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www.coachingwithjanel.com
Transform Your Story Podcast - Episode 3: Honesty, Patterns, and Columbo - January 2025
Janel: We're not some polished people who have all the answers.
Ariana: What?! Are you sure about that?
Janel voiceover: [music] Welcome to Transform Your Story. Iâm Janel Guevara. My clients call me their fairy godmother, but actually, I'm a life coach with a love of words and the women who use them.
Janel voiceover: Join me and my daughters as we have honest conversations about writing, life, and redeeming Happily Ever After in the shadows of the stories we never expected to tell. We recount our experiences as a way to help you see yours in a new light.
Janel voiceover: From content creation to defining your audience and niche, we break down the process into simple steps with practical application. That allows us to nurture hope from ashes, so you can too. Letâs transform your story. [music ends]
Janel: Hello, welcome to transform your story! I'm Janel Guevara and I'm here with my daughters Melindaâ
Melinda: Hi
Janel: And Ariana
Ariana: Hi
Janel: [laugh] You know we talk about thisâintroducting yourself and saying hi when I say this and every time we get here they all look at me like doe-eyes and be likeâ
Melinda: We do not the stage presence that you do. Like whatsoever. And I know that you guys can't see us, but like, we can see each other and we know that it's a stage presence, even if it's only mental. And Ana and I are just standing behind the microphone looking like sheep. Like, just shaking with knobby knees. Like, you know that kid in the spelling bee that you think is gonna puke? Thatâs me and Ana.
Janel: Oh, but when I got up to go get water between the episodes, theyâre like âoh thereâs this Shadow and Boneâdo you know theyâre making Fourth Wing into a TV series? And did you know? And did you know?â Then Iâm like âthese are the cast of characters and these are mine.â Dead Silence.
Janel: Welcome to transform your story. [laugh] I am so totally gonna try to get them out of their shell but you know. I have always had a presence. Ana has it, and Melinda has it. They have just been so, I feel like it's just been that life is just really run them roughshod, and that part of themselves, they're just afraid to be. Because they're still healing from PTSD and CPTSD and all the other stuff. So it does make it frustrating because as their mom, I see these deeper things in them that they [laugh] have not been able to dig out because, you know, they spent their life being sucked into these patterns of trauma and, you know, I'm 30 years older than Melinda and Iâm 20â
Ariana: Youâre 30 years older than me.
Janel: Iâm 30 years older than you and 20 years older than Melinda.
Melinda: I was gonna say, that didnât sound right.
Janel: Yeah, No.
Melinda: I think we did the math and I would have been your graduation baby or something.
Janel: Yeah. [laugh] Graduation baby. Well, with my husbandâs two biological children, and my four biological children, Melinda literally fits right in the middle. And I mean, it is stair steps with the seven of them. So it works out really well. My husband and I had kids young. We started into this parenthood journey way early. It's been rough because, you know, being autistic and not understanding the dynamics. Ha, being autistic and not knowing I was autistic when I had my first child at 21, being in a covert narcissistic abusive relationship and then not realizing that I was also experiencing abuse in the name of Jesus.
Janel: I mean, that's part of what we're going to talk about today. Is, you know, last time we talked about âif you don't know your story you can't tell your story,â but it's like,
âif you don't know it you can't unlock it.â Unlocking it is a really big piece. Because what happens is when we look at our lives, specifically when we're tryingâyou know, if we want to use our childhood and some of the things that we've learned to, you know, share our story, deliver Pearls of Wisdom, and help somebody else out, we need to know the details.
Janel: You know, I went to kindergarten and my kindergarten was teacher was terrible and she scared me, and this is what happened. You know, my grandfather died when I was 10 years old and it devastated me. Letâs see. What else happened in my story? You know, I was homeschooled in highschool and it felt like freedom but it was illegal at the time because I'm that old that home schooling was illegal. The school district pursued us for truancy which was probably one of the scariest things and my lifeâdefinitely scariest thing in my life until that point. But then there's just these details. They keep coming, and keep coming, and keep coming, and it's like, Oh my God, what do you do with them?
Janel: As I was reading books looking for answers, I mean best sellers, and just books, and books, and books, and books, and books, and best selling Christian books on marriage that are so toxic, and just self-help books, and how to be happy with Jesus, and what am I missing? And when all the Jesus books didn't have the answers I needed, I started looking to secular sources. I just needed to organize my life a little bit better. Or organize something. Or, you know, understand etiquette, or whatever. And I went into that to hope that maybe I was just missing a practical aspect of something that I didn't know. But all this time I'm seeing disjointed pieces of a problem that could be explained through neurodivergence, generational trauma, and covert abuse. When you overlay those three things over the situations and all these random details, suddenly you see patterns and connections that make sense, creates an entire picture that I'm standing here going âyeah, there is no book for this.â None of it.
Janel: You know, I guess it's one of the reasons why therapists spend years in school getting degrees because the human, God, human relationships and psychology and all the ins and outs are just like overwhelming. And I realized for years that my special interest is actually human behavior and psychology with an overlay and hard focus in how trauma affects that. And I mean, because of my tragic backstory, you know, I talked about my grandmother in last episode, and how she died when my mom was 21 but she had been put in the mental institute and the family had been told she died when my mom was 18 months old. So when you come up with that there's gaps. There's definitely gaps. Thereâs just a lot. There's just like so much.
Janel: And it's like, when you start looking at details, and you start trying to figure them out, and you see the patterns, and you just go in circles. I'm talking in circles because, you know, trying to figure this out is like, oh my God.
Melinda: It goes just like that. That's the sound bite. Trying to figure it out. That's how that goes. She was just giving you a really good example.
Janel: [laugh] You know, we've gone back and forth it's like, should we edit the podcast? Should we edit some of this stuff out? Or should we just let it roll because everybody when they do this, they're so polished, they're so prim, they're so whatever, and that's part of the perfectionism that Melinda talked about last week. âWell we can't podcast unless we have our stories perfect.â But then on the other hand, it's likeâ
Melinda: In our heads for some reason we're going to sound like Columbia professors or something. For no reason at all other than just our perfectionism. And like masking of like âwe have to do this perfectly.â And it's just like we have never once sounded like Colombia professors about anything, so like, maybe we should just calm down.
Ariana: You said Colombo.
Janel: Oh my God.
Melinda: I said Colombo?
Janel: [laugh] And yes, instead of Columbia professors, we sound like Colombo. [laugh]
Melinda: Oh, I've never watched Colombo. I don't know if I follow the reference all the way, but sure close enough.
Ariana: You have to watch it. He like acts like heâs this crazy little man who's just so eclectic and weird. And he is eclectic, but then he's always a mastermind and he always comes up with the answer in the end.
Melinda: Oh my God, we are Colombo! I gotta watch this. That's us. Yes. We are not Columbia professors, but we are Colombos of our own stories.
Janel: Yeah, thereâs our catchline. [inaudible] Well here's the thing that really bugs me, and maybe we really are Colombo, because they open the TV show showing the murder that he is going to investigate. Who did it is right there. The whodunit is right there and then we go back through we're like âwell we know whodunit,â but he basically goes back and heâ
Ariana: But Columbo is such a mad little man. Heâs entertaining to watch and figure out how he solves it.
Melinda: Thatâs probably why people would listen to this podcast. I hear they're like these crazy people are going to get to a point eventually, I just know it.
Janel: You're welcome. I mean he started, what was it, in the 70s?
Ariana: It was a while ago.
Janel: 70s and 80s, so it's like a vintage TV. But he really does. And he says all this quirky stuff and he asked all these stupid questions that irritates the hell out of everybody. Heâ
Ariana: Everybody loves him except for the murderers.
Janel: Exactly everybody loves him. They think he's so neat. He knows who the murderer is like immediately on it, and he keeps asking this person questions and questions and questions, and they're so annoyed with him. And I feel likeâactually I hadnât really thought about itâand this is how we work. The brainstorming, theâ
Melinda: Mm-hmm
Janel: [inaudible] And it's like oh my gosh. We are Columbo.
Melinda: Yeah we are definitely Colombo.
Janle: Because there have been lightning rod people in our life that just don't make any sense. And it's like, you keep asking questions about them, except in my case I couldn't ask questions because it would trigger, you know, a more abusive response. And so when you're in that situation you kind of stop asking questions. But yeah, I mean that's been a huge huge piece of our story. And the process has been hard. I mean, you go rounds in your head and youâre like âthis doesnât make any sense and I donât know why. I donât know why it doesn't make any sense. I read it in this best selling self-help book that said it's supposed to work. If I do A, and I do B, and I do C, D is supposed to follow right like this and it's just supposed to work and just happen. And it doesn't. â
Melinda: It does not, not for us.
Ariana: A squared plus B squaredâ
Janel and Melinda: Yesâ yeahâ
Melinda: Itâs like that moment you realize neurotypical people don't have to remember to brush their teeth. They just do it on like autopilot.
Ariana: Whatâs up with that?
Melidna: Neurotypical people have autopilot to begin with? You're just like, well that's totally unfair.
Ariana: This from science fiction or something.
Janel: I know right?
Melinda: Like we can't even fathom that. It's like listen, if you wake up in the morning and don't have to think about brushing your teeth, you are not [stutter] I don't know what we can do to help you âcause like, that's not how we operate at all. Like congratulations though. I'm sure your dentist is very proud of you.
Janel: Well, you knowâ
Melinda: Iâm just saying we may not resonate with you very well.
Janel: Yeah you may not be our target audience, you know, but that's part of the story. Oh my God. It's part of the story. That's one thing that's so frustrating, is you know, on one hand when I went in for myâI was in an auto accident in 2008 which just totally, completely, utterly, absolutely, and then some changed the trajectory of my whole life, and so to determine for accident purposes and insurance and all of that stuff, I had to have neuropsych testing and neuropsychological testing to determine my IQ, and what the impact from the accident was to my brain and all of that.
Ariana: How much it affected you.
Melinda: How much brain damage did you have.
Janel: Yeah, and I remember the psychologist sittingâthe psychiatrist actuallyâsitting there and looking at the results of my test and he just was perplexed âcause you know, you just tell the story, but at that point I had no idea that I was experiencing covert narcissistic abuse, experiencing spiritual abuse, and being controlled by Jesus. And he's asking me questions and I'm giving answers that I thought were honest, but if I look back now, I was just masking and I was hiding, because my ex was sitting there with me.
Janel: I remember the very first day he went to interview me, the psychiatrist, and he looks at me, and one of the first questions he goes âDid you have a normal childhood?â And I went, âWhat's normal?â and he looks back at me and he goes, âWell, you tell me.â You know, in my entire childhood, the awkwardness, all of that, and everything flashed through my mind. I'm like, âWell my parents didn't beat me or anything. Does that count as normal?â and he just, you know, kind of nodded and whatever, or he didnât nod, he kinda shrugged his shoulders and was like, you know, âyou tell me.â And so I kind of told him a little bit about my story about not fitting in as a kid and getting good grades in school but not fitting in, and really, you know, kind of struggling socially and whatever, and my parents. And I don't know if I mentioned my grandmother or not but it was just kind of [sigh] I'm like what do you do with that? I mean what do you do with that when somebody asks you if you're normal and you feel absolutely like you're not normal but you don't know how to articulate that because Normal is simply, you know, you have food, you have shelter, you have clothing, you have two parents that aren't divorced, nobody's beating you, and yet I couldn't shake the feeling that things weren't normal. So we're leaving the office and my ex looks at me, and he's like, âlet me clue you in on something. If a mental health professional asks you if you're normal, you just say yes.â And I was just like, I don't remember if I replied. I just remember being wow. I look back at that instant now, and I'm like oh my God, there's just like so many red flags on that, that I just can't even. Can't even grasp the insanity. But it's like, is that really? Is that really where he was?
Ariana: Was he expecting you say yes?
Janel: I don't know.
Ariana: I donât remember hearing that bit. Thatâs crazy.
Janel: You don't remember hearing that?
Ariana: No
Janel: I never told you that story? Oh my God. Yeah, well there we go. I can't believe I never told you that story.
Ariana: Well, I heard the normal bit, but him being like âjust say yes.â Huh.
Janel: [laugh] That makes a lot of sense now?
Ariana: Is that whatâs expected of us? Like seriously? And this is why we need to know weâre autistic.
Janel: Yeah, this is why we need to understand if we are neurodivergent, if we have lived through trauma, because this stuff affects us and it drives our story. Because these unseen patterns are actually the thing that motivates us, that keeps us going, that fuels all of our unhealthy behavior. And when we don't know our story, and we don't understand the dynamics, we will stay in abusive relationships a lot longer than a normal person would.
Melinda: Neurotypical people are driving motorcycles. Theyâre just cruising down the highway. Us neurodivergents, weâre in a shoddy old pickup truck with a bunch of baggage in the back. And we donât realize that weâre not driving the same car.
Janel: Yeah.
Melinda: Like, itâs just, we are driving a very different vehicle. We have double the wheels, we have baggage in the back. They are just cruising. I mean, everyone has their trauma, but like, neurotypical people who have like dealt with trauma, and like, you know parents love them and all that, like they are on a different highway than we are even [laugh] if it's the same road it's different journey.
Ariana: Theyâre on the interstate, we're on the bumpy back roads.
Janel: Oh yeah we're in the bumpy back roads trying to find the interstate and it's like nowhereâ
Melinda: Yeah, there it is.
Janel: And we can maybe hear it buzz in the distance sometimes.
Ariana: But it's probably just [laugh] the blood rushing in our ears. [laughter] Whatâs that buzz? Is that traffic? No. No itâs not.
Janel: Yeah, when you realize that all of the stuff that you experience that you were going to use to share your story and help other people is actually a red flag, or a byproduct of somebody else's red flag and it's actually some kind of trauma response it's like, oh my God, I feel played my whole damn life. Wow. Just wow wow wow. It's just it goes on and on and on and it's justâI can't tell you how many times I have sit down to record details of my story, to try to make sense of them, and just get stuck in the wow.
Janel: I think the very first time I did the exercise, I talk about it in my free handout, and if you sign up for my mailing list, well actually if you go to my website, you can get it, and if you want you can sign up for my mailing list, but it's called Five Steps to Share Hope From Your Story. I share the first time that I did the exercise of pulling in the details so I could, you know, market my story because it was a marketing module that I had worked with with my first business coach. Basically they wanted you to list the five most pivotal moments in your life and use these five most people moments to market all of your content. And I was just like, Oh my God, I can't even. Five? And I mean, I sat there staring at the screen going âI know this, and I know this, and I know this,â and I'm like âbut Oh my God, how do I narrow it to five?â Because I had like 12 more things that were pivotal in my life at the level that they were talking about being pivotal. I just sat there dumbfounded looking at the computer screen going, âwell I can't not put these down.â
Janel: Then I did the exercises where I had to write some about, you know, pick these five and write something about them. So I did that, but I'm like, this list is not complete and I started going back, and going back, and going back, and going back, and expanding on the list with another layer and I'm like my God. This is pivotal, and this is pivotal, this is pivotal, and this is pivotal. I mean this really changed me, and this changed me, and I mean, I had over 40 things on that list. Literally like this happened, and I changed direction in my life, this happened and I changed different directions. This happened. I think the thing that overwhelmed me in a way was the sheer volume of these, I don't know, I don't want to say catastrophic events, you know, we're not talking about all the coffee maker broke on a day that I was giving an important meeting. I'm talking like [sigh] big ones.
Janel: Like I reached out for help when my first biological child was 6 months old. I was so overwhelmed, I was so distraught, and it took me like about 4 months to work up the courage to actually reach out to this woman and say, âhey I really need some advice. Some help. I am so overwhelmed.â And I just I'm sitting there trying to hold back tears and I don't rememberâI don't feel like she asked me what was wrong or if she's like, âWell what's going on?â I'm like, âwell everything is overwhelm. You know I have the baby, I have my ex-husbandââwho I was married to still at the timeââand I have this, and I just I'm just overwhelmed.â Instead of digging deeper to ask me about any of my overwhelm she just reached over she patted me on the hand and she said, âYou just keep praying God will meet you.â
Ariana: The least she could have done was offered and make you a home-cooked meal or something.
Janel: I know! This was somebody, she was the Bible study leader who was supposed to be a Titus 2 woman. We were doing a bible study on Proverbs 31 and how to be a better wife. This was her answer. And I heard about Titus 2 and how the older women were supposed to have the answers for us younger women and that was it? That was the wisest words of wisdom is you just keep praying and God will get you there? And I remember that the moment just gutted me. I sat there and I vowed that if I ever figured out why I was overwhelmed and what was going on, I would work with women to teach them what was going on. That was the pivotal moment I started with, in this this list of putting all my pivotal moments down and in the story but I just remember being soul crushing. You know, I'm still here today because of that promiseâthat vow that I made.
Janel: And then after you know 25, 30 more yearsâ20 more years of living through that nightmare and now, you know, being away from it for eight years and in a healthy relationship where I'm decompressing, where Iâm healing, where I'm figuring all this stuff out. What went wrong, where did it go wrong, how did it go wrong, how many ways did it go wrong, and finally understanding why it had the opportunity to go wrong in the first place. It has been a really really really profound transformation for me to finally have the answers for what happened. And for me for probably about a year now I've shifted from, âoh my God I don't know what's going onâ to âoh, that detail? That detail goes with that. That detail goes with that. That story was because of this. This story was because of that.â And so for me Iâve definitely shifted from the âI'm still trying to figure this outâ to the âoh, now I'm categorizing all the memories that I have that keep popping up that are triggered by a feeling of a memory in this situation.â So I've spent a lot of time in the last year going through all of that and just making sense of it.
Janel voiceover: Well that's a good place to put a pin in this episode and pause because it's funny, this episode, like the last episode was recorded in January of 2024. An additional year of experience, and unpacking my story, and a few more very significant discoveries have given me such a richness and a fullness of the things that we were talking about, and I understood, but there wasn't always a practical application of how to put that together. So it's really neat and inspiring for me to sit here a year later and have those revelations, and that understanding of how far I've come, and the situations and the circumstances, and things that happened in the past year to grow me that much more than of the theories of knowing there's patterns being able to sit here today and go oh yeah I figured out how to identify those patterns. It's not just that the patterns are there and I can see them but to have that, I don't know, redemption maybe? That I know how to actually explain how to unpack those ideas, those theories, those patterns, to offer practical solutions and simple steps, to go oh, we can implement this too. It comes in very, very timely moment for me.
Janel voiceover: The girls are excited to share some of our story and next week we're going to talk about finding those patterns, identifying those patterns, and when we try to change them how sometimes it doesn't feel safe for us to do that. What I have learned is thatâs all about learning to transform your story. Taking it one step at a time and doing the best you can with what you have to move forward. Join us next time as we talk more about Transforming Our Story
Janel voiceover: [music] Thanks so much for joining us today! Iâm Janel Guevara. I hope you caught a glimmer of hope, a glimpse of possibility, and a sprinkle of fairy dust. Join us next time when we take another step towards Transforming Your Story.
Janel voiceover: Content for educational purposes only. Our stories are not your stories Please be cautious and contact your local domestic violence hotline if you need support. [music ends]
