- The speaker, Phoenix Ash, discusses her experiences with love and trauma, as well as her struggle with writing and relearning life without trauma.
- She talks about her divorce and being a single mom, and how she is repositioning her writing as she no longer lives a traumatic life.
- Phoenix also mentions meeting someone new and learning to navigate relationships without the influence of trauma.

- The speaker has been single for almost 5 years and is now in a new relationship
- They express the challenges of being in a relationship and the need for compromise
- They reflect on the differences between themselves and their partner
- The speaker discusses the difficulty of separating trauma from their current relationship
- They emphasize the importance of self-work in a relationship and the need for mental space and communication

- The speaker acknowledges the need for space to decompress and work on personal issues
- They discuss the struggle of relearning how to engage with others without trauma affecting their interactions
- The speaker reflects on the impact of past trauma on their relationships and parenting
- They emphasize the ongoing process of learning and personal growth without the influence of trauma
- The speaker is focused on maintaining their own happiness and not being dependent on others for it

- The speaker is focused on maintaining their own happiness and not being dependent on others for it
- They are learning to share their happiness without overpowering or lessening themselves
- The speaker is going through a transition and wants to live a trauma-free life
- They are working on personal growth and want to spread love to others
- The speaker also promotes their books and social media handles for support and engagement

Phoenix Ash discusses her experiences with love and trauma, including her divorce and being a single mom. She is repositioning her writing as she no longer lives a traumatic life and is navigating a new relationship. The speaker emphasizes the importance of self-work, mental space, and communication in relationships, and the ongoing process of learning and personal growth without the influence of trauma. They are focused on maintaining their own happiness and spreading love to others, and promote their books and social media handles for support and engagement.

You know Beyonce is my friend in my head.

You know when I was a kid I had an imaginary enemy?

I hope you had some time off or some time to unwind, be with your family, whatever it is that makes you feel good, makes you feel like summer is actually here.

If this is your first time, I appreciate you checking in, seeing what everything is all about and however you found me, whether it was a referral, mother, cousin, sister, brother, auntie, uncle, or you saw a retweet on Twitter, or X, or whatever they want to call themselves now.

If you saw a post on Facebook, it's probably an old post because I haven't posted on there in a while, but anyhow, however you found me, thank you for finding me and thank you for sharing your time with me.

If you're a repeat listener, you know what it is.

So I know I've been talking about love and like, you know, it's okay to love without predicting the future and knowing if it's gonna be forever or not.

Like if you love right now, just be in the moment of love and you know, I'm not gonna rehash the last show, but I'm learning so many things, right?

So if you know me, you know that I'm a divorced woman, I'm a single mom, and I have spent some time being intentional about the circle that I'm building, about the life that I'm building for myself.

I am very blessed that starting over doesn't look the same for me, that it looks for a lot of people.

I didn't have to go down to the bare minimum, have absolutely nothing.

However, that's just financially, that has nothing to do with the rest of parts of my life.

And I think every once in a while, I realized that I might've been down to the bare minimum on certain things like certain mentalities and certain emotions.

So do you guys remember, I might be dating myself, but whatever.

There was a commercial years ago, years ago, for people who are recovering from cigarettes and, you know, people who have given it up.

And it was this commercial that basically showed like how you have to relearn everything that you did in life without a cigarette.

So like if you used to wake up in the morning and smoke a cigarette, like waking up in the morning is different for you.

So you have to learn like different patterns, different habits, and just get adjusted to what that's like.

And some people will be like, well, why you got to get used to it?

Because you were like that before, but like if you had this habit for forever, right, you don't really remember life before that.

Plus life before that, you were in a different stage.

And I am truly realizing that when you've lived a traumatic life, yeah, you have to relearn life without trauma.

And if you've listened to previous podcasts, you'll know that, you know, I've been in this little internal battle with writing, right?

I would love for you to pick them up, write a review, or just give it however many stars you wanna give it.

Or hit me up on Twitter, I'm at author Phoenix A.

If you wanna get an autograph copy of 1, that's cool with me.

But anywho, I've talked about how writing is sort of repositioning itself in my life, that I feel like I was blessed to have the gift to assist me in my traumatic life so that the trauma would not take me over, so that I wouldn't drown in it.

And writing has always been my escape, my way of kind of just releasing my thoughts and putting the tears aside or, you know, burying what it was that bothered me, just getting it out without necessarily overburdening anyone else or pulling anyone else into the misery of it all, that, you know, whatever.

I never thought that I would be at the point where I can consistently say, right?

If you've listened to the show the past couple of times, you've heard me say, my life is no longer traumatic.

And so I've been realizing that writing, that gift is sort of repositioning.

And maybe that's what the struggle is that I'm going through.

And I, of course, never know for certain.

So once I get through whatever I'm going through, I will probably know what it was.

However, right now, what it appears to be is that the struggle and the lack of writing and the lack of motivation is because I'm not motivated by the trauma.

I'm not motivated by the hurt and the pain.

I'm not needing a place of comfort, a place of solace to repair myself.

And so it's like, you know, if you have a home and a vacation home, right, but life feels like a vacation, You may not vacation at your vacation home very often anymore because, you know, you've built a life for yourself that sort of feels like vacation all the time.

Rather than me running to cry on the shoulder of the written word.

And yes, I can certainly run to the written word to celebrate and shout from the rooftops.

However, come on, like I write fiction and we all know that when we read a book of fiction, if absolutely nothing happens with good stuff and there is no challenge to overcome, it's kind of a boring book.

So trying to work out the perspectives and what I see or whatever and what I want to document because there's some stuff, I'm not perfectly healed.

I'm not completely clean and my memory has not been wiped clean.

So there's stuff, but just getting a grip.

And honestly, I also think that life is giving me an opportunity to live it, right?

Instead of like, you know, burying my head in the books and being in the house all the time and, you know, documenting life and documenting trauma and docu- like life is like, hold on a second, like live, live differently for a minute.

Because that stuff that you put in the books and you experience that contributed to the stories that you wrote, you got to relearn stuff.

So like that took years to build and create and form itself into something that you can turn into fiction and write stuff that's, you know, some closely related, some not too closely related, but for you to be able to cultivate all of that, you had to live some type of life.

And so I think life is saying like, let's live again, And then let's check back in and see what spills out of the new life.

However, for a long time I was focused on that is what's happening with writing and my life and trauma and all that.

And then I met someone who I'm in complete awe of and it took a long time for, you know, flaws to rise to the surface or whatever.

And I am learning that there's a lot of things that I have to do without the trauma.

When I run into something that we don't see eye to eye on, you know, examining that fight or flight response, I totally think that the person that I'm with is worth the fight.

And we don't, there's not much to fight about over or fight through or whatever, which is hallelujah.

But, you know, asking yourself like the things that we don't see eye to eye on or the things that were not complete peace between the 2 of us, am I ready for this?

It's been, My divorce, I think, was final, I think, come, come this November, it'll be like 4 years.

And, you know, we were separated for about a year before that.

So I would say I'm single about almost 5 years.

And this is my first like relationship since the end of that relationship.

And I haven't had to deal with things that I don't necessarily agree with or like from another person for damn near 5 years.

And you think, you know, okay, I'm ready.

So I'm looking for, And then it takes you forever after you have asserted that's what you're looking for.

And then you find all these people that don't fit.

And then 1 day you run into what works and you think, okay, cool.

You can't really just say, oh, cool, and pack it away.

At least right now, it's not a lot of work, honestly, and so it's not a lot of work.

But, you know, it's a little bit sometimes.

And I found myself asking myself emotionally, like, all right, girl, you here.

Because if this is worth it to you, you're not going back out because of this little thing, right?

I don't want to be in a relationship with myself.

I definitely want to be in a relationship with someone else, someone that I value who takes care of me as well as or better than I take care of myself, primarily because I need to feel good about that's what I'm offering you.

And so if you're not offering me that, I feel like a dickhead.

I feel like an ass because I'm trying to do what I can to take care of you.

I want the person I'm with to be happy, whether it be through me or not, but I want them to be happy.

And I want you to be able to contribute to my happiness as well.

But because you are different from me and I am different from you, We are not going to always be in alignment.

There's gonna be some things that either we compromise on or we agree to disagree or we got to be like, you know what, let's not touch that right now.

Even the best of relationships, the best friends and all that stuff.

Like if we agree all the time, I don't know how much of an individual we are.

No, like, it's okay to not agree on everything.

I know 1 of the things that when I first started dating him that it tickled me, honestly, that we couldn't find movies that we both liked.

He would be completely bored with stuff that I liked or not interested.

And I would be completely bored with stuff that he would recommend.

And it was very hard to find stuff where we were on the same accord, like, huh, this was actually kind of good.

Oddly enough, that's 1 of the things that I loved about him.

He was such a, or is such a breath of fresh air because, like, he didn't pretend to like what I liked and I didn't pretend to like what he liked.

We're apologetic if we think that it's hurting the other, but we're still like, you know, I don't really like that, you know?

I like that comfort and that boldness and that, I don't know, that it's a confidence, that confidence in each other or in what we have, that truth will not upset our balance.

Right now, it's still kind of the same, except we found a few things that were kind of like, okay, all

And then we've watched him and like, hey, that was kind of good.

And we've agreed or whatever, and that's been cute.

But I like that we weren't always on 1 accord.

But there's some things that, you know, we're not on 1 accord that, you know, I may not like or he may not like.

And, you know, I find myself asking myself as asking, am I ready And asking, is he ready?

It's a couple of years for him too, but you know, still, right?

There's always the residue of a past life because the life was so long, right?

We were both with our partners for over 10 years each, I believe over like 15 years each.

It's a lot of relearning life without that person, without that person's habits, without that person's opinions.

And then finding someone that you like very much, maybe even love, and not wanting to lose what you have, but at the same time trying to balance that individuality to say, hey, if I can't be myself, then maybe this isn't worth salvaging or trying to keep.

But at the same time, considering what can be compromised, like, child, that's the whole mathematical equation.

I think had I took my time to do the math, 1, we might not have lasted that long or not even got together at all, but I wasn't in the business of making the best decisions at the time.

And I have a beautiful daughter to show for our union.

So, you know, it is what it is and it went how it went.

But now, you know, as an adult in my 40s, dating, possibly in love, I have to ask myself, like, are you ready?

Do you understand that this person is not a replica of you?

There's going to be some differences and you're going to have an opinion on those differences.

And not that you're weighing out, like, is this a fight-or-flight moment every time?

Because I don't want to do that every time.

So because I don't want to do that every time, I have to sit with myself and say, listen, these things are going to come up.

You cannot use every disagreement or every, I don't like this as a, oh, well, this is a sign.

And it sounds very juvenile, I know, but I'm not going to pretend like it doesn't happen.

I think because we're so afraid of sounding juvenile, a lot of us don't verbalize the juvenile feelings that we have or questions or insecurities or, I don't know, misunderstandings with ourselves because we're so afraid of sounding juvenile and I should have been matured past that.

I go through what I go through and I'm gonna get to where I'm supposed to go maturity wise by going through whatever I'm going through.

And if I can help you go through, or if you can help me go through, we can get through.

But yeah, like, And when I talk about relearning life without trauma is that when I say, are you ready?

Are you ready to not attribute your traumatic past, your traumatic thoughts, your traumatic fears?

Are you ready to not apply those to every single situation?

There are some lessons that you learned in trauma, but take the lessons, the piece, not the trauma part, the lessons.

Learning how to separate the lessons from the actual trauma is difficult, difficult.

It's not 1 of those things like, well, you gotta just separate.

When they say that relationships will work.

I honestly believe that the work part is more self-work than it is between you and your partner.

Because if each of you do the self-work, the work between you and your partner, like it's easy.

You adjust, you flow, you move, you write.

At least that's my experience or what I've been experiencing.

But the work is really the self-reflection, the, well, what do I think about this?

I mean, shit, we gotta do that with our kids.

This is why in relationships, sometimes you get a little wary or people be like, I need a break and a break is not necessarily a breakup, but it's like, who am I going to breathe a second?

My hope is that we learn how to give each other the space without necessarily needing that official break or whatever, but that mental space, paying attention to your partner and saying, I've been irritating you a little bit.

Let me give you some space to kind of decompress off of me because I can be a lot and you can be a lot and let me take the responsibility of giving myself space so I can decompress a little bit because I know you're worth it.

However, I need some time to myself so that whatever is going on with me, I can get over that.

And if we need conversation, I can clearly communicate the conversation from my perspective.

I can also give you grace and mercy and find out what kind of time you need in order to be able to process, to contribute to this conversation.

Listen, if you feel like you do that naturally and it's not an effort for you, God bless you, it's an effort for me.

It might be an effort for me because I'm an only child.

And I, listen, I'm not trying to give 20 years to trying to figure out why it's effort, just recognizing that it's effort and thinking about what I want to do with it.

And I just was like, I am ready because I'm willing and I'm willing to do the work because I believe he's worth it.

However, you know, still keeping my eye open to make sure that I'm not working by myself, right?

Nobody wants to be in an unreciprocated relationship ever.

My work relationships, when I come to work, I am relearning how to engage with people that I work with without trauma standing in front of me.

You say something slick, my trauma is telling me, don't you let that person get away with just bludgeoning them.

But My trauma, like, wants a reaction, wants a prideful response, particularly because if I keep it a buck, sometimes in the past for some of my trauma, I can be embarrassed for how much I did not speak up for myself, be embarrassed for how much I did not protect myself or defend myself.

And the reason why I'm embarrassed is because my outer shell is a pretty tough cookie.

And sometimes I have the expectations of myself that other people have of me based upon my outer shell.

And I forget that that's just an outer shell, that I have layers on the inside and sometimes those layers don't speak up.

Sometimes they make decisions so that they don't have to be alone.

They eat a lot of things so that I can be soothed and so that I can limit the conflict, limit the confrontation.

And I'm shedding some of those inner layers and being more comfortable with myself, more confident in myself and more okay with being alone.

I grew up as an only child who lost both my parents so being alone is just you just kind of did everything to not be alone.

Like I'm just, and you know, there was a little bit of, you know, emotional abuse in my past and some mental abuse.

And So, you know, the outcome of that is a lot of, you know, doing whatever it takes to not be alone.

And now with the bit of healing that I have and the bit of confidence that I have in myself, is being okay with being alone.

But sometimes because I was, you know, in a relationship with myself for so long, sometimes I'm extra okay being alone and so I'm so okay.

And that's not conducive to a healthy relationship.

So, you know, I'm learning that not only have I had to learn life without trauma, but it's not just 1 learning.

It's like life without trauma during the transition, life without trauma when I make it to a new stage.

And so I'm constantly on this learning curve.

I'm constantly trying to grasp who I am over and over and over again in each new stage of my life.

And actually sometimes being surprised that, oh, 0, OK, I hit a new stage.

I don't always recognize when I'm and do you always recognize when you enter a new stage, you know, sometimes I'm in the new stage for a bit and I go, oh, okay.

This, you know, some new stages are intentional.

We create it, we force it, we forge it, we make a move, we get married, we do whatever.

When you go from dating to relationship and you just feel like, oh shit, I'm in a relationship.

We ain't even like, we kind of just eased on into that.

So it's a slightly different mentality than regular dating.

Or, you know, oh, you ain't calling 4 days.

It was kind of easy in terms of being disconnected and just disengaging.

But the frustrating part was, I wanna engage, I wanna be intimate, I wanna connect.

Okay, so now I'm here, I'm connecting, this is new stage.

I'm connecting and trying to maintain my connection, but not lose the connection to myself and the obligation I have to myself.

Not loving my partner or anyone else outside of me more than I love myself.

Being conscious of that feels like a new stage for me.

So there's just, just perpetual learning.

And I just, I don't know if I just didn't realize, didn't know, It could be I just didn't know.

My life has been trauma-filled from birth on.

So, yeah, it took over 40 years for me to be able to say my life is no longer traumatic.

Not that things don't happen, but thankfully, it's not trauma.

I think we assign trauma to so many things that we don't differentiate, like the big thing that can wipe you out emotionally.

Like that's the trauma versus like there was an incident I had to handle or it was something I had to get through.

And I think that what used to be traumatic for me before might be just something I have to get through now because I have a newfound strength.

I have a reinforced belief in God, reinforced belief in the prosperity in my future, reinforced belief in the joy that is mine.

All I have to do is keep it in my hand or go get some more.

And I can just keep plucking from it and learning how to keep picking at that tree while also maintaining all the other things around me that contribute to growing that tree so that when I'm picking, I'm picking because I'm in need, but the tree is fruitful.

So it has something for me to take from it.

I know it's, I, this is how my mind works guys.

I know it's complex and it's not straight up, but you know, if you can follow along, I'm hoping that it kind of works for you too.

And again, like writing was the thing that I was focused on, like, oh, I gotta relearn my perspective and writing and my voice and where I'm coming from and what I wanna communicate and all that, But it's everything in life.

Just being a parent, I, you know, I find I'm relearning how to be a parent because, you know, when I first became a parent, I was in a toxic relationship.

I was, you know, a new mom struggling in my marriage and then, you know, trying to learn how to be a mom.

And now, you know, I've gotten a little experience being a mom, so that that's a new stage and I'm applying that, but there's no trauma present.

Because some of the tools that I gave my kid that I see that she definitely possesses the tools that I gave her, but some of them were out of trauma.

Some of them were out of fear of her repeating my traumatic mistakes, so it's making the decisions that I made without even considering that she doesn't have a traumatic life, so she probably won't make these decisions anyway.

But now, okay, now I'm going to give you some different kind of tools.

Now I'm at a stage where the tools I'm thinking about is, you know, how to help maintain your own happiness and not be dependent on someone outside of yourself to be happy.

How to share that happiness with someone else without lessening yourself or overpowering that person.

How to be appreciative, how to love on those who love on you.

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What's Life Without Trauma.mp3