Toxic leadership stems from the burdens of unresolved trauma and difficult life experiences. 

When you don’t do the work to regulate your nervous system, the parts of you that protect you through mico-managing, shaming, blaming, not trusting anyone, or worse will eventually wreak havoc on your career, those you lead, and your own capacity for discomfort.

So, what does it look like for you to commit to doing the work?

Maybe you go to therapy or coaching, or adopt practices to deepen your self-awareness and reflection. The trouble is, “doing the work” can easily turn into navel-gazing or intellectualizing. The same tools that might help you unburden can also be used to numb out. We so often are sold the idea that we will overcome and be done with it that we bypass doing the real, deep, lifelong work.

Today’s guest illustrates–literally–what it looks and feels like to commit to doing powerful work. Her gorgeous new graphic novel, Past Tense, shares her windy and beautiful journey of doing the work through the lens of Internal Family Systems.

Sacha Mardou was born in Macclesfield in 1975 and grew up in Manchester, England. She began making comics after getting her BA in English Literature from the University of Wales, Lampeter. Her critically acclaimed graphic novel series, Sky in Stereo, was named an outstanding comic of 2015 by the Village Voice and shortlisted for the 2016 Slate Studio Prize.

Since 2019 she has been making comics about therapy and healing. Her graphic memoir Past Tense: Facing Family Secrets and Finding Myself in Therapy is out now. Since 2005 she has lived in St Louis, Missouri with her cartoonist husband Ted May, their daughter and two disruptive cats.

 

 

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How going to therapy for what she thought was just anxiety became a journey of unpacking her past 
• How her therapist helped her “correct the picture” she’d been holding of people and events of her childhood
• How Sacha adapted her private sketched therapy notes into the comics she shares publicly
• How working with IFS to process her childhood has impacted her present-day relationships
• How the IFS process has helped Sacha recast her difficult experiences as gifts and strengths and her story as valuable
• How Sacha approached writing her book wholeheartedly, while still protecting her boundaries

 

Learn more about Sacha Mardou:

• Website
• Past Tense: Facing Family Secrets and Finding Myself in Therapy
• Instagram: @mardou_draws
• Facebook: @sachamardou

 

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

 

Resources:

• Family Secrets with Dani Shapiro
• EP 72: Identifying and Addressing the Burdens of Individualism with Deran Young & Dick Schwartz
• EP 101: Transforming the Legacy Burdens from Relational Trauma with Deran Young
• Compassion Prison Project
• Cece Sykes LCSW
• Ralph De La Rosa, LCSW
• Doris Lessing
• Eric Maisel
• Elizabeth Gilbert
• Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, Rebekah Taussig
• Love Is a Burning Thing, Nina St. Pierre
• Teenage Fanclub – Mellow Doubt
• The Franchise
• The Office

 

Transcript:

Rebecca Ching: Hello, Unburdened Leader listeners! I am so glad you’re tuning in for this episode. I have a little housekeeping for you. First, if you can hear, I’ve got a little voice stuff going on, yes. I’ve had a bout of Laryngitis which is an adventure for a podcaster. I want to assure you that this recording of the show with Sacha was done before I was sick, and so, I just wanted to give you that encouragement to hang in there.

And, speaking of encouragement, if you are not subscribed to the show, I’d love it if you could subscribe and rate, leave a review, and even share it with a few people. When you share the show, subscribe, and leave reviews, this helps the show get out to other people, and I’d be honored for your support! So, onto the show!

[Inspirational Intro Music]

Sacha Mardou: I have a very different relationship and a very different take on my former experiences. I no longer see it as this rocky past that’s to be locked away. I see it as, no, these are my experiences that can be my gifts, you know? They’re gifts to me in a way because it’s like I’ve learned how to heal them. But also I can put them out into the world and make stories, which is what I do. I’m a storyteller. 

[Inspirational Intro Music]

Rebecca Ching: When you hear someone say, “Do the work,” what comes to mind? Now, I see this phrase come up quite frequently in personal and professional development spaces, and it resonates with me when people broadly address the work of taking ownership of one’s own healing and deepening their awareness so they can lead themselves and others in a generative way.

2:03

And I often see this phrase used in, let’s say, performative ways, in ways that can belittle or condescend someone else, especially when you just tell them, “You need to do the work.”

We can other and look down on people struggling when we adopt that posture. Frankly, I see how we do this to ourselves, holding unrealistic expectations of what it means to be human, and this comes from living and working in a world that often feels like a pressure cooker with no room for mistakes and repair. But when you commit to really doing the work, it’s more than an intellectual pursuit. You live and lead aligned with your values, and as a result, feel confident you can handle triggers and discomfort without numbing out or defaulting to people pleasing, husting for your worth, blaming, and shaming.

I’m Rebecca Ching, and you’re listening to The Unburdened Leader, the show that goes deep with humans who navigate life’s challenges and lead in their own ways. Our goal is to learn how they address the burdens they carry, how they learn from them and become better and more impactful leaders of themselves and others.

Toxic leadership stems from the burdens of unresolved trauma and difficult life experiences. And when you don’t do the work to regulate your nervous system, the parts of you that protect you through micro-managing, shaming, blaming, not trusting anyone, or worse, violence, cruelty, dehumanizing wreak havoc on your business, those you lead, and your own capacity for discomfort.

4:09

Look around as we see this playing out around us real time. It’s a scary case study. The stakes are high for you to stay the course and, yes, do your own work. So what does that look like for you to commit to doing your work? Is it therapy or regular coaching?

Now, I’m a little partial to these supports with the right approaches, clear commitments, and alignment, but maybe you do a little extra or different things like lean on a dialed-in morning routine or you value time away at a powerful retreat. Maybe you find a lot of self-awareness by personality tests like understanding your Enneagram type, or maybe you find supports through microdosing or other ways to connect helpful. Honestly, no shade to any of the above. They can all be a valuable part of how you deepen your capacity for discomfort, and they can all be ways that you can also numb and distract from doing the needed deeper work. You, no doubt, hear this phrase in clinical coaching spaces, right? “Do the work.”

Now, when I hear this phrase, for me, it elicits solidarity and a common humanity when shared. I feel a kindred spirit when someone shares that they’re in it and they’re doing the work. Now, I have to be honest with you, a fatigued part of me kind of sees how this phrase is connected to many programs that make lofty promises and offerings and messages that dismiss the very human experience of struggling.

6:05

Yes, I know there are many ways to grow and heal. I’ve got my favorite ways that I help people do that and that I choose to do that, and I take it seriously when someone reaches out to me to do their own work to heal, to become less reactive, to lessen their stress, to reconnect with their confidence, to increase their capacity for discomfort, to unlearn the BS they were taught on what it means to be strong enough and productive, to believe they’re more than what happened to them so they don’t have to chase meaning and worthiness through overfunctioning and overworking and overidentifying with how the world sees them, to feel enough.

When you desire to be more adaptable, you put yourself on a path of doing the work, and doing the work does not always have to be heavy, but it always has depth, and it never happens in isolation. For me, doing the work means you invite people to walk with and support you in the various seasons of doing your work. A therapist, a coach, books, podcasts, retreats, newsletters, groups, various creative outlets, and more may be a part of your path.

But in this day and age, self-awareness is the way to lead with your values, to make quick and decisive decisions with confidence and not be fear led. Fear is always gonna show up. I don’t want to say always gonna show up, but fear is a regular companion when you’re doing things that are new, that are vulnerable. And so, without courage, fear runs the show, right?

8:07

And doing the work requires that constant YOU-turn of self-reflection and a return to those around you. It’s a dance, a flow, an awareness, and a commitment over time. As you connect the dots through your body, your story, your values, and the spaces you live and lead, you stop exiling emotions and experience and work towards integration and differentiation.

For me, I feel really clear that doing the work is a lifetime commitment, not a constant navel-gazing at yourself but a constant reflection (like, hello, debriefing) and curiosity and recalibrating and then turning towards the important work and the important relationships in front of you. Doing the work makes you feel more connected to your work and your community. It requires forward-facing work that takes up more of your internal work. It requires more internal work, and I caution against responding to the understandable impulse to get this done or be over it with whatever you’re struggling with. Impatience is a common bedfellow on this journey. Resist the good marketing that promises to cure, kill, overcome your struggles and stay the course, because I get the temptation. I feel it too. But when you rush your work, you miss things. You teach your body and your inner system that it’s not safe or okay to struggle or feel discomfort, which moves you away from your commitments.

10:07

Rushing your work also moves you towards numbing and intellectualizing, which offer protection, but they do not allow you to lighten the load and live a life with more confidence and clarity.

So when Sacha Mardou reached out to me to come back on the show to talk about her beautiful new book, the graphic novel Past Tense, which illustrates what it looks like and feels like to do some powerful work, I responded with a resounding, “Yes!” She put in her book her windy and beautiful experience of doing the work through the lens of her IFS work.

Now, Sacha is the product of a stoic, working-class British family that had a deeply-seeded distrust of mental health treatment. But then living the life she’d built in the US, and desperate for relief from a growing, crushing anxiety, she found herself in a therapist’s office for the first time, something she thought she’d never do. And there she begins the real work of growing up, learning to understand her family of origin and the childhood trauma she thought she left behind in the past but is still entangled in her present. And a theme central to the book is Internal Family Systems, and it plays a significant role as readers are taken inside Sacha’s sessions, witnessing the life-changing breakthroughs as she unravels her complicated upbringing and confronts the violent relationship between her parents.

12:00

So listen when Sacha shares about dealing with her shame and its impact on how she showed up in the world. Pay attention to what Sacha called her inner sunshine, and it’s not what you may think. And notice when Sacha talks about how she shifted her relationship with her traumatic experiences in her life. Now, please welcome Sacha Mardou back to The Unburdened Leader podcast!

Well, Sacha, welcome back to The Unburdened Leader podcast! Thank you so much for coming back to the show.

Sacha Mardou: Oh, thank you, Rebecca. It’s so great to be back here!

Rebecca Ching: I am really looking forward to this. I have been thinking about this conversation since you reached out to me, and I read your book. I can’t stop thinking about your book and talking about your book, which is a good sign! [Laughs]

Sacha Mardou: That’s wonderful! [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: Well, and I’m not a graphic novel person, and I just think the process of you using your gift for drawing and illustrating and writing and sharing your experience of healing through the modality of IFS just was profound, it was comforting but also captivating. You’re an incredible storyteller. So thank you! I’m excited to get into it.

I think I want to start by talking about some aspects that you shared in your book. The graphic novel’s called Past Tense, and there was this moment in your book where you had already invited us into some of your story, a windy, complex story that had a lot of relational trauma and other aspects of trauma in it, and then you fell in love, and you describe this fear that you felt about sharing your story with your now husband, and I’d love for you to share what exactly were you afraid of and how did the fear of revealing these parts of your past affect your relationship with him?

14:10

Sacha Mardou: Ah, that’s such a good question. And you know when you think about you start a new relationship and you show them your best parts, you show your best side —

Rebecca Ching: Totally.

Sacha Mardou: — your charming, witty side, all these funny stories that you have saved up for the right moment and the right person. And, you know, when things became serious and I realized that my American sweetheart was gonna become my person and I was gonna move here and be with him, it really became the case that, “Full disclosure, I have this room in my house that I never go in, but I need to tell you what’s in there, and it’s nothing to do with me. I don’t want it to reflect badly on me. But I have this weird, messed up family story.” And I told him as a way to just get it out there. “You need to know everything about me. No secrets. But we never need to talk about this again because it’s not important,” you know? That was very much my approach.

It turns out that it was important, but I wouldn’t realize that for another decade, you know?

Rebecca Ching: Isn’t it amazing how much we minimize? It’s such a powerful protector, those minimizing parts, right?

So how did you apply what you were learning about yourself through the lens of IFS so you could share your experiences and eventually, like you said, realize it was very important instead of continue to edit your story?

Sacha Mardou: Okay, so when I first started therapy, I was 41. I was kind of having a midlife crisis. I had all this acne, which is how my anxiety was kind of manifesting itself in my system, and I was really in therapy like, “I need to get rid of this acne, so I need to deal with the anxiety.” And it quickly became so much more than that. And as we kind of moved into Internal Family Systems therapy, which I know your listeners are probably quite familiar with, but one of the tenants of it is that in childhood, when we have a difficult time, parts of ourselves take on roles in order to cope with the stressful situation.

16:02

And so, I realized that I was a 41-year-old woman, and I was coping with life through strategies that I’d taken on as a 14-year-old, for example, you know? And that 14-year-old was having a really tough time coping with this life of being a mother and an artist and an employee and a wife. That 14-year-old, that was too much to put on her shoulders, you know? So IFS was this means by which I could recognize these early roles, these coping strategies of parts and begin to free them from that, you know, let them transform and let the real me kind of come online and handle my life, which is such a better place to live from, you know?

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, and you make it sound so easy.

Sacha Mardou: [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: Right?

Sacha Mardou: Yes.

Rebecca Ching: I mean, you’re on the other side of it, so I know for me when I’m on the other side of things — but what stands out to you when you were in the middle of this journey and this awareness building of this inner world and connecting with the parts of you that you worked so hard to distance from and recognizing the healing was by befriending that, of all things?

Sacha Mardou: Yeah, yeah. It’s funny, isn’t it? These rooms in my house that I didn’t want to go in, it turns out I had a lot of unpacking to do, and I think what became evident to me was that all my childhood experiences, which I’d shoved to one side and said didn’t matter, they did matter, and the way I was treated as a kid, the experiences that I had, they did matter, and I found that compassion would be the way to actually navigate all of that.

And so, I think having compassion is this key. I did get to the other side, and I think my book shows that, that there can be a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the middle can be very, very messy. And I know that, for me personally, in the middle of therapy I would have dreams where I’d be digging up toxic waste on a beach, and I’d be like, “Oh, it’s a good job I found that.”

Rebecca Ching: Wow.

Sacha Mardou: But then I would find more and more of it, and it’s like, okay, I shouldn’t have gone digging for this. This is too much. And it did, in the middle of therapy, it often felt like, “This is too much. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone there. Maybe I should never have gone into that room that I never go in and start unpacking the boxes.”

18:12

But, you know, I think to myself had I not dealt with my past in therapy, I think it would have found me anyway. I mean, it was finding me. My skin was breaking out in acne because I had all this unhealed trauma. So I think to myself, I think it’s better that I went in there with consciousness and kind of dealt with my past rather than letting it come out as some health crisis down the line, you know?

I really love the writer Dani Shapiro, and in her podcast, she said this today, that when you bury the past, you bury it alive. That, I feel like, is so true.

Rebecca Ching: Oh, my gosh. Yeah, and I want to touch on that because there were several aspects of your story and the more that you tried to distance from it, and then it would still come up but in ways that you’re like, “Why is my body acting this way? What’s going on,” right? There was this connection to all those rooms that you locked away. As someone who’s worked with folks with complex trauma for over two decades, I know that experiences and relationships we’ve distanced ourselves from can still affect us profoundly.

And you talked about when memories of your father, who you had a very complex relationship with, surfaced and it had an emotional impact on you. Can you share more about what that was like when those memories surfaced from long ago?

Sacha Mardou: So when it comes to my father, he was a convicted felon, and he had abused my stepsister. And so, there was a lot of trauma around him that I was kind of aware of when I grew up hearing this story. But I think parts of me had taken on the attitude like, “Well, it didn’t directly affect me. I have no right to feel hurt by this. I have no right to feel anything about this,” you know? And I had come out of my life, I feel like — you know, when you think of trauma responses, like flight is one of them, and I think I’d definitely run away from my father as a person and also the idea of him.

20:11

When he did kind of resurface for me it was actually during COVID. I had this realization that he could have died of COVID, and I wouldn’t know. How would I know? He’s not part of my life. And I took this to my therapist, and I said, “You know, to be clear, I do not want to resume contact or anything like that. Just how do you deal with someone who’s not actually present?” And he kind of reframed that for me as, like, “Well, maybe you’re not dealing with him, but you’re dealing with your feelings about him. That’s the door you’re opening.” And it was like, “Okay, yeah. I do have a right to my feelings about him. Yeah.” It was like that’s what I need to do.

And it was not easy to open that door to him. I mean, what came up was feelings of shame, embarrassed that he was my father, that somehow that reflected in me. I was his daughter. I was his DNA. So I’m in some way a reflection of him, and my therapist was also able to turn that around for me and said, “Look, in the order of things, he came first. He was your dad. He was responsible for you, and he failed in that responsibility. You were the kid. You were not responsible for him.” And just, suddenly, having that put in the right order in my mind, it seemed so obvious, but I think that’s one of the gifts of therapy, that your therapist can actually put things in the right order, can actually correct the picture that was so wrong growing up and the story and the picture that you carry in your mind, it can actually put things the right way around, and that was very freeing and releasing like, “Yeah, this is not my fault. Who he is, is not my fault. And furthermore, who he is, and his issues are not mine to heal. But what’s for me to heal, I can kind of embrace that, and that’s what I’m gonna tend to.”

And so, that has been incredibly freeing, and I show that journey in my book, how I got there and how I did it, but yeah, it’s been a wonderful reshaping of long-held feelings of distaste and shame. There is another side to that, which I was very glad to be able to show.

22:12

Rebecca Ching: There’s so much on what you just shared that is powerful and profound. That piece about dealing with your feelings about a family member who betrayed you, who you don’t want to be in relationship with, you still have to deal with your feelings about that person.

Sacha Mardou: Yes.

Rebecca Ching: And helping your system trust, “Oh, wait. We can do that without having to be around someone who’s unsafe?”

Sacha Mardou: Yes, yes.

Rebecca Ching: But, “Oh, wait. We’re still gonna feel a lot of difficult, big emotion, and we’re gonna be okay.”

Sacha Mardou: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: That’s the freedom, right? It’s not that it wasn’t — and you were very clear. It was hard, and it knocked you out for a while. You were moving through life while you were healing, but it took a beat, and I am grateful that you model that in your book. And what you also just said about the order of things, and so many people I work with — I work with some of the most incredible, big-hearted, intelligent, talented people (I’m very fortunate), and these folks have a lot of relational trauma, and so much they’ve made the best, you know? They’ve taken what was really hard and channelled it. But sometimes they’re running from the past through work, through achieving. It can only go so far, and then they hit walls. And some of that comes from taking on so much responsibility that wasn’t theirs, that overfunctioning, over-accommodating, people pleasing, or even just avoiding. A lot of the personal and professional development stuff says, “Let the past be the past,” you know, and, “Just be in the present and look ahead.” And I’m like that’s a lobotomy! Like, you’re just gonna cut that off?

Sacha Mardou: Yeah.

24:07

Rebecca Ching: So I’m curious, how did integrating your creative process — because, listeners, if you haven’t picked up this book, I really encourage you to do so. I’ve got several copies now because I’m just handing them out.

Sacha Mardou: Thank you!

Rebecca Ching: “You get a copy, and you get a copy!” Well, because it’s, like, instead of hearing me talk about something I’m very passionate about, which is healing trauma and IFS, it’s like, “Here, Sacha did a great job. There you go!” [Laughs]

Sacha Mardou: I got to show the journey.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah.

Sacha Mardou: You know, that kind of says so much more than reading a textbook and understanding how something works.

Rebecca Ching: Ah, exactly.

Sacha Mardou: Actually seeing a person in therapy do this in real time because I do invite people into my therapy sessions in the book, and that was very intentional. But I’m sorry, I kind of cut off your question there.

Rebecca Ching: No, I’m glad you jumped in! And I’m just wondering for you, because before this, I mean, you’ve been an illustrator. That’s been a part of your life for a long time. What was that like to integrate this creative process that was so personal to you with IFS, and how did that help you move through these emotions without feeling overwhelmed and still functioning in your life?

Sacha Mardou: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it’s a two-pronged answer.

Rebecca Ching: Okay.

Sacha Mardou: The first answer is that I started making these comics about therapy just as material for myself to kind of graphically record what I was discovering in therapy. So I would take with me a sketchbook to my therapy session. I use public transport, so I’d get the Metrolink home, and I would have time to wait, you know, at the station, on the train. And I would write down and record and do little doodles of everything that had just come up in therapy. And it was a very thrifty measure because therapy was expensive. I was a library clerk. I couldn’t really afford to be in therapy as much as I wanted to be. And so, yeah, it was a way of kind of getting every bit of my therapy dollar and kind of keeping it so I could revisit it and really learn. Okay, so that was one aspect of it.

26:05

The second aspect of it is that I reached a point about two years into therapy when I felt so much better, and I felt so much more unburdened, and I knew that what I’d learned in therapy and what I’d made this graphic recording of in my sketchbooks was kind of worth talking about and worth sharing, and so, that’s when I kind of took the plunge. And that’s also something I talk about in my book in a chapter called “Drawn Out,” realizing I would like these tools from therapy to be out in the world, and I would like to be the person who gets to draw them and share them.

And so, there was a very conscious movement towards how do I do this because it’s very difficult to tell a story of therapy without telling the story of your family and what happened and what gave rise to these situations. So I had to do a lot of therapy work around what is it I need to do in order to enable myself to tell this disclosive story, and that involved reaching out to certain people. You know, Brené Brown talks a lot about the people whose opinion matters to you. So I discovered who those were and whose opinion and whose permission I could find, and then it was a question of the people that I was never gonna contact in a million years, how do I disguise them, how do I protect their identities and their locations and all that stuff.

Rebecca Ching: Mm.

Sacha Mardou: So there was some adapting as well. And then one more thing I will say about the second prong of the story is that when you begin to share work, you’re sending something out into the world, and you can find community around that, and I was very much influenced by Seth Godin around 2019. I’d discovered his talks and his books, and he talks about how the internet is this place where the mainstream doesn’t really exist anymore. The internet is a collection of special interest groups, and you can find the people who care about the subject you want to write about or the work that you want to make. You can find people who are also interested in that, and you can make work from a place of generosity and say, “Hey, look! I made this. This is for you guys!” And so, that’s exactly what I did.

28:05

I already belonged to a comics community, because I’m a cartoonist and I’ve done graphic novels. But now I was moving into making work about therapy, and it turns out there was a whole community of IFS therapists and IFS clients who are like, “We are interested in this because we’re going through this, and nobody talks about it because it’s a clinician thing. And you can read textbooks, but you don’t really get to read clients’ point of view.” So I found myself entering this very kind of unique space that I kind of made for myself on the internet, and that led to the book happening, and it’s just turned my life around. I mean, professionally, I have achieved the goal I always wanted, which is to be a full-time cartoonist. I don’t work in a library anymore. So this has really transformed my life, but it’s wonderful because it taps into something which had so much meaning, like I love making this work, and it comes from the heart so it’s worth making.

So that’s a very long answer to your very wonderful, simple question. [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: No, it’s really beautiful. I want to follow up on a couple of things. First, I want to say though, no matter what the modality is, when I see someone share their story on the other side of their healing and do it with a way that they’re honoring themselves and honoring their story and they’re not placating, they’re not — you know, so many people stay silent because they don’t want to hurt anyone in their story, even including the people who hurt them. And there’s a lot of things that get jumbled up in there, but our stories are our stories, and I love that you brought in that piece from Brené of who are your people and who are not your people.

Sacha Mardou: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Ching: And even the folks that were not your people, you said, “Okay, this is gonna be a part of my story, but for the world, I’m gonna disguise this a little bit.” I think that’s an important thing to say for anyone who’s working through that because, yeah, there can be a lot of backlash on that, and internally too.

Sacha Mardou: Yeah.

30:06

Rebecca Ching: And I think there’s also something that we need more of, not in the — Brené Brown often talks about vulnerability ceases to be vulnerability without permission and boundaries, you know?

Sacha Mardou: Yes.

Rebecca Ching: We had to buy your book. We had to consent to read your story, right? There wasn’t just I opened up something on my screen and I got firehosed with this story, like we see so much on the internet, right?

Sacha Mardou: Yes. Yes.

Rebecca Ching: There was a relationship, a permission, a consent in there. And when I come across stories like yours to share, I know that the world is better for it. I know I am better for it. There are so many things in my story that just where I’m at in my life right now, just were so important as I read your book prepping for this. I had no idea how much I needed it, and I know that that’s the case for so many. And especially right now where I think we are in this season of do we normalize trauma, particularly relational trauma and betrayal trauma? Do we just go, “Oh, whatever. People are –.” And you have this beautiful container to say, “That’s not okay. It has a big effect across generations.” 

Sacha Mardou: Yes.

Rebecca Ching: So I’m really grateful for that, and I just appreciate you sharing a bit of the process and the attention to how you shared it.

Sacha Mardou: Thank you. May I just say one more thing as well?

Rebecca Ching: Absolutely.

Sacha Mardou: For people who are interested in navigating their own stories or writing, I think there’s a lot to be said for doing the work in private, and I did the work in private. So when I was first making comics about my therapy stuff, it was for me. I had no idea that I was gonna share this. And it really took feeling healed and feeling okay before I was confident enough to say, “Look, this has value, and I’d like to share it with other people.”

32:02

The messy middle is some people are very comfortable working in that space, emptying the closet in front of everybody. That’s not me. I’m a very boundaried person. I’m a very private person. If you look on my social media, you’re not gonna see pictures of my kid and stuff on there. There are very strong parameters that I want to kind of hold around the space I live in. But when it comes to making work about therapy, which I feel like has useful information for the world, yeah, I’ve found a way of working with that. But I had to be over the hill first. That’s what I’m trying to say.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, and that’s what I probably was saying in a little bit more verbose way, but I think there’s something to be said for that and our motivation, and like you’re saying, your motivation was for you first and then came upon this way to merge some passions and have meaning in your life professionally. It just happened that way. But it is a gift, and your story, there are a lot of people that are reading that going, “Ah, okay. Not just me. Okay. Wow.”

Sacha Mardou: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Ching: And I just want us to normalize hard experiences and getting on the other side of it. I don’t want to normalize pushing it away into the closets and the rooms.

Sacha Mardou: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s gonna show up anyway. Like I said, you know, you bury secrets alive that kind of show up some other place, you know?

[Inspirational Music]

Rebecca Ching: Leading is hard. Leading is also often controversial as you navigate staying aligned to your values, your mission, and your boundaries. Navigating the inevitable controversy can challenge your confidence and clarity and calm when you feel triggered and less confident in your ability to navigate the big emotions that you’re feeling. I know you don’t mind making hard decisions, but sometimes the stakes seem higher and can bring up echoes of old doubts and insecurities during times when you need to feel rock solid on your plan and action.

34:00

Finding a coach who gets the nuances of your business and leading in our complex and polarized world can help you identify the blocks that keep you playing it safe and small. Leading today is not a fancy title or fluffy bragging rights. It’s brave and bold work to stay the course when the future is so unknown and the doubts and pains from the past keep showing up to shake things up. Internal emotional practices like IFS and Polyvagal Theory, along with systemic strategies, are needed to keep the protector of cynicism at bay and foster a hope that is both actionable and aligned.

When the stakes are high and you don’t want to lose focus, when you want to navigate inevitable conflict between your ears and with those you lead, when time is of the essence and you want to make hard decisions with confidence and clarity, then Unburdened Leader Coaching is for you and where you deepen the capacity to tolerate the vulnerability of change, innovation, and doing things differently than we were taught. To start your Unburdened Leader Coaching process with me go to www.rebeccaching.com and book a free connection call. I can’t wait to hear from you!

[Inspirational Music]

Rebecca Ching: How much did your work in therapy impact your life and work outside of therapy?

Sacha Mardou: Just in my day-to-day life, I mean, your earlier question touched on how relationships are affected by the things we carry. I can give you an example of that. There was a man I used to work with. For some reason, he would always trigger me and activate me and just rub me the wrong way, and I’d come away feeling really annoyed and kind of so angry, and I never really understood it. And then when I got to do my therapy work and journal it, I realized he is the spitting image of one of my mom’s old boyfriends, and I hated this guy, and I’d never made that connection before. But being able to do this inner work of excavation is like, “Oh, that’s why that guy activates me so much!”

36:05

Once I was able to work on that, it’s like I can handle the fact that he reminds me of someone in my past who I don’t like, but he’s not him. He’s his own story. It’s not his fault that he looks like this other dude, you know? And so, it’s a way to be able to carry the story without the activation. He’s always gonna look like somebody I don’t like. But I no longer need to feel triggered by him, you know? I no longer need to act from that place of feeling triggered. So, you know, there’s the self-awareness of that, and that’s just one example, but there were so many.

I mention in the book that my mother is a Jehovah’s Witness, and her religiosity is something that pushes my buttons even now. But now when she brings up Jehovah or Jesus to me, I’m able to recognize there’s a little 14-year-old kid who doesn’t want religion pushed on her, and she is showing up. She’s showing up really strongly. And I can be like, “Yeah, I see you. I hear you. It’s hard. I know it annoys you, but I can handle this. You don’t need to be the one who has this conversation with your mom. Grown-up me can handle it,” you know? And so, I’m not putting that on my mum either.

So my relationship with that is a lot better, because everybody knows when they’re being judged, right? We have a sixth sense for it, and I was always judging my mother, you know, for better or for worse. But she could always tell, and she would be defensive around me.

So once I can handle those parts of me that show up and notice them and recognize them and just tend to them, even in a small way, it changes the world around me because I’m not acting from a place of activation. I’m acting from a place of Self, even if that Self is just holding the hand of a little part of me right now, you know?

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, you know the phrase in IFS that’s kind of a fun one where we have mentors, right, people that we learn about ourselves with. And so, it’s usually a mutual, a choice. And then we have tor-mentors, tormentors.

Sacha Mardou: Tormentors, yeah.

Rebecca Ching: And this guy was a tormentor, that when you did your YOU-turn you went, “Oh, okay, yeah, this guy? Yeah, he’s annoying. But he doesn’t deserve this zero-to-a hundred response that’s connected to something that I need to deal with.”

Sacha Mardou: Exactly. Yes.

38:05

Rebecca Ching: Instead of always being forward facing, like what is it about this person, this situation that has me so hooked? What in my story needs me to connect with it? And a lot of people are like, “No!” They don’t want to do that YOU-turn. And I think this is one of the biggest objections I hear from everyone is, “Listen, I know I have complex relational trauma, but I am afraid that if I address it, my past is gonna bring up more pain. I’ve got work to do. I’ve got a family to care for. I’m getting ready for a promotion or a big launch. I’m sorry. This is gonna destabilize me.”

Sacha Mardou: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Ching: And so, I’m curious what you would say — I mean, this is such a personal thing, but how has your IFS practice helped you navigate the concerns of getting on the emotional rollercoaster when you re-engage aspects of your trauma?

Sacha Mardou: So I would say that when we deal with our traumas we’re dealing with exiled parts of ourselves, and we’re dealing with the manager parts who are trying to keep that shoved down, right, so we can just get on with our lives. And having respect for that relationship is, first and foremost, you don’t go directly to the trauma in IFS therapy. You work with the managers first and you get their permission. You ask them to ease off if they can trust you, if you can access Self. And once you really begin to kind of get into IFS therapy, accessing Self becomes more and more available.

I think when I first started IFS therapy, my therapist would be the one who held open Self energy for me, and I would kind of leach off their compassion or their connection. But as I got more and more used to it, my own Self energy came online, and even though I was dealing with very, very difficult things, there was always this bright beam of sunlight, which was me, which was my own compassion that would show up and hold my hand. So it never became anything more than I could bear. Even the worst of it was never more than I could bear for a couple of days at least because the door was always there, and it was Self energy, and that would always kind of lead me out back into the sunshine.

40:09

And I remember there’s actually a page that didn’t make it into the book because we just had too much material. But it was that the action of going to an IFS therapist weekly and doing this work of unburdening, unburdening the trauma I was carrying, I would feel like my own inner sunshine. I would often open my eyes and see my therapist would have tears in her eyes, and she was obviously moved by it too, and it was amazing. And then I would go out in the sunshine, and the actual sunshine would hit me, and it’s like, “I am doing this! Every week I’m feeling freer and freer and freer, even though I’m dealing with the most hard, unimaginably hard stuff that the old me would never have touched with a barge pole, that was firmly locked away,” you know?

So Self is the answer. It’s always the answer. Finding that self-compassion is the key to unlocking all of that, and it’s never that bad when Self is there. My therapist would always say, “There is no fear in Self.” And so, if there was fear, it’s like, “God, that’s a part!” And that also needs me, needs my compassion, you know? So it just gets deeper and deeper and more complex rather than — no, I guess more rich. What starts off as complicated and complex becomes like a richness, you know, as you get to know your story, grapple with those exiles, and really love them into letting go. And it’s just a sense of freedom that you come out for it with. That was my experience.

Rebecca Ching: I love that you kind of caught that and said it’s a richness, right?

Sacha Mardou: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: It’s still complex. [Laughs] It’s still layered and windy.

Sacha Mardou: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: And I’m just thinking, too — even I’m thinking as you were talking, even some of the leaders I work with, with their tormentors at work or the pressures, and even sometimes just the witnessing and the befriending and the curiosity leads to so much more spaciousness. But these parts are like, “If we look at it at all, it’ll all come crumbling down.”

42:00

And it’s amazing how even just those little moments, even sometimes some spontaneous unburdenings for systems that are at a different place, it’s been really cool to see because we’re taught to avoid, we’re taught to exile anything that’s uncomfortable, anything that holds us back. I’m doing air quotes. And really what I love about this model is it says, “Well, hey, what’s going on? What are you afraid of right now? What do you need me to know?” And “Hey, can I give you an update? Can I just tell you that I’m not five anymore.”

Sacha Mardou: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: And it’s just amazing how that YOU-turn relationship, instead of just reacting to the world, we take that pause, how that can transform relationships, transform our workspaces, all the spaces we’re in frankly. [Laughs]

Sacha Mardou: Right.

Rebecca Ching: So thank you for that.

Sacha Mardou: Yeah, there’s a wonderful IFS teacher called Deran Young, and she —

Rebecca Ching: I love Deran. She’s been on the show! Yeah.

Sacha Mardou: Oh, yes! Of course! Okay, and so, I did a comic based on one of her sessions with Dick Schwartz, and, you know, it’s about a  legacy burden, and how at the end at the unburdening, she’s turned it into a gift, a gift of strength of her inheritance that she carries with her and has met with love. And I think about so many people in different fields, once they have managed to heal their very specific traumas, they become advocates and experts in that field and are able to help others with it, you know? I see it with the Compassion Prison Project. Fritzi Horstman, you know, she has a history of criminality, and she has turned that into kind of understanding how trauma affects prison populations. And she’s using it in that specific field.

In my own work, you know, I’ve grown up with things that felt too difficult for me to handle as a 14-year-old, but on the other side of that, as someone entering my 50s, it’s like I have things to say, for example, about Christian fundamentalism, growing up in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and that is something I want to put into novels, and I want to use as my material.

44:04

So I have a very different relationship and a very different take on my former experiences. I no longer see it as this rocky past that’s to be locked away. I see it as, “No, these are my experiences that can be my gifts,” you know? They’re gifts to me in a way because it’s like I’ve learned how to heal them but also I can put them out into the world and make stories, which is what I do. I’m a storyteller. So it’s not wasted, you know?

Rebecca Ching: Oh, gosh, no. And you’re a great storyteller. And when we don’t, those rooms eventually get full and they start to kind of overtake the space, to go with that metaphor. But then I see so many people that have to lean on overworking or drugs or alcohol or unhealthy relationships or spending or whatever it is to try and keep it up, and it’s just not sustainable.

Sacha Mardou: No.

Rebecca Ching: And it’s as simple and as hard and challenging as just looking within.

Sacha Mardou: Yeah. 

Rebecca Ching: Helping our system trust that we’re gonna be okay is so powerful.

Sacha Mardou: Yeah, you know, like Brené Brown talks about in another of her books about how people are maybe doing the best they can, and I know from my own part, I grew up in a culture that doesn’t go to therapy. British people are not into therapy. We don’t have a culture of asking for help. We keep a stiff upper lip. And so, for me to kind of move to America where therapy is a lot more accessible, there are a lot more IFS therapists, you know, I’m actually realizing the, “Oh, all this I’m carrying, I can actually do something with it. I can actually heal it.” I didn’t even know that it was there to be healed, do you know what I mean? I feel like there’s so much unconsciousness about what we carry, and all those behaviors you describe, I mean, IFS has the terminology of firefighters to describe the parts which will turn to substances or will turn to behaviors like online shopping whenever a bad feeling comes up.

46:07

But, you know, that first step is noticing, “Ugh, I feel terrible right now. Do I need alcohol or to buy something off eBay, or do I actually need to be with the feeling that’s awful?” We can be so intolerant about our bad feelings, and we’re not taught in society that the bad feelings are actually little messengers, you know? There wasn’t a framework for me growing up to recognize that, oh, all this that happened to me is actually — there was work to do that. I thought you just had to get past it, you know?

Rebecca Ching: Exactly, and then there are also a lot of messages within culture and other teachings and trainings that reinforce that too, and people in power, “Just get over it.” Of course but, “Don’t look at the past!” And you reference the firefighters, the ones that come in with very extreme behaviors, but often we judge them, they get a lot of shame, pushback by culture even. And I love how Cece Sykes, who’s a very kind of OG trainer in the IFS space, she actually calls those comforters and soothers, and so, I actually use that language, “How are you comforting? How are you soothing?” because I just have such respect for those parts because they get beat up like you’re doing something bad.

Sacha Mardou: Yeah, that’s wonderful. I think I’m gonna adopt that too. I actually talk about my own firefighters earlier in the book where I start getting this acne and this anxiety, and my firefighters jump into action, and they’re very health-orientated, so they’re like, “Must do more juicing. Must do more yoga.” They’re actually doing compulsive behaviors, which are kind of good, and yet at the same time, they’re keeping me away from the pain, you know, from actually addressing the source, yeah.

Rebecca Ching: They’re good until they’re not. Juicing? Great. Yoga? Great.

Sacha Mardou: Exactly.

Rebecca Ching: But if that’s all we’re doing, right?

Sacha Mardou: Right.

Rebecca Ching: Yeah, yeah.

Sacha Mardou: And, I mean, the honesty — I went to see an acupuncturist before I went to therapy, and that’s how I found my therapist. And I am so grateful to my acupuncturist who was honest with me and said, “Look, you’re dealing with an emotional blockage. I can’t help you any further. I mean, if you want to just chill out and relax, and can still come here, but I recommend therapy.”

48:06

And my initial response was like, “That is so insulting! How dare you think I need therapy!” And then one I could sit with it and realize — he told me he was talking from his own experience. I was like, well, I’m really grateful to that. He doesn’t want to just take my money and keep me coming here. He actually wants to help me, and he’s telling me he can’t help me!

Rebecca Ching: It’s not the norm. It’s not the norm.

Sacha Mardou: Yeah, I know. I’ve been so blessed by leaders in the field who have just been so good at what they do. Even my own therapist, towards the end, he was trying to kick me out. He was like, “Why are you here? You’ve got this!” [Laughs] You know? That’s not the stereotypical therapist you see in a comedy TV show where they’re just trying to get your money and spin you along, you know?

Rebecca Ching: Oh, my goodness.

Sacha Mardou: So it was just a different experience.

Rebecca Ching: I’m not sure most helping professionals are represented well on TV.

Sacha Mardou: No.

Rebecca Ching: I guess there might be a reason for that too, so we’ve got to keep the bar higher. But I think, too, let’s just zoom out outside of therapy, and even asking for help and even just sitting with discomfort instead of just trying to fix it. You had your acne. And then so you went to fix the acne, and that’s often where, especially with my leadership work, that’s usually the entry point. But sometimes we’ve got to get under the hood just a little bit on what’s going on. Sometimes acne happens, and sometimes parts of us can tap biology and things can happen! And that relationship between Self, our self, and that part, sometimes it’s hard for the thinking parts to realize, “That’s all we need? Really?” [Laughs]

Sacha Mardou: Right. Right, yeah. Especially I think a lot of people who are quite high functioning who have trauma in their past, they have fix-it parts, like, “I can think my way out of this. I can solve my problems by using my brain and my tenacity.” And actually what needs to happen is a little bit of do nothing, a bit more being than doing, you know?

50:00

Rebecca Ching: I know. I say that a lot, and I get a lot of eyerolls, but they understand. [Laughs] They understand me. But it’s also dangerous for parts that are afraid because if we’re with all of this stuff, if you’re just like, “All of a sudden I’m gonna look at all of the rooms that have been locked away all at once.” Like, nope, we’re not gonna do it all at once. We’re just gonna peek at the one right now that is connected to the issue you’re struggling with today or this relationship at work or this deadline that you’re avoiding, and what’s going on with that.

Sacha Mardou: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: And having some curiosity versus those parts that just want to fix it, so you don’t have to go to the pain. It’s actually, no, we just need to connect with the discomfort.

Sacha Mardou: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: And you’d be surprised how strong you are.

Sacha Mardou: Absolutely. I remember my therapist saying to me early on when we were just starting to use parts work, IFS. She said, “You know, we’re just turning on a light. We’re just looking,” and that was very helpful to hear. It’s like, okay, I don’t —

Rebecca Ching: Yep.

Sacha Mardou: It’s like an episode of Hoarders. I don’t have to clear this room in one go. I can just maybe open one box or just look at one box. And the methodology of IFS where you work with one part at a time and you get permission before moving on, I mean, it speaks to why finding a support person to do IFS with is so important.

Rebecca Ching: Yes.

Sacha Mardou: I do a lot of solo work now, but that was not the case in the beginning. I really needed somebody to hold space, to guide me because, you know, there was a way of doing things that is respectful to your parts that you can handle. I feel like the capacity — Dick Schwartz said recently that capacity should maybe be a C word —

Rebecca Ching: Exactly!

Sacha Mardou: Because I felt an increase in capacity. The more I engaged with my parts, the more I felt able to deal with the difficult stuff. And it’s why I chose Louisa May Alcott has a quote: “I’m no longer afraid of storms because I’m learning to sail my ship.” That’s why I put that quote at the beginning of my book because it’s like, yeah, there are always gonna be storms in life, but I can navigate it now. I know how to deal with my emotions, you know?

Rebecca Ching: We’ve got the tools! It’s more than tools. We’ve got trust.

Sacha Mardou: Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: And also, you know when we care about things? When we care about people or we care about our country, we care about values, we’re gonna have our heart broken. It’s kind of part of the gig of loving and caring and moving through that very natural human process and rising from it versus just being that cultural burden that Dick Schwartz writes about, the individualism, right? “Just pull up your bootstraps.”

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Many people have written about individualism, but he talks about it as one of the cultural burdens in this model. So yeah, and it really is the power. There is so much power within and how contagious that is to others.

Sacha Mardou: Yes.

Rebecca Ching: Even reading your book is a hope merchant. Dick Schwartz loves to talk about being a hope merchant. It does bring in a little bit of that hope, and then there could be parts that get cynical or go, “Eh, it’s just for her, not for me.” But what if it’s available for you too?

Sacha Mardou: It’s a paradigm shift, isn’t it? And I feel like the IFS community is one that I have found so much kindness and generosity in because it’s a group of people who have learned the model by doing the work on themselves, you know? And so, I’ve not banged my head against a wall. I’ve not encountered all the things that scared me about sharing my story. I didn’t need to be so scared. The people who have read my work and engaged with it are people who are also invested in doing this work on themselves. And so, yeah, those virtuous cycles that Dick Schwartz talks about and how Self is kind of contagious, you know, I found all of those things to be totally true.

And what is such a paradigm shift for me is that I was kind of raised religiously for a time and taught this biblical idea that we are inheritors of original sin, that we’re somehow bad inside, and with IFS it’s like that’s turned around. It’s like actually we have a lot of goodness. We have this core Self, which is not touched by trauma that we can tap into, you know, that we can kind of pull into our daily lives and our work lives and our creative lives. Yeah, it’s been such a paradigm shift that I’ve appreciated so much. It’s been life giving, you know?

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Rebecca Ching: Yeah, and, you know, it’s interesting you bring up that faith piece too because, for me, faith is one of my guiding principles, but this work really — I didn’t realize how much I was doing this until IFS came into my life. But there’s that concept, that theology of original sin, and you’re born into this world burdened with all these things. And then there’s this other theology of Imago Dei and that we all are image bearers of God. And there was just something that I would just sit in front of people and hear them share their deepest, darkest, most shameful things and just delight that they just gave witness, and I was just seeing that, and maybe even done some terrible things, but they’re wanting to do something different. And that humanizing of everyone in front of me, and then making sure I was doing that to myself too in my own struggles.

Sacha Mardou: Yes.

Rebecca Ching: But that’s something we can do a lot better of is recognizing even in our humanity, in our flawedness that we’re all just, you know, this kind of — to delight in the humanity of someone else, even if we deeply disagree with them. It’s something I’ve been trying to work with my kids on because they love to poke fun at people they don’t like, and I’m like, “Nope. Nope. Nope. We can disagree with what they say and what they do, but we will not be bullies like them. We will not!” [Laughs]

Sacha Mardou: Yeah. Yeah, that’s so wise. That’s so interesting. I’ve recently been digging into the work of Ralph De La Rosa who kind of incorporates kind of like Buddhist psychology with IFS, and he has a book coming out on the subject. He’d be a great guest for you actually. But he has this video where he talks about how the heart of the Dharma is found in IFS as in, “Is the heart open or is the heart closed?” That’s everything for him, and I really love that because it’s so simple.

Rebecca Ching: Oof.

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Sacha Mardou: I know that when I encounter difficult situations for me, I can go and shut down like that, you know?

Rebecca Ching: Totally.

Sacha Mardou: My heart can close. It’s like, “It’s not gonna affect me. Roll off me.” But it’s like, “Oh, yeah, my heart is closed right now.” And Dick Schwartz has so many meditations to open the heart, to feel into it, to actually feel your body and how the heart is like an organ but it’s also a quality of love. It’s such a simple tool and such a simple shift. It’s not easy, but it’s simple, you know? That, for me, is one of the gifts of IFS. It’s like, “Oh, yeah. Is my heart open? Is my heart closed?” It’s kind of like my mantra right now.

Rebecca Ching: I really love that because one of my favorite proverbs is: “Out of the heart flows the wellspring of life.”

Sacha Mardou: Mm, yeah.

Rebecca Ching: And if my heart’s closed, things are gonna run dry.

Sacha Mardou: Yes.

Rebecca Ching: So I’m loving that. I’m loving that.

Sacha Mardou: That was beautiful, Rebecca. Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: Well, yeah, I appreciate the windingness on this. And I guess I just have to ask, too, because, you know, I can jump into — within two minutes be into someone’s deepest, darkest stuff and not me fazed just because of my training. You didn’t hold back on your windy, painful, complex aspect of your trauma story, and I want to ask how does it feel to have it all out into the world right now? How is your system doing with that?

Sacha Mardou: Mm, thank you for asking! I really am touched and appreciate you asking. It’s so interesting. I feel great about it! I always forget, too, I did a workshop the other night having people draw their parts, and if people were to share, they were welcome to. And everyone was squirreling away their notebooks like they didn’t want to share, and it was like, “Oh, yeah, I forget it’s so easy for me.”

I come from a background of studying literature, and so, being a storyteller. And for me, all my favorite writers like Doris Lessing, for example, they mind their own experiences, and there was no path that they weren’t willing to go down. It was like there were no corners that they wouldn’t turn.

58:11

Doris Lessing, particularly, she would experiment on herself in these incredible ways, and I’ve gained so much from her willing to be human and bare and honest that I feel that, as a writer, it’s kind of my responsibility to do that too. I’m gonna be dead for thousands of years, right? But I’m here right now, and I don’t feel shame anymore. I mean, I have dealt with the shame that I was carrying.

And so, now I have parts of me that kind of value my story and see the value of it. And so, it feels wonderful, the fact that people are responding so well. And also one more thing is that I had a creativity teacher called Eric Maisel who’s written lots of books on creativity, and he’s a therapist as well as a creativity coach. And he said about being a human in the world that people can tell when you have a lot of shadows inside you, you know? You’re talking to someone, and they’ve got a lot of shadows and places that’s like, “Oh, don’t go there.” You just feel guarded, or the hackles are up for some reason, and it’s like can you learn to be a person who’s got no shadows inside them, and I feel like I’ve dealt with my own shadowy corners. Like, all the doors are open. There’s really nothing to hide anymore.

And so, it feels very liberating to be here talking about my book, and the hope is that it connects with other people, and it shows them that, you know, therapy is work that you can engage in that can be so transformative and that there are tools that therapy has to offer. I would love it if the therapy tools and what we know about IFS could just enter the lexicon, so people don’t have to wait until therapy to learn this stuff. They can just learn it because it’s out there. It’s public information. So I feel like there’s a public service aspect of what I’m trying to do here. Future generations can just benefit from having more emotionally nimble parents, and we can all recognize trauma when it comes up and just deal with it rather than kicking it down the road for the next generation, you know?

1:00:11

Rebecca Ching: I want to circle back on something you said, though, just for some nuance there because you feel free, everything’s out there, but I also want to go back to what you said at the beginning of the interview: you’re still a private person, you still have boundaries. You’re free from your story. Not everyone has access to every little bit of your story. But what you shared is out there because of the freedom you feel with all of your story. Would you adjust anything in that statement?

Sacha Mardou: I remember what Elizabeth Gilbert said when she kind of wrote her book. She said she wanted to be a blank page, like an open door, that there was nothing that she wasn’t too afraid to talk about or examine. And obviously she’s still a person with a private life, and she doesn’t share all of it, but what she chooses to engage with, she’s 100% on board with engaging in it. She’s wholehearted about it. And so, that’s maybe the key is I feel very wholehearted about talking what I’m talking about, and they are my darkest family secrets, but they don’t feel like secrets anymore. I mean, they don’t have the energy of shame around them.

Rebecca Ching: That’s the key.

Sacha Mardou: You know? I feel like I’ve taken my story, my family story, and it’s something I can give to my daughter now and say, “Look, this is the story of your family. This is where we came from. My grandmother went through World War II. My great grandfather went through World War I, you know? Look at all this history that went into us being here right now.” I feel I can give her the power and the pride of that without giving her the dark emotions that used to surround it, you know?

Rebecca Ching: Mm, and everyone’s on their own pace, too. Brené taught me the difference between personal and private, right?

Sacha Mardou: Yes. Yes.

Rebecca Ching: You share a lot of personal things, but there are still some things that are private, and I just think this is important to name because sometimes it’s like this I’m all a secret versus all the world. I’m like, “Well,” you know?

1:02:04

And so, I just wanted to bring some of that nuance in there and that what you just said is that it doesn’t have the shame around it, so it’s kind of like, “Eh,” and that is powerful, and that doesn’t have the shadows. I’m gonna be thinking about that for a while too.

I often ask my guests on this show how they define success and how is their definition different from what they were taught and how you were raised?

Sacha Mardou: Mm, that’s an interesting one. I’m from a working-class family in Manchester, in the north of England. And I was raised by women. The men were largely absent. But I was raised by my mother and my aunts, and honestly, they didn’t push success. For them it was about climbing the ladder but not going too far. And so, after I got my university degree my mother said to me, “Well, now you can be a schoolteacher,” and I was like, “I don’t want to be a schoolteacher. I want to be a writer,” you know? And so, I had higher aspirations and goals. Sorry, not to disparage teachers, but she was a nurse, and she saw being a teacher as a step up from that without going too far.

So I feel like success as a Northern British person was very much couched in limitations, you know? And for me, success looks like living a meaningful life and doing meaningful work. And I really feel like I’ve found that, you know?

Rebecca Ching: Ah, I love it. All right, so another tradition I have — I appreciate that background on your experience with success. I often ask these fun, quickfire questions at the end of an interview. So here we go! What are you reading right now?

Sacha Mardou: I’m reading two fantastic books. One is called Sitting Pretty by Rebekah Taussig, and it’s about the experience of having a disability in a culture that really doesn’t recognize its own ableism if that makes sense.

Rebecca Ching: Ooh.

Sacha Mardou: It’s really wonderful, and she’s such a delightful person to sit with and read her story, and she shares it in such a fun, bright, and easy way. And yet she deals with really thorny issues. So I’m absolutely loving that. That’s Sitting Pretty by Rebekah Taussig.

1:04:14

And then the second one is called Love is a Burning Thing by Nina St. Pierre, and it’s a memoir of having a mother who had these horrific traumas, and it’s kind of couched through spiritual bypassing. It’s a really unusual memoir, and I’m absolutely loving it. So that’s Love is a Burning Thing by Nina St. Pierre.

Rebecca Ching: Oh, that sounds great too.

Sacha Mardou: I love a lot of memoirs! I do read a lot of memoirs. [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: [Laughs] You learn so much about yourself hearing and reading other people’s stories. What song are you playing on repeat?

Sacha Mardou: So music is very much — when I’m writing a story, often a song will come through the ether and connect itself to a project. So the story that’s been living in my head is by Teenage Fanclub from the nineties, and it’s called “Mellow Doubt.” And it’s a song connected to a character in a story I’ve just been writing. So yeah.

Rebecca Ching: I love it.

Sacha Mardou: That’s been living rent free. Yeah.

Rebecca Ching: What is the best TV show or movie that you’ve seen recently?

Sacha Mardou: I’ve been watching The Franchise on HBO. It’s a production by Armando Iannucci who’s one of my favorite writers and producers. who’s British. It’s such a hilarious show, and it’s just getting better and better. I wanted to start it from the beginning as soon as I finished it.

Rebecca Ching: Nice. What is your favorite eighties piece of pop culture or piece of pop culture from the generation that you grew up in?

Sacha Mardou: Oh, yeah. Can I pick the nineties, please? [Laughs]

Rebecca Ching: Go for it!

Sacha Mardou: So it would be The (British) Office. We showed it to my kid for the first time. Now she’s old enough to watch it and hear the profanity, and she really enjoyed it. And I’m sorry, America, but I just cannot handle The (American) Office. You ruined it!

Rebecca Ching: Ah! I get it. I get it. I actually just watched that with my son. We watched The Office this summer together, and there were a couple things I’m like, “Do you know what they’re talking about?” He’s like, “Yes. Sex.” [Laughs]

1:06:02

Sacha Mardou: It’s so funny how both the American and the British version are cultural touchstones. But they really changed TV, you know?

Rebecca Ching: For sure. What is your mantra right now?

Sacha Mardou: I think I mentioned it earlier, the heart open, heart closed, just remembering, recognizing in that moment. And it’s such an easy thing. It’s an easy shift, you know? It’s like, “Oh, yeah. My heart’s shut closed right now. Can I work on that?”

Rebecca Ching: What’s an unpopular opinion that you hold?

Sacha Mardou: Do you know I find travel kind of overrated? I don’t travel well. I get jet lag and I just find it really stressful. You know, you can have subscriptions to Criterion and travel the world through cinema or documentaries. So yeah, I’m very much an armchair traveler, and it’s better for the environment as well, so I’ll say that.

Rebecca Ching: Who or what inspires you to be a better leader and human?

Sacha Mardou: My daughter, definitely. She’s 15 years old, and I have a huge sense that my generation, the proceeding generations, have really not done a good job of stewarding our society or our planet, and yet she has such an innate sense of justice and kindness. Yeah, she really pushes me into not feeling apathetic but to kind of keep learning and keep trying to make a difference, you know?

Rebecca Ching: Beautiful. Where can people connect with you and your work, Sacha?

Sacha Mardou: So I have a website. www.ifscomics.com, and if you go to that, you will find links to all my social media accounts and to my book, which is available everywhere books are sold. I do recommend going to your local independent bookseller if possible.

Rebecca Ching: Awesome! Sacha, thank you so much for not only coming back on the show but for this wonderful book, Past Tense. And I really loved this conversation. I cannot wait to share it with folks. Thank you for all that you do!

Sacha Mardou: Oh, Rebecca, thank you for having me back. It’s been a real joy!

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1:08:00

Rebecca Ching: Before you go, I want to ensure you take away some key nuggets of wisdom Sacha shared with us in this beautiful Unburdened Leader conversation. Sacha gave us snippets of how she tackled, over time, the three generations of trauma in her family. For her, it was therapy. For a lot of people it is. And some people might still find the echoes of stuff from their story after doing lots of work, and I think there’s a role for therapy and there’s a really cool way where coaching can come in and address those echoes.

And I love how Sacha gifted us with this very detailed account of her work and also how IFS can help in ways that she never thought possible. I just love that because I use that in all of the work I do – my clinical work and in my leadership coaching. I also appreciate how Sacha really reminded us this process was tedious and took time. It led her on a windy path with different people supporting her at different seasons. You know, and Sacha continues to do her work to this day, building self-awareness and, in turn, giving back through her books, cartoons, and generous conversations like you listened here today. And I think this, so importantly, is the ongoing work of an Unburdened Leader.

[Inspirational Music]

Thank you so much for joining this episode of The Unburdened Leader. You can find this episode, show notes, and free Unburdened Leader resources, along with ways to sign up for my email list, my new Substack, and ways to work with me at www.rebeccaching.com. And if this episode impacted you positively, I’d be honored if you left a rating, a review, and shared it with a few folks you think may benefit from it. And this episode was produced by the incredible team at Yellow House Media!

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