The Codependent Millennial Podcast

Sophie helps you heal from codependency by delving into the most important issues that contribute to it, like people-pleasing, emotional childhood, insecurity, enmeshment, resentment, and so much more. By listening to this podcast and implementing what Sophie teaches, you WILL create a life that you truly love, even if you don't yet believe that's possible. Enjoy!

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52. Come on a walk with me (summer rain in the forest & a few thoughts) 07/18/2022

51. Some Loving Words & An Essential Daily Practice For You 07/04/2022

50. Shani Silver on how to live a happy, joyous life as a woman who just so happens to be single 06/30/2022

*Springtime Reset Workshop* Today at 2pm EST 06/13/2022

49. Omisade Burney-Scott on Being Sweet to Your Damn Self 02/23/2022

49. Omisade Burney-Scott on Being Sweet to Your Damn Self Follow Omisade on Watch Other Inquiries: About Omisade: Omisade Burney-Scott is a Black southern 7th generation native North Carolinian feminist, mother and healer with decades of experience in nonprofit leadership, philanthrophy, and social justice. She is a founding tribe member of SpiritHouse and previously served as a board member of The Beautiful Project, Village of Wisdom, and Working Films. Omisade is the creator of The Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause, a multimedia project seeking to curate and share the stories and realities of Black women and femmes over 50. She is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, the proud mother of two sons, and resides in Durham. Transcript: Sophie Shiloh You're listening to the codependent millennial podcast with Sophie Shiloh episode 49 Omisade Burney-Scott on being sweet to your damn self Hello, my love. So nice to be talking to you so happier here right now. Today's episode is a treasure. It's a conversation I had with a woman named Omisade Burney-Scott. I want to read to you the words that she uses on her website to self identify. But I think powerful introductions are about so much more than someone's bio resume or a list of all their most notable accomplishments and she has many. But I think it's really important when introducing someone to emphasize the impact they've had on your life. And so that's what I want to do here in this intro as well because while I've only known that Omisade exists for like, two weeks, she really has had an incredibly profound impact on my life. I learned about Omisade and her multimedia project called the Black Girls Guide to surviving menopause a few weeks ago on YouTube, I was watching those amazing style like you interviews and one really stood out there was this radiant, gorgeous woman on the thumbnail. She just looked electric. She was radiating. And then I saw the title. It said my body was screaming at me how depression saved Omisade Burney-Scott's life. And that's my story. So immediately, I was just like, Okay, this is a human that I need to learn from immediately. It was such a moving interview, but I was left with so many questions. So I went to her website started devouring podcast episodes, started seeing all of the incredible things that Omisade is doing out in the world and I was just overwhelmed and inspired and enlightened by her work. So go to the shownotes to find everything that she has going on because there's a lot and it's all really good. She has a zine called messages from the menopausal multiverse. She has an amazing podcast called The Black Girls Guide to surviving menopause. She has essays on grief and love and liberation and so much more. Her website is Black Girls Guide to surviving menopause calm. Her podcast is Black Girls Guide to surviving menopause and you can find her on Instagram at oceans sweet and sour, sweet and sour ocean sweet and sour. I'm seriously so honored that these women that I admire and appreciate and call on as guides want to talk to me. My intention with that statement isn't to belittle myself at all. But after the conversation with John on the last episode and this conversation with Omisade and with a couple of other things that I have in the works like I'm just blown away, really by this huge web of a community that you don't even realize exists before you dip your toe in. Please don't wait a single moment or talk yourself out of it when you feel the spark of wanting to get in touch with someone even if your brain tries to tell you that they're too important and smart and busy and powerful and cool to talk to you. I just recorded interviews with two of my heroes in the span of 30 days so you can literally do anything. Trust me. Trust me. Before I roll this interview with her I'll read to you her own words about who she is and what she does. Omisade Burney-Scott is a black southern Seventh Generation native North Carolinian feminist mother and healer with decades of experience in nonprofit leadership, philanthropy and social justice. She's a founding tribe member of spirit house, and previously served as a board member of the beautiful project village of wisdom and working films. Omisade is the creator of the Black Girls Guide to surviving menopause, a multimedia project seeking to curate and share the stories and realities of black women and femmes over 50. She's a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, the proud mother of two sons and resides in Durham. Now, without making you wait another moment, please enjoy this conversation that I had with Omisade. Omisade Burney-Scott, you are amazing. I want you to give a little bit of an introduction. I'm going to introduce you of course before this, but I want you to tell my audience who you are what is really important that people know about you. Omisade That's a great question. And thank you for having me. So I think the things that are really important to me, that I want your listeners to know is not what I do, but who I am and who I'm trying to be. So who I am. I am a seventh generation North Carolinian so I'm southern who I am As I'm A I, my parents daughter, and my parents or ancestors have been deceased now for almost 20 years or more. So, I move in the world as somebody whose child but not somebody who's here physically anymore. I am a sister. I have older siblings and a younger sister. I'm mom to two spectacularly beautiful black boys, who aren't boys anymore. My oldest son will be 30 next month, my youngest son will be 14 in October. But they they've taught me so much about like, how to love and how to love myself and be more soft and open and gentle with them and with me. I am an Aries. Me Sue. Yeah, but with a Leo moon and Leo rising. So I am fire fire in fire. Sophie Shiloh Incredible. That's so powerful. Omisade I think that's important for folks to know. Sophie Shiloh Yeah, exactly what they're getting into, Omisade you know, just just be prepared. And I'm a really passionate person around healing. My own healing, and the healing and safety of my people, black people. Healing of our country, healing of our culture is my my thing. I think that liberation and radical love, like is at the core of healing. So that's really important to me. And like who I'm trying to be, it's just a really happy, vibrant, safe, joyous, young person. That's who I'm I'm trying to be? Sophie Shiloh Can I ask you to elaborate a little bit about radical love and what that means to you how you embody that how you use that in your relationship with you? Omisade Yeah, so I think, you know, I had a very traditional kind of view of what love is, I have older parents, who were both born during the Great Depression, and raised in Jim Crow South. And so a lot of the ways that I experienced love from my parents was, you know, providing you something, right, like you have a home, you have a safe place to live, you have a safe place to lay your head, you you are going to school, you'll get to go to college. You're safe, like your physical safety, in terms of like stability was like a really important thing. But kind of emotional vulnerability was not something that was always available to them. And I understand why. And I also feel like for me, I didn't think that I could be as sensitive as I am emotionally, I felt like that was problematic. So I started to try to figure out like how to mask my emotions or mask my sensitivity, not very successfully, honestly. And so as I've gotten older, and also have been on a pretty consistent journey around my mental health and my wellness, radical love looks like me actually allowing myself to be much more curious and open to my authentic self. Like, who is she? What does she want? What does she desire? What does softness look like? What does intimacy and vulnerability look like? In all relationships, I choose to do have access to that, because I don't think that everybody should have access to it. I think boundaries are really important. But I think that the radical part of it is like, what does it mean for me to be vulnerable to myself, and allow myself to have whatever kind of thoughts I might have? And be curious about the origins of those thoughts without shaming or being embarrassed? Or if I am feeling some embarrassment for a thought or if I am feeling some shame or whatever, for thought to allow that to just be released from me in his time, you know, and not like you're failing you have to hurry up and get over this thought, like no, I'm not feeling I'm like this thought has is here for a reason or this feeling is here for a reason. And so I think the radical part of that is like, working everyday to suspend judgment working everyday to sit to alleviate shame, working every day to be more open to who I am in who I allowed to have access to my authentic self. So. Sophie Shiloh So that is a beautiful lead into just me saying just for a second about how I discovered you, because I found out about you five minutes ago, essentially. And I really, I saw your style, like you interview and I was immediate. I'm like, I'm done, like, so I'm done. It's, I was blown away. And so I haven't had the chance yet to like, listen to quite every single podcast you have. But I just dove in immediately and started gobbling them up. So the the thing you said the phrase you said, that kind of hit me and just told me that I had to reach out to you and talk to you and learn everything you have to say. And all of that was you talking about just being sweet to your damn self. And part of that, you know, includes not coming to yourself with judgment and shame, like you just mentioned, which is amazing. I want you to talk more about that. But that there are so many ways for us to be sweet to our damn selves. And you also had an interview with blue now, who was that interview? Everyone has? That's just, it's prerequisite information for like, a woman on earth. You know what I mean? Omisade I think so too. She was a absolute hoot when we interviewed when he was in her night dress, like she was actually like, anybody gonna see this? I was like, no, no, I'm in my pajamas. As it's fine. I'm in blue. Now it's fine. Sophie Shiloh For her to just show up so much as her that she didn't even check before. Like, that's just so powerful. And so. So this concept of being sweet to your damn self, talk a little bit about that, because coming out of, you know, a childhood, where you're describing you were shown certain kinds of love, and you were probably not shown how to love yourself in other various important ways. So like, what is what does it mean to you to be sweet to your damn self? Now? How do you do that? How have you learned that over the course of you know, having kids experiencing menopause? This simple question should only take, you know, one or two sentences to answer. It's no big deal. Omisade Maybe maybe 12 or 13. But um, so I want to say something, you know, I my parents worked really, really hard, really hard. And my, my mom was super lovey. And like a huge cheerleader of anything that my younger sister and I wanted to do in terms of like, extracurricular activities, if we wanted to do dance, if we wanted to, whatever she was like, yes, let's do it. Let's make it happen. And I think that was born out of her not having access to so many things as a kid, like they were really, really, really poor. The thing that I didn't see my mother do was take good care of herself. She was always extending that out to other people. Are you good? Are you hungry? Are you cold? Are you sleepy? Let me take you here. Let me take you there. I didn't see my mom rest until my mom gets sick. And that that felt like a really, really important part of my framing of like, what does it look like to take care of yourself? What does it look like to be sweet to yourself? What does What does rest with this care look like? She just did not read. And she wasn't the only one that I observed doing that inside of our family? Like, none of the black women inside of my family? Didn't know. Yeah, that they were always in Sophie Shiloh the concept was just like, foreign entirely. You know, Omisade the concept is foreign. Because it's not a luxury that black women are afforded in many ways. It's definitely that generation. Right? Like I said, my parents were not boomers. My parents were the greatest for Sophie Shiloh Yeah, so that was not even a question. Omisade Absolutely. What do you do you work hard? Yeah. And you take care of your family. And you're in constant motion, you're cooking, you're taking someone to this class or someone to this club, there's always something going on. And so my relationship with rest to me is like an exemplar of a place where I wasn't I didn't know how to be sweet to myself, like rest to me is such a really important part of my sweetness practice now. And I think that what are the unintended outcomes of the pandemic, is that it allowed me to lean in more deeply into the fact that I don't know I don't know how to rest. I still struggle sometimes even working remotely even still working primarily from home Like carving out times in my day, where I'm just in a place of just rest and ease, and not in motion. Even inside my house, you know, I teased that, you know, the virtual world that we kind of operated now I feel like I'm in a long hallway and I'm running from one Zoom Room to the next, you know, Oh, are we on Zoom? Are we on Google me? Are we on Google meet? Are we on Skype, and I'm just running around in this virtual space. And like, giving myself an opportunity to stop in this virtual space and go outside and get to stop and to lay down even if I'm not taking a nap. Like if I don't close my eyes to go to sleep, but just to, to recline. Yeah, and let my body soften and be quiet and just settle in. I listened to music all the time anyway. But to put on some music that just lets me just like time travel or relax? Yes, time travel. Yeah, all the time, all the time, whatever it may be. So the being sweet to myself, right now primarily looks like the ways in which I allow myself to rest. And I think it's still a journey of figuring out these things, and unlearning a lot of what I saw growing up as a kid. Yeah. Sophie Shiloh So unlearning. Let's pause there for a minute, the undoing you mentioned that in your interview with Dr. Jenn from decolonizing therapy, you talk about the undoing of so much of what we were taught, the disguises that we put on ourselves in order to survive and the, you know, just the various habits of either not resting or telling yourself that you're not allowed to not giving yourself permission to do all of this. Like, I think it relates also to sovereignty, having sovereignty over your own body in your own life. Literally just living it as if it is yours because it is it is so tell. Tell talk a little bit more about what you have to undo what you have to unlearn in order to be a happy woman. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, that's really the essence of it. Omisade I mean, you know, I want everybody to be happy people, however, right? Cis, hetero woman, whoever's listening to your podcast may not identify that way. Exactly. Everyone who listens to you to know that what hat for me, the undoing or the unlearning? Absolutely kind of exists inside of these constructs that we live in, in this country. Right? So capitalism tells you gotta be like producing, producing, producing, producing, I'm a genetics kid, right? So it's like, Where is the evidence that you are a valuable person? In? Did you go to college? Where did you go to college? You know, there's always the bar of like evidence of your legitimacy. Or if you're fraudulent, like, it feels like it's like one of those kind of like Whack a Mole situations like you can never actually get it right. So it's like, okay, inside of a capitalistic construct, what does success look like? You got to go to college, you got to go to a particular kind of college. You got to have a particular kind of degree or a particular kind of job, but you got not just have any job. What's your title in your job? What do you do? What are you responsible for? Are you a supervisor, like how many people use provides? Do you have a budget? Well, how big is your budget? Like it's always like, Sophie Shiloh proof and also the competition of how much do you overwork this masochistic competition? Omisade masochistic competition of like, I literally put in 65 hours, I'm killing myself. Yeah. Right. And if you being like, Oh, my God, I put in 80 hours last week, and then they're like, but I'm getting to go to Cabo. So I feel so much better about it. So it's like, Well, why do you have to do that? Yeah, like, it's very bizarre way in which we're in the hyper productivity, hyper, you know, hyper speed of work, like you have to prove your worth. Yeah. And I you know, and because I operate with an intersectional identity of someone who is a black who's black, who's a woman who sits who's heteros college educated, who I feel like has been pretty successful and being able to take care of myself most of my adult life, not all of my adult life. Most of it, yeah, you know, you you move in a way where you're like, you also realize how much white supremacy and patriarchy is like jacked you up. Sophie Shiloh Yeah. And that hits you and then you're like, Omisade Alright, and so the unlearning is why am I doing this? Yeah. Am I actually really happy don't want to do this. Well, if I stopped doing this what what will I lose? Am I'm willing to lose whatever that is? Like cuz some But what I think I will lose is like, actually not real anyway. So like, how do I give myself permission? To be very clear, I've never worked in corporate America. I've always worked. I worked in higher ed. And I've worked. I've worked in social justice in the nonprofit sector. And so in the US think, Oh, well, that doesn't happen inside of the social justice nonprofit. That's not true. Sophie Shiloh Yeah. Oh, god. No, I mean, ya know, Omisade the hyper hyper work that exists inside of nonprofits is to me again, an example of like, how capitalism and white supremacy work ethic, like, what have you working seven days a week? Every Dragon, I Sophie Shiloh come from that world to it, Omisade and I'm talking to you, so drag, my oldest kid is to drag him to every single meeting every single action, every single protest every single phone game, you know, every single board meeting, you know, he, for the longest time, che was always the only kid in the room. Yeah. You know, and, you know, there was some, you know, I don't know, honor in being like, oh, yeah, right. Sophie Shiloh Yeah. Which I mean, it honestly, that does make sense. Because like, fuck, yes, you're raising this incredible aware child who's engaged and who sees the impact of how he and how his mom walks in the world. But then there's like, what you what you're saddling yourself with, when you allow yourself to live only in that way. There's, there's no rest, there's no connection with hand, there's, like, Omisade no rest, and there's no there's no boundary, right? There's no boundary, there's no like, somebody could call me at nine o'clock or 10 o'clock at night. And when, especially with Che, because my boys are 16 years apart. Yeah. So Jay, you know, focus, disrupt whatever time that I should have been really dedicated to being in mommy mode with him. Yeah. And be like, Listen, I need to talk to you about this, or I'm working on X, Y, and Z. And, you know, he just learned to go with the flow with it and be like, you know, snuggle up underneath me while I'm working, um, or, you know, take care of himself and be in his room. And you know, both my boys are... /episode/index/show/codependentmillennial/id/22227752

48. Joan Sotkin on Codependency & Money 01/28/2022

47. How to Enjoy Your Life Instead of Dwelling On Negatives 12/23/2021

46. Oversharing 12/01/2021

46. Oversharing Learn more at Join me today as I discuss what it means to "overshare", why we overshare, how to determine when it’s harmful for you, and how to stop oversharing if you want to. What is oversharing? Overstepping your own boundaries(or someone else's depending on the information) in a conversation with someone else. Why do we do it? Because of our (codependent) need to try to gain the approval of others. How is oversharing harmful? Oversharing undermines and chips away at your relationship with yourself and your trust of yourself and your own intuition. This is one way in which we disempower ourselves & we can stop if we want to. How do I know if I’m oversharing? You can feel the difference. You know the difference between healthy venting vs. unhealthy dumping. You know the difference between healthy explanation and communication vs. unhealthy oversharing in an effort to gain external approval or permission or validation. You know the difference between what it feels like to do something that undermines your relationship with yourself vs. what it feels like to do something that bolsters your self trust, your confidence, your self concept, etc. How do I stop oversharing? You need space. Just a fraction of a moment of awareness and observation--awareness of what’s going on for you in that moment that is causing you to want to overshare, try to justify your decisions, try to get approval from this other person for your decisions, etc. When you get that awareness, it doesn’t magically change your behavior but it does become easier to let go of harmful behaviors when you see so plainly and clearly that they negatively affect you. What does progress looks like for you? Maybe a huge improvement for you would look like not answering EVERY single question that someone asks you that you don’t want to answer in a conversation. Maybe progress for you looks like changing the subject at dinner, or taking a breath and checking in with yourself and how you feel before discussing something personal with someone who asks. Please: acknowledge and celebrate your progress during this process! If you’re looking for more support in healing your codependency, you can learn more about my codependency coaching program at /episode/index/show/codependentmillennial/id/21345401