 this video is sponsored by better help which is perfect seeing as how this Friday I have my very first appointment with a therapist yes your girl is going to therapy a sentence that I am both really proud to be saying but also kind of embarrassed to be saying this late in the game in my life but let me explain why for a very long time I just didn't know what I would talk about with a therapist number one because I do invest so much time in therapeutic processes and mediums through my work and number two because I'm really close with my family and so I've never felt like I don't have an opportunity to voice how I'm feeling or to work out things when I'm not feeling like I have all the answers but what do you do when you're in a place where you can financially afford therapy and you realize that your family is probably the people that you should be talking to a therapist about and since I know the advice I would give to all of you is talk to a licensed counselor that's the advice that I am finally taking for myself so if like me you're in a place where you realize you probably need that I personally suggest you look into a service like better help for these five reasons one there is a broad range of expertise and better helps counselor network which depending on where you live may not be locally available in your area to better help is made with accessibility in mind which means it all happens right through your phone find a counselor set appointments for weekly video or phone calls and even text updates to your counselor all on the better help app three better help is committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed at any time for better help is more affordable than traditional offline counseling and financial aid is available and lastly yeah girl can get you 10% off your entire first month of counseling with better help to get this incredible offer all you gots to do is go down to the info box and click the link or go to better help.com that's B E T T E R H E L P dot com slash B O O D Y because that code is gonna allow you to get 10% off your first month of counseling with better help alright so if you've all been Instagram you know that right now is a difficult time for me I actually feel like I'm going through postpartum struggles right now eight months after RAU was born I don't want to say depression because I don't want to use that word lightly but I do note that this has been unusually difficult and emotional time for me and I couldn't really quite figure out like why like why are all these things coming up for me now and then it hit me so Esther Perot has a brand new game that's called where should we begin and it's a conversation card game I keep it in my kitchen so once in a while I might just like open the deck and then ask whoever's around whatever question I find so I popped it one day and the question was what is your role in your family and I can't remember who was in the kitchen I asked and they answered and then they asked me the question and I answered and as I was talking I started like really tearing up so I excused myself to the bathroom and it just like released so much like I cried for quite some time and I thought there's something here so I want to just say as a note if you're a family member and you're watching this video you're always welcome to my content but I just want to put a massive caveat I am not saying any of this to trigger a response out of you and the reason why I think the best person to talk to about these feelings is one just open air just to hear myself speak and to share with all of you but two for the more to a therapist is because I don't want you to take on anything that I'm saying with guilt with a sense of responsibility or with an inclination that you need to come up with some kind of solution everything I'm experiencing I know I'm just experiencing and I'm going through and there is nothing nothing at all that you have to do differently but I acknowledge that the role that I have within my family has completely changed and it has been changing for years now but really especially since October to now it is 360 to what it was three years ago and that is weighing on me the biggest change obviously of the role that I play in my family is I now play the role of a mother a role that we all know would come with changes and with exciting changes at that but some hard ones and the hard change that I have experienced that I didn't plan for is how much more fear guilt and shame that I would live with on a daily basis I feel like as a mom especially as a new mom you are in a state of fight or flight almost constantly you're always thinking about what could go wrong what might be dangerous what you should be doing or what you shouldn't be doing at that at that given moment and it sits as this like it's like a wave that's just hitting you against the throat all day long I actually remember because I'm an aunt of two incredible young awesome people and I remember when my nephew was around five years old something happened that I honestly replayed my mind probably every day for years and instill to this day if I think about it it makes me really tear up and it makes me sad because when you love somebody so much the last thing that you want is for you to be the reason that harm comes to them so I took my nephew and one of those wagons that you pull and my parents live on a square which means a street that you only drive on if you live on that street so there's low traffic on the road and I raced with my nephew in the wagon and I pulled him behind me and he was yelling like faster faster and so I got up to full speed and then I stopped and I huffed and puffed and then I looked back and he was way in the middle of the road like he had fallen out of the wagon and I didn't notice he was fine but I just kept imagining like what if a car came you know like what if he hit his head like what if this and again like that experience like sat with me and since I've had Ryu I feel like I've had five of those I feel like I've had so many of those moments that you're just not aware of how much danger you're putting this small person in who completely depends on you and completely trusts you so that's a part of the fear guilt and shame that I'm really trying my best to learn how to cope with so I don't live my life usually with this sense of fight or flight that again that's looming underneath the surface so it's very atypical of me and as a result it's taking a big toll on my body I have so many more gray hairs than I had before I gave birth and I also started balding a little bit which is normal for postpartum as well too I should say that but I do acknowledge that I have to find a way to manage this stress a little bit better my mom assures me that it never goes away because then your kids grow up and then they move countries and you don't know where they are and then again that fear always is there but I have a sneaky suspicion and if you're a parent let me know I have a suspicion that it gets better and by suspicion I mean a dream another way that my role in my family dynamic has completely shifted is I went from being selfish to self-full to now self sacrificing a place I do not plan to stay at so let me walk through each of the various stages with you I am the youngest in my family and furthermore I am what you see when you come to this channel I'm all over the place I'm sporadic I am spontaneous I am impulsive and as a result I just do and I live and I exist and because I was the youngest no one is depending on me to be the responsible one and I never have been the responsible one so I've always just been a very selfish person selfish meaning me first in many cases me only I do what I want I do what works best for me now I'm part of a family dynamics I'm not an asshole about it but I can admit to the fact that I probably didn't take on the responsibility even in ways that I probably could have earlier on I do believe that when I met Jared I did transition I did mature to become a more self-full person self-full because I have to ensure that I'm getting and maintaining my sense of self-esteem and integrity and joy so that I have the ability to give to other people and through my self-fullness I think I found the best parts of who I am I think I also improved all of my relationships no duh I think that was the place in the space that I experience the most joy and could give the most joy now as a new mom I have gone through spans mind you again I have an eight month old baby but this is how unwilling I am to be a self-sacrificing person I have gone through a couple of months of being self-sacrificing and I hate it self-sacrificing essentially means that I don't make time for self-care that I don't feel like I'm getting to tend to what matters to me because I put myself second not just to Ryu but to the home and to everybody who is in the home and again if you follow me on Instagram you are aware that we have a house that has a constant revolving door there's always people coming in which means there are always people to clean up after people to clean for people to cook for people to entertain and as a result I don't get to get to the things that matter to me and I spent a lot of days going to bed thinking like what did I do for myself today what did I accomplish that was on my list so I actually had a pretty big pretty big breakdown maybe a week ago two weeks ago at this point where essentially my brother-in-law was staying with us and Kray so Kray is Jared's brother who we hired really early on after I was born to be like we need help just because again we could spend our entire life cooking and cleaning alone and because when we moved into a new house there was so much housework to do and we have a quarter of an acre of land here so there's a lot that you could busy yourself a lot with just home maintenance stuff and of course with the baby so we hired Jared's brother just to come nine to five just to help out like he literally just comes checks it to do list and like helps out but he got sick and he was out for two weeks and those two weeks coincided when my brother-in-law came so we had a guest I had less help and then Rai was going through sleep regression through that time not only did I feel like there wasn't enough hours in the day I felt like I didn't have enough hands I felt like I didn't have enough oxygen I felt like I just didn't have enough me and I had a night with Rai you where I was up with her I actually took her because again we had a guest over and my brother-in-law was working too so I felt really guilty when Rai would cry in the night and so one night she just would not go to sleep and I felt like he could hear her so I and I also think there's no point in both Jared and I not being able to sleep so I just took Rai you and I went downstairs into my office and I closed the door and I just let her scream and cry it out for four hours and during those four hours I didn't react I mean I can't react I just let her I was just here for her I just made sure she didn't bash her head against the wall or do anything dangerous I just let her climb on top of me and spin and cry and then climb on top of me and then pull my hair and spin and cry and I just sat there like a statue for those hours and I thought to myself like wow I really kept it together until the next day when I don't even know what triggered me and it just started flowing out of me and I called my mom and I just screamed into the pillow like I need you here I need you here I need you here because I don't know if I'm doing this right I need you here because I need help I need you here because I need somebody who's here just for me and Jared has to be here the same way that I am for the business and for Rai you and for the house and for the guests and so as much as he is an incredible partner he's also torn in a million places and I just wanted someone to fly down to be like I'm just here for you so I just like begged my mom I'm like I know there's a pandemic happening and it is selfish and everything but I just need you here and she came that to be said that was a lesson for me of like I don't know what I have to do in life mind you this is all circumstantial again like having somebody stay with us during a time when the person who helps us wasn't in or available to be in is a circumstantial stressor and I acknowledge how privileged I am to even make the decision to say like I can't allow that what was happening to continue like self-sacrificing me is just not the best me it's not a high functioning me and I am fighting tooth and nail with every resource that I have to continue to be a self-full person rather than a self-sacrificing person which I know is a battle that a lot of moms end up losing but man another way that my role has changed within my family dynamic is on the financial end and this is like one of my greatest joys and also a crippling fear of mine all at the same time so again if you're a family member watching this please don't say don't think that I'm saying this to make you feel bad or to make you feel like I don't feel good now being the person that I am in the family so again I went from being the youngest least successful least stable person to now being the opposite in my family and as a result we hired Jared's brother full-time and now I hired my sister full-time and my joy in life is to be able to treat my mom and dad mostly my mom because my dad very rarely allows it but it is my joy to be my mom's sugar mama and to buy her things and to spoil her and to get her whatever you know she desires and it makes me very aware that I can't afford to fail for a long time I wanted to succeed because I wanted to be great in the world and I wanted to have an impact in the legacy and I wanted to be a provider in my family and to be able to provide opportunities and to give back to them in the way that they've given to me for so many years and now that I am that person kind of all of a sudden all at once it is beautiful but also terrifying and terrifying because I exist in an industry that is so fickle so people needing me means that I desperately need you and that's a lot of pressure to put on all of you as well and I don't expect you to do anything with that again not saying this for like any reason other than just communicating what I am going through because that's what this YouTube channel is about and Lauren who is extremely successful and was extremely successful in her corporate job in Canada leaving her job to come to LA to work with me was a thousand percent my idea I actually pressured her for years to do this and now that it's finally happening I am scared shitless that I will let her down Lauren this is not to say like you should feel guilty it's for me to tell you that I would feel like a failure and a letdown if I couldn't facilitate this opportunity for you and the opportunity to give you an opportunity to build yourself up to the highest ability and it's good fear and I'm grateful I'm grateful for the ability and the privilege to have such a fear but it is still fear the last change that I want to note this isn't about family dynamic it's about my social dynamic is mourning the loss of my single and free self and I think it's actually really logical that I have to mourn it now eight months later and I never really had to mourn it when I got pregnant or when I had Ryu because of the pandemic so prior to maybe a month ago people weren't going out people weren't being social people weren't going to events people weren't going to conferences so if I couldn't go to stuff I didn't really feel the pain of it because nobody else was going either but now that the world is opening back up and people are traveling and succeeding and doing cool things together socially and I can't I'm confronted with the feelings that are associated with that that I just didn't have to look at for a long time I feel like I as a result have a very negative relationship with social media that I know that I've got to put a handle on because in essence I'm so busy and torn all day long that when I do have moments to myself they're like four minutes at a time and if you've got four minutes or 30 seconds what are you gonna do open up social media and just scroll for a second and every time I scroll I feel less than which I've never really experienced before I mean of course I've experienced it before but I think before I might have been motivated by the less than this because I had the time and the ability to say oh if this person did this let me spend tonight doing that you know what let me actually refocus myself because seeing this and realizing I want that is informing me on what I should do going forward but I just don't have the luxury of changing much about my life right now because another life is so dependent on me so even if I do see someone doing something cool the thing I can do about it because I can't participate in that cool thing with you you know the Maya Angelou quote which is like you have to change your circumstances or your attitude and because I can't change my circumstances right now I definitely have to change my attitude but moreover I do have to change my habits around what I do during those five minutes apiece that I have because I am still happy for other people and I am happy with my life I'm just adjusting those of you have followed me for a while know that one of the therapeutic processes that I gift myself with is quarterly I put together a list of things that I love about myself and I make it a short novel and then I put together a list of things that I'm neutral about things that I can't change that I don't feel great about but I don't feel bad about either I just accept them as a part of the Boudre and Brady lifestyle and then I put a middle list of things that are bugging me things that I actually can change or do something about that I think about every day or once a week that are bothering me and then I make an action plan to move things on that list either up into things I love or down into things that I accept so I did my quarterly list the other day I feel better thank you for being here and for listening I started this video with the tide coming in on my throat and now it feels like calm seas in my belly just even saying that out loud and I think in saying this we can all agree that that appointment on Friday is definitely not one that I should be skipping I'm looking forward to it and if any of you want to examine this fascinating thing called life with a professional counselor securely online please do yourself a favor and look into the sponsor of this video better help because they are a leader in online therapy they have a network of 22,000 therapists available all over the world and they're more affordable than traditional offline counseling plus they have financial aid and as I said at the top I'm also offering 10% off your first month of counseling with better help when you go down to the info box and click that link or go straight over to better help.com slash booty that's B E T T E R H E L P dot com slash B O O D Y because that code is going to allow you to get 10% off your first month of counseling with better help.