Hello beautiful!
Thank you so much for supporting me! It truly means a lot to me that I have people who are excited to hear me speak. I am still trying to figure out how to do this audibly, but for now here’s a download I got. I used talk to text, so please excuse any grammar or misspelling. 🥰
Also, this community price will be going up before the end of August. You, being the smart cookie you are, will always only pay $11 per month. If you know of any friends that could benefit from my downloads, please share this group with them.
If you refer five or more friends, and they join (send me their names via DM), I will give you a free personal reading. As a thank you for believing in me, and for helping me grow this community to empower so many women. 🦄🥰🎉
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SHADOW WORK
One of the things that has been a catalyst for me this year, is truly learning what my superpower is, and what my gift is. And not being ashamed or embarrassed of either. Which for a majority of my lifetime, I was.
When I was growing up, I heard on a daily basis “Amanda you talk so much. Amanda you are so intense. Amanda why are you so emotional?“
And it wasn’t until I was 36 years old, that I started to realize I talk a lot because I’m literally getting messages from source.
I was 37 when I realized my intensity only seemed too much because I was around the wrong people. I poured too much energy into those that would rather shame me then celebrate me. Whether those people were friends, loved ones, clients, or random people on the Internet. when I started clearing my circle, and stepping more and more into my natural crazy, I realized I spent my entire life thinking I was a neon sign in a flower shop. Come to find out, I’m actually a fucking night club.
And finally this year when I turned 38, I discovered all of my Claire senses we’re highlighted and intensified because of the childhood abuse I suffered. Childhood abuse I was unaware existed until I was willing to do all of my shadow work.
Shadow work, in case you were unaware, is forcing yourself to walk through the fires that shaped you as a child. That shaped you as a teenager. That shaped you as an adult.
On the surface I thought it was dealing with past relationships, past clients, learning about my ADHD and how that is why life has been so unnecessarily hard for me.
But the deeper I dug the more shit I unsurfaced. Like discovering I was emotionally and mentally abused as a child. Like the realization that my mother has absolutely no idea. She has no idea SHE was an abuser. Because I could also see where all of her stress and anxiety came from and I did everything in my life to not emulate that. I had no idea the reason I had rage issues for a majority of my life is because that was my immediate defense mechanism. It’s why I can go toe to toe with anyone, because I grew up in a house were screaming was a daily occurrence. I spent a majority of my marriage ashamed of the fact that my husband monetarily took care of me, because I grew up believing we had no money because of it being spent on us children.
Now before you freak out and go I’ll cancel culture… I’m not kidding when I say my mother is completely unaware of this abusive behavior. At Christmas I remember my mom stressing the entire month of December. Stressing about how much money she was going to spend, how big the gifts were, all the parties we were obligated to throw, all the food that would be spent, all the events we had to attend. Christmas equated insane stress. Top that off with the fact my mom worked three jobs up until three years ago. Now she’s down to two. She turned 70 this year. She said she felt like she partly retired.
So when you have that level of stress of working three full-time jobs, raising three children, a husband who is severely diabetic, and you toss in Christmas… Well. Let’s just say I still hate Christmas to this day. And then of course being a January baby, for the first two weeks after Christmas, I would overhear continuous conversations (and fights) about how my parents were going to pay the mortgage. How are they going to pay the water bill? We missed a car payment because of Christmas. So by the time my birthday came around, which just happened to fall in that two weeks, because I was born on January 7, the guilt I felt about my parents throwing a birthday party was enough to have me choose a different theme every single year. And rarely was it a winter birthday.
Because in my mind it made sense to postpone my birthday so that it no longer felt stressful monetarily. So my birthday has been celebrated in June with a sock up, and my creativeness making a jukebox out of cardboard. And having my brother play the records from my dad‘s high school behind this giant cardboard structure. I had an August swim birthday and used plastic shower curtains and Christmas lights to make decorations. Because that would please the people in my life, which would cause them to be happier, which would mean they wouldn’t yell.
My craftiness, and creativity was literally born out of the desire to make things easier monetarily for my parents. To people please. Because money was the reason they fought all the time, from my observations. Money was the reason my mom would come home and start raging. Money was the reason we couldn’t go away for the weekend for my senior gift. Money was why we spent three days torturing each other to drive to Lagoon in Utah, and three days driving back, because somehow that anxiety and stress was a good balancer to spending a LITTLE more on flights. Money was the reason my mother did not fly out to see my son until his first birthday. Money is the reason I’ve seen her four times in 6 years. Once for my brothers funeral.
It was no wonder I had a broken relationship with money.
The thing is, I had no idea that emotional and mental abuse existed until after I was willing to walk through all of the money issues I had caused in myself. Everyone dealt with that shit in the 90s. I wasn’t special. …Which started with working on unworthiness. Like feeling guilt that my husband spent $400 on me for Mother’s Day to buy me a cricket machine so that I could have a craft room. Which is some thing I had desired for years.
So here my husband is, excited and proud that he was able to buy me a gift that completely surprised me, completely spoiled me, and was completely ridiculous and unnecessary. And I am apologizing to him for it being so expensive. That was when I realized it was time for me to do another round of shadow work.
So I did. I focused on my personal money issues, where they came from, where I believed they came from, understanding the fear I had of working so much that it almost killed me like it has my mother, and then realizing the irony that just because you don’t work for somebody else you can still work yourself to death. Forcing myself to circle back around to my entire business that I had built up and worked and literally sacrificed every for, for over a decade, that also blew up completely in my face and shattered my entire world in less than two weeks time during Christmas of 2018.
Of course it was during Christmas right?!
Because humans, for as intelligent as we are, we are not subtle creatures. We are not taught in this society how to listen to the little whispers that would help us heal, or help us avoid the tragedy in the first place. We are taught to “Keep pushing! Keep hustling!”
“You’ve worked so hard for this career, why give it up now?”
“Artist don’t get paid.”
“Creativity does nothing for you.”
”Stop being so emotional.”
“You’ve got to have your shit together before you can be a motivational speaker.”
“No one is going to want to listen to you, you go off on tangents, you ramble on, and you have no cohesive train of thought.”
See I had to go back and examine the piece that I personally thought was the catalyst for the way I have lived my adult life. The workaholism. And after that was healed, another layer was revealed. I have ADHD, which is why even though I was constantly an overachiever, I was only overwhelmed when I stopped enjoying it. It’s white client work stopped being fun. It would take too long. My dopamine would run out. But my sister had extreme ADHD… The hyperactivity one. And I was nothing like her. I am nothing like her. But then I did research. I have executive dysfunction. I have body dysmorphia. I have depression. I have anxiety. Guess what all of those things are a product of? I can either do all the things, or absolutely none of the things. I cannot retain auditory information. I listen to my clients Voxer messages on 2x and 3x speed, because I can process it easier. I can talk in tangents, with eloquence and articulation, supporting my original thought, and always circle back to the point. And through that process, this amazing information comes out, and I am able to help so many people. Holy shit! ADHD is a super power, and my Clair gifts support that!
Suddenly I was totally OK being emotional. Any emotion I was experiencing in that moment. I stopped trying to force myself to do things that made me feel like I had to peel myself off the floor to even start. I started to learn ways about how to function as an adult woman with ADHD. I re-examined events in my life from a healthy standpoint. For the first time ever I was able to do the thing in Christmas Carol that always seemed like it would be so healing. Being able to watch a memory and have all the emotions, but none of the triggers. Remembering an event that was traumatizing, and yet being able to remember the positive elements about that point in history as well.
And I guarantee, if I have not given myself the grace to walk through this and it’s entirety, I would still be completely blind to the fact that I suffered emotional and mental abuse as a child. I knew my mom was a rager, I had no idea what that actually did to me.
My mother never intentionally meant to scream at us all the time, but as a mother I now know when everything is piling on you, when you're sleep deprived, when you’re just trying to get everybody fed, when you want the house to not look like a disaster for just one day, you’re stressed out about work, you’re stressed out about money, you barely even touch your partner anymore, and you just want ONE. FUCKING. MOMENT. ALONE!
See I know, because I became my mother. That was me that I just described. And that is what I grew up with. But unlike me, she never found pressure release. So she would explode on a regular basis because of things like the dirty dishes not being stacked - let alone washed, and we would absorb the shrapnel. My mother couldn’t show nurturing affection, because she was always a ticking time bomb because of her stress levels. So I didn’t grow up in a household where I was hugged often. I was not told she was proud of me, I was not told she loved me. To this day, my mother doesn’t say I love you, unless I say it first. Like I am reminding her that is some thing she should say to her child.
Walking through that fire was a really hard one, but it made me a more aware mother. One that daily hugs my son, and tells him how much he means to me.
It made me a more conscious partner, one that values and respects what my husband has to say.
It made me want to take care of myself. It made me want to allow all of the emotions that I had suppressed for decades. It made me want to fully feel the emotions that I do when I’m watching a movie, or a profound TikTok.
It made me understand why I feel so deeply for people who are walking through some serious shit. Because just like Spock, I can logic the shit out of everything, but I do feel. Others saw I felt deeply, it’s why I am so damn good at this coaching thing. I just had to prove it to myself.
If you take anything from the story, please take this:
Focusing on your healing, your shadow work, your discovery of who you are and how you function the best, will NEVER be a wasted moment. Even if that means you sit on a balcony smoking weed for a whole year to be able to do it. The end result, and the freedom and pressure release of emotions from mental stressors you feel is more worth it than you could possibly imagine.
I believe in you beautiful. You can do hard things.
I love you.