How I got through the unexpected, unexplained full-term stillbirth of my first daughter with Christine McAlister | POP 751

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A photo of Christine McAlister is captured. Christine McAlister is passionate about helping impact-driven entrepreneurs attract their next clients by being value-driven podcast guests. Christine McAlister is featured on Practice of the Practice, a therapist podcast.

How does a mother cope with loss and an identity shift? What happens to a relationship when a couple goes through multiple miscarriages? Are there expectations and ideologies that hold you back from living a full life?

In the sixteenth episode of the How I Got Through It series, Joe Sanok speaks about getting through the unexpected, unexplained full-term stillbirth of Christine McAlister’s first daughter.

Podcast Sponsor: Pillars of Practice

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Meet Christine McAlister

A photo of Christine McAlister is captured. She is passionate about helping impact-driven entrepreneurs attract their next clients by being value-driven podcast guests. Christine is featured on the Practice of the Practice, a therapist podcast.

Christine McAlister is passionate about helping impact-driven entrepreneurs attract their next clients by being value-driven podcast guests.

She’s generated well over 6-figures as a podcast guest, and has been recognized as the best in the world at podcast guesting by 7-figure founders like John Lee Dumas, Dana Wilde, and Andrew Kroeze.

A media expert for 2 decades, she’s helped broadcast the Olympic Games, produced an award-winning documentary for PBS, and has been featured in Inc., Business Insider, Bustle, The Huffington Post and on over 100 podcasts, in addition to hosting her top-rated show, No One’s Ever Asked Me That.

Visit Life With Passion and connect with Christine Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

In this Podcast:

  • Christine’s pregnancy history
  • Dismantling expectations
  • Coping with miscarriages in marriage
  • Helpful mindsets and habits
  • Christine’s advice to her younger self

Christine’s pregnancy history

Christine is the oldest of four kids and had experience with babysitting and looking after children, although as she got older, she began to doubt whether she was suited to being a mother and whether she could even get pregnant.

Her first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. She started fertility treatment, and unfortunately had two more miscarriages.

Then, she had a full-term pregnancy.

I was very sick and [became] depressed from the hormones. I had a hard time physically and emotionally with the effects of the pregnancy on my body, but the baby was perfect. (Christine McAlister)

Everything was progressing as it should have up until 37 weeks. They had the nursery ready, family coming through, and went to a routine doctor’s appointment where they discovered that the baby didn’t have a heartbeat.

I was sent directly from the doctor’s office … to the hospital to be admitted, be induced, to deliver this baby that had already left this world. (Christine McAlister)

Dismantling expectations

Christine struggled with feelings of guilt from struggling to have a baby.

It was a big, fat “should” for me. It was something that my husband really wanted … a lot of guilt [from feeling that] this is what it means to be a good woman because I grew up in a very conservative Christian [household]. (Christine McAlister)

From the life that she was in her family as a child to wrestling with ideology from within her community, she felt that she was somehow failing as a woman.

Part of her healing from these experiences also meant addressing these false expectations and letting them go.

Coping with miscarriages in marriage

Both Christine and her husband had to get through some conflict because he was desperate for a baby while Christine needed time to heal her body.

She had to lay down some boundaries and they discussed their expectations.

Helpful mindsets and habits

Before these years, Christine had been conservative and Christian.

Dealing with this experience “cracked open” her introduction to spirituality and other ways of looking at life.

She joined groups and went to retreats with other people who had experienced similar situations, and felt seen and understood.

Christine’s advice to her younger self

Stop taking everything so seriously. Play, be curious, and explore.

Useful Links mentioned in this episode:

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Meet Joe Sanok

A photo of Joe Sanok is displayed. Joe, private practice consultant, offers helpful advice for group practice owners to grow their private practice. His therapist podcast, Practice of the Practice, offers this advice.

Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners that are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.

Thanks For Listening!

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Podcast Transcription

[JOE SANOK] Just a trigger warning before we get started in this show; in this show, we talk about pregnancies that don’t go as expected, miscarriages, stillbirths and just how that plays out. Just wanted to make sure that you are aware of that before we dive today into today’s episode. This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 751. I’m Joe Sanok, your host, and welcome to The Practice of the Practice Podcast. We’ve been doing four episodes a week for a while now, and this summer since late June, we’ve been talking about how I got through it, how I’m getting through it, all sorts of stories of stuff hit in the fan and how people got through it. Today I am just so excited to have my friend Christine McAlister here with me. Christine, welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast, so excited to have you back on the show. [CHRISTINE MCALISTER] Me too, Joe. Thank you so much for inviting me back. [JOE] Yes, I’m really excited because you’ve been on the show before talking business things and we’ve known each other for a really long time but it’s not always common to just dive into like how’d you get through some of the roughest things in your life. So just to hear more of your story and get to know you better today, I’m really just excited to have you on the show. [CHRISTINE] Thanks. I’m honored. This is so much of why I do. What I do is to be able to have conversations like this, so thanks for creating this space for it. [JOE] Well, I’ve been starting with who are important people, family, dogs, animals that are in your life, and then what do you do for work? [CHRISTINE] I love that you mentioned animals because I think I was in love with animals before I was in love with people. It’s a very common thread. [JOE] Just my seven-year-old. [CHRISTINE] Yes, we need to meet. I have a brand new eight-week-old puppy and I have an eight-year-old dog. I have a beautiful Arabian horse. Then we can talk about the people, I have a wonderful five-year-old daughter, a wonderful two-year-old daughter, an amazing nanny who’s lived with us for a year and a half, who’s part of the family and my husband, my girls’ dad and I’m lucky enough to have both sets of grandparents nearby as well. [JOE] Oh, both sets of my daughters’ grandparents live nearby as well and there’s nothing like it for them to have that ongoing relationship. That’s wonderful. [CHRISTINE] Yes, yes. [JOE] Well, so where does it make sense to start your story? [CHRISTINE] I think probably with my, we could dive in with my extreme ambivalence around whether or not to become a parent. When I was young, I thought I would do what my parents did, which was to marry my college sweetheart and start a family and that didn’t happen. So as I went through my twenties and enjoyed my independence and all of these things, started my first business I really valued my independence and I really, I think was very terrified as to whether or not I would actually be any good at being a parent. I was the oldest of four, and so I was the built-in babysitter. I babysat a lot, didn’t have a problem with kids, but never really considered myself a kid person, especially nurturing or any of the qualities that I thought of. Definitely not a Pinterest mom when you think of like, what I thought it would mean to be a good parent. I also wasn’t sure that I could get pregnant, so when I became pregnant the first time I had a miscarriage, an early miscarriage, and that was the way that I even learned that I could become pregnant because the doctors weren’t sure. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. So it just sort of happened and then I decided, oh, I think that this is maybe a thing that I want to pursue if this is a possibility for me. I went on to have fertility treatments and have two more early miscarriages. Then I got pregnant and had a perfect pregnancy. This is back in 2015 and 2014, and then due 2015. I was very sick. I got very depressed from the hormones. I had a really hard time physically and emotionally with the effects of the pregnancy on my body, but the baby was perfect and everything progressed exactly as it should until I was 37 weeks pregnant. We finished a big weekend of two baby showers that parents had flown in for and friends had driven in from other states. We put the car seat in the car, the nursery was ready, and it was time to put my feet up and wait to go into labor. When we went to a doctor’s appointment, 37-week doctor’s appointment, the baby didn’t have a heartbeat. That was how I learned that my baby, I was waiting to be surprised as to whether it was a boy or girl had suddenly passed away. I was sent directly from the doctor’s office across town to the hospital to be admitted, to be induced to deliver this baby that had already left this world. I had no frame of reference that this could even happen. I didn’t know anyone that it had happened to. My doula didn’t even know anyone that it had happened to and I was just like sitting in a hospital bed, nine months pregnant, being handed brochures on how to plan a baby’s funeral. I was like, this doesn’t happen. I can’t even comprehend the backwards ness of this entire situation. I literally looked at my doula and I was like, I do not know how I’m going to get through this. I do not know how I’m going to get through labor knowing that there’s not a prize on the other side. Like, what am I going to do? [JOE] I mean, I can’t even imagine, birth is so hard no matter what, and then to know the outcome isn’t having this joyous baby. How did you, I can’t even think of a question of how to phrase other than how did you get through that? What was that like? [CHRISTINE] I think I had a job to do, the actual delivery. I mean, I was the patient. There were all these drugs going through my body and people asking me what I needed and it just became this very, it became a project of like, I have a job. My body is going to go through these things and I just have to figure out how to allow it to. I mean, in the intensity of that moment, I think there was a lot of shock. My husband was the one making all the calls to let people know, to get people in and my doula, God bless her, got on the phone with doula friends and were like, “What the hell do I do to help this woman? How can we resource her? How can I be present for her?” Really, thank God the hospital had bereavement trained nurses. They put me in a quiet room at the end of the hall and they put a special poster on the door that was, everybody knew what it meant, as a picture of this leaf. They called in a chaplain for me and called a photographer who drove through the worst snowstorm in that city’s recorded history in the middle of the night to come capture the only images we would ever have of her. So I just, other people knew what to do when I didn’t. They knew to tell me like you need to go induce now because the sooner you have heard, the better she’ll look. They knew that the questions that I would have and the answers to give me and the things that I would regret not doing later, even if I thought, why would I take pictures? Why would I record this? That sounds like something I never want to remember. Or why can’t you just knock me out and wake me up when it’s over? They knew because they had been trained for situations like this because it isn’t that uncommon. I would say that’s how I got through it because other people knew what to do and I just, I didn’t. [JOE] Now I want to go back to, you started with saying you weren’t sure if you wanted to become a mother. I think in our generation becoming a parent is almost like the default, whereas it seems like the next generation of parents coming up is questioning a lot of things. Like, not even just having kids, but should they get married? Should they, whatever? For you, was there guilt around maybe not feeling, or right away feeling that you wanted to be a mother for that first pregnancy, a few pregnancies earlier? [CHRISTINE] There was guilt the whole time. I mean, I feel like I still, to this day now, I have living children, wrestle with this whole idea of, it was a big fat should for me. It was something that my husband really wanted.. especially going through fertility treatments and stuff like that were really, really hard on me, it was making me crazy. I was like, why am I doing this? And yes, a lot of guilt, this is what it means to be a good woman. I grew up very conservative Christian. I had a stay-at-home mom and the oldest of four. This is what it means to be a good girl. It means being self-sacrificing. It means giving up your career. It means prioritizing everyone else. I happen to have work that I deeply, deeply love and want to invest my days doing. So feeling guilty for wanting to work and then feeling guilty for not working to take care of the pregnancy and then the baby and all the things like, yes, I mean, I think guilt probably. Then feeling guilt about not being sure if I wanted to become a parent and wondering if that had played into her death and also feeling guilt about a bit of relief because she had died and then I wouldn’t have to do the thing I was so terrified to do. Like, it’s probably the biggest hallmark of this whole parenting journey for me. [JOE] So let’s go back to that hospital room when you’re giving birth. I mean, what was that like? [CHRISTINE] It was, so that’s probably the moment that the old Christine died, because, I can watch myself now like welcoming my mother-in-law into the room and caretaking her and oh, you shouldn’t have to sit on the floor and someone make room because someone bring a chair. I’m sitting in this hospital bed waiting to deliver my dead baby and I’m taking care of everyone else because that’s who I had been to that point. I had been this people pleaser. I had been this caretaker, this codependent who believed that that was the only way, being nice and taking care of everyone else was the way to get attention and get love. So I’m taking care of, or making sure my mom is taking care of my husband who’s crying on the floor when I’m the one in labor. From that perspective I look back and I’m like, wow that was quite a way to live for the first 33 years of my life. Physically it was very hard. So in my subsequent deliveries this didn’t happen. My subsequent deliveries were induced as well because I was unwilling to go past the date that she had died because we couldn’t find a reason. But regardless, I had convulsions, like I shook, I trembled all over. I got really, really cold. I just wanted someone touching my head and I didn’t know why. That’s not like a thing for me. But I think the chemicals, maybe the chemicals combined with this processing, my body processing what was actually happening made it quite an intense and also long and drawn-out process because my body wasn’t ready. It physically wasn’t ready and so they had to make it ready and then they induced me and it was just a very surreal experience. Also one that was like, it was surrounded by a lot of love. My midwife had had a traumatic pregnancy experience herself and had been treated so badly by her own nurse that she decided to become a midwife because she was like, this is outrageous and unacceptable. But part of her journey was that she is, when stuff like this happened to her patients, she had someone else step in because she couldn’t handle it. We had become really close, like we had become friends with her in the journey and she decided to be, I don’t even know how much courage it took to sum up in within her, but she decided to attend the birth to be there for us and her attending physician pulled us aside when he was like, “She does not do this. She loves you all so much. She is figuring out a way to show up for you.” That was just the feeling is these people really, really bonding together. They were the only ones who ever met her, that team. They’re still, we’re still all text friends to this day. I mean, they changed my life. [JOE] What were the first six months to a year, the anniversary of that, what was that first year like? [CHRISTINE] I realized that I was sort of rebuilding from the ashes and the way that I realized that everything had become ashes is because nobody knew how to talk to me anymore. I lost the majority of my friends, even some immediate family. People either didn’t know what to say or they couldn’t handle the fact that I wasn’t the old me and they couldn’t handle the grief. It made them too uncomfortable. So I just, I did a lot of course I did a lot of crying. I did a lot of, practiced a lot of dark humor. I bought the HBR book on resilience a couple of years ago and they say that’s one of the hallmarks of a resilient person. I was like, yes, I’m not some sick psycho. [JOE] It’s funny how many people, like you haven’t had the chance to listen through this whole series, I remember in the very first episode it was, let me go back and look, it was, yes Kate Piper was talking about her son’s seizures and her daughter’s sexual assault. One of the things that she had talked about was just how she and her husband’s dark humor about seizures or other things. There’s other people throughout the series who have said that, and I didn’t realize that was like a HBR thing that they discovered. But yes, it’s so interesting how that dark humor sometimes just helps you laugh at the crazy absurdness of humanity and what happens to us. [CHRISTINE] Yes. I think it’s something that, This Is Us is one of my favorite shows of all time, and I watched it unknowingly that the whole thing pivoted around a stillbirth. So it was very, very cathartic for me because they handled it beautifully in my opinion but one of the things that one of the couples does is they play a game called Worst Case Scenario, and they just name the absolute worst outcome that they could think of, is the way that someone spins out over something that’s happening to them in real time and what they’re going to be doing in five years. I’m like, this is so normalizing. Like, yes, we need to be doing that more. Just name it rather than fear it. [JOE] Well it’s like, I’m in an Improv group and they know more of my story than what I share publicly of details. Sometimes I’ll like weave those details into a scene just to make my friends laugh and they’re like, “Seriously, Joe? Oh my gosh.” [CHRISTINE] Did you just say that? [JOE] Yes, but it’s like they know the story but the audience doesn’t and it’s just hilarious. [CHRISTINE] I love that. I love that. That’s amazing. [JOE] So that first year, so you lose a lot of friends, you get into some dark humor, what else was going on in your head? I mean, I imagine from what I’ve heard in regards to couples that lose a child, that it can be, I mean, stressful isn’t a strong enough word but that it can cause just such rifts. How did your relationship look during that time? [CHRISTINE] It was so tough. I mean, I would say that my relationship with my husband, probably the last bastion of codependency that I needed to tear down, it lasted the longest. The closest person in my life and our relationship up to that point had been built on me being agreeable and nice and all of that, so switching that in this context was super hard. One way that that showed up was that he really wanted me to get pregnant as soon as I medically could and it wasn’t happening as fast as it medically could. So they told me, if I remember correctly, that I could try again after three months. I don’t remember the timing of when I started the fertility drugs again, but I do remember that they were giving me ice pick migraines, which I didn’t know what they were until I Googled it, but that’s exactly how they feel and hot flashes. I was like, I’m 33, 34, I’m not going into menopause. I’m taking these fertility drugs that are essentially sending me there. It was just awful and I wanted to take a break and he was like, basically, I’m not going to be okay unless, until we have a baby. So dealing with that and setting boundaries and going, I need to take a break from these drugs and when are you going to be ready, I don’t know, for him that was the solution. For me it was like, good God, what my body has been through what it’s going through again, like it’s huge, huge amounts of conflict. I also was doing a lot of soul searching around my work. I had my own company at the time, but losing her made me realize that it wasn’t my highest level of impact. I had this like really, really big desire to create a legacy for her because I was terrified that she would be forgotten since she wasn’t here to make memories and that was the only way I felt like I knew to parent her, was to do some meaningful work. So I was totally switching what I was doing at the same time as well figuring out what that was and building a brand new business, which my husband is a career nine to fiver, so that was highly unsettling for him as well. So yes, it was all kinds of upside down and backwards. [PILLARS OF PRACTICE] We brought together all of our checklists, videos, and other free things in one spot so you don’t have to opt-in all over the place just to get another checklist. We’ve put it all together over at pillarsofpractice.com. Whether you’re just getting started or have an established group therapy practice, we have a free e-Course for you. As well, we have eight-minute experts, which are short eight-minute videos around specific topics completely free. If you want to take your practice to the next level, head on over to pillarsofpractice.com to get access to our free e-Courses. Again, that’s pillarsofpractice.com to get all of those free e-Courses. [JOE SANOK] I mean, what was helpful during that first year, second year to get through that? I mean, what mindsets, habits, just things that you did helped you get through that first couple years? [CHRISTINE] This experience cracked open personal development for me, cracked open spirituality for me because I had been so black and white Christian, like conservative, like nothing else is safe. The best way to sum it up is like, the people in my life would say, and whenever you talk about someone awesome, like, Oh, I just met this person, they’re so cool, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The first question, well, are they a Christian? That was a filter through which everything ran. When I, as part of this process of soul searching around my work, I hired my very first coach and she introduced me to all of these books that were now immersed in this whole world of sort of non-Christian personal development and it totally opened me up to possibility and to this whole other world that I had never given myself the chance to explore because it didn’t feel safe. So that was super, super helpful because it helped me to create this meaning out of, as Tony Robbins would say, how is this happening for me instead of to me? What opportunities am I being given? What meaning can I make out of this for myself as opposed to locking myself in a dark room for the rest of my life, which I totally could have done too. I mean, absolutely and I get why people do it. So I would say diving into personal development was super, super helpful. One of the best things that we did was go to, there’s a retreat center in Wisconsin called Faith Lodge, and it’s this gorgeous, high-end western style lodge in the middle of the country that was founded by folks who had lost a child the same way that I did. They run like healing weekend retreats for people who’ve lost a child of any age or have a child with a medically complex diagnosis and they group you in cohorts by type of loss. It was Father’s Day, like three months after Mave have passed when we got to spend a long weekend, in therapy sessions and having dinners and talking with these people who had all lost, all young professionals who had lost their first child unexpectedly in a full term still birth. I mean, those folks are all still friends today. We visit each other. I mean, all of us have had now what they call rainbow babies, babies born after a loss. They’re similarly aged. I mean, these are people that will be in our lives forever because we were bonded over this thing that no one knew could happen and then it happened to us and we had to figure out how to pick up the pieces. So being able to feel so seen and understood and being held by like a trauma-informed therapist who just was amazing. I mean, it’s like they’re getting money in our will, like they totally, totally changed the trajectory of our healing journey. [JOE] When you think about this loss, what’s it look like now? How do you continue to get through it? When are there times that memories pop up or sadness pops up or joy pops up? What’s it look like now? [CHRISTINE] It’s such a mixed ball. Like at Faith’s Lodge, a therapist handed us out this really, really poor photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of this image of grief. It looks like a ball of rubber bands and every different rubber band has a different emotion on it. So like you said, the sadness, the joy, the anger, the relief, the things you’re not supposed to feel and the things you are expected to feel. It’s just like, it’s just tangled. We know now, like the stages of grief are not linear, but it feels a lot more like this tangled ball. I would say it continues to be retraumatizing on milestones either for my living children or for Mave because it’s like, oh, what would’ve Mave been like when she turned five? Or Wow, we would have a seven-year-old and she would be in this grade and we would be doing these things with her. There are also these strange moments of, wow, I wouldn’t have my five-year-old if I had had Mave, because I got pregnant nine months after and that wasn’t going to be happening for sure, if I had had a nine month old to care for. So there are these bright spots too, honestly, and feeling like a lot of people around the world know who she is because she is the core reason why I do the work that I do. So there was a time in my life when I was like, is this being attention seeking or exploitative of her? I did some processing around that and I was like, no, actually it would be disingenuous not to share because like, she is the reason for all of this. So I get to have these really healing conversations, at least on a weekly basis about her, about what it takes to move through loss. I get to share this story as a way for other people to open up about a loss that happened 30 years ago that they’ve still been holding onto and have never shared publicly, everything in between. I mean, as therapists, like you hold so much space for your clients and I feel like I have been able in my work and the people I now attract in the work that I get to do on myself to hold such a depth of space and compassion and non-judgment that didn’t exist within me before her. Also I’m doing a lot of somatic work these days because while I’ve done a lot of healing work and regulation work along the journey, that is still in my nervous system. I mean, it is still, I carry it in my hips, like all of this stuff. I have a lot of anxiety about something happening to my living children and I deal with PTSD from those deliveries. So it’s just, it’s like you were saying earlier, it’s like, how do I live with it? How do I honor her? How do I care for myself in the midst of everything that happens when you have young kids and in more extreme situation and most people have experienced? Yes, it’s quite a thing. [JOE] How do you deal with the, and maybe you don’t have this, but I would guess, I mean, because I feel this a lot with sometimes my situation where it’s like, there’s this anger at the universe where it’s like, man, things felt so much lighter before all this stuff happened. Like, I’m so mad that these things fell apart. But then there’s also, like you’re saying these joys, how did you not get too far into the woe is me, like stuckness? You referenced some of that, but I think there could be, the people I’ve talked to in this series, they’re moving through it, they’re finding reframing. There’s still that pain that’s there. How did you get through the shaking your fist at the universe part of this? [CHRISTINE] I would say I got really freaking woo. So one of the things that Christine would’ve been like, well you can’t do that, that I have now gone all in is like, I started to get readings from some people that I trusted who I believed were like really connected to what’s beyond our senses. Early on I remember one of them saying to me, Christine, like you two chose this. She knew what she signed up for and her role, like you, I think she said, you two have been with each other for many lifetimes and you will continue to be in different roles in different ways in this lifetime. Her role was to awaken you and to help you connect and elevate your consciousness. She knew what she signed up for and again, you two had agreed on it ahead of time and she was okay with that. I was so comforted and relieved by that because in my previous belief system, there’s a finality to everything. Like it’s, you’re done. Maybe you’ll see her again in heaven. I was literally told that by one of my doctors and I was like, well I guess I’m screwed for the rest of this life then. I’ll see her again in heaven. Great, so why don’t I go there now? I see people in my life who hang onto things like that, like, this didn’t go the way that I went, so I’m just ready to go to heaven. I was like, I’m too young to be thinking about that? So I think that really, for me exploring cause, exploring challenging all of the things that I had previously believed, it brought me a lot of peace because like, oh, there’s a possible different explanation and I can access it. I continue to get messages from her in all different kinds of ways, like through other people and through birds and through her setting my kids’ electronic toys off across the house on special days. So there’s a lot of like, okay, our relationship looks different, of course, and it is not as black and white as she was here. She’s gone. I’ll see her in however many years. [JOE] That it’s so crazy, because I have, now we’re so many episodes in, Donna Kennedy when she was talking about the death of her son and he was in high school and his high school number will pop up in random spots. She was talking about birds and all these things and it’s just sages throughout like thousands of years have talked about different ways to think about whether it’s the afterlife or these thin spaces and just, it’s so interesting how many people when they’ve been through these traumas or difficult times just start to be able to be more open to things that we can’t explain. It’s just amazing. Man, thank you so much for all you’ve shared. The last question that I’ve been asking quite a few people, I don’t know if I’ve done it every single episode, but if you could go back to an age to give yourself some advice, what age would you pick and what advice would you give yourself? [CHRISTINE] Ooh, I’m laughing because this is like a, this is a joke, a common joke with my close family and friends that I really haven’t shared publicly, but I’m going to. I was so uptight and so determined to be this perfect Christian and play by all of the rules of purity culture and all of the things that I bought into like hook, line and sinker because I believed that it would give me a good, happy, joyful life if I followed all of the rules. Now we joke that I’m sort of like doing Rum Springer at 40 with two young kids. I’m just like, I didn’t do this in college, so let’s play. I think that I would, age wise maybe 17, I was 17 when I graduated from high school and if I could get in that girl’s ear and be like, stop taking all of this so freaking seriously, stop being the one with a stick up your butt who’s like the goody two shoes and just play and be curious and explore and like, there’s a reason that everybody does this or a lot of people do it. Like, it’s not going to ruin your life. It’s not going to blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah, if you go to parties or whatever the thing is. Just play, have fun, really rediscover who you are because the person I am today is who I was when I was four before the world happened to me and told me I was bossy and to shut up and nice girls don’t act like that and they’re not leaders and blah blah blah. This is another gift of Mave is that I really, really rediscovered who I was and who I am here to be. When I was 17 though I was that buttoned up modest, conservative, whatever, who thought she was an introvert because she didn’t like most of the people that she was around. So I would encourage her to yes, have some fun play and do whatever it takes to rediscover and recover who it is that you actually are because you’re going to have a couple more decades of enjoyment and beyond if you do that. [JOE] Oh, that’s so amazing. Christine, if people want to follow your work what’s the best website to send them to? [CHRISTINE] Well, this is a little bit meta but I help people with podcast guesting, so if you want to learn how to be a great podcast guest, I have a checklist at lifewithpassion.com/checklist. That will also get you connected to my world. [JOE] Oh, that’s so wonderful. Christine, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast. [CHRISTINE] Thank you so much for having me back, Joe. [JOE] Wow, what a difficult, joyous, just delightful conversation there. I was thinking about this as Christine was talking and didn’t really weave in and I thought I’d just save it for the end. So many times, when I share my story whether it’s with close, usually with just like close friends, they’re like, “Man, that is like a freaking movie.” I had this insight a couple months ago where I get the front row seat in a crazy movie of a life. Like I never would’ve picked the unfolding that happened in the last year and a half. Yet man, it makes my life interesting. It’s tough to be an unexpected single dad. It’s tough to try to make it to every single field trip and to do my best to show up for my girls, but it’s also like a movie that a lot of people just have regular divorces and boring divorces, khaki divorces or boring marriages. I got this whole crazy explosion that is really, really hard at times, but also quite the entertaining thing. So that’s just a mindset that’s been working for me. I hope that this series has been just so helpful for you. I haven’t looked at my calendar and see how many more there are coming up but to go through now, let’s see, we started on episode 736, so we’re looking at 14 or 15 episodes of this with so many just amazing stories. Thanks so much for joining us. Also we couldn’t do this without our sponsors. Pillarsofpractice.com is our sponsor for this show. Pillars of Practice is actually something we put out where you can get a free e-Course all about starting a practice or growing a practice. When you go to pillarsofpractice.com, you choose your own adventure, are you starting or growing a practice? Then within each of those e-Courses you get all of the downloads that we’ve created ever. Instead of having to individually opt-in to every single thing, you get checklists, you get infographics. We have a bunch of videos which are called Eight Minute Experts, where I literally set a timer and for eight minutes just interview the heck out of people around a specific topic like starting a website, managing your money, marketing your practice, all these different areas where in eight minutes we just dive in into a certain area of expertise. So if you go to pillarsofpractice.com, you can opt-in to either one of those. It’s a self-paced course, it’s totally free. It’s our way of just bringing together a ton of resources to help you in one spot. So pillarsofpractice.com. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an amazing day. I’ll talk to you soon. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.