In this episode, we're joined by Stephanie Baker, a licensed trauma counselor, Army veteran, and EMDR therapist who knows firsthand that birth doesn't always go according to plan. What started as a near-perfect pregnancy took a sharp turn, and what followed was a crash course in things nobody had prepared her for.

Jan also pulls back the curtain on her own birth story, one she rarely shares. Let's just say it involved more than one emergency, more than one surgery, and a phone call from her mother that was... a lot.

We laugh. We wince. We say "oh my God" a lot. Because sometimes that's the only appropriate response.

Here's what we covered:

• The warning signs during pregnancy that are easy to dismiss as normal
• The grief of losing the birth experience you planned for, and why that grief is valid
• Why guilt and shame sneak in even when none of it was your fault
• The isolation that can come after a complicated birth, and why community matters more than most people realize
• How to choose your birth team and actually feel safe with them
• Doulas, breastfeeding pressure, and asking for help without feeling like a burden
• The generational thread of moms who carried their own birth losses without ever having words for them

Birth is wild, unpredictable, and body-hijacking, and someone really should have warned us. That's why we're here.

About Stephanie: Stephanie Baker is a licensed trauma counselor and coach out of Mason, Ohio, who runs her own practice called Change Heals, where she helps clients untangle the kind of pain most of us were taught to just power through. She's a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor, EMDR-trained, an Army veteran who served in Iraq, and she's a certified trainer and a member of the leadership group at the Healing Our Core Issues Institute.

If you've read Gifts from a Challenging Childhood, you've actually already met a piece of her work — one of her original techniques is in there, in the 2025 edition. So she's not just teaching the model. She's helping shape it.

Stephanie is the therapist a lot of us wish we'd had earlier. She's deeply relational — human first, clinician second — and she shows up in the room as a real person, not a role. What she does so beautifully is help clients understand themselves in ways they were never given permission to before. The patterns, the protective parts, the why underneath the behavior — she helps her clients see all of it with curiosity instead of shame. She works with people healing developmental trauma — the stuff our mothers definitely forgot to mention- and she does it with humor, heart, and zero pretense.

Stephanie’s Links:
Stephanie’s Website
Intensive Workshops
Stephanie’s Instagram

Find resources mentioned in this episode here.

Learn more about this podcast here.

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*Information shared on this podcast is not medical advice. If you have a concern about your physical or mental health, please seek support from a proessional.

Teeth. The thing nobody warns you about until you're crying in the dental chair with half your face numb and a stranger drilling into your mouth for the third time that visit.

This episode is Jan and Patti getting brutally honest about their dental horror stories—the bad dentists, the botched procedures, the money spent, and the hard-won lessons that came out the other side. Spoiler: we both came out stronger (and way more committed to flossing).

What we get into this episode:

• Jan's childhood dentist, who did fillings with zero Novocaine (yes, really)
• Why the dentist's chair can trigger real anxiety and panic, especially if feeling trapped is your thing
• Patti's multi-year nightmare with a dentist who was charming, attractive, and genuinely bad at his job
• The very expensive lesson in people-pleasing and not trusting your gut
• When to see a specialist vs. letting your general dentist handle it
• Teeth grinding, Invisalign, and Jan's $12,000 smile glow-up
• Medications, dry mouth, and tooth loss — something no one talks about enough
• The real reason so many of us go years without seeing a dentist

Bottom line? Trust your gut, get referrals from someone who's had real work done, and for the love of everything — brush and floss twice a day. Your future self will thank you.

Find resources mentioned in this episode here.

Learn more about this podcast here.

Submit your 90-second lesson/experience here.

Apply to be a guest here.

Stay updated on new episodes here.

*Information shared on this podcast is not medical advice. If you have a concern about your physical or mental health, please seek support from a proessional.

Nobody sat us down and said, "Hey, one day your hips might just stop working." And yet here we are.

In this episode, Jan and Patti are joined by the brilliant Nicole Grose, a retired professor, Gen X middle child, leukemia survivor, and now the proud owner of two brand-new hips. Nicole brings her background in anatomy and physiology (and a whole lot of hard-won personal experience) to a conversation that is equal parts eye-opening and deeply real.

We talk about what it actually looks like to navigate joint replacement surgery, from the frustrating search for the right surgeon, to recovering mid-COVID, to the very specific math of being told your new hip will last 40 years when you have leukemia.

This one's for every woman who's ever been waved off by a medical professional, told to push through the pain, or simply never given the full picture of what her body might need someday.

About Nicole Grose Ph.D:

Nicole obtained a Ph.D. in Quantitative Biology, studying the relationship between the nervous and immune systems. She is a recently retired professor who spent nearly 2 decades teaching college-level anatomy, physiology and animal physiology from 2003 to 2021.Her academic expertise and personal experience brings a unique perspective to conversations regarding joint replacement and long-term health. Living with chronic leukemia, Nicole understands firsthand the challenges and realities of navigating complex medical decisions, procedures and subsequent recovery. A GenX middle child of five and longtime educator at heart, Nicole now enjoys splitting her time between Dallas and Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

Nicole is developing an academic success/tutoring business with the goal of assisting STEAM students in developing the skillset to succeed academically as well as in the workplace.

Find resources mentioned in this episode here.

Learn more about this podcast here.

Submit your 90-second lesson/experience here.

Apply to be a guest here.

Stay updated on new episodes here.

*Information shared on this podcast is not medical advice. If you have a concern about your physical or mental health, please seek support from a proessional.