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For the Love of Therapy: Jada Pinkett-Smith on Trauma, Grief, and the Power of Embracing Your Journey

Release Date: 10/25/2023

For the Love of Peace: You Deserve Time To Rest with Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

Are you one of those people that says “I’ll rest when I’m dead?” We can relate. As busy people–partners, parents, career drivers, caretakers and a host of other hats we wear, rest seems like an elusive and sometimes impossible task–especially during the holidays. To kick off our new series, For the Love of Peace, we’re here to tell you–you need and deserve rest. And lest you think rest is just getting 8 hours of sleep at night (wouldn’t we all love that), it’s more. We need emotional, creative, physical and mental rest, just to name a few. The stats are real; when we...

For the Love of Therapy: Two Friends Compare Notes On Therapy: Jen and Kelly

For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

We’re bringing a close to our series on therapy, and we couldn’t be happier to have Kelly Corrigan with us to have a candid conversation with Jen around their thoughts on therapy, including when it first entered their awareness, and now, in a more enlightened age, how the next generation has more access to therapeutic help. Even as recently as 20-30 years ago, therapy was not talked about a lot in public. For Jen and Kelly, they didn’t see it modeled from their parents, it wasn’t mentioned in their church circles, and only earth shattering situations seemed to require it. But as they...

For the Love of Therapy: Freedom From Codependency with Melody Beattie

For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

We’re back with some more therapeutic goodness as we approach the tail end of our therapy series with another fire episode! Awareness around mental health, trauma, dysfunctional family systems and more has been coming into the national awareness on a bigger level over the last 10 years. But back in 1986, the concept of codependency was really new. And unless you were deep into studying sociology or psychology or seeing a therapist yourself back then (also something that wasn’t as widely accepted), Melody Beattie’s book, Codependent No More, gave words to the masses who never had a way to...

Jen’s Favorites: 7th Annual Christmas Gift Guide

For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

It’s that time of year again, and we’re back with another *fire* gift guide for all your giving needs this season. And not only are we showcasing amazing and thoughtful gift finds, every gift we feature gives back as well! This year, we’re partnering with Ten Thousand Villages to present a beautiful array of artisan products. Ten Thousand Villages is a global maker to market movement that addresses economic injustice. We love to shop with intention, and Ten Thousand Villages gives us that window into ethically-sourced, handcrafted wares so that our dollars empower makers all around the...

For the Love of Therapy: Wellness Doesn’t Come From a Product, It Comes From Within: Dr. Pooja Lakshmin

For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

In this latest installment of our For The Love of Therapy series, we delve into a timely discussion on mental wellness with a focus on genuine self-care. Our guest, Dr. Pooja Lakshmin, a renowned psychiatrist and advocate for women, offers fresh insights that urge listeners to break free from the superficial beauty and wellness industry's narrative that is steadily being pushed at us through all kinds of media, but in a dizzying fashion on social media, in particular. Steering the talk away from quick-fix solutions, Dr. Lakshmin illuminates the essence of true self-care, which, in her...

For the Love of Therapy: Are You Happy? Dr. Sara Kuburic Wants Us To Stop Lying To Ourselves and Take Ownership of Our Choices

For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

It’s time for this week’s podcast therapy session and we’ve got another great therapist in our “office” as part of our For the Love of Therapy series. Dr. Sara Kuburic is an existential psychotherapist, author and the force behind The @Millennial.Therapist account on Instagram. Dr. Kuburic believes that each of us is a free and responsible agent who determines our own development through acts of our will. Though this isn’t always a popular view to take, as we often look to outside forces to blame for our unhappiness, Dr. Kuburic wants us to understand that we have this amazing...

For the Love of Therapy: Jada Pinkett-Smith on Trauma, Grief, and the Power of Embracing Your Journey

For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

For the Love of Therapy: Women and Emotions - No More Apologies: Dr. Anita Phillips

For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

Have you ever been told you are “too emotional,” or if you display sadness or anger that you’re “overreacting,” or (gasp) - even “hysterical?” Women have long had their emotions weaponized against them. And as part of our For the Love of Therapy series, we have a trauma therapist and mental health expert Dr. Anita Phillips at the mic to share her thoughts and findings on why embracing our emotions can be the key to living our most powerful life. Dr. Phillips extensively explores the societal pressures that often lead women to suppress their emotions. She argues that emotions are...

For the Love of Funny: It’s Funny Where Life Takes Us Sometimes: Anjelah Johnson-Reyes

For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

It’s so fun when we get to have guests back on the show that we love, but it’s especially fun when we get to catch up after we haven’t talked to them for awhile! This guest joined us in the very first year of our show in the For the Love of Laughter series, and she was fire then, and she’s fire now, 5 years later. We’re talking about the amazingly talented and hilarious Anjelah Johnson-Reyes, one of our favorite comedians in the whole wide world! You know her from her awesome Nail Salon comedy sketch, which launched her career, or as her character from MadTV, Bon Qui Qui, and from...

For the Love of Funny: Laughing Toward The Light: Comedian Kevin James Thornton Finds Himself at 50

For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

We’re keeping the laughs going as we continue our For the Love of Funny series–and this week we’ve got Kevin James Thornton, a comedian and entertainer, who, after spending his youth in a fundamentalist church in the 90’s, found a lot to laugh about. After moving to LA to make his way on stages at the Comedy Store and as an actor, Kevin wasn’t sure he was happy with how his life was going. After a move to Nashville and some serious contemplation about where to go next, the pandemic hit. Bored at home, Kevin discovered a little thing called TikTok and decided it might be...

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We’re in the thick of our “For the Love of Therapy” series, and this week we’re getting a full helping of candor and insight from the multifaceted actress and author, Jada Pinkett Smith. Jada candidly reveals another side to her journey that many might not know from her highly public persona, a story where she takes charge of her narrative in the face of what people have decided for themselves who they think she is. Jada recounts the formative and often traumatic events of her past, and talks in stark terms about her present day pain points. Without sparing the hard parts, Jada leans into what it’s like for her, as it is for so many of us to be a woman today, what it’s like to reckon with our trauma, and marriage is really like behind the curtain, in hopes that what she’s learned will resonate with other women, no matter what their story is.

Jen and Jada compare notes from their own lives about:

Jada’s encounters with complex trauma, PTSD, panic attacks, and suicidal ideation
How mental health issues can visit anyone at any time, regardless of privilege or upbringing
The slow acceptance to admitting they’ve faced trauma, thinking “others have had it worse” - and the continued work toward reckoning with that truth
The reality that all of us, especially those in the public sector, will be judged by others, and a new understanding that judgment is most often about people’s own pain and how they’ve been hurt by others’ judgment, rather than it is about the person being judged

Through sharing her life journey, which she covers in much greater detail in her newly released book “Worthy,” it’s Jada’s hope to encourage others navigating similar struggles towards wellness and understanding.

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Thank you to our sponsors!

BetterHelp | Visit betterhelp.com/forthelove to save 10% on your first month!

Jen Hatmaker BookClub | Visit jenhatmakerbookclub.com and use code READ at checkout $5 off your purchase!

Thought-Provoking Quotes:

“I just wanted to offer other women breadcrumbs that are on this journey called life. Our journeys aren't going to look exactly the same, but there are just some universal challenges that we have just being human and specifically being women. I just wanted to go, ‘Listen, I don't care what's going on. Instagram and Facebook, life is messy. Life is difficult. It's challenging. We're all trying to figure this out, and I'm just going to show you little things along the way that I figured out.’” - Jada Pinkett Smith

“When you really start to understand the human condition, and when you really start to see people's fears, you really start to see people's pain. That's why people want to strike at you. That's why people want to spew whatever they can your way because of how they've been hurt, how they've hurt themselves, how they've been hurt from others' judgment.” - Jada Pinkett Smith

“I am so lucky--yes, my mother was deep in her addiction, but I'm going to tell you--she showed up [for me] at some of the most pivotal times.” - Jada Pinkett Smith

“It would take me years to really detach myself from chaos because chaos became normal for me.” - Jada Pinkett Smith

“It's not other people's judgment that's the problem. It's how you judge yourself. When you know who you are and you are in the process of healing your self-judgment, you realize that any judgment that anybody's got on you is really a reflection of where they are sitting within themselves.” - Jada Pinkett Smith

“I know what kind of oxygen that would've given me if I had been able to hear someone talk about [mental health] in an honest way. I wouldn't think that I was crazy or I wouldn't have to feel so ashamed. I felt so much shame for feeling the way that I did, having the things that I had, because it's like, "well, what are you upset about?" And mental health doesn't have anything to do with that.” - Jada Pinkett Smith

“I wanted to share that here is a person who seemingly had it all, who was looking for cliffs to drive off of, and it was a serious dire situation that nothing material could help me with.” - Jada Pinkett Smith

“Even today is difficult for me to look at my life and say that I've suffered trauma. I didn't realize how much trauma I had. I know it theoretically, but I'm still in the process of believing it.” - Jada Pinkett Smith

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Time's 100 Most Influential People in 2021.

Red Table Talk

Girls Hold Up This World by Jada Pinkett Smith and Donyelle Kennedy

Worthy by Jada Pinkett Smith

Guest’s Links: