Sisters In Law of Attraction

Adler, Trauma, and the Driver’s Seat

Sam brings a birthday gift to the conversation this week: The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, a book that walks through the psychology of Alfred Adler as a back-and-forth between a young man and a philosopher. The very first chapter is titled "deny trauma," and Sam knows going in that the idea is going to be provocative. So she says it out loud anyway. The Adlerian claim at the center of it: we don't suffer from the shock of an experience, we suffer from the meaning we assign to it, because that meaning serves a purpose. Adler called the focus on purpose teleology, as opposed to etiology, which only looks at the cause. Christine pushes back, because trauma is real, and the two of them work through the nuance together. The point isn't that bad things didn't happen to you. It's that ruminating on why they happened keeps you stuck, while asking how you want to move forward is what lets you grow. As Christine puts it, we are not responsible for what happened to us, but we are 100% responsible for how we carry it. To keep it from getting too heavy, they pull in the Summer House reunion, where Sierra finally tells Amanda to stop letting life happen to her and get in the driver's seat. Amanda got comfortable in the victim role because, on some level, it served her, and that comfort is the same trap Adler is describing. From there it comes back to the whole point of this podcast: you are more powerful than you think, your thoughts run on a loop, and you get to decide what you make them mean. The episode also opens with a sweet listener story about a dad who taught his kids that kind thoughts don't belong to you, so if you think something nice, you say it. Next week, they pick up the thread with self-sabotage. In this episode: • A listener's story: if you think something nice, you say it • The Adlerian idea that we suffer from the meaning we assign to trauma, not the event itself • Teleology vs etiology, or purpose vs cause, without getting too academic about it • Why playing the victim can quietly serve you, with a Summer House assist • The difference between visiting your pain and living there • You get to decide what you carry forward Quotes from this episode: "We don't suffer from the shock of the experience, the so-called trauma. We suffer by the meaning we assign to it, because it serves a purpose." - Samantha Bauer "We are not responsible for the things that happen to us that we have zero hand in. But we are 100% responsible for how we carry through life after that event happens." - Christine Goforth "You could sit back and let life happen to you. But let's be honest, life is happening exactly how you want it to, because you're making decisions." - Samantha Bauer "We all have these narrations in our head, stories we tell ourselves. So often they're not true, and they're self-limiting beliefs." - Christine Goforth Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sisters-in-law-of-attraction/id1848757802 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4OngsZM3ofSq3xTUgpChfc All platforms: https://linktr.ee/sistersinlawpod Episode page: https://sistersinlawpod.com/episodes/episode-27-adler-trauma-and-the-drivers-seat.html Sisters In Law of Attraction is hosted by Samantha Bauer and Christine Goforth.

Lift Others, Lift Yourself!

Sam and Christine pick up the high-vibe thread from the spirit guides episode and turn it outward this week. The question on the table: what does it actually do for your mental health when you serve other people? The hook lands in the first minute when Sam shares the line she used to tell her son Max when he was four years old and asked her why he was here. Her answer was simple: your job is to lift others. From there, the conversation gets practical. Helping other people lowers cortisol, the stress hormone, and raises oxytocin, the chemical tied to positive social interactions and generosity. Translation: doing nice things for other people genuinely reduces your anxiety and your depression. But Sam and Christine spend most of the episode pushing back on the idea that service has to be a grand gesture. It doesn't. It's holding the door. It's putting groceries on the belt for the older woman behind you who can't quite reach. It's smiling at someone in the grocery line. It's the small stuff nobody talks about but everybody notices. Christine tells the story of her older daughter Jules, who started doing affirmations in the car on the way to elementary school, then asked the principal if she could lead the whole school in affirmations every Wednesday morning. She wrote them out the night before, stood in front of her classmates with a microphone, and the whole school repeated her words back to her. Then there are the anonymous notes Christine's girls would write and have the office slip into other kids' lunch boxes. Thanks for being my favorite teacher. You're awesome. That's it. That's the whole move. Sam shares about a recent Clemson tailgate in South Carolina, where she and her husband wore the wrong colors and got hauled into strangers' chairs anyway. The guy walked over, handed her husband a beer, and said: we really would like to get to know you, can you please sit? Sam also talks about the bonding that happens during work days with her women's guild raising money for Valley Children's Hospital, folding a thousand napkins side by side. The takeaway is small: this week, turn around in the grocery line and smile at someone behind you. In this episode: • The mental health science of service: cortisol down, oxytocin up • Why the grand gesture myth keeps people from giving at all • Christine's daughter Jules leading affirmations in front of the whole school • Anonymous lunchbox notes and other tiny moves that change someone's day • Sam's southern hospitality moment at a Clemson tailgate • How serving others builds community and pulls you out of your own head Quotes from this episode: "I always told my kids, your job is to lift others. So much of depression or anxiety is being internally focused. If you could just get outside of yourself and go help, you shift." - Samantha Bauer "We have this idea in our head that it has to be some big grand gesture. It doesn't. All you have to do is have your eyes open, be aware of your surroundings, and see where you can help." - Christine Goforth "Helping others decreases cortisol, our stress hormone, and increases oxytocin tied to positive social interactions and generosity. It reduces your anxiety and your depression by default." - Samantha Bauer "If everybody laid all their problems out on a table, you would take yours back in an instant. That's the perspective shift you get from looking up and out." - Christine Goforth Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sisters-in-law-of-attraction/id1848757802 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4OngsZM3ofSq3xTUgpChfc All platforms: https://linktr.ee/sistersinlawpod Episode page: https://sistersinlawofattraction.com/episodes/episode-26-lift-others-lift-yourself.html Sisters In Law of Attraction is hosted by Samantha Bauer and Christine Goforth.

Angels and More Angels

Welcome back to Sisters in Law of Attraction. This week, Sam and Christine pick up where they left off on spirit guides — and the conversation gets deep, personal, and full of the kind of stories that make you sit up a little straighter. Sam opens with a goosebumps-inducing account of her cousin's recent visit to a medium. Without any prompting, the medium asked, "Do you have an aunt whose name starts with M?" — and from there, came a message of love from Sam's late Aunt Mary Lou to her sister, Sam's mom. Then a set of grandparents who passed long before their great-grandchildren were born, asking simply: please tell your kids about us. And finally, a remarkably specific moment — the medium telling her cousin that when her outdoorsy daughter is out fishing, her grandfather and uncle are right there with her. Skeptic or believer, it's a story about the peace these moments bring, and what it means to stay open to the signs around us. From there, Sam and Christine walk through the seven archangels and what each one represents: * Michael — "he who is as God," the protector, aligned with courage, strength, and justice. The go-to, the one who covers it all. * Raphael — "God heals," responsible for healing physical and mental ailments. The archangel Sam leaned on during her mom's recent hospital stay. * Gabriel — "God is my strength," the angel of communication and God's messenger. * Jophiel — "beauty of God," guiding you to see beauty in all things by redirecting your perception back to love. The archangel of artists, writers, and creatives. * Ariel — "lion of God," protector of the earth, its resources, animals, and nature. * Azrael — "whom God helps," guiding the deceased through their transition into the spirit realm. * Chamuel — "he who sees God," bringing peace and restoring order even in the most chaotic situations. Sam shares stories from her mom's recent hospitalization that landed like little miracles: a young woman on the housekeeping team who heard her mom crying and came back after her shift was over to download her favorite gospel station onto her phone — then hugged Sam and her mom and said, "In Christ, I love you." A Christian faith leader who stopped in to pray with her Catholic mom, because faith doesn't care about denominations when someone is hurting. Christine opens up too, sharing two moments from her own health anxiety journey when women in doctors' offices showed up as angels in disguise — one who held her hands and prayed over her in the exam room, and another who quietly bent the rules to give her peace of mind after two long months of waiting for results. "You are an angel," Christine told her. Because that's exactly what she was. The throughline running through it all: angels are among us, in whatever form you understand them, and they show up the moment we're willing to receive them. Once you lift the veil and accept that you're connected to something larger than yourself, the help, the signs, and the peace start finding you. The sisters also dig into the renaissance happening in the Catholic Church among younger generations, the difference between spirituality and formalized religion, and Christine's beautifully simple takeaway from a conversation with her youngest daughter: strip away the labels, and what religion really teaches you is how to be a good human — how to walk through the world with respect, give back to your community, serve others, and build the kind of relationships that hold you up. Plus: Sam's rainy Dallas birthday weekend, getting roped into a "buzz bike" bar crawl at 10:30 a.m. in a poncho instead of shopping for a mother-of-the-bride dress, and a reminder that leaning into what you didn't plan for is usually where the magic lives. Until next time — keep that veil lifted. 🤍

Spring Cleaning

Spring has arrived, the windows are open, and Sam and Christine are looking around their houses with that all too familiar feeling: I've got some work to do. But this episode isn't about scrubbing baseboards. It's about the mental weight that physical clutter quietly puts on you, and how clearing a little bit of your environment can clear a surprising amount of space in your head. The conversation kicks off with Gretchen Rubin's mantra: outer order, inner calm. Sam shares a Psychology Today article on research from Caroline Rogers and Ronna Hart about clutter and wellbeing. The takeaway lines up with what most of us already feel in our bodies. When our environment is tidy, our minds are freer. When it's chaotic, every little pile is whispering at us in the background, asking to be dealt with. From there, Sam and Christine get honest about the stuff most of us live with. The junk drawer of dead batteries and pens that don't write. The chair next to the bed that becomes a clothing graveyard by Wednesday. The kitchen island that collects everyone's accoutrements within an hour. Christine confesses she has built up unloading the dishwasher in her head as a major project, when in reality it takes less than four minutes. That story leads into the heart of the episode: two tiny rules that change everything. The first comes from Gretchen Rubin. If it takes less than a minute, do it right now. One pair of shoes turns into shoes plus a sweatshirt plus a pen plus a coloring book, and suddenly you have a mess that feels like an hour of work. Twenty five seconds in the moment saves a much bigger lift later. The second is the timer trick. When you're dreading a chore, set a timer. Christine promises that whatever your brain is telling you about how long it'll take, it's lying. The mental drag of avoiding a task is almost always heavier than the task itself. They reframe the never ending stuff too. Laundry isn't done. Dishes aren't done. They're cycles. Asking where you are in the cycle is a much kinder question than asking why you're not finished. The conversation widens out. There's a kind of clutter blindness that happens when you live somewhere long enough. The painting that doesn't speak to you anymore, the trinket attached to a chapter that's already closed, the piece of furniture you only kept because it's always been there. None of it is loud, but all of it is doing something to your subconscious. Gretchen Rubin gets the last word: it's not about more stuff or less stuff, it's about wanting what you have. That single shift turns spring cleaning into a values exercise. For anyone who works from home, the stakes are higher. Your house is where you live and where you work, and the chaos on the other side of the wall doesn't stay there. Christine talks about how she can't focus when surrounded by mess. Sam shares the rule that her kitchen has to be in a certain state before she can sit down for the workday. The episode lands on a quote Christine read recently. A lot of anxiety is the mental weight of the things you're putting off doing. So if you just do the thing, the anxiety lifts with it. The closing message is the most important one. You don't have to clean out every flippin closet. Start tiny. Pick one stack of papers. Pick the junk drawer. Set a timer for ten minutes and stop when it goes off. Whatever you got done is more than you would have. That's the whole game. If you've been carrying around the heavy invisible weight of all the stuff you've been meaning to deal with, this episode is your permission slip to start small and feel what it's like when outer order brings inner calm.

Trying Is Timid

What if the word "try" is the thing quietly keeping you stuck? Sam took the whole family to see Scream 7 (a full-circle moment, since she took Christine and her sisters to the original 30 years ago), and somewhere in the middle of the movie, a single line stopped her cold: "Trying is timid." She was fumbling for a pen in the dark theater, writing it on her checkbook, because it hit that hard. This episode is what came out of that. Sam and Christine dig into Carla Androsik's book Stop Trying and ask a pretty honest question: why has "I'm trying" become such a comfortable place to hide? We've all said it. I'm trying to eat better. I'm trying to save money. I tried to call you back. But trying is tentative. It's half-committed. It lets us off the hook before we've even started, and it protects us from the fear of failing out loud. In this conversation, Sam and Christine talk about: Why "trying" creates confusion in the brain and takes personal responsibility off the table How fear of failure sits underneath most of our trying Christine's marathon training as a real-life case study in doing, not trying The shift from doing to being, and why that question stopped Sam in her tracks Consistency over intensity, and why the slow, honest version of effort actually wins How Christine's mindset shift started when she noticed her own fear showing up in her kids Whether you're the intense one or the chill one (hi, Sam and Christine), this one's a gentle nudge to drop the hedge, own the outcome, and go do the thing.