About Face Kate Marlene

I took a break from podcasting because I didn't know how to tell my own stories anymore. There was shame, confusion, fear, and hardship around what I was going through- leaving my marriage, becoming a single mother, and learning to embrace the truth about my situation and my life. This episode is about the reality of why I had to leave my marriage, what I learned about processing the grief and trauma, and how stories and podcasters have given me strength and hope. 

Dating after divorce or after 40 can be messy, but it's also a great time for self-growth, healing, and introspection. In this episode, Kate talks with Quintin Mecke, social activist, politician, and former mayoral candidate of San Francisco about healing in sex and love. This episode is a funny reflection on how they met doing storytelling in San Francisco, Kate's existential crisis when a sex tape is revealed, a relapse, polyamory, divorce, breakups and their misadventures in dating and healing. This episode explores personal healing, gender dynamics in marriage, family trauma, and how to heal ourselves to be ready for new and more mature love. 

This is the first episode in a new season of About Face. Kate shares her personal journey with creating the podcast, what it means to be authentic, why being honest with ourselves is crucial to recovery. She shares about losing a guest to overdose, divorce, addiction recovery, sex and love addiction, her inspiration in the trans community, and the role of storytelling in recovery. If you want to heal, you have to be real. Here is the first episode on a journey of truth and finding authenticity in our lives and ourselves.

Last summer I got hypnotized for over two hours and I wanted to share about this experience as well as the relationship I found between narrative healing and subconscious imagery. In this episode I interview Marta Styczen about her hypnotherapy practice and we talk about my session, including the process of going under hypnosis, what it is really like, whether anyone is susceptible to hypnosis, what I learned, and how I found it to be such a powerful source of healing and information. While there was also a situation of what could be considered "past life regression," we also talked about the role of imagery, metaphor, and of course, narrative. 
I talk about how the session unlocked some early experiences, some painful, but also awakened some understandings for me around relationships with men, my past, and my current energies.
Marta shares about her Quantum Healing Hypnosis practice, the role of deep meditation, connecting with a higher self, and how she is self-recovered from schizophrenia. 
We also talk about how language itself is an artificial construct and is limited in communicating some messages and ideas and how the right side of our brain uses imagery to tell stories. 
For more information about Marta:
current location & session booking via website www.selfhealing.work or IG @marta.styczen.
Mental health advocacy projects: neurodivergencegallery.org & IG @neuro_gallery
Instagram: @restorya
FB: Kate Marlena-Restorya
Restorya is a member of Bear Radio.
Theme music by Kenichi and the Sun

Today I want to talk about something I call “Attachment Stories,” and it’s the stories that attach themselves to events, issues, or traits about ourselves, our families, communities etc. Basically, it’s the accompanying stories that might crop up in a damaging way.
Many of you have probably heard this expression: “Pain inevitable, suffering is optional” an ancient Buddhist expression, made popular by Haruki Murakami. This quote is basically the premise of how to face attachment stories. That is to say that the human experience will inevitably involve pain: we will face hardship, loss, and eventually death, but the suffering that accompanies it will be of our own making. So, beyond the other Buddhist tenants of acceptance and impermanence, we can also look more practically at these attachment stories that really can exacerbate the suffering of our lives.
In this episode I share about my own experiences in the last month- a new lockdown, my daughter's brain surgery last month, getting served divorce papers, and losing my apartment. I share about how these experience triggered my old self narratives and how I was able to reconnect with other stories around love, connection, and self-empowerment. 

I used to think I could insulate myself against pain or hardship by doing the right thing or making "good decisions." When my daughter was diagnosed with a rare brain condition, I had to face my greatest fears of illness, vulnerability, and a total loss of control. In this episode I share about going through the transition from denying and fighting against hardship and how learning to accept difficult fates and struggles has taught me about connection, humanity, and empathy. 
This episode was inspired by an essay I wrote called, "The Things We Cannot Handle," originally published in Scary Mommy in 2017. 
If you are interested in learning more about narrative please check out my website www.restoryatherapy.com and feel free to book a session with me. 
You can find more content at Patreon and please consider subscribing to support my work. 
https://www.patreon.com/join/restorya
Email: kate@restoryatherapy.com
@restorya on Instagram
Facebook: Kate Marlena-Restorya
Restorya is a member of Bear Radio, the premier English speaking podcast network of Berlin
Our theme music is the song JEANNE by KENICHI & THE SUN from album White Fire which you can find here.