This week on the podcast we have another incredible female. Today we have Adrian Ellison, who you guys are gonna love. And you’re so gonna love this conversation that we had. Adrian is a badass woman, and she is so bold in her truth. She is a dynamic speaker and coach around conscious relationships that center around health, self-healing, intimacy, and purpose. Prior to this, she spent five years building credibility with a physical transformation company, which then led to her passion for more human potential. Through trauma, healing, and deepening connections with self and community.

Adrian has proven that transformation can be fast-tracked, which she, I think has done in her own life and we talk about it quite a bit. You can find her hosting impactful experiences all over the world that are built to draw awareness to unconscious patterns and help individuals step into their power. And don’t miss it. At the end of this episode, we talk about a transformational experience that Adrian is hosting. We talk about embracing the healing journey. Something I love about Adrian is that she really has embraced it and has dived right in. 

We talked about how past romantic relationships have really helped her with her healing journey. We talk about codependency we talk about dating, we talk about vulnerability, we talk about cord-cutting, so many juicy topics. 

Adrian:  It’s also interesting when you started to say I’m settled now, after two years, all this stuff is happening in your body. I think a lot of times when we think of healing, people think, I must be sedentary, I have to be in a place for the healing to take place. Whereas for you, you were on the road, and those experiences were what were stretching you and letting you have the space to heal.

Yeah, and I think I’m in the third-dimensional plane right now catching up on the healing. So, there’s a huge difference between expansion of psychological and energetic evolution, versus, physical. And I think that’s kind of what hasn’t been able to catch up is the amount of growth that I’ve had, in my own self-awareness, my understanding of myself and really stretching my limits as far as, who am I and what do I believe? What do I resonate with, all of that has been exponentially expanded because of travel. So I would say that travel actually puts me in a space where I’m able to heal and resurface things more. And then there’s, there’s a lot that goes into that. Because if you’re, traveling with somebody who’s toxic, you’re adding layers of things that don’t make sense together, if you really want to do your healing journey, it’s less about where you are. And it’s more about, the surroundings around your energetic environment. But now being actually still in my body and grounded, it’s kind of an actually see this with sexual trauma come up, where people’s sexual trauma doesn’t really surface until they maybe get married, and they’ve settled in with a safe partner, and then all of a sudden, now, this is the perfect time to really unpack it. And that happened to me in my last relationship, it’s happening to me now, with moving into this house,   my body’s just, it’s wondering how long are we going to have to really, move some things around, and I can, I can actually feel my ribs shifting in place in my diaphragm and all the moments of trying to catch my breath last year, and now I’m catching more breaths, and my ribs feel they’re breaking while I’m doing that.

REGINA:  It’s so beautiful and powerful to things that the body does, especially when we’re healing the deep trauma that we’ve been so good at suppressing for so many years. When did you start this journey? Because when I look at you, and I read the things that you write, you seem to me somebody who is always embracing the next step of the healing journey. I feel you’re like, this is gonna be really fucking painful. Let’s do it. It’s the next necessary step. Is that real? Are you really like that?

ADRIAN:  Really, if you look at the human design, I’m a generator, three-five, which is all about experimentation, and then sharing. I just genuinely believe everything is an experiment, which is why I don’t have a lot of fear of failure in some of the things that I want to try to do. Because it’s just an experiment. But yeah, I don’t know what it is, and it’s not an addiction, I don’t have this addiction to like, I have to heal, I have to heal. I’m not hard on myself anymore. I think what it is, is like when you are able to assemble a bunch of furniture all week long. And multiple people have been like, Oh, my God, I love assembling furniture, you should have called me and I’m like. Fuck, I really should have called you because I hate it. But that same thing of being able to start working on something and fucking know at the end is going to be so beautiful. I just know that with my healing at this point, I’ve done so much work and allowed myself to go into spaces that I was really afraid of. And it’s really helped to the whole “as above, so below,” really understand that, as much as I’m willing to look at all the depths of the suffering and the darkness and the shadows. It’s equal pleasure on the other side, so long as I actually go and do the work and don’t look away, and really submerge myself into the experience of it, and not into the experience of depression. But you can go in for an hour during meditation and come out and be “Oh, I was really heavy”, but then at the same time, all of a sudden, your capacity to go to the polar opposite end of that has actually grown and there’s this kind of new about the whole trauma healing space is they’re figuring out, is it safe for… breathwork was super-hot over the last couple years, and then all of a sudden, now you’ve got people coming out and be “yeah, be careful with breathwork, because that’ll resurface some shit that  some people are willing to deal with it.” And we’re still trying to understand what are the levels of trauma. So I really can only speak for my own self and then the experiences that my community has shared with me. I’m in a place where I have not had a significant enough trauma, meaning that there is nothing that happened to me that if I were to go do a really heavy session of breathwork, that would be resurfaced, that I couldn’t cope with. I don’t have the capacity to cope. So, I’m not saying, if you had suffered from a really severe trauma as a child, especially physical trauma it wouldn’t be as easy to just go diving into the deep end and being “Oh, I want to find out what’s in here.” Most of what’s in my deep end are narcissistic tendencies. It’s manipulation, it’s betrayal, it’s control, just a lot of the things that when you think about,  the ego, the egotistical person, arrogance, and opinionated and dismissive and aggressive and controlling, that’s what’s in my dark pool of things. And most of my trauma has been inflicted based on those characteristics. And a lot of those characteristics were developed based on what I experienced in the womb and passed down from generational trauma from I would assume the women in my biological families line who suffered from a lot of physical abuse, so I could see how that kind of moves on down.

REGINA:  Was there a moment or a thing that was the catalyst for you to start this deep healing work?

ADRIAN:  Definitely. It’s always the same. My dad died when I was 23. Right when I turned 23, a few days after my birthday, and I had built this entire persona of who I thought people wanted me to be, and who I thought I was lovable as. And when my dad died, Most of my friends, I mean, my childhood friends did, but my current friends that I was friends with didn’t even come to my dad’s funeral. And it was only five hours away. I mean, it really set into perspective, who I was spending my time with, and how supported I was and, and then also the one of the most important people, probably the most important person in my entire life is now gone. And all the things that I thought mattered, don’t fucking matter at all. My super expensive car, the apartment that I wanted in Dallas, that was in the high rise, the friends of mine, that I would go party and go club with, none of that stuff really mattered. I was just sitting in a lot of confusion about death, and the in between spaces, and a lot of guilt for not feeling. I showed up for my dad enough, when I was younger, I was a super difficult kid. So there’s a lot of my shadows that will resurface around. That is how guilty I feel for the way that I showed up with my parents when they adopted me and took such good care of me. And I was just a really destructive child. So that moment of losing him and not being able to ever get back… like as a mass manipulator at the time, it was like, I can’t manipulate this situation at all.  I don’t have anything that I can do. It just is what it is. And I just have to sit in that lack of control. And it kind of spun me. It spun me in one direction. There’s nothing that I have control over and a very big victim consciousness. It spun me to the other side that was not working for me whatsoever, which was to control everything, to get into a partnership where I was able to manipulate and get everything that I wanted out of it. So I did that dance for a year and a half, before I met my next partner, who, when I went into the relationship, was super manipulative as well. And just really unconscious. I had no idea how I was showing up in the world. And this was, around the time I was 24 when I met him, but by the time I was 26, which was two years into our relationship, a lot of things happened. We’re in an age of dating online right? I would say a large chunk of the population that’s married doesn’t have a fucking clue their partner is not a fucking clue.

I met this guy online. My ex taught me (my ex that I’m really good friends with). I met him online. Two months later, I moved from Texas to Utah to move in with him. And it was probably six months before we were looking at each other and we were like, you are not who I thought you were. He said, no, you’re not who I thought you were. Who the fuck are you? And in that, we definitely had a lot of pain in the first, I would say the first year of our relationship. The second year of our relationship was a lot of digging and rebuilding. And we were kind of scratching each other open but also more receptive to it.   he would tell me things about myself like “Hey, Adrian, you have all these masks that aren’t even you” like, “all the ways that you show up with your big dick energy.”  It’s not real because then I come home and you’re just fucking crying and you’re soft and he never said it like that. He was always really nice in the in a little bit avoidant. He ultimately was the person that said, “You need to look at yourself not in the way that you think that you are, but in a different way. Because the way that you talk about yourself, I’m going to tell you right now, I’ve lived with you now for over a year, and that’s not who you are.” When he would tell me that, I would be like, “What does that even supposed to mean?” And part of it was his projection. And part of it was true. But it wasn’t until one day that he hired this girl, and she was gonna be his assistant. And then maybe some more things over that if it worked out. And they had this really great synergistic energy together that him and I could never figure out how to have because we would fight we were so different. So, so different. And so we would try to have business meetings, (we had a business together) and it would just turn into a screaming match, like “You don’t have sex with me enough”, kind of, whoa, this is a business meeting, where is this coming from? And we were not able to separate church and state whatsoever, up until the end of our relationship, which was really great learning and progress. But yeah, he hired this girl. And she’s the spitting image of me, like a year before, so I was only maybe a year ahead of her growth. And I don’t say that in a competition or judgment right away. It’s really more just relevant to the story that I’m telling, I don’t know where she’s at now. She was really dope. She was the most powerful mirror of my life at that point. She showed me things about myself that was whoa, is this how people feel about me? And is this how passionate I was? She could really speak well, she could show up in a way that if she’s at the front of the room, and you’ve never met her before, she’s fucking awesome. And you’re just, “Who is this person?” Now, I’ve always been that person, I’ve always been able to do public speaking, I’ve always been able to put on this front of, I know everything that I’m talking about, listen to me, my words are magic. But the truth of that is, what’s the shadow side of that, right? If you’re not able to understand that it is a craft and that you are moving and manipulating energy when you’re doing that, and I don’t mean it in a negative way. But if you’re not aware of it at all, and you’re just doing it based on survival needs to receive validation, you can’t even imagine some of the darkness that’s in that. And I got to see my own darkness in her. And it ended up being very, very eye-opening, she ended up leaving the company, it was kind of bad how she left us. And it was very traumatizing for our relationship and everything that was happening. And she was kind of trying to take us down. And I, the whole time, I just sat back and said, this is me. This is 100% me. I’ve done this to people in the past, I’m capable of doing this in the future, and I just observed her. And it’s really cool because I’m back in contact with her now. We don’t really talk very much. But it’s really neat to see kind of where I have that level of awareness and what I would call that a dirty mirror, because they show you, your darkness. But she’s such a beautiful person, just I’m a beautiful person. It’s just I didn’t want to see those things inside myself. It was really, really traumatic. And that was the whole first part of the relationship. Is figuring out that you have no idea who your partner is. And here we are, down the road.

I’m a hopeless romantic in the dumbest ways, if I’m being honest, I feel that’s why I’m a relationship coach. Because actually the same when I was a nutrition coach, I was the best fucking coach. Not because I followed literally anything that I was supposed to follow, but because I didn’t follow anything. And I knew the pain points of things so well, because I would sit and why I wasn’t doing the things I knew I needed to be doing. And I would understand those little shadows so well, that understood it with a client and I was able to communicate to them in a language that they never heard before. Yeah, and the same fucking thing with relationships. For the most part, I’m a pretty conscious partner, I would say that the way that I show up is really beautiful 85% of the time, and then the other, whatever, 15% I’m a little trashy in certain ways. I have this thing that I do when I get mad where I start putting my finger in people’s faces. And I start telling them and   using degrading language and I haven’t been in this scenario in a very long time. I would say I haven’t I haven’t had any of those things come out in nine months since my one of my partners named Eric was the last person that really got to see that version of me. But that version of me that’s really grimy and just wants you to know that “I’m a fucking independent woman, and you’re not gonna fucking talk to me like this” even though I’m actually really sad. I don’t like the way that this is going, and I don’t feel safe to be in my feminine right now. And so what I’m going to do is I’m going to put on this really ghetto masculine front and call you boy and degrade you. And Gaslight you and, we’re going to see where this takes us. It never fucking takes us anywhere.

REGINA:  Yeah, I’m similar to you in that way. In my feminine I am soft. I am. Maternal. I am loving, I want to take care of people and love them. But that 10 to 15% of me that comes out is that trashy girl from Philly who’s like “Are you fucking kidding me?” When that girl comes out, and I feel her come out. I always say to my clients, we all have that. That girl that lives inside of us. And she’s hurt. And she comes out with a fucking vengeance. She’s a crazy bitch. And when she comes out to me, I feel the voice, the Deep South Philly voice so I get it.

A; Well, and I by no means condoning, like throw coffee cups at your partner… it’s totally fine.  Those memes that are like, “I’m that girl.” No, it sucks. And I’ve had to do a humungous amount of healing on that part of myself. But I’m also in a really neutral place of, I don’t know that that part of me is ever going to fully go away. But what I do know and commit to is to attracting partners and doing my own inner work so that I’m never put in a position where I feel that level of need for survival to where I have to start throwing things or, calling people boy or using that language, and it’s how much you respect a person, but also how much they respect you. If I’m using degrading language, there’s a good chance that the partner that I have is also using that, and it’s a mirror for itself. And if I’m becoming physically aggressive, there’s a good chance that my partner is either also physically aggressive, or he has had physical aggression through his mother or someone and he’s calling upon that kind of energy.

There are always two sides of an energy line between another person, and you’re sending things and they’re sending things. It’s never one way. And so yeah, it’s an interesting topic. And it’s hard to because when I go on first dates, guys are like, Oh it’s gotta be super hard to date you because you just kind of know everything about relationships. And I’m like, yeah, you’re gonna find out.

REGINA: What is it like to date at this point in your life? What is that experience?

ADRIAN: Yeah, that’s such a specific question. Based on where my mind says right now, I’m really looking forward to getting settled in my home, and in one place. So I would say this is the first time that I’ve really craved having more of a consistent partner. But I have a lot of beliefs that I’m working through right now, as we do at every single level of every layer of growth. But some of the things that are traditionally, like just dating normally, for me would look like me going out on a date with someone, what I’m kind of assessing is how aware that person is of themselves. And I don’t need that person to have the same language as me. Actually was talking about this yesterday, I don’t want somebody to have the same level of language and knowledge on self-healing that I do, because we would be so fucking annoying together. I get to drive people crazy. What would be great is to have a guy that says, “I think that what you’re saying makes so much sense.” And it’s such a cool way that you’ve said it. And I think for me, it’s just a little bit simpler than that. But thank you so much for sharing. It’s simpler than that. Let’s just have some great sex, we don’t have to talk anymore. Yeah. I think that’s just an opportunity to step away from what makes you super safe or strong in their relationship and have a different type of relationship.

So dating for me right now. I’m a little less interested in sharing and exchanging words as I am sharing and exchanging energy and physical touch that feels really safe. And I want to know that the person that I’m about to engage with on that deep of a level has done enough work that they know their own internal energy field so that when they step into mine, there’s no confusion about who’s is who’s and what’s what because I’ve been in a relationship where I was so lost in the sauce of another person’s energy field that it took me three months to figure out what was mine. And the truth was, is almost none of it was mine. And that’s really intense. And so now dating for me is —I’m not going on dates. I’ve been on one Hinge date. In six months, I’ve been on one Bumble date in six months, one of them turned out incredible, incredible lover. That was just kind of random it was very divine timing. And then the other person is just, oh, you seem really cool. But I don’t have that deep spark of “I want to know more about you.” And I’m super interested. And I’m also watching that part of me shift because my ego used to be like, yes, this is the person you’re going to do all of your healing through, they’re gonna fuck you up but it’s gonna be awesome. And you don’t know that that’s what your ego saying, because you’re thinking “Oh, this person is so amazing we’re supposed to be together.” And when you get that level of excitement, at that level of attachment that early…. You know what’s coming.

REGINA:  Whenever I have that level of excitement and that level of the feeling of attachment that early. The fucking fire is going to blow up.

ADRIAN:  That’s a twin flame right there. I interpret that as “Oh my God, I’m seeing myself in a way I’ve never seen myself before.” And because it’s not me, I find it so much more attractive. And I’m interested in diving into myself, because of how attractive it is, but it’s actually me. And then once I start unpackaging it, I don’t want to see that part of myself. I do not want to be that to be reflected back to me. I don’t like the things that you’re doing. Because those are the things inside of me that I have not yet been able to understand that I also do to people. And that really is twin flame energy that I’m very aware of whenever I feel that feeling. Like, sometimes you grab the same page at the supermarket with some guy, and you lock eyes with him. And your mind’s imagining your future together and you’re just out… Nope, already have enough mirrors right now. Thank you, sir.

REGINA:  One of the guys I had dated this year, so much healing came from that relationship. In the dating, everything, everything was triggering to him. So he’s like, this is triggering me that is triggering me. This is triggering me. And at the moment I was like, what the fuck? But it was so good. Because it was a mirror for me to examine myself under a microscope in a way that I had it before. How am I speaking? What is the energy behind the words that I’m saying? What is the intention behind the thing that I’m saying right now? What do I want to happen? And it made me really dissect a word-by-word basis. How am I showing up? What am I saying? And I was like, God, I fucking hate this, but I love it, but I hate it.

ADRIAN:  That man is medicine. I had a similar and different experience and the way that I interpret things, I have a harder time in the dissecting of things when I’m in the thick of it. I’m pretty much deep in that one specifically in my relationship it was more of just a really kind of traumatized wounded feminine, I was in masculine when I had to do things for myself like really pick myself up and I was traveling and running a business, but in that relationship specifically, it wasn’t like I had stepped into that crazy masculine of like, I wasn’t throwing my fingers up, and it was more of just a traumatized, I can’t move kind of feeling or, if I do move, you just question everything about yourself. But once I was able to get out of it, that’s when I was my magnifying glass on some of the things that were showing up and why they were showing up and I think my wounding is specific to when somebody else is really suffering I have a little bit of that martyr complex and I have a hard time. Like, say that we’re both having a situation and that situation was caused by this person doing something and all of a sudden this person is suffering because of what they did. I’m going to automatically take over the need to care for their suffering over the fact that, Yo, you did this to me. But let me care for you because I can see that you fucked me up has also fucked you up and I don’t want you to feel fucked up. Yeah, and so dating for me in the future looks none of that. And a lot of nonverbal communication, a lot of sharing of energy but also knowing whose energy is what. One of the things I do now, and this is relevant for dating but also just for everyone is I cut cords with everybody when I leave them. The only people I don’t cut cords with is my roommate, Austin. I don’t really need to cut cords with him. We have super super clean lines and he’s never in my field. And then my best friend Ciarra, we have some of the cleanest, the cleanest lines I’ve ever felt on this planet of just all I feel from those is just unconditional love coursing through them. But when I go hang out with friends, or if I have clients that I’m with for the weekend, I will always do cord cutting rituals in the bath and just really understand what I experienced with them, what were the lessons, is there anything that I could have gotten out of it more, really thanking them for that time and then just sending their energy back to them and taking back all of my energy back to being a whole person and whatever their free will is, is their freewill. And then now I’m back into my own space. And I want to do that with my partner because I do get lost in the sauce pretty easily in a relationship. And that’s not something that I want to continue.

REGINA:  I’m the same way as you I do the same thing. I do an energetic unhooking every night in the bathtub, where I literally go through my day, even if I’m at Target. I’m unhooking from the woman I spoke with at Target that checks me out. I do the same thing because I get lost sometimes. A few weeks ago, I was feeling all of this anxiety, I haven’t felt this kind of anxiety since you were in your early 20s. And I was like, well, this is not mine. Oh, well, this is somebody else. And so I get especially in dating I gotta pull back. I gotta, pull back.

ADRIAN:  I get that. Sometimes it happens, I recently I talked to a client weeks ago, and then all of a sudden, I was lying in bed one night, and I’m deep in a rabbit hole of thinking about her suffering. And I’m like, whoa, this is so strange. I would talk to this person in two weeks and why is this the thing that I’m thinking about before bed? When I go to get into bed, I’m alone, by myself in bed. And that’s what I’m thinking is, “Hey, look at all these things that are not yours.” You probably don’t want to go to sleep with these. Because you want to have the cleanest communication and your dream time and when you wake up, you want to feel restored, and you don’t know what’s tugging or what’s happening. And if you’re that connected to someone, and they have a really fucked up night, you wake up the next morning feeling the sauce and I feel so terrible right now. Why and we don’t really know why. So for me, it’s no harm to just kind of cut cords on unhook, as you say, from people.

REGINA:  Today you and I chatted about a little bit, and you talk about a lot and it’s coming up for me is codependency but especially I was thinking as you were talking about dating and being in relationships, there’s a difference for me with my codependence journey. There’s the learning and the understanding and the deep work that we do on our own. But then I believe with codependency there’s a certain level of work you can’t get to without a partner. without somebody in your life. There are things that you don’t see or feel. What is it like now because you’ve been on such a journey with codependency and dating and relationships.

ADRIAN:  I think you can do work on codependency outside of a relationship. But the more intense the mirror, the more intense the work is. One of the ways that I noticed my own codependency really early on was in my friendships with other women. And codependency, by the way, it’s not this thing that’s like you’re married to someone and you expect them to take out the trash. That’s codependent or she can’t change her own tire. She’s codependent. Like that shit, I’m not gonna change my own tire, either I’ll pay somebody to do it. Or if I have, if I have a man in my life that wants to do it great.

I mean, what is really more important is to look at how your energy has to through another person because you’re unable to move it yourself. So for instance, me growing up, I would always have one best friend and this one best friend was always the best friend who had a really hard time using her voice had a really hard time kind of speaking up sharing her truth, laying down no boundaries. And I grew up as a person who was a boundary over stepper. So I don’t like the word no. And they don’t like to say no. So that’s a great pairing for codependency because when we go out on the town, my energy needs to move in a way that is controlling, and it’s not going to move in a way that’s controlling with another person that’s controlling, that’s when you’re gonna butt heads, right? That’s when you’re younger and you show up at a party and you hear a girl say one sentence, you’re like, I don’t like her because she’s a mirror for how your energy would have to move in a different direction. And codependency is usually out of necessity rather than choice. So for instance, in that scenario when I’m younger, and I show up to that party, and I see another person who’s controlling, I can’t be attracted to them. Because I don’t have a choice in how I move my energy. It’s only a necessity. It’s the only thing I know how to do. And the game of self-awareness allows you to lay your cards on the table and say the reason why my energy moves this way is because I have never known it can move a different way. Because I have beliefs, I have social programming, I have trauma, I have all of these things, these shadows that have created these stories around why my energy must move in this direction. And nobody’s referring to this as energy. It’s personality, right characteristics, she’s bossy and at what point in her trauma in her arsenal, the things that happened to her, and the stories that she created, is that playing out because that’s what’s needs to play out. And then if so, that energy of me needing to tell other people what to do, it has to move, it has to move, and it has to shift. And so for me, if I just know that I need to be controlling, and you don’t call it that, right. We call it independent, or whatever, whatever word you want to use for it, you know the difference between that energy. You can tell when somebody is like, “this is just how I am. And it’s okay, cool,” or that’s just how your trauma and your beliefs have played out. And you actually don’t even know who you are. And now the only way how to move your energy is by telling other people what to do. And so you make sure unconsciously to find people that to be told what to do, because if you didn’t, you would be stuck, and you wouldn’t be able to move forward. And so your energy knows exactly how to find people that meet that can help you move your energy in this direction.

This is magic. And you being able to understand this, you can create your entire reality around you. So for me being able to look at all of those things that I was doing, and all the people that I was attracting and how they were all the same type of woman, the woman who wanted to be crazy, but she just didn’t have it in her yet. She didn’t have that self-expression I had. She wasn’t able to be aggressive. She needed somebody. I was always a girl that fought people, for other people. Could you imagine two of those girls, sometimes it happens, they’re usually sisters or something. And they’re the ones that beat each other up. Yeah, it’s so different. And when I first got into my relationship that I have with my best friend Ciarra, she was the first person female wise, it stepped into my peripheral, into my line of sight, where I was like, ooh, she’s the same avatar. But I’m different, and I want to be different, and I get to choose to be different with her. And so what this looks like is, we have a relationship where it’s much easier for her just to go with the flow of what I say. And it’s much easier for me to tell her how things are, and for her to make decisions based on that, and it’s not healthy. And so now, I have to be in my light when she’s wanting me to help guide her or make decisions for her or, speak up for her, I have to say, that’s not, that’s not my place, and you’re gonna have to make that decision on your own. And then for her, her work is not allowing somebody to come over and to tell her and there’s been times where she stopped me and been like, I don’t really feel like, that’s my truth. But thank you. And then I’m like, yeah, that’s cool.

And it’s fun in a relationship when you have a choice of how you get to show up, because now it’s less of a trauma bond. We’re just unconsciously going through the motions that our traumas need us to go through, because we feel we can’t survive any other way to being like, this is a little scary if I show up a different way, because my whole life has been, heavily validated on the way that I showed up. And I truly, at this point, have enough of that validation to believe that that’s what makes me lovable. But in this moment, I choose to love the other person, as much as I would like to love myself. And by doing so I don’t want to manipulate that person. And so I’m going to be aware of my codependency, and I’m gonna be aware of how my energy is to move through them. And I’m going to choose not to do that. And then I’m going to observe what that space looks. And sometimes you just end up realizing, I don’t want to take the trash out, I want my husband to do it, but because I want my husband to do it, and I don’t want him to do stuff like that. I want to have an honest conversation with him about it, rather than being  “Oops,” I know that he does that. And I don’t have appreciation for it. And I never a great example, I’ll give you useful. I used to have the worst codependency with money. I have a long history of really bad shadows with money. And it comes from my parents and just I’ve done a lot of work on the beliefs, and I actually broke down the beliefs last year in Bali, and it changed my whole life. But one of the things that I noticed and when I was in Bali is I was at the time dating two men and I had just come out of a relationship with my ex, and I was looking at my patterns with money around them. And one of the men that I was dating he was super successful high profile really, really gnarly person. And a lot of my desires to be with him is… I can’t tell if I really like this person or if this person is just on paper, the thing that my money codependency is looking for because it makes me feel like I’m going to be able to have my own money in the future. The other partner that I had was always paying for my stuff, and here’s the thing, it’s okay if you have a partner that makes a lot more money than you, and they just want to buy your dinner every time, it’s totally fine. What’s not fine is if it’s never talked about, and you start feeling anxious about it the way that I would. And what would happen is, we would go out to dinner, and I wouldn’t even mean to do this, but I’d find myself in the bathroom as the bill came because I would feel so much anxiety that I would just need to get up and move my body. And I wouldn’t know that it was because the bill was coming, right? Or it was the thing of he paid for all these meals. And I never said “Hey, I just realized you’re paying for a lot of meals. And it’s kind of a lot of money. And I personally am not in a place to be able to afford that. So I just want to say thank you. And if you would like any help, maybe we could talk about what I could afford to do”. I never had that conversation. Instead, I just kind of look the other way. I was just like oh, unconsciously hope that nobody brings it up. And so one of the things that I did is I called my ex and I called this guy that I was dating and I was like, Listen, I just found out how deep my money issues are. And I need to be honest with you. I’m not making any money right now I have some serious money issues. It makes me uncomfortable, how much you pay for things, not because you’re paying for them. But because “I can’t even have a conversation with you about you paying for things.” And I’m afraid that if I bring it up, you’re going to either stop, or you’re going to want me to pay for things or you’re going to shame me. And he was like, “Adrian, I know you have no money, why pay for everything that you need? So, I know you’re terrible with money. I’ve seen how you spend it, it’s awful. And if you want to pay for things, pay for things.” What we ended up coming up with is because he wanted to do a lot of more extravagant things that I wouldn’t be able to split down the middle, when we would go to dinner, I would just leave the tip. I was always contributing $20 or $40 to certain things. And it only went on for a couple months before we broke up. But then it was being able to look at that, like, how much of me being in a relationship is based on how another person makes me feel safe with something as small as my beliefs around money, right? And then I called my ex and said “Listen, I gotta tell you our whole relationship, like when you were paying for groceries and things like that, I just unconsciously was hoping that it never got brought up because even when I had money, I was afraid that if I paid for groceries, then I wouldn’t have money the next time for groceries. And so it wasn’t that I was like, I need you to pay for everything. It was that I was just saving up the little bit of money that I had. Even when I had a lot of money. It felt like I had nothing, because I was just afraid for the moment that I was going to be asked to use my own money. And that is a definition of scarcity.

And so, if you have scarcity like that, how is that going to move? How is the scarcity going to move to make itself feel it can survive? That’s a codependent movement. That’s a codependent pattern. And it was very transformative to be able to have those in my ex said the same thing. He was like, hey, I know you’re terrible with money. I pay you. I mean, we have a business together.

REGINA:  So, this principle that you just described with money, how you felt about money, that, “Ooh, I can’t talk about it.”  People feel that with a lot of different things in their life. That feeling so as you said that I’ll be honest, I was thinking about, I can literally talk to anybody about anything, I could sit on a stage naked and talk about my Labia, that’s how I feel.

When I am with someone who I deeply love, to talk about, to articulate the love I have for that human and the feelings I have for that human, my insides go AAAAAARRRGH!   I mean, just look at the totality of the circumstances, look at how we engage with each other look at these factors. But for me, the girl who will talk about anything and with my girlfriends, I will articulate my love and feelings and be vulnerable with women, but with men, and as you’re saying that I was like the way you feel about feelings. What do you think that is?

ADRIAN:  That’s the part of you that kind of has a whole record of what it means to be loved and what persona you have to have in order for people to feel you’re strong and know you come from a difficult household or family that needed you to be the strong child the strong one in your family, a control of composure almost. When you allow yourself to be so deeply in your feminine and in your feelings. And to even with me, one of the things I see show up is even when I’m deeply in my feminine it’s only safe so long as I can feel the perception that I’m in my feminine. Sometimes I will catch myself thinking I only feel comfortable being in my feminine because I know other people are perceiving me as feminine and they’re perceiving it as strength. But the second that I get this thing where I’m in my feminine and another person feels something weird about it. All of a sudden, I’m toppling upside myself. Just like, whoa, wait a second. I was, the most powerful being a second ago. And now all of a sudden, I’m having a hard time even knowing what is okay, am I, am I dressed okay, am I putting too much energy out there? Am I making other people uncomfortable? Did I overdo it? It’s that wounded feminine wound, Am I taking up too much space? And I think just being able to share how you feel with another person and be that vulnerable is it’s not composed. And to be honest, vulnerability isn’t composed.

One of the things I feel with people like you and I who were able to just share to such a high degree is, there’s so little that we can be vulnerable about that we are almost never really vulnerable. Even in our perception or appearance, right? Like, guest perception of us is like, wow, that was such a vulnerable share. It’s a vulnerable share when I’m not articulating it perfectly, and I’m crying. That’s the vulnerable share.

When I’m like in a relationship, and I’m like, listen, I want you to know that the way that I feel about you is this, this and this, and this. That’s not fucking real. It’s not. And so that’s what it feels to me. Yesterday was one of the days that I had this. I’ve had all this stuff going on with my body, and I’m teaching my mastermind, I’m teaching my clients and they’re always asking me, “How are you? And I tell them, I just feel like I’m creating space for myself just like I did for you. When I when we first got on. And we’re just chit-chatting. But last night we did a retreat back in. I don’t know when we did it. It was confusing. This year was confusing, but we did a retreat back in sometime this year. And we were doing an integration call for all those people. And just a catch-up on what’s been going on since the retreat. And most of them were friends of mine. And so I got on and I didn’t feel I could share with anyone. I felt like I was at capacity to share, which as I was sitting there on the phone, I was realizing, oh my gosh, being a capacity to share is really just me saying I could not compose myself to give a share, that wouldn’t be really messy and wouldn’t be really vulnerable. And so I got on the camera, and I was blank on the camera. Just texting, I’m here. I’m just here to listen. And as soon as my face comes on, they’re like, “how are you?” and I just lose my shit. And for like, 20 minutes, I just tell them, all the things that are going on in my life. I’m ugly crying at this point, like, do I need to stop? I don’t even know if I’m saying what I need to be saying. And I just got it out of my system and other people were crying and saying, thank you so much for sharing. And when I got off the phone, I thought, I don’t ever do that. I don’t ever do that. Because I’m always so composed. I always have the perfect articulation. I’m always here holding space for other people. Even when I need the space held for myself, it goes back to that same thing. Oh, I need to hold space for myself. But I see that because of what happened you also need me to hold space for you, even though you’re the one that created the scenario where we need to hold space. So, I’m going to hold space for both of us.

REGINA:  Yeah, that’s something that’s just coming up for me a lot lately where I realize, I have things that need to come out. I sat in the bathtub the other day, and but again, it’s by myself, and I’m laying in the bathtub, and I’m just sobbing uncontrollably. And my brain, my conscious mind does not know why I am crying so hard. And I lay there and I’m feeling so many feelings, so many emotions. But I’m not doing that in front of anybody. I’m doing it by myself. And so, I’m on the space now where I’m trying to learn how not always have to be perfect and composed. And it’s hard.

ADRIAN:  The truth is, that if it’s vulnerability, it can’t be perfect, and it can’t be composed. And it’s hard. I’ve caught myself actually using the appearance of vulnerability to manipulate people before in my past where I’ll tell a story that I know to other people would seem vulnerable because it’s a very unconventional share, knowing good and well it doesn’t bother me whatsoever to share. And I tried really try not to do that with my mastermind. Because if I’m able to share something that’s really vulnerable with them and at the end of it, they’re like, that story was so captivating and this and that… Well, that was a story. That was my articulation of what happened in a way that I knew was going to impact my audience. That’s me being dope in my copywriting. And in my storytelling, right? And sometimes it’s great like on stage, you don’t want to be a sobbing mess for the whole audience. They’re there to learn. And so for my mastermind in workshops, those are going to be how I tell stories. However, there have been a couple of times with just our group discussion calls where I’m going to be really vulnerable with you guys. And I’m just going to share from my heart, and when I do that, it’s very touching for me and for them.

REGINA:  How have you been able to step into that and be like, I am just going to be truly vulnerable and embrace this.

ADRIAN:  I think honestly, creating safe spaces all around me. Part of having the house here and really wanting to feel settled is to feel an even deeper layer of safety. I have had a lot of people in my life that I am safe enough to be able to just completely break down and know that they’re not going to try to fix me, fix my problems, give unsolicited advice when I’m feeling vulnerable, manipulate me, or reject me. And I really have four of those people that I feel solid about that experience, my ex is one of them. There was the other day, I was reading a David Deida book, Dear Lover, and it brought up some dark, deep stuff from the beginning of our relationship that I had experienced sexually, and didn’t have a place, I didn’t have a way to share with him because it brought up things for him as well. And now I knew we were in a great place. And so I was already crying. And I just decided to call him and not to make him feel guilty or not to get validation from him. But because I was processing so much that was coming up all of a sudden, and I really wanted to share with him my healing with that. So, I called him and said I’m just reading this book, it’s bringing up a lot for me, I really just love it if you would sit with me. And for 20 minutes, he just sat on the phone while I sobbed. And he didn’t try anything. He just said, Is there anything else I can do for you? And I was like, no. And then a couple of days later, we talked about it. He was like, yeah, it was hard for me to not want to tell you that I was sorry. Or tell you that I love you or whatever. But I knew that that was your experience. And that you were just calling me because you just want to you just wanted a safe place to process. And to be able to have a place like that, most people don’t have that anywhere in their whole life. That’s who mothers want to be for their children. That’s why I feel my growth has been so exponential is the containers that I’ve created to be able to really heal and to look at my stuff and to not be judged by it. And also, we all have everything inside of us to heal. And some of us definitely need teachers and mentors to help us unlock the pieces that are already inside of us that are bound up. But we all have it. And when you can find people who are like, my best friendships are people who, when they’re going through suffering, the only thought that I have is Congratulations, because I know that they have everything that they need to overcome it. And I don’t have to spend my time trying to absorb their suffering because I know for a fucking fact that they’re going to do the work. And I know that the work that they’re going to do is going to lead them to unique conclusions about themselves. And through those unique conclusions. I’m ultimately going to end up with an even more aligned friend, and this person is going to teach me more about myself.

REGINA:  You’re such a beautiful, you’re such a beautiful soul. I love chatting with you.

I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as we did recording it. 

You can connect with Adrian on Instagram @AdrianEllison or at @the.alpas.project and at https://www.thealpasproject.com.

You can join the waitlist for the Self-Healers Mastermind at https://the-alpas-project.mykajabi.com/mastermind-waitlist

Regina Lawrence Esq. is a former trial attorney and law school professor turned soulful business & life strategist. She has found that so many entrepreneurs have these brilliant ideas and dreams but don’t know how to take the dream and create a system or structure to make that dream & idea profitable.  That is where Regina comes in.  With discipline, consistency, systems & structure, we can’t help but create profit & fulfillment from our soul-driven business ideas.

Regina’s approach to coaching marries her background in legal analysis, spirituality, mindset coaching, holistic nutrition, and neuroscience to create an experience that will assist you to get into alignment, get clear on what you are here to do and what steps and systems to implement to make that dream a profitable reality.

You can find Regina on Instagram @reginaalawrence