have the opportunity to discover what you were meant to do instead. One of my favorite takeaways from this conversation is this idea that the universe will start by throwing pebbles if you're on a path that might not be fully aligned.
If you don't listen, it throws rocks. And if you still don't listen, eventually it starts throwing these boulders until you finally receive the message and step into the purpose that was meant for you all along. And Brianne got thrown a whole bunch of boulders, which you'll hear about shortly. She shares her powerful journey from nursing to coaching, how she went through a devastating and very public business failure, and then ultimately came back to the dream that she carried since childhood: becoming a writer.
As you can imagine, this story inspired me on such a personal level. In this episode, we talk about cancel culture, shame, social media, the journey from coaching to writing, breaking free from the need for external validation, finding your real voice, refusing to carry other people's projections, and so much more.
Brianne is honest, hilarious, deeply reflective, and completely unfiltered in the best possible way. Enjoy this conversation, and I'll see you again soon.
Hello, Brianne, and welcome to the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast
Brianne: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Kayla: I am very excited to have you and to share your story with the listeners, because you have a powerful story of reinvention that is going to inspire all of the writers and the creatives listening. So can we really start with where you started, where you are now, and what the journey looked like?
Briane: Mm. Yeah, for sure. I mean, how much time do we have? So it's a long story, but it's a good one, and I will try to shorten it the best I can. , So I have had a very interesting, a little bit unorthodox journey into writing, and it has been messy and filled with so much challenge, a lot of shame, and learning how to kind of authentically become myself.
And so backing it up, like 10 plus years, I came from a childhood that was very abusive. I had a lot of different experiences in my life from a very young age that taught me that I was to be seen and not heard, my body belonged to others and not to myself. I had to make sure that everybody else was okay before myself.
It was really important to people please and seek a lot of validation and make sure that I was doing okay in everything that I was doing in my life. And so my mom kinda raised me as a, a mostly single mom for most of her life. Um, definitely didn't choose great partners. My bio dad, um, was an abusive man.
My stepfather was also an abusive man. And when I got into the space of deciding what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, you know, when they're in high school and they're trying to tell you, "What do you wanna be? And what do you wanna create out of the years that follow?" I was a very confused, very, um, hurt child, and I always looked to everybody else outside of myself to decide what it is that I wanted to do.
And my mom pushed me into a career of nursing, which was never something that I really wanted, but her and my stepdad insisted that it was going to have a good paycheck, lead to a lot of really good things in life, et cetera. And so I ended up pursuing that knowing that I didn't actually wanna be a nurse.
I wanted to be a writer my entire life. I remember when I was younger, I had a poem published. I used to write family newsletters all the time. I was always stealing my grandparents' typewriter and, you know, writing up whatever I could. Even my grade nine science project, I can remember this still, and I actually found a copy of this, , a couple of years ago.
I wrote a choose-your-own-ending storybook for my grade nine science project, and so writing was always something that I absolutely loved. I wanted to be in that space, but, you know, writing's not a career a lot of people tell you that you can make money in, especially not in my family. I was the first to go to university, the first to go into the medical role, and it was supposed to be this really prestige thing, right?
With all my family expecting me to do really well here So I went into nursing and quickly forgot about writing. Didn't really have time for it other than all of the essays and horrible papers I had to write through my degree, which is not the same thing. And, I didn't really have a lot of writing in my background, but what I did was try to make the best out of the situation that I was in.
And about 10 years ago, this is kind of the point where I had been, I guess you can say, finalizing, like, my nursing degree, moving into, like, the actual world of working bedside in the hospital, that sort of thing. And, I remember this kind of being the start of my conscious healing journey, where I started to actually realize that I had a lot of trauma, and there was something that I could do about it, and I didn't have to continue to show up in my life being triggered and, you know, allowing that to kind of rule the roost, if you will.
And so I started to make some changes and started to work on myself, and I decided that I was gonna become, like more health-oriented. And so I actually ended up enrolling in a health coaching certification program. And what that taught me was that, there was a lot of things within my power that I could change in my life, and health was a really big component of a person's life, so why not that be my focus?
So I ended up taking nursing and coaching and creating, like, this business that ended up having a lot of health coaching, a lot of trauma coaching in it. I always seemed to kinda come back to that. But the, the bread and butter of it was helping people get healthy and happy in the most natural way possible.
And so over the course of this last 10 years, things started to really shift and move in there. I built some... a really good, like, solo practice doing this, and then I hired on a couple of nursing staff. And then I got this really bold, albeit really stupid idea about three years ago, four years ago now, that I was gonna take this company and massively expand it.
And I ended up hiring on over 20 staff, opening up over four clinic locations, and thought we were gonna be, like, on the cusp of this really big turn in the world where people were looking for these type of options. And I had no business taking an expansion of that size. I had no idea what I was doing or how to do it properly, how to manage people or run a company of that size, and it fell flat in my face rela- relatively quickly.
I ended up losing everything. The business went under. We ended up being put into a bankruptcy. All of our assets, my husband's pension, literally everything that we had ended up getting lost in the mix of this catastrophic failure. Not to mention, in addition to the finances, I had to lay off all of my staff.
We had to close all of our clinic locations, and so now we're being placed into the position where money's gone. We don't have the ability to pay off remaining wages or pay the vendor contracts or the leases or any of these things that we had signed for, and a lot of people ended up getting hurt because of it.
And when people get hurt, oftentimes they direct their energy towards where they believe the root cause of that problem is, which was me. And so on top of all of the financial loss and the catastrophic failure and the very, very public failure that it was, I ended up also being put into, like, a cancel culture attempt of me online, where now everybody was angry, and they were coming for blood, and I was the source of that So my face, my picture, my story, everything like that was posted online in every single group you can imagine in our local community.
And I had anonymous emails and comments on social media and all the things coming in consistently. There was times when I would wake up to hundreds of comments or hundreds of messages or emails telling me what a terrible person I was, what a fraud, an imposter, and how I did this purposely to hurt other people.
I even escalated at one point to being anonymous death threats in my email box. And it was a, a very traumatic period of time, and I'm not gonna lie, my nervous system during this period really shut down internally because I would, you know, go to our grocery store or run errands and I would have this thought of, you know, "Who's gonna recognize me?
Who's gonna see me?" And I would be darting around the store and constantly on edge. And I lived a couple of years in that fight or flight mode not knowing what was gonna happen or who was gonna say what And so as a result, I mean, you know, this really traumatic, horrible situation that happened, was actually a really big blessing in disguise for me.
Because what I didn't realize during the course of this, you know how we always say, you know, the universe throws you a pebble when you don't listen, it throws a rock, and when you don't listen, it throws you a boulder. Well, I had received like probably 500 boulders before I even chose to start this company or move into this expansion or do any of these things, and I just, I wasn't listening.
I had this really deep-seated wound of needing to people-please and show up for other people and, like I said, validate, you know, everything that was happening in my life. I wanted to be liked, right? I wanted to be liked by other people, loved by other people. I wanted them to have good opinions of me and never say anything bad about me.
And that actually being that huge driving force behind all of the decisions that I made in this company and what ultimately led to it crashing was because I was trying to please everybody else, and especially I was trying to please my mother, right? I haven't had a relationship with her for 14 years.
We've been no contact for four years, and this really was a way of me being like, "Oh, look what I did, and look what I created and who I became even though we don't talk anymore." And that reality was a huge slap in the face for me because I had to realize that all the choices that I was making in my life never actually were for me.
I was showing up as a completely different version of myself, a masked version. Nothing that I was doing in my life was what I actually wanted or who I was, and I had to make some really hard choices from that point moving forward. So in the last four years, I walked away from my nursing license. I hung up my scrubs for good and my stethoscope for good.
I walked away from coaching only as of last summer, and then I kinda have this last year of really trying to figure out what it was that I wanted. I knew that I wanted to go back into, to writing 'cause I've wanted, as I said, to be a writer my whole life. And I've spent this last year since I fully hung up coaching really finding the confidence to be in this space, finding my voice to execute that in a different way than I ever have, and be more raw and unfiltered and unapologetic in what I have to say.
And it's been this really beautiful lesson and learning curve that so many incredible opportunities have come out of, but I first had to go through like this major death and rebirth cycle in order to get to where I am now. So that's the gist of everything. That is a wild story, and just the fact that you had to lose multiple levels of safety all at once, so the financial safety, the safety of like, "Am I gonna get hurt when I go to the grocery store?"
And that like activation you'd feel from the emails and the comments. Like, getting canceled is like... I feel like that'd be like one of the yuckiest things that can happen in today's society because it's everywhere, and it just like seeps into everything. And what I love is the fact that you were able to mine the gold from that and realize, "This was a very painful way of being directed to my purpose, but I was being directed."
And now you're in this like really inspirational place from like where I'm sitting. So now you have this podcast, and it's called Go Regulate Yourself, and I love it. It's like curse happy. There's like, you know, you're saying it like it is. It is unfiltered. It's such a great... Like, I love listening. So can you share a little bit about what that title stands for, and maybe how you even came to come up with that name?
Brianne: Because it's so creative, and it... People know exactly what they're getting as soon as they hear that title, which is awesome. Yeah, for sure. So, Go Regulate Yourself was actually born out of this whole cancel culture attempt of me online. Because a really big thing that I recognized in this was that when people were telling me that I was a fraud, I was an imposter, I was a terrible person, all of this stuff, the problem wasn't that they were saying it, the problem was that I was believing it.
I believed it to be true. I thought that they were correct, and I held onto that for way too long, longer than I should've. And when I finally started to break free of this mold of people pleasing, one of the things we recognize is that, like, healing doesn't necessarily make you more gentle, more nice, more laid back.
It actually makes you very honest, and you're able to recognize, "No, I actually do know who I am. I know that I have a good heart, and I no longer have to show up to prove that to somebody else. And if they don't see it, they don't recognize it, then that's not a me problem. That's a you problem." And so Go Regulate Yourself was born out of two kind of notions, which if your audience hasn't guessed it already, is a spinoff of Go Fuck Yourself.
But it, the idea behind it is, on one hand, a very endearing reminder to take care of yourself, right? It's important for you to heal, for you to face the inner demons and the wounds that you have, to do something with the stuff that you've been handed in life. Because while you might not be responsible for everything that happens to you, you are responsible for what comes next, and the only way that your life improves is by you deciding that you're gonna do something about it.
So it's that endearing reminder to like, "Hey, go regulate yourself. Go take care of yourself. Go do something for yourself." But then on the other hand, it's also a reminder that you are not responsible for anybody else and how they feel, how they think, what they project upon you, their triggers, the things that they needed to learn in their life.
You are not responsible for any of it. So when somebody's up in your, you know, craw, and they're trying to give you all their shit and tell you to, to wear it and that it's yours, you have this opportunity to not pick it up, to set it down, to walk away from it, and to remind them to go regulate themselves.
And so that was very much where the energy of this was born from. And now you're right, there's a lot of cussing in there, but the premise of it is being about mental health, right? And mental health meaning real life. About when we heal and when we do all this work, it's not about becoming saints or, you know, thinking of ourselves as being enlightened and therefore better than somebody else.
It's about actually taking care of ourselves at the end of the day and being realistic about what that looks like in today's world. Because this isn't a, a world where things just never happen that challenge us. We're gonna consistently be triggered or have things pop up for us in our reality that are going to challenge us in how we show up and how we speak and the values that we hold for ourselves.
And so the whole mission behind the podcast is to talk about real-life stuff. I share a lot about my own traumas, things that I went through, and also am going through every single day, with the hopes that it might help somebody feel a little bit less alone, and also get the tools, the resources, the knowledge to be able to move forward from whatever hardships they are facing in their lives.
Kayla: I love the dual meaning of that, and I love that you took such a unfortunate circumstance and, like, you know, put a little bit of like... Stephen Potler talks about big S spite versus little S spite. Big S spite is like, "I'm trying to hurt somebody." We don't want that, but little S spite is like, "Oh, you're gonna cancel me?
I'm gonna come up with this ridiculously clever podcast name and create a movement." Thank you. So I love that, and I want to talk a little bit about social media in general, 'cause this is something I have had such a wretched relationship with. And what you're sharing kind of reminds me of something I heard David Goggins talk about, and he hates social media too because he's like, "I don't wanna go on here and post this stuff 'cause these people don't know me.
They don't know what I've been through." And he goes on this tangent, and I'm like, "Feel that." It's, it's, it's such a, a rough place, and there's, you know, like you said, hundreds of people emailing you, commenting. Not all of those people were directly impacted by the businesses you had to shut down. So there's so much, like, turbulence in that entire online world, and you're still on there.
Brianne: You have a social media presence. What is posting on there now like versus posting back when you were still in the people-pleasing, the seeking validation, all those different things? Mm, that's such a good question. I feel like before, every time that I would post, I would go down like this spiral, this rabbit hole of what do they wanna see?
What version of me do they wanna see? What way can I make somebody else feel like they, they like every part of me, right? There's nothing to offend. I walked on eggshells with everything that I said. I would rewrite it a million times, and always be worried about offending or being taken the wrong way.
And if, God forbid, I did get a comment where somebody had something negative to say about what I had posted, I would either, like, feel this immense, like, guilt and shame and fear around their comment. And oh my God, who's gonna see that? And what are they gonna say? And it's gonna be this whole thing. Or I would overexplain, and I would go into this method of like, "Oh no, you're right, and here's all the reasons why you're right, and this is actually the way that I was saying it to make you, like, seem like I was saying it in a different way."
I was so scared of using my voice. I didn't actually even know what my voice was or my opinions that I did have because I was so conscious of other people's. I really bit my tongue a lot. And now, when I'm on social media or I'm in that presence, very different experience. I post whatever the hell it is that I want.
Whatever's speaking to me, whatever I feel like is resonating. And it's so interesting because the more that I'm doing that, the more traction my stuff is getting than it ever has before with people resonating, comments, sending me messages, and just saying that they feel that way too. That usually also breeds into like, different writing topics or podcast topics on a deeper level when you are having those very open conversations with people.
I don't tread the water anymore or walk on eggshells or worry about what people are gonna say. And in fact You know, maybe I went too far to one side, but I actually really enjoy the negative comments now because I like to act like that mirror for other people, right? When somebody has something really nasty to say about what I've shared or my perspective or even about me, you know, some people love to take things and make it very personal about your appearance or whatever else when you do share stuff.
Whenever that happens, I actually love to engage in conversations with people in the comments because I just act like the mirror and it's like, "Oh, it's very interesting that that's what you picked up based on this. Like, what's going on for you in this area that that is making you think or see this in that particular way?"
And it's very interesting because most of the time after you do that, people don't comment back so you hope that maybe you got the idea across. But at other times, sometimes it does open up a really beautiful conversation, and I've had people actually change their original comment and be like, "You know what?
I take it back," or, "Thank you for changing my perspective or helping me see that in a different way." So it's kinda cool now, my interactions on social media. There is no fear and, you know, I'm still in the very beginning stages I would say of like really allowing my light to shine and showing up fully in that space.
Kayla: But it feels so much more aligned than it ever has, has before. That is amazing. Like, to be someone who gets to the point where you thrive getting those, like, almost troll comments is so powerful, and I feel like that's a really great approach. Because I don't know where I heard it, but they say that, like, when you point a finger, there's, like, three point- fingers pointing back at you, like, literally.
Brianne: So I feel like that's kind of what's happening for you here. So on your social media now, who would benefit most from following you, and what can they expect to see on your page, in your content, all the things? Mm. So I can have two very distinct divisions of, like, how I show up and I use my voice, I'll say.
So on my, like, I'll call it a personal social media where I'm doing, like, a lot of my own face and shares and thoughts and stuff like that, and sharing a lot of my writing pieces, that is the space for anybody, I would say, who's, like, in their 30s or around their 30s who is navigating messy transitions in life.
So if you are moving from an old identity to a new version of you, you're healing, you're recreating, you're looking to put in boundaries to show up as the best version of you and really romanticize this thing called life and make it as delicious and joyful and delightful as possible, that would be what my kind of, like, personal space is for, my writing space is for.
We talk a lot about those things., I still share a lot of my journey, but it's just a very different type of share. It's more of a reflective piece, going a little bit deeper into some of that introspection and inviting you to kind of do the same in relationships and beyond. Versus now, on, like, my podcast pages and the voice that's in that space, that is a little bit more raw, more explicit, more like, "Let's talk about this from a very taboo angle," and invite in some of those conversations that we might not have otherwise.
And so that is kind of more of explicit nature, we'll say, right? If you're not somebody who's into a lot of cussing or, like, those type of things, then maybe that isn't the best space for you, 'cause there is a lot of that. But it's just very real and unfiltered in that space. And I would say both are for anybody who is in that space of healing, right?
If you're in the space of trying to overcome some really hard stuff and get to a place where you wanna feel a little bit better, either of those can be very allocated towards your journeys. And it's kind of fun that you have, like, your PG-rated one and then, like, your R-rated one- ... and people can self-select, which is so magical.
So what are some of your favorite taboo topics to talk about on your show that don't get discussed nearly enough? Mm-hmm. Oh, another good question. Um, I like to talk a lot about shame, which seems like it's not a, a taboo topic in that a lot of people talk to- about it. But I think that truly the way in which I talk about shame is to a depth that a lot of people aren't necessarily willing to look at or be around or even hold within that space.
Like I said, I am very open and I share a lot of my journeys, the deep, like, dark stuff, the things that we would normally hide in a closet and lock away and never wanna show anybody. I'm talking about my own stuff openly within these spaces in regards to overcoming shame, because I allowed shame to depict so many of my choices in my life, and really keep me hidden away from being true in my relationships or, or any part of my life, to be honest.
And I think that shame is one of the biggest driving forces to turn us towards, like, numbing agents, whether we are using things for addiction or we end up being down the road of, like, suicidal ideation, which I was for a really long time, self-harm, et cetera. Shame can keep us completely locked off from our life, and I think that is one of the scariest things about going through hard stuff in your life, is not exactly that moment, but what comes after that moment and the choices that that can, I guess, inflict upon our lives.
And so I feel like that's a really big taboo piece that I love to talk about. I also love to talk about, demanding more for your life and not being as scared to, like, call in really big things. I just talked about relationships the other day and expecting relationships to give us something, and I know that triggered a lot of people because they don't wanna...
They wanna follow societal contracts and ways of being right that we're expected to show up with. And so things like that are really big. I like to talk about sex and pleasure and all of these components. Really just, like I said, overcoming hard stuff and calling in really beautiful, joyous stuff for your life moving forward, and some of that can get pretty twisted in a really great way, and sometimes trigger the hell out of people, which is kinda what I'm here for, so I think sometimes getting triggered is one of the biggest catalysts for healing.
Kayla: So you are doing the Lord's work or the devil's work. One or the... Maybe both. Who knows? But Bri, yes. So Brianne, this has been such a fun, inspiring conversation. Two more questions as we wrap up. I always get my guests to give the listeners some kind of an embodied activation. So it can be a writing exercise, a nervous system wr- exercise, a embodied way to demand more from your relationships.
Brianne: Something you'd like to leave the listeners with Mm. Yeah. Actually, I would love to leave them with something that I have literally just clicked into place this last week, 'cause it's been showing up for me in my life in a way I didn't even realize. But, a really quick way of assessing what is actually the root cause behind the problems that you face in your life.
And long story short, I had a massage last week where I went in with lower back pain. It's been driving me nuts, really painful, and I told her that going in for the massage. And for the entire hour, she did not touch my lower back. She worked on my glutes, my hamstrings, everywhere else. And during the massage, I was like, "She's not even touching the place that I told her was a problem."
And then I started to feel my lower back completely release during the entire massage as she worked on every other area. And it clicked for me that often where we think the logical problem is, like what is actually causing the problem in our lives, is not actually the root cause of what the problem is.
And so it's a way of us being able to... Look, say you're having a, a fight with your spouse, and you seem to continually keep coming back to this conversation of money. Is money the root? Is the relationship the root? Are those the actual problems, or does it maybe stem from a wound or a belief around the fact that maybe you don't feel safe?
Maybe you're experiencing some scarcity. Maybe you need to have a little bit more understanding or compassion, or maybe there's something that's coming up about worthiness for you. There's gonna be a root cause that is actually leading you towards the problems in your life or the cycles, the patterns that keep coming up, and 99% of the time, I would argue, it's not where your brain goes towards the logical root of the problem, it's something entirely different.
And it takes a little bit of some self-reflection piece to be able to assess what that might be, analyze it, and actually put some time and attention towards it. But maybe perhaps bringing that up in a meditation or if you go for some walks outside or some silent periods of your life, maybe exploring where the challenges you're facing right now might actually be coming from instead of the problem that you keep thinking it is because of, and just see what comes up.
Kayla: That is such a good one, because I think there is this tendency to focus on the symptoms instead of what's really deep and driving those symptoms in the first place. And then when people want to learn more about you, connect with you further, where are the best places for them to go?
As you've already talked about your podcast, so in addition to that. Absolutely, yeah.
Brianne: So for the podcast, I mean, you can find it on Facebook, Instagram, all the things. Go Regulate Yourself is our handle. You can go to goregulateyourself.com, which will pull up the main website for the podcast. You'll find all the things there, all the episodes, et cetera.
But if you're interested in the writing side of thing or my personal pages, you can find me on Facebook and Instagram @itsbryanneroberge. And then bryanneroberge.com will bring you to my main Substack, which is my writing profile. And my host, or I guess you can say platform, is called The 30-Something Bible.
So it is around surviving and thriving in these very hot, messy 30 years of, like, when transitions come up and things happen, and suddenly, you know, you think you have your whole life figured out, and suddenly you're thrown for a complete loop, and things are changing faster than you can imagine. That is what The 30-Something Bible is all about.
So again, you can go to brianneroberge.com, or you can find me @itsbrianneroberge on Facebook or Instagram.
Kayla: Beautiful, and I will include links to all of that in the episode description. So thank you so much for being here.
Briane: Thank you for having me.
