Change, Perspective, Honesty, and Truth

February 06, 2025

Episode 5 - Change, Perspective, Honesty, and Truth

Explicit Content Warning: language (hell, oh God, shxx)
Trigger Warning: domestic violence, verbal abuse, physical abuse, abusers, divorce

Host and Guests: Janel, Melinda, and Ariana

Anyone who has tried to change habits and unhealthy behaviors knows it isn’t always easy. Join us as we talk about how important it is to feel safe before we can implement positive change, dig into the details of our story, and how the lack of it can spiral us into fear. We share what led us to discover and confront the domestic violence in our life, and some of the mental anguish we faced to break free.

Length: 31:34

If things don’t feel right in one or more of your relationships, even though no one is physically harming you, I encourage you to reach out to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Despite its name, they recognize that abuse is more than fists and yelling. I wish I had known that thirty years sooner.
NDVH has resources on their website that explain abuse in all its forms and what you can do. If you contact them, they have staff who understand your fears, hesitance to trust new people, and know exactly what you’re going through. They can help you with the next step. You can call them at 800-799-7233, text 88788, or visit them online at https://www.thehotline.org. Stay safe. 💕

For more information about Janel’s programs and resources, visit her website: www.coachingwithjanel.com

Episode Transcript

Transform Your Story Podcast - Episode 5: Change, Perspective, Honesty, and Truth - January 2025

Janel voiceover: Hello there, it’s Janel Guevara.
Janel voiceover: I want to let you know that today’s subject is heavy and needs a trigger warning. What started as an airy conversation about change, progressed into a discussion on domestic violence. While we don’t get graphic, it is a sensitive topic.
Janel voiceover: This is another episode recorded in January of 2024. When I began editing the audio, I contemplated including it at all. I felt the irritated vibe we had the day we recorded it, but a year later, it’s out there waving like a flag in a hurricane. I struggled with the decision because there is a necessary, often overlooked message to it that would be lost without context.
Janel voiceover: After careful consideration, I decided it wouldn’t be authentic if we didn’t include the very real feelings of irritation and anger that accompany the healing process. As Anne Lamont shares in her book Bird by Bird, if others want you to write warmly of them, they should have treated you better. That goes for podcasting too. I hope our vulnerability allows you to see your story in a new light.

Janel voiceover: [music] Welcome to Transform Your Story. I’m 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. Let’s transform your story. [music ends]

Janel: I'm not sure I've met anybody who enjoys making changes.
Ariana: [laugh]
Janel: Hi, I’m Janel Guevara. Welcome to transform your story. Again, I have my daughters Ariana and Melinda with me. And I’d get them to say hi but we all know that they don't. So can y’all just grunt?
Ariana: Hi.
Janel: Okay, Melinda’s not grunting. Are you alive?
Melinda: Do I grunt? I don’t know, grunting sounded rude.
Janel: Well, you won’t say hello, so at least breathe loudly or something. [laugh] Oh my gosh. So the first episode we talked about, you know, figuring out your story details and a little bit about your story. Last time we talked about figuring the details behind the details. At the end of last podcast we were talking about how when you make changes—make healthy changes, that sometimes it feels scary. The healthy actually seems unhealthy when you've been stuck in patterns for so long. I just kinda wanna talk about that today because even in your story, if you're, you know, as a writer or content creator, you know, it can be scary to step out and share your story, or tell your story, or you know, make the change or make the commitment to, you know, I wanna grow my audience, so I'm gonna be on social media twice a week, and I'm gonna do this, and I'm gonna do that. Making those changes can be scary because it's like “what if I put my effort and my energy in this and it doesn't work?”
Janel: ‘Cause part of my story is I've tried this before and it doesn't work. I think that is part of the reason that change can be so scary is that even if we're making healthy changes we've—Oh God. Particularly when you come from an abusive background and you're standing up and going “this isn’t right. We need to do something different.” And everybody's like “No! You're the person that's wrong, and you're the person with the issue, and you're the person who just needs to come to our way of thinking.” And so when change becomes scary because we've got abusers that are, you know, upset with us because we wanna rock the boat and we want them to stop abusing us?
Ariana: Rude
Janel: Yeah it is rude. But you know, it is change because, you know, after those experiences all our life of being told where the wrong one, not being supported when we’re actually trying to do the right thing, it messes with our heads. So, today let’s talk about change. Changing habits, changing patterns, changing the way we think, changing how we look at our story.
Janel: Gosh, probably 20 years ago when I was still publishing my magazine, I wrote an article on perspective. A dear friend of mine, she’s the assistant editor, she and I had been friends since high school. Well, she lived in Philly. We were invited to be faculty at a writer's conference. So after I stayed an extra day or two, we went and toured Philadelphia because I had never been. She took me to one of her favorite places. The Irish potato famine memorial down there in the Philly area.
Janel: And it struck me in that moment because we had been talking in the conference about perspective and things like that. One of the things that I was sharing on my panel for a question that I was asked is, you know, about perspective and, you know, different perspectives produce different things for different situations. And two people can look at the exact same thing and see two very different things. Some people look at the curtains and see they’re blue. Other people look at the same curtains and “Oh look at that. Velvet. I love the drape on the valances.” It's the same curtain, but the two people are describing it. After the conference, we went to the potato memorial. It struck me because it's a 365 memorial and the entire thing is beautiful. Every little place that you move and to go around it, there's another beautiful carving. But while I was there, I noticed that when I was standing on one side I got to see one side of the memorial and if you went to the other side it was completely different. And I took a picture of the monument. At the top, the only thing in both pictures was you could see this woman's hand sticking out of the top of it. If I hadn't told you, or you hadn't been there to see it and I just showed you these pictures, there is a possibility that you looked at it and looked at them separately and you would not have realized they were the same monument. Except for the lady with the hand.
Janel: And I think that is what neurodivergence, covert abuse, and you know, this generational trauma really does for us. People call it different things and have a different understanding of it, but some of it is perspective. We can look at the curtains and know they're blue, but changing our perspective on what's actually going on can be daunting. Because some of us have felt wrong so many times in our life that it's like “Is this the right thing? I got it wrong last time, and the time before, and the time before that, and the time before that. Is this the right thing?” So when you're wading through all of the details of your story and you're like, “I think it's this or maybe it's that? Is it really?” We kind of become gunshy to wary of making a change in our thinking what we believe and what we see unless it's right there in front of our face and undeniable because we could be wrong and change is hard. Getting out of unhealthy patterns is hard.
Janel: And one of the things that really has struck me in my healing journey and unpacking my story is, you know, what were the lessons. And I talked about last time, we talked about safety and Melinda actually offered some really good points about feeling safe and how safe doesn't feel safe when you haven't known it. So I kind of wanted to talk about that, and one of the things that we can do to build safety into our stories—both our life stories and the stories we share online. If you've seen my 5 Steps to Share Hope From Your Story, I write about how one of my articles that I wrote back in 2007 was simply titled “Difficult Christians.” [sigh] God, that article saw tens of thousands of visitors. I mean there were some months it was Googled by thousands of people. It only ever received 2 comments, but I found out a year—I watched a year later that it had been shared and shared and shared and shared and shared and shared.
Janel: In 2007 when I wrote it, it was like right before my accident, I mean my life had always been crazy, the accident was a pivotal point because my ex-husband used that and said “God punished you.” So that really rattled me because of this Gothard-esc spiritual abuse “If you're unhappy it's because—your suffering is for God. You've clearly sinned and done something wrong.” So up until that point, I mean, I had really felt that, you know, if you're doing the right thing, God will bless you, and, you know, I had followed this cookie cutter ideal of being a homeschooling mom, and, you know, listening to my husband, and the whole submission thing, and all of this which is just, you know, if you haven't seen the Shiny Happy People documentary that they did on Amazon about the Duggar family, if your story is anything like this, you really need to watch it, because it was eye-opening.
Ariana: Yeah
Janel: Absolutely eye-opening for me to realize how much the doctrine that I had experienced through my life was simply this cult-like abuse. And in this state when my auto accident happened, my ex was like “God is punishing you.” And that just turned everything on in my head. Everything. I was like, I've done all this work, I have done—I defined myself as a writer and it’s my identity because it’s the only thing that I got joy out of in life. And it was the only thing that I enjoyed in life is because all of the rest of my life was manipulated by this covert narcissistic abuse in the name of Jesus. And so to get out of this, this mindset, this understanding, this headspace, it took a pretty significant event. And things unfolded, and that's for another day.
Janel: But when I made the changes, I doubted myself. Was divorcing him the right thing to do? Would God be upset? Would God be angry? Was this a big mistake? Did I just need to hang on for a miracle, did I—and everything. The right thing to do was divorce him. It was life-saving for me and the four kids. Melinda was living elsewhere and it just [sigh] change is hard. It was scary and I doubted every decision. But at some point, you have to go wait a minute, if I make this decision, it's gonna resonate with the old pattern, and I need to do something different. And I need to be intentional, and I need to move forward. Then when I met my husband, I learned what safety felt like for the first time and I was able to relax. It was mind-blowing. That change really riveted my entire life and sent reverberations in ways that I didn't understand. Didn't know would reverberate the way it did. But making that change was like yeah we need to do this.
Janel: [sigh] Steps to making changes. You know, most life coaches are like “Oh, you just set a goal, and you just do it.” When you're on the neurodivergent scale and you have experienced complex trauma your executive function doesn't work like normal people. And it's like Melinda waxed poetically and she talks about if you wake up and you don't have to think about brushing your teeth in the morning, consider yourself lucky. But—
Melinda: Oh and by the way, if the way that works is you don't have get up and think about brushing your teeth because you've already established a routine that you have to follow or you will forget to brush your teeth, you still count.
Janel: [laugh]
Melinda: It counts. That is simply what Janel was talking about with the accommodations. But like, that's what that is guys. When people are constantly looking at this, taking account of like, oh do you have sensory issues, like wearing socks? And if your answer is “well no, because I turn them inside out so that I don't have [inaudible] part of my little toe in my shoe,” then you still have sensory issues, you just learned to work around them. But they're still there.
Janel: [laugh] Melinda’s a little salty about that. But I understand why because you know it is a thing. And then—
Melinda: Well, so many people have looked at me and they're like “Well, do you have sensory issues?” because when my daughter's stuff came up, they’re like, “Well, what about you?” And I’m like “Well, I have this, this, and this.” And they’re like, “Yeah, well, everybody has that.” And I'm like “OK but I only named like the three that came to the top of my head. You don't know the 53 other things that aren't coming to mind because I’m just not thinking about it right this minute.” There's more there.
Melinda: You know, I read this really awesome thing the other day, where if you have some kind of like chronic illness or chronic condition, which I do, you know, you look at people and you’re like, “Oh yeah well you know I have to do this so many times, or this happens all the time,” and they’re like “Oh, you know, that happens to everybody.” And I’m like, “you know what, everybody else goes pee too, but if you do it 50 times a day there’s a problem.” Same thing.
Janel: [laugh] It’s like when you are in abusive situations and you’re neurodivergent and you're not diagnosed, life feels like that. You do, you get stuck in this helplessness of, well why—
Melinda: Abusive relationships in general, you get stuck there. Because they're trying to manipulate you into doing what they want. But if you're neurodivergent then you have that to begin with. And it makes it just that much worse.
Janel: Yeah it does.
Melinda: I mean I look at Janel in like all the time she was like married to her first husband. She did so much stuff. Like when I was pregnant, I was so sick to my stomach. I was constantly sick. And Janel was like “Oh, I just powered through that.” And I’m like How? How do you power through that? It’s masking from different levels of abuse.
Janel: Yeah, it really is. When Melinda was pregnant, she did, she just laid there. She was just incapacitated. And I mean, I was worried about her. There were some times I went over, and I feel like I made you some meals, and the [laugh] ginger popsicles I made. She took one look at them and was like “Ugh I can’t do that.”
Melinda: Melinda has food issues you guys, like really big food issues.
Ariana: [inaudible] [Ginger is nasty]
Janel: [laugh] I think ginger is good. I like ginger.
Melinda: I like ginger, but not on its own. It’s good in a teriyaki chicken.
Janel: Yeah, well and—
Melinda: It’s missing a few ingredients.
Janel: And making a change is like when Melinda first started coming around, I cooked with a lot of vegetables and strange food and I—Well, not strange food but I put vegetables and everything.
Melinda: It’s strange food.
Janel: [laugh]
Melinda: She also, because of her brain injury, she had like, this whole list of allergies and it was like, Oh my God, it was strange food.
Janel: Basically I could eat—I ate meat because if I didn't I would have died. I had like having 45 or 50 sensitivities to food that would trigger my brain injuries.
Ariana: Major sensitivities.
Janel: Yeah, major sensitivities that would trigger a major immune response. And so I really needed to be in a bubble somewhere. And because all of this happened, my ex-husband shamed me for it because if I had just listened to him and submitted more, God would have blessed me and would never have had to put me in an accident and almost killed me.
Melinda: Yeah, let’s completely ignore the fact that all the stress he put you through for 15 years prior to that had nothing to do with your current predicament that led you to be knocked down even further and prevented you from healing faster because all he did was kick you when you were down.
Janel: Yeah, we’ve lived through this. We're still a little bit salty about it. But for me to make the change out of that type of toxic environment terrified me. Absolutely terrified me. And to get into my relationship with my current husband, who means the world to me, and is like, the best thing that has ever happened to me.
Ariana: What it wasn’t me?
Melinda: It was definitely me, you guys.
Janel: [laughter] Yes.
Janel: Making those changes is hard because—
Ariana: That’s the point. Abuse is to make you doubt yourself and you know—
Janel: Absolutely.
Ariana: —make you believe that your intuition and your decisions and everything you have to think and believe and do is wrong. And you're wrong. And everything's wrong. And that along with the fact that you, maybe unconsciously or consciously made the decision to be in the relationship, to stay in the relationship, it just makes you doubt everything.
Janel: It’s like a double whammy.
Ariana: Yeah, it's like not only are you like, “Okay, am I repeating this pattern?” You're also like “Okay can I even trust myself?” Then when it comes to neurodivergence. Oh my gosh. Like, you start from the earliest possible age, if you're undiagnosed, not being able to believe yourself and your own experiences because everybody your whole life has gaslight you because, well, “wearing socks isn’t a big deal, what's your problem?” Or “Eating ginger isn't a big deal what's your problem?”
Melinda: Mm-hmm.
Ariana: And you know, “talking to people isn't that hard why are you so terrified?” Like—
Melinda: Oh yeah, let's not talk about the number of times that your parents are just like, “Of course your friends love you. Like why wouldn’t anybody love you? You’re a peach” or whatever. It’s just like—
Ariana: Mm-hmm
Melinda: Nobody acknowledges or understands that doubt of yourself inside. Like if you leave a social event and don't immediately start panicking about all the things that you said wrong and then like, I don't know commiserate on it for the next seven years, [laughter] you’re not our people. I am very jealous, and congratulations on whatever it is you did to get there, but I am not there. Not fun.
Janel: This is where we’ve been. I’ve been there for a long time. I guess the thing is we don't want to be stuck here.
Melinda: No.
Janel: And getting out of the mindset of being afraid to tell your story, being afraid to write your book, being afraid to make the choice to go on a trip, or invest in your relationship, or leave your current one that is you know, not making you happy in.
Melinda: Is it that people are afraid to write their story or is it they’re afraid to confront their story?
Janel: Yeah. That’s where I was going with this but yeah no. The change we have to make is not just telling our story, it is allowing ourselves to step back into the memories and the history and understand and feel what it was that we were feeling in that moment and be honest with ourselves. I think the very first thing to do to change our story and transform our stories and to be able to use our story and unlock it, is honesty and it's truth.
Janel: People are like, “oh but I’m honest.” Honest is being upfront and truthful about what you feel. It's different than the truth. When you talk about truth, truth is the facts of the situation without manipulation. I think the biggest thing that people who have lived through hell and have stories that they don't know what to do with, I think the biggest biggest biggest thing that they can do is be both honest with themselves about what they feel, and what they felt about a situation, and be truthful about what's actually happening. Because until you confront both of those, you're gonna stay where you are because you're not asking questions, “Well, why am I feeling like this. Why is going on? Why is that happening?”
Janel: But you cannot be honest and truthful with yourself if you are not in a safe place. That was probably one of the biggest things that I took away is if I don't feel safe in my body, safe in my environment, safe with the people that I'm around, I am not safe. My body does not respond as safe. That means I'm not safe. It's like a triune thing. I don’t know what to call it. I don't have a good acronym or snazzy example for it. But in order to be genuinely honest with yourself about your emotions and be truthful about what happened to you, you have to feel safe enough to be able to process it.
Janel: Right now—I've been working on a journaling course for several years now, and I realized one of the biggest pieces and the reasons why people don’t journal is because they don't feel safe with their thoughts. Either safe that somebody else won’t read them, or safe enough to actually go “What happened?” And it's a big piece. Even neurodivergent children to regulate their emotions, like one of the things that they do with autistic children when they're diagnosed young is they teach them to regulate their emotions. And even as adults who are late diagnosed, we have to learn to regulate our emotional system, our nervous system, to bring our anxiety and our anxiousness, you know everything around, us down to where we're emotionally more grounded. But we cannot do that unless we feel safe. When we're on this journey to do a new thing and we've had all this stuff happen to us and all these details in our story, we need to be asking ourselves the question, “Do I feel safe?”
Janel: You know, some people don't meditate. And some people need to meditate and calm down. And other people need to do dance and movement to get out the anxious feelings. Different people are different. Sitting and meditating upon whether you feel safe or not is not the way that everybody has to do it. You know, sometimes I dance to feel my body and it's like, “do I feel safe in my body right now?” And the answer is, “well if I'm gonna process this whole piece of trauma over here, I don't know.” And so I allow the movement to somatically release some of that fear and that anxiety to allow myself the safety to sit down and then meditate and go, “Okay, what am I feeling? Where is this going?”
Ariana: And sometimes, if you’re like us, your body is always saying “ouch.” Something always hurts. So it doesn’t feel pleasant to do that. Ever.
Melinda: I feel like we should mention because we’ve mentioned that we have chronic illnesses, if you are stuck in a state of chronic PTSD, the symptoms will appear as autism and ADHD. They are the same and if you continue in that place, the stress on your body will give you chronic illness.
Janel: Yeah.
Melinda: Like this is a for real thing. You’re not just mentally upset. Your body will respond. Because your body doesn't understand that it’s just emotions. And I know you guys have heard this, but your body doesn't know that you're feeling something because of a scary thought and not a cougar trying to eat you.
Janel: Yeah
Melinda: So you’re living in a serious state of chronic stress and it’s another reason you really need to try to figure out how to feel safe or figure out a strategy to get somewhere that is safe. Because you will end up in chronic illness and your situation will go downhill from there.
Janel: Yeah. My actual background is naturopathic medicine. I spent seven years working as a holistic health consultant teaching people that we are not just a mind, we're not just a body. We are mind, body, and soul. And what we do in our head affects our body. Ironically, my ex was also a naturopath and taught classes about how, you know, we’re mind and body and soul and yet, this was all going on, and I was so disconnected. You know, while I was putting whole grain bread and lots and lots of vegetables in my stomach, the trauma and the stress of everything else going on in my life was like killing my digestive system. We're living in this state of stress and our body is just like breaking down and going to shit because it was not created to cope in this kind of environment.
Janel: When, you know, you're neurodivergent, basically the brain is wired different to begin with, and you have a higher sensitivity to stimulus. So when you're stressed out and you're extra stressed out because you're neurodivergent and then you're trying to do all these normal things, it really does wreak havoc in the body.
Janel: One of the first things that, you know, most people don't talk about is when we begin, more than what you put in your body, more than what you watch on TV, more than what you read, you need to figure out how to become safe in your body. And if you don't feel safe in your body that's a whole thing.
Janel: So how do you start with safe? If you suspect that you are in some kind of abusive relationship when you're here in the United States call the domestic violence hotline. Get on the website and look at some of the ways abuse happens. Their counselors can help you and talk with you about an exit strategy. In my situation, I'm like, well he's not beating me, so there must be no domestic violence, why would I call them? The answer is domestic violence is more than just somebody beating you. It is emotional, it is spiritual. Anytime someone acts aggressive—
Melinda: Financial.
Janel: Yeah financial. There's a whole laundry list of abuses and whatnot and they address them.
Ariana: Basically if you have a need and they're using it against you.
Janel: Pretty much. Actually that's a really good—
Melinda: Yeah, if you’re being punished for being human.
Ariana: Yeah. If they take away your basic human needs because you're being human.
Janel: Yeah, and you know what, 20 years ago I had no idea. I had absolutely no idea. You know what, the resources that they have online are fantastic. If you need to talk to somebody, you can do it via text, or they can call you. You can call them. Reach out and get support to get to safety.
Ariana: Don’t go to people in the church.
Janel: Yeah.
Ariana: That’s a whole topic.
Janel: Yeah, the people—a lot of times—if you’re in a Christian situation and you have gone to your pastor and expressed some of the experiences, and they tell you all you need to do is pray and submit and just let God, and go. These people are not safe. You need to go to someone who is not a church counselor, not sanctioned. You need to find a licensed therapist who has a set of protocols that they follow to identify abuse. I think that's definitely on the list of one of my biggest regrets is like “Well, I'm a Christian I have to go to the church to resolve this.” And in reality, the church is part of the problem.
Janel: Yes, there are fantastic pastors out there. It was a pastor at the church that I was going to when I walked in and I said “I need some perspective.” And he said “I thought I would have seen you months ago.” And I said “well, I am a woman of faith, and I pray and God gives me through a lot.” And he goes “well, do you know that you have been emotionally and verbally abused?” I'll tell you what. In that moment, he could have reached out and slapped me and I would have been less surprised at what he said. Then he started explaining what he saw and what he had witnessed. Part of me was like, “Well why the hell didn't you come and tell me before?!” And then the other part of it is, I also know that you cannot hear what doesn’t feel safe. And when people say stuff that you desperately need, but you are feeling so unsafe that you can't even listen to what they might say, that you will not hear. Safety is so important if you recognize that you don't have it, reach out to get help so you can possibly find it.
Janel: Change is hard. The first step into change is to realize if you feel safe or not. I'm going to post some resources in the description to help you get out. But the first step to transforming your story is figuring out if you're safe, and you feel safe, and your experiences feel safe, and when they didn't, and when they did, and find some safety. That's a huge huge piece of the puzzle. Simply being able to feel safe, for some of us for the first time in our life, is what will transform your story.
Janel: So we're gonna leave it with that today and we'll come back next time with some other squirrel chasing passage but just know if any of this resonates with you, you are not alone. There are women out there who have lived through this who understand it and can support you.

Janel voiceover: [music] Thanks so much for joining us today! I’m 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. [music end]

Change, Perspective, Honesty, and Truth

Gaining clarity and transforming your story takes some bibbidi bobbidi boo.