Listen in as Dr. Valerie Rein exposes the system of oppression the majority of us have been impacted by, but few of us have a context or a name for. Hear for yourself why her work is being hailed as the most important work of our time.

Dr. Valerie Rein has discovered Patriarchy Stress Disorder (PSD) and created the only science-backed system for helping women achieve their ultimate success, happiness, and fulfillment by healing the intergenerational trauma of oppression. She holds an EdM in Psychological Counseling from Columbia University and a PhD in Psychology from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Her bestselling book, “Patriarchy Stress Disorder: The Invisible Inner Barrier to Women’s Happiness and Fulfillment” has been heralded by Amazon reviewers as "the most important body of literary work of our modern times" and "perhaps the most important book of the century for women." Her cutting-edge programs have helped thousands of women shift from survival to thriving and master the game of "How good can it get?" in their work and personal lives.

• PATRIARCHY STRESS DISORDER (PSD) is generational collective trauma or oppression that women have experienced in the patriarchy for thousands and thousands of years. It manifests in multiple ways but ultimately creates an invisible barrier to women’s ultimate success, happiness, and fulfillment.
• Most of us are socially conditioned to be “Good Girls,” “A Good Wife,” and “A Good Mother,” and as long as we live a life of compliance, we don’t experience a lot of friction.
• Most women are not in touch with our desires; we simply follow the tracks laid down by the Patriarchy in terms of what roles we can fill and how we can live.
• However, once we can see the invisible barrier, we begin the “jailbreak” journey, where we start to reach for our authentic desires and access our inner liberation.
• One of the most significant issues women face is not having role models of women living fully actualized lives who have stepped fully into their own sovereignty and feeling whole in all areas of their lives.
  
• Women may have mastered their lives in one area but still have trouble relaxing, being playful, or considering themselves successful. They can’t identify what’s wrong or what’s holding them back, and this is when the psychology of PSD really begins to get interesting because this oppression lives in our nervous systems, and it must be released and expelled.
• When women go from surviving to thriving, once this hidden system of oppression has been revealed, a daily practice and community are essential to keeping the work alive.

Links:

• YouTube - Dr. Valerie
• Dr. Valerie Rein
• Book: Patriarchy Stress Disorder: The Invisible Inner Barrier to Women’s Happiness and Fulfillment
• Instagram - #PatriarchyStressDisorder (@drvalerierein)
• Facebook - Dr. Valerie Rein
• LinkedIn - Dr. Valerie Rein
• Pema Chodron Books - Amazon.com

Alyssa Neill is a holistic Registered Dietitian, Certified Life Coach, in-training Quantum Alignment Human Design Analyst, and a Nourishment Evangelist, who deeply enjoys exploring all the avenues of nourishment, including & especially (!) those that are culturally taboo.

She works with clients one on one in her private practice and hosts groups, intensives, and retreats. Alyssa loves nothing more than creation, expression, learning, and connecting. She climbs, dances, hikes, and adores being anywhere outside.

Alyssa is a Human Design G-Center Authority Projector, a Cancer Sun, Pisces Moon, and Capricorn Rising. While she appreciates all of these ways to define who she might be in relation to you, she also loathes when people try to define her.

This episode covers:

• Reclaiming How We Nourish.
• Nourishment guided by the body's wisdom.
• Stripping away the externalized authority and conditioning (e.g. "you should look like this," "you must eat less," "be smaller here," "bigger here," "bad foods," "be neat," "chew quieter," "don't fart," "that's inappropriate," "masturbation is a sin," "not ladylike," etc.) and reacquainting ourselves with our Selves and our Senses.
• Nourishment guided by our Individualized Inner Authority & Senses (via sensation).
• Less socially acceptable modalities/avenues of nourishment: creative expression, sexuality, sensuality, being int the body, intimacy, etc.
• Why? Well, great damn question. Our life-soul trajectories are often so externalized. We don't trust ourselves because we have been taught not to.
• We have been taught to live within the very specific, often very comfortable structure of existence, and while it has worked well for some, for many of us it a) causes dis-ease if we try to ignore our soul-purpose by overriding internal signaling b) leads us to numbing out c) puts our power outside of ourselves (i.e. consumerism, judgment culture, shame-guilt as drivers), which in turn paralyzes us d) causes massive amounts of confusion, pressure, and tension

Shownotes:

• Alyssa was the one who would bring up uncomfortable conversations at the dinner table.
• She didn’t realize that she was pushing the envelope.
• Stories that reveal Alyssa’s humanity.
• Alyssa’s work in the world is to meet Women where they are and begin the conversation about nourishment, and all avenues of nourishment including menstruation, food, emotional health, sexual health, allowing sensation and pleasure.
• Norms don’t resonate with Alyssa.
• Western society has conditioned us to be separate from our nourishment.
• Alyssa remembers being an adolescent and becoming very self-conscious due to development at an early age.
• We’ve been conditioned to think of sex as predatory vs. a natural part of coming into our sexual essence.
• An experience with disordered eating became a catalyst for Alyssa to recognize her disconnection from her body and her radiance.
  
• Disorder creates disease - because it makes us separate from the truth of who we are.
• Sensation (sensuality) is a huge part of nourishment.
• Our bodies are super organisms working synergistically - even our microbiome responds to what we are feeling.
• When we are in our senses we are not overthinking.
• Alyssa works with clients to help them reframe the narratives they might have around food, body, and everything.
• When we are caring for ourselves we glow with radiance.

Links:

• Jessica Martin: Disrupting The Narrative of Self Limiting Beliefs
• Website: Nourishment Nutrition
• Free 15-minute Chat | nourishmentnutrition
• TheNourishment Web
• Facebook: Nourishment Nutrition
• Instagram • Alyssa Frances Neill, RDN🌙 (@alyssa_neill)
• Book: The Multi-Orgasmic Couple: Sexual Secrets Every Couple Should Know: Chia, Mantak, Chia, Maneewan, Abrams, Douglas, Abrams, Rachel Carlton

Fast forward, and while I have been following her on social media for several years, I recently noticed that she was publishing an important book about race. I asked for a copy, devoured it, and felt deeply excited about its content. I loved it because Jenna doesn’t try to simplify or dumb down what’s happening in the world and why. In it, she calls out middle-class white women to recognize where we unconsciously keep the systems of oppression in place and why. She further argues that if we were to awaken to our power and our willingness to be with difficult truths, we could quite literally change the future for all human beings. Jenna asserts that white women benefit from the very systems that oppress us, and we use our voting power to keep these systems in place because we won’t face where we have been complicit in the oppression of ourselves and others, and where our inaction has determined the current trajectory of this country. This is such an important book, and a powerful conversation- please listen in- I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Jenna Arnold is the author of Raising Our Hands, an educator, social entrepreneur, activist, and mother who lives in New York City with her husband and two children. Jenna was one of the National Organizers of the Women’s March in 2017 and Oprah named her as one of her “100 Awakened Leaders who are using their voice and talent to elevate humanity." For her work as the co-founder of ORGANIZE—an organization focused on ending the waitlist for organ transplants in the US, Jenna was named one of Inc Magazine's "20 Most Disruptive Innovators" and the New York Times called it one of "the biggest ideas in social change." Jenna created the hit TV show on MTV, 'Exiled!' which took spoiled American teenagers to live with indigenous cultures around the world, and while at the United Nations, Jenna created multi-platform programming for MTV and Showtime with A-list celebrities like Jay-Z and Angelina Jolie. Jenna sits on the board of the Sesame Workshop Leadership Council and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her first book, Raising Our Hands, is about how white women can stop avoiding hard conversations, start accepting responsibility, and find their place on the new frontlines (published June 2020).

• Jenna Arnold's grandmother was one of 90 who contracted COVID-19 in her nursing home and is only one of two who survived.
• Mindset is so powerful and important when it comes to what we are facing in the world at the moment.
• All oars in the water - we all need to put our oars in, and row in the same direction.
• The title of Raising Our Hands was so difficult to get to, and yet, so obvious. It symbolizes the way Jenna wants white women to remember that we all need to raise our hands and be counted when it comes to being antiracist and volunteering ourselves for hard conversations, truths, and paradoxes. "I’m guilty, but I’m also willing to learn." That the constant contradictions of who we are, the raising our hand emoji is a great way for us to relate to all the ways in which we need to make ourselves available to be with the truth of what is, in all of it’s complexity.
• We need to learn how to allow paradoxes to stand together and hold “the sacred AND."
• There is a genocide in this country that we do not talk about.
• Abraham Lincoln is the victor and therefore he got to tell the story however he wanted. We have to be careful throughout history of who gets to tell the story.
• When marginalized people are systematically abused, ignored, enslaved, and destroyed, they don’t get to tell a story anyone is willing to hear because it’s not a story of “victory,” yet these are the voices that need to be centered when it comes to telling history.
• Middle class and above American white women need to sit down and be quiet AND stand up and roar.
  
• Middle class white American women have to say, "I’m willing to show up and be messy and imperfect."
• We spend more money on our prisons than our schools.
• The data related to the demographics of white women was not adding up to the psychology of American white women in the voting booths.
• Jenna formed listening circles of women around the country and for four years she asked them questions to have conversations that would give her insight into this paradox that had white women voting for someone that wasn’t aligned with their values.
• Our systems are broken, not our humanity.
• There are 480 sources in the book Raising Our Hands - the information Jenna included is well researched.
• There are billions of dollars lost in wages to the gender pay gap.
• There are exactly zero pronouns referencing “her” or “she” in the Constitution.
• What we have to be willing to be with is the ALL of this big mess. We have to be willing to see what’s not working and see how we have been complicit in allowing it to happen.
• We have to be willing to see that we have been the direct beneficiary of things that have been built off the backs of others.
• We have a desperation of qualifying ourselves instead of realizing that no matter what we have biases, and we have to move out of the binary and back into “the grace of grey."
• Perfectionism is the achilles heel of the country and white women are responsible for holding it up AND, we might not have known how bad the disease of perfectionism is, but it’s getting in the way of us making change happen.
• “There is blood on the hands of voters who voted Trump into office.”
• The founding fathers hated each other, they did not get along and they purposefully excluded women because they were too powerful.
• This isn’t going to be easy but we all need to put our oars in the water and row in the same direction. We need to be willing to be with hard truths and use our voices and our voting power to change the status quo that’s currently killing all of us.

Links:

• Raising Our Hands | Jenna Arnold
• Book: Raising Our Hands: How White Women Can Stop Avoiding Hard Conversations, Start Accepting Responsibility, and Find Our Place on the New Frontlines:
• ORGANIZE
• Inc. 35 Under 35: Organize on Ending the Organ Shortage in the U.S.
• Simon Sinek
• Book: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, Bryan Stevenson — “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
• Facebook: Jenna Arnold
• Twitter: Jenna Arnold (@JennaArnold)
• Instagram • Jenna Arnold (@itsjenna)