The Emotional Junk Drawer
What a breathwork session taught me about blame, baggage, and the weight women were never meant to carry.
A few weeks ago, I hosted a session with a handful of Real Girls Guide baddies led by my cousin, Jessica Cathey.
I walked into the entire session thinking I knew exactly what I was carrying. I left realizing some of it wasn’t mine in the first place.
And if I’m being honest, I was a little skeptical.
Not of Jessica… of the idea that a few hours on a random Saturday were going to tell me something I didn’t already know.
I’ve spent years talking about my feelings, writing about my feelings, and overthinking my feelings. I’d done therapy. I’d had the hard conversations. I’d unpacked (and am still unpacking) plenty.
Then a breathing exercise came along and reminded me there were apparently still a few boxes in storage.
One of the things that came up for me was blame. I’d spent years taking responsibility for things that weren’t mine to carry. As a daughter, a wife, a mother, and a fixer, I got so used to holding the bag that I started mistaking it for part of my personality.
I also had a moment involving my grandmother that I’m still not entirely sure how to explain.
And, I’m okay with that.
What I know is that I showed up expecting an interesting experience and left carrying less than I arrived with.
And since I come from a long line of women who process life by talking about it (usually loudly, we are Italian after all), I figured the best next step was a conversation!
Let’s start at the beginning. How the hell did you end up doing this work? What was happening in your life that led you toward healing, breathwork, and helping others reconnect with themselves?
Jessica: For most of my life, I thought I was healing. What I was actually doing, was surviving.
I spent decades carrying abandonment, grief, insecurity, loss, and a nervous system that seemed permanently wired for danger. I became incredibly skilled at functioning. I could show up. Perform. Take care of business. And keep moving.
By my late 30s and early 40s, I had a beautiful life. A loving husband. Two amazing children.
Meaningful work. Yet the coping mechanisms I’d built over a lifetime were still running the show.
Control. Hyper-independence. Seeking validation outside myself.
In May of 2023, I attended a plant medicine journey hoping to heal. What happened instead was that I remembered.
I remembered who I was before survival became my identity. And that experience changed the trajectory of my life. It led me deeper into understanding the nervous system, breathwork, intuition, healing, and ultimately helping other women come home to themselves.
Because that’s what I believe healing really is. Remembering who the hell we are beneath the noise, the conditioning, and the inherited beliefs.
Was there a moment when you realized the life you were living no longer fit the person you were becoming? What shifted for you, and what did you learn from it?
Jessica: Well, I wasn’t trying to escape my life. I loved my life. But I also started to realize that my soul was getting louder than my coping mechanisms. And I was fed up with looking for external validation, hiding my pain, acting from survival, and wearing armor. I reached a place where guarding myself became more painful than changing. And once I started remembering who I was, forgetting was no longer possible.
You work with women navigating divorce, caregiving, empty nests, grief, menopause, career pivots, and all the other surprises nobody warned us about. What patterns do you see over and over again? What are women struggling with most right now?
Jessica: Women living in survival mode and calling it normal. Women who have become so accustomed to carrying everyone else’s needs that they can no longer hear their own.
Women who believe exhaustion is just part of life. Women who have spent years proving their worth through what they do instead of recognizing their worth already exists.
Most of the women I work with aren’t broken. They’re disconnected. They’ve spent so much time surviving that they’ve forgotten who they are underneath the survival. And through my work, time and time again, I watch them wake up in real time. It’s incredible.
For women who hear “breath work” and immediately think, “Cool. I’ve been breathing my whole life,” what is actually happening during these sessions and why can they feel so transformative?
Jessica: Most people hear the word breathwork and assume it’s about breathing better. It’s not.
It’s about accessing parts of yourself that thinking alone can’t reach.
We spend years trying to heal through logic. We talk about our experiences. We analyze our patterns. We understand exactly why we are the way we are. Yet we still find ourselves reacting from the same wounds, fears and survival strategies.
That’s because healing doesn’t happen exclusively in the mind. The body keeps score.
It stores grief, heartbreak, stress, fear, trauma and emotions we never fully processed.
Breathwork creates a bridge between the conscious mind and the subconscious body. It allows us to bypass the part of ourselves that wants to analyze everything and access what is ready to be released, felt, witnessed or transformed.
I’ve watched women reconnect with forgotten parts of themselves in a single session. I’ve watched tears that had been waiting decades to fall finally come through. I’ve watched women experience profound peace after years of anxiety.
What makes it transformative isn’t the breath itself. It’s what becomes available when the noise quiets down and the body finally feels safe enough to let go.
It’s not just a breathing session. It’s a reconnection to intuition - allowing it to become loud again.
And for many women, it’s the first time they’ve truly met themselves in years.
So many women spend decades taking care of everyone else and then wake up one day wondering where they went. When someone feels disconnected from herself, where should she start?
Jessica: I think the first step is understanding that you’re not lost. You haven’t disappeared. You’re not broken.
You’ve simply become buried beneath years of responsibilities, expectations, roles, obligations and survival strategies.
Most women don’t wake up one day disconnected from themselves. It happens gradually. We become the caretaker. The wife. The mother. The employee. The helper. The fixer. And somewhere along the way, we stop asking ourselves what we need.
So I don’t believe the answer is to become someone new.
I believe the answer is to remember who you were before the world told you who you needed to be.
Start by getting curious. What do I want? What feels true for me? What am I tolerating? What am I pretending not to know? What lights me up? What drains me?
The smallest acts of self-connection matter. A walk. Five minutes of silence. A journal. A breathwork session. A conversation with someone who sees you. A bath. A massage.
You don’t have to figure out the rest of your life. You simply have to start listening again.
Part of my work - whether through breathwork, channeling, sacred circles or intuitive guidance - is helping women remember how to hear themselves again. Because the answers they’re searching for are often already within them.
The woman you’re looking for isn’t gone. She’s been waiting for you to come back.
Bonus Question: What’s a belief, piece of advice, or expectation women have been carrying around for years that you wish we’d collectively throw straight into the trash?
Jessica: That being everything for everyone else is somehow a virtue. I think women have been praised for self-sacrifice for so long that many of us confuse depletion with love. We’ve been taught that good women give until there’s nothing left. That our needs should come last. That rest must be earned. That asking for help is weakness. That if everyone around us is okay, then we’re okay too.
Fuck. That. Noise.
A woman who abandons herself cannot fully show up for anyone else. Caring for yourself is not selfish. It’s responsible.
When a woman learns to honor her needs, trust herself, set boundaries, rest, receive support and take up space, everyone around her benefits.
So if I could throw one belief directly into the trash, it would be this: Your worth is measured by how much you sacrifice. Your worth was never up for negotiation in the first place.
I still don’t fully understand what happened that day. I just know I left carrying less than I brought with me. At this stage of life, that’s reason enough for me to pay attention. If you’d like to learn more about Jessica and her work, you can find her here:
Website: www.thejessicacatheychannel.com
Instagram: @TheJessicaCatheyChannel
And if you’ve ever had one of those experiences that leaves you staring at the ceiling later thinking, “Well, I wasn’t expecting that,” I’m here for it all!
We’ve earned every wrinkle. Might as well make more laugh lines together.
Books | Website | Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn
And if you’ve read my first book and loved it, a quick review on Amazon helps keep it moving!