Let Perfect Burn Tara Beckett

Teddy Frank is a Licensed Master Social Worker, a Reichian Psychotherapist with a love for leadership facilitation and coaching in the corporate arena. Teddy works locally with scientists from Colorado State University that are looking at diversity, equity, justice, and inclusion within academia. Teddy works with collective trauma healing and ancestral healing, including her own, on what she names “The Hera’s Journey.” Throughout the recording of her Let Perfect Burn episode, I kept thinking, “She does THAT too?” Teddy’s passions are boundless, her convictions pure and fiery and her quest to understand and intuit humanity is unlike any other person’s I have experienced in my lifetime. 
Teddy grew up in a tumultuous and violent family where there was sexual abuse. But for Teddy, her homelife didn’t sink her, it activated her. “My awakening was at the age of 19 with the women’s movement. I mean, the feminist movement was in full swing. And I became a leader of grassroots community organizing, leading the whole on sexual crimes against women.”


Teddy is a healer by nature and so she couldn’t pass up the opportunity for us to be in dialogue together for this episode, creating a safe and grounded place for me to take a step toward. “I’m different than you, Tara, but you are also in me, and I am also in you.” We spoke about being a woman and a mother and that in society, staying good and staying quiet often leads to a wider acceptance. Daring to express pain and speaking truth to trauma rocks the boat, but it is an act that Teddy describes as ‘an awakening’ which is born out of “feeling the pain of not conforming, of questioning worth and value.” 


And what was so moving was that after speaking with Teddy, I started to realize that my ‘falling apart’ was something so universal to being human and that my strength to buck the norm of the ‘perfect woman’ was dare I say it, heroic. 


By the end of Teddy’s beautiful interview, I started using different words to speak to my mental health crisis, my hospitalization and my falling apart. 


“I am on the Hera’s journey, and I have had an awakening that has irrevocably changed my life.”

Highlights from Teddy:

"I remember five years old, my mother was very depressed. And I was sitting at the kitchen table across from her, and she was looking off to the side. And I looked directly at her and I said, 'Mommy, are you mad at me?' And she brought her gaze back, and she said, now finally resting in my eyes, 'No, honey, why would you think that?' And I said, 'I can't see myself in your eyes.' And in that moment, my five year old wisdom self said, 'My mom is not available to me.' And that's when we start to say, 'Okay, I need to take care of myself.'"

"So in a moment, our nervous systems get wired for survival and says, 'It's not okay to express my needs.' And so we develop these patterns that become the cracks in our psyche, the shadows in our soul. And that's what we then ride upon as nice girls, or as high performers in the world. Or, as you know, the sort of conforming to the female notion, which changes culturally but by Western dominant male standard says, 'You don't express your needs too strongly, because then you're aggressive. She's aggressive, she's angry.'"

Don't Miss a Beat.

My Website, Let Perfect Burn:
https://letperfectburn.com/

Follow my Instagram for news from me, Tara Beckett:
https://www.instagram.com/letperfectburn/

Connect With Teddy Frank:

Her Website:
https://www.humanenergetics.com/

Her LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/teddyfrank/

Comedian Antonia Lassar self-identifies as 60% Jewish, 30% Chronic Illness and 10% Bisexual chaos and recently their standup addressed embracing the term disabled. “Prior to this, I was like, ‘Yes, I’m exhausted all the time. Yes, when I lie down, I choke on my own stomach acid. Yes, I don’t poop.’ But that’s not because I’m sick. I was like, ‘That’s because I am morally inferior.’”
During this set, Antonia’s crowd laughed, but Antonia shines in their ability to take truth and push the envelope one more time. “And I know that you might hear all those symptoms and be like, ‘Obviously that’s an illness and not moral decay’ but you are seriously understanding my Jewish capacity for self-blame. Okay, I’m like, ‘What about my diet and lifestyle caused the Holocaust?’”

Before coming to LA to focus on their career as a comedian, Antonia toured college campuses addressing sexual assault with their work, Post Traumatic Super Delightful. Antonia is a victim of sexual assault and in their work they utilize comedy to challenge the expectations of the perfect survivor. “Trustworthiness is big. They need to have the education level that we believe that they are trustworthy enough to actually speak accurately about their experience. And a lot of my work really dives into this critique of our expectations of the perfect survivor.”

In their interview, Antonia takes us through the challenging, and sometimes devastating, path to create art after falling apart. “Suddenly, my body totally broke down and it was, to me, a message from the heavens being like, all right, this has gone on long enough. You're literally killing your body at this point. You need to get your art back together.”

Highlights from Antonia:

“For some artists and for some people like me who's mental health, when it deteriorates, it manifests as me stopping to produce. But just getting art and writing out of me is a health behavior. It keeps me healthy to keep getting art out of me. Also, physically, like when I'm unhealthy, I can't poop. You know, they feel very tied in my body. It's like, I've got to get my art out. I've got to get my shit out. It's all got to come out.”

“So, I mean, it was crazy. It was such an unusual experience to watch your body stop working, you know? And I started getting so malnourished, because I literally wasn't able to eat food over two years, that's how long this took. But I finally got to the point where I felt ready to put my work out into the world. I have been putting a lot of sketches and comedy content out on social media, which to the outside observer, I think just looks like any regular comedian putting sketches on social media. But for me, it's like the tail end of this epic healing journey. And, it's a really important step and it's been really healing just to finally get it out.”

“I just moved to LA which is also a big part of this journey. I moved to LA to fully invest in my career as a comedian and it's so exciting and also as soon as I got here, all of my physical and mental health flared up and I immediately felt all the old patterns come back. You know, not wanting to create, not wanting to put myself out there as well as just physically having a hard time. So, it is not linear. All these things are because I took this big next step on the path. It triggered this big kind of backslide. Yeah, it's not like a clean and simple process. It's taking a long time.”

Don't Miss a Beat.

Follow my Instagram for news from me, Tara Beckett:
https://www.instagram.com/letperfectburn/

And my Website:
letperfectburn.com

Follow Antonia Here:
https://linktr.ee/antonialastar

In honor of National Suicide Prevention Month, I sit down with Liz Sweigart, an Award-Winning Mental Health Advocate, former PwC Partner, Author, Keynote Speaker, Advisor, Coach and Adjunct Professor. Liz understands to her core that the only way to save lives and to improve the lives of those suffering with their mental health is to speak truth without shame. “Until we put our voices together, we’re all just individually shouting into the void. But when we come together, that’s when I think we galvanize. We give people hope.”
 
Liz walks us through her journey with depression starting as a teenager. “I experienced depression like this heaviness, inertia, and this complete disconnection from the world. It was  like watching somebody else live my life and not having any sense of connection to myself or others.” Incredibly intelligent, Liz masked the severity of her depression as an adult through perfectionism and her ability to put together a high achieving persona. Eventually, Liz couldn’t fight her depression anymore. “I felt I was disappointing everybody at home. If I was at home, I was disappointing everybody at work. And no matter where I was, I was a disappointment to myself. And that was when I set the plans in motion to end my life. And I am really fortunate that did not happen. I have a wonderful life partner. My husband was there when I needed him. And somehow, I found enough of the words, and he was able to quickly put together what was going on and so I am here.”
 
Inpatient treatment was incredibly important for Liz to reset her body and mind and to keep her safe. But she is so clear that maintaining her mental health is a journey and that in order to continue on, she had to accept that there were no easy happy endings. That the work would be sitting in moments of discomfort and being able to tolerate them before they became crisis. “I can sit in these moments of discomfort, they will end, I can get through them. And on the other side, I will feel better. And right now, this sucks. It’s like, yes, the sun will come out and right now, it is raining. So no, it is not sunny. It is not sunny at the moment. The sun is still going to come out. Two things are true. Like the sun will come out and right now is awful.”
 
Highlights from Liz:
 
“I like to say, I have a beautiful mind and a jerk brain. My mind does beautiful things. And at the same time, my brain has tried to sabotage me more times than I can count.”
 
“I convinced myself that I could like eat, pray love my way out of this. Like I was going to be fine. It would take 12 weeks. All I have to do is get off all of these medications and I'll be fine. So I worked with a therapist and a psychiatrist and I got off all my medications and three weeks later I realized that I wasn't actually getting better. I needed the medication that I needed and that was a crushing blow to me because I felt like I'd failed.”
 
“I can do hard things. I know I can do hard things. I have done hard things before. I can do hard things again.”
 
Don't Miss a Beat.
 Follow my Instagram for news from me, Tara Beckett:
 https://www.instagram.com/letperfectburn/

And my Website:https://letperfectburn/
  Liz’s Website:
https://lizsweigart.com/contact

In this episode, I sit down with Emily Krempholtz, a writer, creator, and an all-around amazing human that I have the pleasure of calling my book coach as I write my memoir. In her interview, she takes us through her life going from doing what she thought she should, to now doing what she loves. “I knew that writing books was what I wanted to do for a living. I knew that working with stories was what I wanted to be when I grew up. And even knowing that, it took me a really long time. I let a lot of people talk me into going to college for a major that was a lot more practical than what I wanted to be doing, which was creative writing.”
Emily believes in the magic of the world, infusing it into her books and passion projects while also acknowledging the need to pay the bills with her non-fiction work. While her work that pays the bills is compartmentalized in one half of her brain, her creative work is where her heart lies. “And it’s hard, you know. You put your book out there to say, “here is a little piece of my soul, I’m giving it to you,” and then to have someone come back and say, “no thanks, this isn’t for me.”


Inevitably, pieces of Emily’s life became woven into her novels and she shares how important it is for writers to give themselves the grace of being a human being. “So suddenly I was writing a book about grief when I was kind of actively grieving and that was really difficult. And so I poured a lot of that emotion into this book and then I also had to put it down for a little while. And that's something I think not enough writers talk about is sometimes, you know, it's okay to set something aside.”


Highlights from Emily:


“I think we have these points where, in a perfect world, we'd be able to go back and edit our lives and edit the way we did things in the past, but we don't have that. We are slaves to time in the real world in a way that we aren't when we're writing. And being able to take the hindsight, to take the lessons that we learned from that first draft of our lives, and take that breaking point and say, okay.”


“There is no one right way to write a book. There's no one right way to do something. There's a lot of different schools of thought about how to create a book, because it is, it's this huge thing. It is multi-dimensional, it is complex, and when done right, you should never be able to just sit down and spit out a book without, and say, okay, this is perfect. This is exactly what I intended it to be.”


“Let Perfect Burn means abandoning those shoulds—abandoning that sense of this is what I'm supposed to be doing to get to where I am, focusing on the things that you can control and saying fuck it to the rest.”


Don't Miss a Beat.
 Follow my Instagram for news from me, Tara Beckett:
 https://www.instagram.com/letperfectburn/


Emily’s Website:
https://emilykrempholtz.com/

And.... we're back!

FINALLY.

I had no intention of being gone from the show for so long, but sometimes life is mess. Perfect is nowhere to be found within a million miles of my life right now, but then again, can't all of us say the same?

Season 1 of Let Perfect Burn was some of the strongest medicine I've ever taken because it made me feel so renewed every time I got to have intimate, rewarding conversations with my guests. These women on the show were real, they were vulnerable, they were raw, they were gracious, they were funny, they made me laugh (hard) and they made me feel so very alive every single time I stepped in studio.

And now... I get to do it again. Only it feels a little different this time. 

Season 1 I was still on the high of my inpatient psychiatric hospitalization— because I had advocated for myself for the first time in my life, I felt like my life was destined to only go up from there. 

YEAH. NO. 

Season 2 feels like landing back on Earth. And even though being on Earth doesn't have any of the self-actualization euphoria I felt before, I feel more grounded. Grounded in reality. Grounded as a woman speaking the truth— and as the great Ruth Bader Ginsburg would say, "Even if your voice shakes."

I feel honored that you are still with me and that you want to take the chance on a second journey around the sun. 

Welcome back to Season 2 of Let Perfect Burn. 

Here we go.

Only 9 months ago now, I was leaving a psychiatric hospital, the moment in my life that inspired me to create this podcast. The laughter and the joy during these months on Let Perfect Burn were moments where my depression lightened, because I felt full- I was having these intimate, rewarding conversations with my guests. 

These women on the show were real, they were vulnerable, they were raw, they were gracious, they were funny, they made me laugh (hard) and they made me feel so very alive every single time I stepped in studio.

And while we say goodbye (just for now) I want to leave you with every guest from Season 1 reminding us that when you let perfect burn, what’s left can be really, really, beautiful.