When Things Fall Apart To Come Together with Juliana Wexler
This episode kicks off our first official podcast episode here at TTL. In our first episode, I talk to Juliana Wexler about betrayal, divorce & the path to living in alignment.
In this episode, we talk about:
Pandemic Angels
Betrayal before marriage
What happens when you don't get along with your partners family
Saturn Return & amateur astrology
How did we get here?....Seeing a sex therapist with your husband
Falling in love with your engaged boss
The formula for betrayal=mission driven startup + youth + co-founder flirtation
The moment that changes your life forever
Unexplained anxiety as a warning sign How do you know when to leave?
The stigma of divorce & overcoming the shame of leaving your marriage
Traveling to Europe to heal your heart
Self-care practices to support the healing journey
Instagram vs. Reality
Juliana was raised by two psychologists trying to understand her every move in San Diego. Never quite resonating with the laid back Californian surfer culture, she headed out east to the University of Michigan and was captivated by Ann Arbor’s high vibrational energy. Always fascinated by how systems work, she folded a pre-med education into designing her own major evaluating disparities and inequities in the U.S. healthcare system. Professionally, her 20s comprised living in Manhattan working her way up and out of various healthcare startups. Personally, her 20s were a time of trying to fit into a mold of a person that she desperately sought to be. Upon turning 30, she suddenly realized all the ways her own beliefs and the people and systems around her kept her small and confined. She finally began to recognize her own intuition and started following that little voice. Suddenly divorced at 30, she found herself questioning every aspect of her life. It was through the dismantling of all aspects of the life she built that she began to come home to herself. After quitting her job and leaving NYC, she traveled around the Mediterranean coast alone searching for her soul for several months. Upon getting an intuitive hit to move to Washington DC, she relocated and is currently getting a Masters in Policy Management at Georgetown.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Cami: Welcome, Juliana. Juliana is a dear, dear friend who I actually only met eight months ago?
Juliana: Yeah. Right before quarantine.
Cami: Yeah. So, I met Juliana like two days before--no, like seven days before quarantine hit, and it was one of those encounters where you meet someone and you're like, "I really like her, and I'm going to try my best to make her my friend."
Juliana: But it was so hard. You really had to come at me so hard. Just invite me for dinner once and I'm there.
Cami: Yeah. We hung out one day, and then the next day, I was like, "Do you want to come over for dinner?" Which was great and really fun, and you got to see a snapshot into my old life.
Juliana: Right. Good.
Cami: So, that was fun as well. I feel very seen in that regard. But I consider Juliana to be one of my pandemic angels. And I just thought of that today. I was like--
Juliana: Yeah. That's great.
Cami: I was like, "Juliana was as a pandemic angel," and I don't know what I would do without you, but I'm really excited to have you here to share your story because I've just so enjoyed listening to your wisdom in the past eight months, and I feel like I couldn't have survived the last eight months without you. So, it feels very fitting to start this podcast off with someone who means a lot to me, but also has just really been such a rock and a big inspiration for why I wanted to start this podcast. So, I want you to tell the audience a little bit about yourself, and where you currently are, and when you're coming back.
Juliana: Okay, okay. Well, what a warm introduction. I couldn't have come up with the term "pandemic angel" myself, but know that that feeling is reciprocated, definitely. And one person's angel is the other person's angel, too. It's not a one-way relationship.
Cami: Heard.
Juliana: So, I am currently in Santa Cruz, California. I moved to DC--I'll back up a little. I moved to DC in March, the week before I met Cami, right before the pandemic hit, to do a master's in policy management program at Georgetown, which started on June 1st, and has obviously been virtual. So, I am in Santa Cruz for the last two or three months with my boyfriend and coming back around Thanksgiving.
Cami: And it's not soon enough, right? Juliana was here until, I guess the beginning of September, and then she went to the West Coast for a hot second, but I'll be happy to have you back. And as you know, we like to go deep, and we've had some pretty epic conversations over the past couple months. And I've learned so much from you. I think, one, because you're really good at sharing in ways that show me an example of like how I could do something in another way because you've had that experience in that area if that makes sense.
Juliana: Yeah. I mean, that's my goal. It's like, why go through stuff unless you can help other people on the other side of it? What's the point, just your own pain?
Cami: Totally. And I don't think that--there's a lot of friends that I'm like, "You're just projecting onto me, which is different." But I think that's your gift is to show people how their situation can--or show them your situation so that they can implement it into their situation, right? And so, that's what I want to get into today. I also want to say like you can be as vague with your details or as explicit as you want. I want you to feel super, super comfortable. But as you know, this podcast is a lot of what smacks you awake in this lifetime, what happens when things fall apart, and the rebuild back up to things coming back together. And as you can see, Juliana is now in California. She is enjoying the sun and things have gotten much brighter for her, but--
Juliana: Really much brighter than the times I'm about to describe, I'll say that.
Cami: Yeah, yeah. So, I want to take it into--well, this is actually perfect because we're moving into Scorpio season. And so, Scorpio season's a little dark, it's a little watery. So, I can't really think of a better time to have this discussion, but I want to start with a snapshot of what your life looked like five years ago versus what it looks like now.
Juliana: Okay. Five years ago, I was living in New York, engaged to my fiancé at the time, who was my college boyfriend, which we'll talk about here. I had recently found out that he had cheated on me with someone who--the creative man or creative director at his company. And I caught him and confronted him, and we almost called off the wedding, we had gone to therapy. We were fighting with his parents about something different. It was a very low time five years ago. When you asked me that question, I thought, "Oh, five years ago." And then, I looked, I did the math, I thought, "Ooh, okay. That was a dark time." Different dark, but--
Cami: Flavor of darkness.
Juliana: Different flavor of darkness. I was feeling very alone and needed my ex to get me through that time. It was a weird time, the feeling of being cheated on and feeling like the person that I normally go to for support has hurt me, and still wanting them for support was very confusing. And I was also really struggling with having, I think in a lot of ways, too much pride to call off my wedding. I didn't want anyone to know. It was not a, "You cheated on me and I'm going to tear down the streets, or tear down your life." It was, "Well, we're going to hold this together. We're going to keep this under wraps." I was very into the idea of things looking good, and things seemed like they were good on the outside and know we have a good relationship, and I have a good job, and we live in this nice apartment and everything looks good. So, it must be feel good.
Cami: Yeah. And like, what would have happened if you shattered the illusion right there and then?
Juliana: Right. And I think often, "Why didn't I?" It's like I had this opportunity to, and I think I just wasn't ready to. It wasn't going to go down like that.
Cami: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you had so many things to still fulfill in your illusion.
Juliana: Exactly. And honestly, it didn't really occur to me that much. I never thought, "Oh, I don't want him--" I think I thought like, "Oh, this could be a breaking point for us to get closer." And I think that can happen with cheating sometimes, that it brings people closer, it opens up a different side, or any kind of bump in the road like that. It can tear you apart and it can bring you closer, and I think I thought, "Oh, we're going to go to therapy. We're going to get so much closer. He's going to open up to me more." And that did happen to some extent and I felt good.
Cami: Yeah. And at what moment did you realize like you weren't the exception, like, this was not going to be the exception to the rule?
Juliana: Probably after getting married. So, we got married the following May, and I think after about six months of marriage, I realized like, "Oh, these problems with his parents are not going away. These problems with our life, our own chemistry and our own relationship are not going away." These were the problems that led to him cheating. Of course, you don't see it like that, but it's the same problems. We have been together for eight years or whatever at that point. It's not something new. It's not like, "Oh, you have this." You don't cheat in a vacuum and don't have problems with people's families in a vacuum. All of these things are the same thing. So, I realized like, "Oh, getting married is not going to solve this. It's just bringing out different flavors of this." And actually, getting married was terrifying because then I realized, "Oh, now I'm really stuck with this."
Cami: What is it like dating someone's family? Because essentially, you're dating a person or you're married to a person, but you're also married to their family, and that's the one thing that I'm like, "Ooh, what happens if you just don't get along with their family?"
Juliana: So, I remember a good friend of mine saying, "When you marry someone, you marry their family," because I always had problems with--his parents and I never got along, and his sister. I didn't get along with any of them. I mean, we tried to, but it wasn't really a good fit. And I thought, "That's not true. Sam and I have such a good relationship. We don't have to be close to this family. He feels closer to me and my family than he does to his family," and that was true. But I think what she was speaking to was this old wives' tale of many generations that there is something to be said for when you marry someone, you marry their family, especially if you lived--we lived in New York and his parents did, too, and we spent weekends with them, and we spent a lot of time with them.
Cami: Yeah.
Juliana: And that's a hard thing to do with someone whose family you don't get along with. And I think I really undervalued, or really under anticipated how much that was going to affect me. I think that would have been much worse obviously with kids, which luckily, we stopped before we got there, but just the being intertwined.
Cami: Yeah. Well, it's also like you're not going to bring his family up to therapy.
Juliana: Right. Yeah. I mean, we wrote a letter to his dad with our therapist. So, we tried, but it didn't go over well. I mean, they were very resistant to healing, and certainly when I was in the picture. I mean, I hope for them that there's been a lot of healing by the process of our relationship breaking up, which I think probably has happened, but it's challenging. I think it gets better as you get older, too. I mean, we were 27. We were not really individuated. He certainly wasn't. He lived in the same city as his parents, he saw them all the time. And I think about now, in my relationship now, just being in your 30s, I don't know, I've just been through more. My parents have seen me through more. They're more understanding. There's less expectation and there's less of parents needing to fulfill their own dreams and misfortunes through the children, which I feel like happened more--
Cami: Totally, and that is like awful. That is hard. And what I respect about the situation is that it's not a lack of trying that you guys didn't try to make it work out, or you didn't have--maybe you don't have the tools that you have today necessarily, but you really gave it a fair go and I just think that says a lot about your personality when it comes to putting in the work. And I'm curious because obviously, divorce has a stigma attached to it and I don't--there are stigmas around all different types of things that I don't agree with. But I'm curious what about divorce do you find to be the most triggering?
Juliana: Yeah. I think there's two things. One is the you didn't try hard enough. I mean, I've had people say it outright, and I've had people just say just subtle things like, "I don't know if I would get divorced," or, "I don't know." Well, you don't know what it feels like to feel completely unsupported and unsatisfied in a relationship for many years and realize that you made a mistake. So, I don't know. I think it's unhelpful to say things like that, and I think you don't wake up and get divorced. It's not a breakup. And not to say that a breakup is easy or that you wake up and decided to break up, but it's something you've thought about for months and that you've likely been to therapy, you've journaled about it, you've cried at night in the corner about it, you've done a lot. I don't know anyone that just is like, "Oh, getting divorced is trendy. I'm going to do that." It's not an easy thing to do.
And the other thing which plays off that is this idea that if you don't have kids, then divorce is just a glorified breakup. I heard that a lot. "But you don't have kids. Oh, but thank God you don't have kids." Yes, thank God we don't have kids. However, this is not the same as your breakup when you were 24. I know that's your reference point, you're trying to give me support on, but it is different. And in a more secular society today where divorce is okay and religion was not a binding factor for either of us, I didn't feel like I was defying God or anything.
Cami: Yeah.
Juliana: Divorce is accepted, but there is something to be said for standing in front of everyone that you know and committing to this person, and it makes the implicit explicit. Like, when you're dating, when you're in a serious relationship, pre-marriage, you have this idea, "We're probably going to be together, we're probably going to have kids, we're probably going to have a dog, we're probably going to go on these trips, blah, blah, blah." When you get married, that all becomes explicit, and you talk about that, and your money is combined, and you're saving for things. People ask you, "When are you going to have kids?" These things are no longer things that you think about, they're things that you talk about.
Getting divorced is just like wiping away the future that you talked about having, not just the future that you thought you might have, but the future that you talked about every day. And so, letting go of that image of yourself in 10, 20, 30, 50 years is like letting go of a part of yourself. It's letting go of like, "Oh, I thought my kids were going to look like Sam." I pictured them. I know I pictured them differently. I thought my life was going to be in New York. I thought about these things and it's hard to let go of. And of course, you don't have the issue of custody and all the things that come with kids, but the lawyer process is really devastating even for people like us that thought, "Oh, we could do this amicably." And I don't know anyone that actually has totally succeeded in that, but I think for me, it was very hard to hear people say like, "Oh, but this is just like a glorified breakup." That didn't feel good.
Cami: Yeah. I can imagine that's kind of--it's making it feel smaller than it is, but I also think people say things like that to try and take away a little bit of your pain. Enduring the grief process from what I've learned is that just seeing people in that pain, like, "I see you grieving," like, "I'm here for you," whatever that looks like, is such a nicer way to say something than being like, "Yeah. Well, at least you didn't do this, this, or that." You're like, "Yeah. Okay. I'm still in a lot of fucking pain."
Juliana: Yeah. It's like, "Well, at least you didn't lose your job and lose a child." Yeah, yeah, yes. Thank, God, that didn't happen, but why are we listing all the things that could have been worse?
Cami: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, you had this pain of getting divorced. And there were a few flavors of things being layered on top that made the divorce more painful. And so, I know you came to a breaking point, eventually. Can you paint a vignette of that breaking point and where you were mentally and physically during that time?
Juliana: So, breaking point in when I realized I wanted to leave the marriage or breaking point within myself?
Cami: Within yourself, because I feel like that's--
Juliana: Yeah. So, after we had separated, I moved to Brooklyn, and I remember I was just crying every day, like multiple times a day, and it just felt it was just dark and heavy. Every time he and I would communicate, I would end up in tears. And I remember standing on the escalator in Whole Foods in Williamsburg crying, thinking I'm going to cry every day for the rest of my life. This is a new reality that I have to accept, and I'm just going to work it into my life. It actually triggered me into being rational, but it was like--instead of feeling like, "Oh, this is so uncontrollable." I'm skipping over, but I had plenty of the hysterical cries on the bathroom floor.
Every floor, every floor in my apartment had been cried on. And this moment was more like, "Oh, I just need to accept that I'm going to feel sad and I'm going to cry, build it into my day." And the funny thing about that is I think when you're in pain, it's not the pain that you feel in that moment that is so hard, or in that day, it's that you extrapolate out that you're going to feel like this every day for the rest of your life. And once I realized like, "Oh, even if I do cry every day, one, I'm okay. But also, I'm probably not--" even in that moment, I felt like, okay, I'm really going to cry for the rest of my life every day. I'm sure part of me knew that that wasn't true. And when you can bring it back to like, "I'm okay in this moment. I'm okay maybe for the next five minutes. I don't know if I can commit to 10. Okay, 5 minutes passed, I'm at 10." And you get like that, then it's not as bad. It's the feeling of like, I'm going to feel like this literally forever, and we just cut out the rest of our life, and I'm just going to die feeling like this.
Cami: Yeah. And I think we've talked about this before, too, but it's like the anticipation of pain can sometimes be worse than the actual pain.
Juliana: Yes.
Cami: Yeah.
Juliana: Yeah. I felt that pain of just being alone, of having been in this relationship for so long, I felt like I didn't know how to be alone. And I remember saying to people, "I don't want to be alone," and everyone said, "Well, you're not going to be alone forever. You've always had boyfriends." And I thought, "I don't think I'm going to die alone, jeez. I am worried about being alone today. I always have someone to say goodnight to and someone--" it's just that feeling of like, "What do I even do with my time? How do I structure my time? How do I be alone?" Instead of thinking this is going to go on forever, I started doing that with being alone, too, is like, "Okay. I'm okay being alone today. I can work out, I can make this plan with a friend, I can go on this walk, I can structure today. And then, I'll figure out tomorrow, and tomorrow."
And the great thing about that is that that's largely what forced me to be present for the first time in my life, was my whole life was about--when I was three, I wanted to be in the four-year-old preschool class. And when I was in kindergarten, I wanted to be in third grade. I was always looking forward. I always wanted to do what the older kids were doing and wanted to be more adult. You rob yourself of enjoyment by being like that. And I became present by having to live moment to moment because it was too painful not to.
Cami: Yeah. And one thing that I see that's appeared as the way you were saying, or what appeared to me as you were saying this, is the idea of you have one identity and you have had that identity from when you were at Michigan State meeting your ex, moving through that.
Juliana: I have to correct you that it's University of Michigan.
Cami: Sorry, sorry. University of Michigan, sorry guys. And you have this identity that you've built up and you've totally created. So, when you go through a divorce and you leave that person, not only are you leaving that situation, you're actually shattering part of your identity, so you're--
Juliana: Oh, yeah.
Cami: Talk to that a little bit because I'm so curious about how sometimes divorce isn't only the pain of divorce, but actually the rebuilding of self.
Juliana: Definitely. So, I think particularly when you meet someone in college and you have this shared group of friends and--it doesn't have to be college, but you hear it a lot with college. You just grow up like you're--my 20s was just an extension of college. It was fun, but it actually hindered my growth a lot because I was still--my social world at 28 was not very different from my social world at 20. Those are formative years. And so, as I'm changing in the background, I'm trying to not change enough to make it so that my external world didn't fit my internal world, which is eventually what happened. But I'm moving things around in my head and trying not to become too big to outgrow this world.
But my whole identity was I didn't--I had one good friend from high school. My world was college, and the extension of college in New York, and those friends, and those values, and that mentality, and it just--I didn't really know myself outside of that. I got married at 28, and at that point, Sam and I had been together for eight years. That's a third of your life. It's a long time at that age to not know yourself outside of relationship, and outside of one relationship. When we got divorced, it was like, "Well, who am I? I don't know who I am. I haven't really thought about this in a long time."
Cami: Well, I really liked what you said about not trying to outgrow that group of friends or that person because if I think of back to myself at 22 and break up at 24 and being so shattered, it wasn't that I was sad that we--yeah, it was sad that we broke up, but it was sad that I had to then rebuild myself into a new person, which is always the hardest part. So, how did you find yourself not being too big? Like, what are the characteristics of someone who feels like they have more outside of the relationship they're currently in that isn't super overt that you're going to notice it, but can be subtle? Like, what was the pain that you were getting that you're like, "There's more to life than this?"
Juliana: I think that I masked it by trying to fit in super well, and I thought like, if I can--in a social world where people were, there was a lot of engagements, and there was a lot of talking about weddings. There was a lot of talking about a lot of career drive and ambition, and those are things that were highly valued, like getting promotions, getting a new job, making more money. I think I became materialistic because it was like a fun way to fit in. It gave me this common language, like, "Let's talk about where we're going on vacation," or, "Let's talk about what my wedding's going to be like because I didn't--" and I remember feeling like, "I don't even like myself right now. I don't like that I'm doing this, but I don't know how else to connect."
Some of these are my own good friends and we had more to talk about than that, but it was like the conversation somehow got hijacked because--I mean, also to not talk about that then threatened my relationship. It was like I didn't know myself outside of these values, and it sounds ridiculous now, but it was like a fear of getting too deep, I think, a fear of really evaluating like, "What do I want in my life? What does that feel like? Do I want to be in this hustle community working all the time?" It was just like I felt like I couldn't ask a lot of those questions, and I had chosen this life. It was like, "I made this decision for myself that I was going to pursue this life, and damn it, I'm going to stick with it." That's the way it felt.
Cami: Yeah. Oh, I love that because something that has been coming up for me a lot lately is the choice thing to be in relationship with someone versus feeling like, "Oh, shit, I'm in too deep. There's not much turning around, there's no going back, but this is good. I can make this work. It's fine." Right? Whereas having the ability to choose someone and continuously choose them creates a lot of freedom in a relationship. And so, I love what you said about that. Can you speak on having so much more choice now compared to where you were then?
Juliana: Yeah. It's amazing because it felt like my relationship was constricting in the sense of my imagination. It wasn't that my actions were constricted. Sam would have never said, "Don't do this," or, "Don't go here," or, "Don't hang out with this person." He was not controlling, but it was like to be with him, I felt like I had to play small, and I had to play by his rules to be happy in his relationship, in that relationship, our relationship. And I felt like--
Cami: There's a part of yourself that you don't know anymore.
Juliana: Exactly. And there was no imagination. I remember saying like, "Let's move to Buenos Aires." And he was like, "No." And of course, I wouldn't have gone through with it probably, but I wanted to think about it, I wanted it to be a possibility. I didn't want to feel like we were stuck in this life and I just wanted openness to say like, "Oh, yeah. Let's just fantasize about this for 20 minutes then move on." And now, I feel like both in my current relationship and just in my current life, I do whatever I want, and I found someone that really supports that and likes that, too. It's kind of the feeling of like, "I'm never too big. I'm never too much." I would say I always used to feel like I'm too much. Sam is just telling me, "Simmer, simmer. You're boiling, simmer, and do this." It was always like I'm too much, and I have to be contained, and I have to constrict. And now I just feel like, "Oh, I'm not too much. I'm enough."
Cami: Like you're born to be too much.
Juliana: Too much, right. I think none of these things are new patterns that we find in relationship at 20. These are things that I was told as a kid that then I sought out a partner who would reconfirm the things that I didn't like about my childhood because that's the way that psychology works.
Cami: Yeah.
Juliana: And so..
Cami: Yeah.
Juliana: And it's so easy to blame the relationship that is most recent on like, "Oh, well, he made me feel like this," and blah, blah, blah. All these things were there, I just chose someone who was going to keep me in that prison.
Cami: And it's so interesting because you are also the product of two psychologists, right? So, your parents are both psychologists, which I find fascinating, one, because I love psychology, but two, because you know so much about psychology and how the brain works just by being the product of being around your whole life, right? And so, you appear to be someone who came and grew up with a lot of tools, right? Like, your parents are probably offering a lot of tools, solutions, guidance growing up, I can imagine, right?
Juliana: Yeah.
Cami: So, moving into picking the pieces back up before your divorce--I mean after your divorce, what did your self-care team look like and how did you know where to move next? How did you know what to do? How did you pick yourself up? Because a lot of times, you're in that trauma response, you're in that fight or flight, and your cognitive functioning and your brain is not being very helpful. So, how did you know what to do, and what is that?
Juliana: So, I had a great therapist. Actually, the therapist that Sam and I had seen when we were engaged I started seeing when I started cheating on him, which was what eventually ended our marriage, which we can talk about, too, because I needed help.
Cami: I would love to talk more about that.
Juliana: Oh, I'm sure you would. And I needed help. And she was great. I've sent several of my friends to her. She was really supportive. She did this technique called BEST, which is like bioenergetic somatic therapy or something, and she was like a therapist to me, too. I had seen her for years throughout the decision even to get married. I remember having conversations with her about I don't know if I want to get married. Most of it's there, but a lot of it's not there. So, she was really a confidant for me. The rest of my self-care at that point was like exercise and eating well. I bought a journal. The day that Sam and I decided to separate, I bought a journal and started writing in it, which is not something I had done since I was a little kid, which I still have all the journals from the past, and started journaling just everything that I felt. And it felt really disingenuous at first because I felt like, "Dear diary, today, blah, blah, blah."
But then, it started taking new forms and it became this healing modality. And that was the beginning of me healing myself of like--you know, I think teachers, and healers, and therapists, and everyone that gives us tools are great, but the alchemy for me was healing myself and feeling like I never knew how to self-soothe. How did I not learn how to self-soothe with two psychologist parents? Maybe they were always soothing me, or maybe I just refused to soothe myself, I don't know. But it was like I could feel horrible and get myself out of it for the first time at 30, which seems really old to learn that, but better than never.
Cami: Yeah. Thank God you learned it, right? Because people go through their whole life not knowing how to self-soothe. I mean, I definitely did not know how to self-soothe until the past couple years. I'm still learning every single day how to do that. Okay. So, you, an amazing intuitive, great therapist, you're in a lane.
Juliana: Yeah. One thing that really flipped it for me was my mom sent me an email about Saturn return. She read it. She heard about what a Saturn return in astrology means that it happens around 28 or 29, that it's this pivotal point where you grow up. And I remember the email was the subject of Saturn return, and she said, "I think you should get an astrology reading. You had one when you were like 12, but I think it would be really helpful. I think this is what happened to you." And I thought, "Okay. If you want to pay for it, sure." So, she finds me this astrologer. She was in Hawaii. I talked to her on the phone. She starts rattling off things about me and dates that things happened. That was like the day I started having an affair, the day that Sam found out, like within plus or minus a day or two, the day that things in that other relationship ended. "This is when this happened. This is when you would have felt this. This is when you would have felt that." And I thought, "Oh, my. What?"
Cami: You're going back to the journal. You're opening the journal.
Juliana: Yeah. You are just reading history that has happened without having any way of having that information, obviously, which there's obviously the reading the natal chart telling me about myself. And I remember her telling me, "Your Venus is a Capricorn. You're very loyal with your--probably the most loyal placement of your heart for relationships. You take relationships very seriously. This idea that you blew up your own marriage is going to be so much harder for you than for someone else." And that was my experience that people in my life were saying to me, "Why can't you just forgive yourself? People get divorced, people cheat. He's mad, but you're better off." And it was like I couldn't forgive myself. And so, I was looking for forgiveness from someone else as a cheat to forgive myself. And astrology for me really opened up this like, I don't get it. I don't know. It'd be that people will say like, "I don't believe in that." Well, I don't believe in it either, but it happened to perfectly outline my life as it had already happened. To me, it's not like a belief, it's just a--I don't know how it works, but it worked. Yes, you have now.
Cami: And if it's something that gave you hope, but also gave you a lot of information about yourself, you move on and into a new level of healing, that's powerful, and that goes back to all wellness tools, right? Like, if it's progressing you, and moving you forward, and giving you the confidence and the trust to move on with your life, why wouldn't you use it as a tool?
Juliana: Right, exactly. And I think about that a lot with all of the different things, all the different languages, the healing languages, the organized religion versus new age spirituality, the therapy versus every meditation--people are saying like, "Oh, running is my meditation," or, "This is--" like everyone finds their own things, and that's fine. There is no right--I think the greatest disservice we can do to ourselves is say like, "There is this way. This is the way. This is the way to eat. This is the way to exercise. This is the way to think." What does anyone know? I mean, we know what works for us. We find what works for us and that's all we know.
Cami: Yeah. Life is an experiment.
Juliana: Exactly. And we get better at it, and we find the things that don't work. I've tried a lot of things that didn't really resonate, and I think that there are people that have so much tension in their body, that massage, medical massage could be the experience of therapy. It could be this huge release, like, that doesn't mean that's going to be my healing, but I accept that, I see that, that's possible.
Cami: Absolutely. It makes a lot of sense. Juliana is my resident astrologist. When I'm feeling weird, I text her and I say, "What is going on with me?" I mean, I feel weird a lot. So, that's always fun if you need someone to--well, would you consider yourself an amateur astrologist?
Juliana: I think that I've learned--it was all through the narcissistic image of learning about myself, which somethings are. When you want to learn about yourself, I will go hard at anything. When you're in pain and looking for answers, that drive is there. I've learned a lot about my chart and it's funny. I know about the signs mostly that I have placements in because I didn't learn about astrology to read people's charts, I learned about it to understand myself, and a lot about the transits. It is so accurately predicted, the times that I have when I quit my job last year and moved to Europe. That is something that was largely seen in a transit being getting into a new relationship this year. There's a lot of things. And of course, could that be a self-fulfilling prophecy? Of course, I'm not ruling that out. I'm not saying that this is like predestined, but for me, it's nice to know like, "Oh, it's okay that I feel this way right now because it's going to shift."
Cami: Yeah. I like that. It gives you the hope that it's, "Okay. This is just temporary. This is just part of my life's chart." Right? So, I know everyone is on their toes curious to hear about the second layer of the divorce, and I think it's super relatable, and that's why I want to talk about it. And I think that going back to stigma, there's a lot of shame around how people exit divorces, and I think you do a beautiful job of just describing what unfolded and how you can move through that, letting go of the tendrils of the past.
Juliana: Yeah. So, my experience of getting through my own marriage was about six months in feeling like there was a lack of--no, a lack of--really, what prompted it was a lack of sexual chemistry. Being married brought this feeling of, "Oh, god. Now, I have to deal with this for the rest of my life." I remember just thinking like, "Okay. All I have to do is get from 30 to 35. Get from the point of marriage to kids, and then this won't be an issue anymore," which now I think back on is so sad. It's like I wanted to rush my life. So, we saw a different therapist. We went to a sex therapist for several months, on my request, demand. And I just hit this point I remember in the summer of this December 2017 of like, it's gotten slightly better, but this is the best it's going to get. I guess we should just stop seeing him and I'll just go back and just be this person.
And it wasn't like I was unhappy every day. I thought a lot about this. I was happy in the life that I had made for myself on a day-to-day scale. It was like I enjoyed going to work and coming home. I looked forward to being with Sam and cooking with him. We had these things that we enjoyed doing. We had a nice life, but I would get these pings, these intuitive hits of like something isn't right, and just lose my shit and cry hysterically and just feel like something is off, and I didn't know what to do with that. And there were these repeating themes that would come out as like not having good sexual chemistry, not having good emotional support, having such a strange relationship with his family. There were several repeating loop thoughts that I would have.
Cami: Yeah.
Juliana: So, I had just resolved to being in this relationship and making the best of it. I mean, I didn't even see a way--it was like leaving was not even on my radar. It was like, "What would that even look like?" I just didn't even know. I just turned 30. I didn't know anyone that had ever done that. It was like the shame. It just didn't occur to me.
Cami: Well, and you didn't have the choice.
Juliana: Right. I didn't have any expanders. I didn't have any examples of anyone doing that. It just didn't seem like something like--and I didn't really want to. Leaving a relationship to be single and walk through divorce on your own, why would I do that? It wasn't bad enough, or I had gotten really good at creating a reality for myself in which I was okay enough. And a lot of pressure was put on, I thought we would be good parents and I had always really wanted to be a mom. And I remember that summer after we'd been married for about a year, people started asking, "Oh, when are you going to have kids?" And I started getting really anxious. And I remember my mom saying to me, "You've always wanted to have kids. Why are you so suddenly anxious about having kids?" And I couldn't figure it out. I felt really judgmental of my friends for having kids, like, why are you having kids? We're so young." It was just my own stuff of this deep knowing that I was not with the person that I was supposed to have kids with.
Cami: Yeah. So, knowing you now, I'm like, "Oh, yeah. The way you talk about wanting to have kids in the future is with a lot of excitement as opposed to."
Juliana: And it always had been, even since when I was a little kid. And so, it was like, that was a big sign that something was off in a way that--and these things were coming to me. It's like it's easy to talk about them now, but they came to me so subtly. And it's like, "Okay. Well, I'm not going to leave my marriage because I am not excited to have kids." Like your brain attaches to 100 other reasons that you're not excited to have kids that make sense. I'm young, they're expensive, we live in a small apartment, all these things. I'm not going to get to that one. I'm not going to get to, "Oh, maybe I'm in the wrong relationship for a long time." That's just not going to come up. It's too upsetting.
Cami: Yeah, yeah. And I think it's important to note, too, just to people in general that if you're in a relationship and you feel like you don't know if it's the right one, you'll know, you'll know. It'll be explicit when it's time to go, don't you think?
Juliana: Oh, I say that all the time now, too. It's like, I don't have to make decisions. Things just happen for me. Doors just open, and then you don't ever--I remember in college with--I was just telling you this that I've made this pro/con list about Sam. We stayed together. But it was like, I don't have to make pro/con list anymore because there will just be--it's like a parting of the Red Sea and then you never have to sit down and think like, "Do I want to be in this relationship or do I not? I'm going to wrap." It's just like a knowing. It just happens. Either the other person leaves or something else comes in to break you up, or you suddenly want to leave. It's not like this decision that you have to force.
Cami: Yeah, yeah. And I think that provides a lot of hope because it takes the pressure off of like, "Do I know? Do I not know?" It's like you know you'll know. It'll be very apparent.
Juliana: Right. So, what led to me knowing was I had started working at this job that I loved, this healthcare startup that was at the time my dream job, and really loved my position in the company, felt like we were working on something really important, which I think that startup, drinking the Kool-Aid mission-driven thing leads to a lot of relationships and quite a few affairs, as I've seen--
Cami: Whats the formula for--is it mission-driven startup?
Juliana: Young 25 to 35-year-olds, attractive. That's driven. It's the feeling that you're working on something that your partner doesn't understand. That was a big thing for me is I would try to explain things to Sam and he didn't get it, which is fine, it wasn't his industry, but I felt like, "You don't get it, you don't get me," which then turns into, "You don't get me." Just because you don't get my job doesn't mean that you don't get me, but that's where it led, because I also felt like he didn't get me. So, that one makes sense.
Cami: There was some underlying stuff that was already going on.
Juliana: Definitely. And so, I was working with one of the co-founders of the company, and directly, he had hired me and we were working together and everything. And he was engaged. In other words, it felt safe. I was married, he was engaged. What's going to happen? Well, I never felt like if we were working together, I never--there was no sexual tension. It never crossed my mind, just put it that way. Until several months in, we were traveling together in Phoenix, just the two of us, and had too much to drink, and then ended up having--that started our affair. Him saying, "I really like you." And I remember for me thinking like I'm making a decision here that is going to change the course of my life. I cannot undo cheating on my husband and I will be that person.
Cami: Do you think that that's a moment that woke you up to the person you actually wanted to be, even though you knew that this was a destructive thing that was happening?
Juliana: Definitely. And I always say that he, the other guy, was in some way like you're calling me a pandemic angel. I mean, he was a life angel for me because the way he came in and out of my life and brought me so much clarity, and brought me to exactly where I needed to be in albeit a very painful and horrible feeling way, but it was like a surgeon. It was so precise, it all happened so fast from that point that I don't know how I could have gotten to where I wanted to be faster and any less painful.
Cami: Yeah.
Juliana: More painful way.
Cami: It's like sometimes the way towards salvation or whatever you want to call it--well, obviously, it's not going to be not painful, but it is a superhighway if you get on the right--
Juliana: Right. And I remember feeling like I have done everything with Sam. I have no more gas in my tank. I have done everything with him. I've tried everything. I had given up. I had just was living like, "Okay. We'll do this." I remember we had started taking vacations with our friends instead of--we used to love being together. It was like little ways our relationship had degraded. We started hanging out with groups of friends more instead of just by ourselves. So, it was like we had just fallen into these--this was not his experience, but I had felt like we had fallen into these routines and they were unfulfilling. And so, by the time that came along, it actually didn't very much feel like cheating to me. I felt like I was already out of my relationship with Sam emotionally and physically, and certainly had not been physically. I did not feel like I was physically cheating on Sam because I felt like I never had a sexual relationship with Sam really.
Cami: Well, when he's your brother. Sorry, that's an inside joke, but yes.
Juliana: Sometimes we could fall into relationships where people end up feeling like siblings as opposed to a romantic partner.
Cami: Yeah.
Juliana: And so, I knew it was a betrayal to him and it opened up these doors of like, "Well, what do I do now?" But it never felt like--and I knew he would be really hurt by it, but I never felt like, "Oh, I'm sharing something with someone else that I have with this other--" I think about what it would feel like now to do something outside of a relationship and it's like, "Well, this is something special that I have with this person and I don't want to share that with someone else." And I didn't feel like that because I didn't feel like that was a place that we had anything special.
Cami: Well, and it's also interesting because it gives you perspective into him cheating on you as well because--
Juliana: Right.
Cami: You're like, "My intention is not to hurt. I still think very highly of you. I still love you. I still have this." It comes down to the place of like, "Well, actually, maybe it's just the sign we're not supposed to be together."
Juliana: Yeah. I mean, I think it has been said before obviously that when both parties are cheating, there's something seriously wrong, to say the least.
Cami: Right.
Juliana: Yeah. And that whole experience was just kind of like me--that was me opening up. That was me going on of like, "Oh, my god, I can have so much more than I realized I could have. I don't have to play small. I don't have to settle." And at the time, that meant being with this other person, but I think--because that's what the mind attaches to is like, "Okay. So, I'm just swapping out X for Y." For me, it was the learning of like, how can I ever go back--I remember thinking, "How can I ever go back to Sam now that I've seen this life?" Now that I've seen what it feels like to feel connected to someone and feel really seen by them and feel loved by them, it's like I can't unknow that.
Cami: Yeah. What a beautiful insight even though it wasn't the most socially accepted way to gain it, right, which of course goes back to the stigma of what we believe in society to be right and wrong. But that's still a gift because it brought you to where you are today even though it's not an easy path. And I'm curious, tell people about what that caused you, like the turn it caused you to take, because I feel like that really is the dark knight of the soul, like, yes, you wanted a divorce with Sam, but the affair, I feel like, is really what tore you down to build you back up.
Juliana: Oh, yeah. I mean, losing the affair relationship was harder than losing my marriage at the time because it was like I was holding on--I was okay leaving the marriage because it was like I had this other thing. He was going to leave his wife. We were going to be together. And I hate telling the story sometimes because it's such a trait story, but it is interesting to know that even with all of the tools, and the wherewithal, and the psychological sophistication, you still get caught in it because you feel like you're going to be the exception. And I think there is something very humanizing and knowing that really anyone, a lot of people can fall into that.
Cami: Well, and two, and how many people have been in that situation and just don't talk about it, and they just hide it, and they just brush it under the rug because it's much more comfortable that way, and that's why we have so much shame in our society. So, when you can out the shame, you don't have to hold on to it, and it's just…
Juliana: Yeah, exactly. The feeling of him saying, "I'm going to stay with my wife," I mean, there's obviously a long story that goes into that. We could get into that, but it's probably not the best use of time.
Cami: Maybe one day we'll have a part two.
Juliana: Yeah. We'll have a part two of just the story. I've been told many times I should write a book on the drama of that story.
Cami: An awesome story that I had the honor to hear and it's like, "Whoo."
Juliana: It's a page-turner. It's a cliffhanger.
Cami: It is such a page-turner, and it's also just because you have such a brilliant mind and you're able to see different patterns and things so clearly, and you are logical and pragmatic, but you're also like--you have a beautiful mind. So, the way that you explain it definitely adds to the understanding.
Juliana: Losing that relationship was just like--oh, that was the feeling of like I can't eat for two weeks, I can't do anything. It felt like the rug had been taken from underneath me and I just didn't know what to do. I mean, that was the heartache--the pain of losing Sam was actually very predictable and very logical, but it was really muted by the excitement of having this other relationship for me on the other side of it, and moving to Brooklyn, and having him, and we were looking--I mean, just the plans of us being together really made the pain and status of leaving Sam so much less sad. And I think that maybe I needed that because otherwise, it would have been potentially unbearable and I would have gone back at some point.
Cami: Totally. And I think that goes to being like--what do you call it? The marriage angel of someone just being there to help you transition out of something that would have been really hard to leave otherwise, and you may not have ever done that if you didn't have that option.
Juliana: A real concrete, shiny carrot dangling in front of me.
Cami: Yeah.
Juliana: Yeah.
Cami: Yeah, because there's so much judgment that goes into divorce. Like, how did you let go of other people's judgment, especially when it comes to the affair? Because people are just so--sorry, it can be so weird when it comes to like--
Juliana: Yeah. So, I had so much shame around it, and particularly because Sam and I had agreed that--it was actually his idea I think that we would tell people together and we would tell them the story that we were comfortable with. And then, I went out of town and he just told everyone his side of the story. And it was like I came back to all of these people knowing and I felt really betrayed. And I understand why he did that because he--I'm sure got angry and thought, "Well, why am I protecting you? You hurt me." But I felt like we made this agreement and you knew all the information, and now I'm this whore, the town whore, and it is really hard.
We have this narrative in society of like, "Men cheat. Men are pigs. You can't trust men. They think with their dicks." But women are not supposed to cheat, and we don't think of them as doing that as much. And it's more threatening to the man's masculinity when--it is much more threatening to the institution of marriage for a woman to leave. I think that's changing, but it definitely hasn't changed yet. And the shame was really hard, being told by all these people like, "I don't want to be friends with you anymore." And I just heard for so many months, I mean a year probably, in my head Sam's voice berating me, making me feel like what I had done was the worst thing in the world. And I have a lot of empathy for the way that he felt, but I also think he didn't have the support or the desire to handle it in a mature way, to really have a conversation around it.
That took both of us, too, but I think that that hurt me a lot, this feeling of like he hates me. In a small social circle, you use the word "everyone" a lot. Like, "In college, everyone's going to this bar on Tuesday." And that's kind of like what our life was still like because we were living an extension of college, and it was like, "Oh, everyone hates me." Now, who's everyone? But at the time, that was a real thing, the idea, that idea. Everyone hates me. And it just felt like this narcissistic injury for me of, I had always been this responsible person that people looked up to and trusted with. And then, it was like, I felt just discarded.
Cami: Yeah. Well, it sounds like it was a little bit of a shattering of the ego, or a damaging of the ego. Was it fun to be like, "Yeah, I fucked up, and now your illusion of me is, well, I--"
Juliana: Now, that's fun. At the time, no. At the time, I was not ready. It was a lot of he said, she said stuff. So, there was a lot of like my friends making sure that Sam's friends knew that he had cheated on me first. And there was a lot of just immature stuff, but I think you do revert back--when you're in that kind of a tight-knit world, you do revert back to we're just in college.
Cami: Totally. And you are dealing with such high emotions and people being really hurt and not to underplay the devastation of both sides. So, when you got your friends involved and also like your 24, 22-year-old selves coming out, it's like--I mean, when you're going into your reptilian brain, you do reptilian things.
Juliana: It really changed the way I think about gossip. I loved to gossip when I was young. I loved juicy deets, and I loved all of that. But it made me think about like there are people on the other side of this gossip whose lives are--we are trivializing by talking about them and then moving on, and it felt really horrible to know all the text messages. A lot of things got back to me that people had said to so and so that got back to a good friend of mine. And it just felt like really horrible to know that I was just the flavor of the week on someone's mind and that it was so much more. It was both horrible to know I was being spoken about in a derogatory way, and also that I was just like food for thought for that day, and then people moved up.
It's like both comforting to know that people don't really care, but also just like, this is my life. This is a horrible thing that has caused me so much pain in my own life and you're just calling your friends and talking--it really changed the way I think about when I talk about people the way that I also blame. It's so easy to hear a story and say, "Oh, what an asshole." Especially with cheating, we love to attach to the narratives of cheating. Society loves that. Either male or female doesn't matter. And it made me now every time I hear a story about anything, I feel like I'm always like, "Well, I wonder how the other person felt."
Cami: Yeah. That's such a good point. I mean, it gives you so much more perspective than the average person.
Juliana: Yeah.
Cami: Yeah. So, kind of bringing it back around to, right, you have this moment where you were triggered to life and now you're back on this path of like healing. I think you mentioned at the beginning like you left this relationship--well, the affair relationship, then you went to Europe.
Juliana: Yeah.
Cami: And you did a lot of work in Europe, which I want you to touch on briefly. But then you come back to your life now and kind of like the back that uprise into where you are now because I think it's fun to show people that you don't suffer forever, you come out of the suffering--
Juliana: Really, the suffering, I suffered for a year. I suffered for the first year and I--
Cami: People want a timeframe.
Juliana: Yeah. It was a year, and it wasn't until--I had these looping thoughts of, "Sam's going to hate me forever." It was just like whatever I could attach to, they didn't really have a rhyme or reason, but I couldn't stop them. And those didn't stop for about a year and--I mean, even so, I would say even like until I went to Europe, which was at the yearend change mark. I didn't want to leave New York after we got divorced because it felt like he's from there and--I just felt like it was like abandoning--I was fleeing the scene or something. But after being there and I had a new job, and I had rebuilt my own life, and moved, and had this new life, and I thought, "I don't really want to be here anymore." And it's okay to leave now because it's like I had proven to myself that I could be there on my own.
And so, I quit my job and traveled around Europe for five months, and that was where I just came back to myself. I think I had covered up the holes of pain that I felt when I was in New York, still from all of this, but I hadn't really healed. I hadn't healed me. It was like I was still really suffering and dark. And I realized that because I dated briefly this guy that I didn't like that much, and he triggered me a lot, and made me feel bad about--or I turned it inward on myself and felt really bad about myself and realized, "Oh, man, I got some stuff to work on." This is me, this is my--and I think you realize it more when you're not that attached to the person because it's so obvious that it's your stuff and not theirs.
Cami: Yeah. You're like, "You're making me feel this way," then you're like, "Oh, actually, I am definitely--"
Juliana: I am making me feel--
Cami: This is a pattern of mine and it's not going away unless I fix it.
Juliana: Yeah. So, that was Europe for me and there was a lot of journaling, a lot of channeling my higher self, and a lot of autonomic writing, a lot of--my grandfather had died a few months before and gave me this locket that was his grandmother's, and I used it as a compass for my trip of, I would just think about--almost like speak to myself in my great, great grandmother's voice as this calming entity. It was just this all getting in touch with my intuition. I didn't make any plans on where I was going to go, where I was going to stay, which if you knew me before, was not how I lived my life at all, everything was planned, and I just felt this freedom. I swim in the ocean every day. I was on the Mediterranean Coast. I felt happy being by myself. And before, it was like--in New York, I was like trying to put the pieces back together, but I felt a lot of resistance. And being outside and hiking, and in the ocean, and writing, and reading, and talking to my family and friends from afar, I feel like my soul was being healed.
Cami: I love what you're saying about, I wrote this down earlier, "What does a life with no roadmap look like." And I feel like you just exemplified that so beautifully.
Juliana: Yeah. And to not have plans was so foreign to me, but so freeing to--and I think a lot of my friends have said, "Wow, you really prepared for 2020 on your own in 2019." And I think that is true. I got really comfortable being alone, not having plans, not seeing people, like finding things that made me happy. And a way that we've been forced globally to do this year, I had a little head start on by doing for myself last year, which is just interesting.
Cami: And life unfolds as it will for the reasons it does. It's kind of funny how you can look back and see, "Oh, that totally prepared me for this."
Juliana: Right.
Cami: So, I'm going to ask every guest this that comes on, but what--well, two things. One, what song gave you hope in your darkest hour?
Juliana: So, I'm not a huge emo, sad boy song girl listening there.
Cami: You're not like me.
Juliana: No. But I like pump-up songs. So, I would listen to a lot of Drake and Post Malone and Beyoncé. Like I wanted to feel fierce, and strong and energized. Like, I'm not as sad on the floor ballad listening person. I have enough pain. I don't need someone to sing their own pain. I had enough on my own. I am one with music to get me through to give me the power to get through the next stage.
Cami: So, you're like more "Holed Up" by Beyoncé than like "Breathe" by Sia?
Juliana: Definitely.
Cami: I love it. What wisdom, like a little snippet of wisdom, what wisdom would you give yourself in your darkest hour?
Juliana: Yeah. In my darkest hour or just when I was younger?
Cami: Either.
Juliana: So, when I was younger, I think that--something I didn't realize until all of this was I thought that if my life looked a certain way on the outside, that it would feel good on the inside, and that meant feeling like I had the right job, had the right relationship, had the right body, had the right clothes, had the right Instagram, all of the things that we think--and it's all marketing, but it works. It worked on me. And I thought like, "Oh, that person is happy because they have these things. Oh, having a beautiful wedding, having the right engagement ring." All these material things that like, "Oh, that means you're happy, that means you're good." And I had all those things and I felt hollow, and I felt so much more alone than when I had none of those things but was literally alone in Europe, or had some of those things but now feel much more supported in my relationships and friendships now. I think understanding that don't go for--stop trying to make it look right, make it feel right. I don't know why I didn't do that.
Cami: Hell, yeah. I freaking love that. It's like, what does it feel like? What do you want to feel?
Juliana: Right.
Cami: Wow. Well, thank you so much, Juliana. I know we could talk for hours because we do that often, but thank you for part one. We'll definitely have you back for part two at some point. I can't think of a better guest to kick off the series "Triggered to Life." And so, we heard an awesome story with Juliana, and we look forward to many more, but yeah. Just big thank you for coming on and I'm excited for this to come out.
Juliana: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. It was so fun.
Cami: I know. This is great. Alright. Well, we will talk to you all later.
Juliana: Okay. Bye, everyone.
Cami: Bye.