Saturn Returns with Caggie - 1.3 Shona Vertue on Sex and Relationships: finding healthy dependency in a partnership and knowing yourself first

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

How do we establish and maintain our boundaries within a relationship? Why do we often attract the “wrong” people? And can we de-condition ourselves from everything Disney has taught us? Here’s why celibacy might be the answer... Shona Vertue and Caggie explore sex and relationships, and discuss where the line between independence and co-dependence lies.  --- Follow or subscribe to "Saturn Returns" for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact of Saturn's return with inspiring guests and thought-provoking discussions. Follow Caggie Dunlop on Instagram to stay updated on her personal journey and you can find Saturn Returns on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.  Order the Saturn Returns Book. Join our community newsletter here.  Find all things Saturn Returns, offerings and more here.

Hello everyone and welcome to Saturn Returns with me, Kagi Dunlop. This is a new podcast that aims to bring clarity during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. I decided actually I want to pull it all back and just focus on the discomfort for me of what it would be to sit in the discomfort of celibacy and not get that validation from anyone. And I actually think, at least for me in my life right now, it's more powerful and empowered for me to acknowledge my vagina as being precious. That is the brilliant Shona Virtue who is my guest this week. Shona is an author, speaker, yoga teacher, personal trainer and creator of the online mobility program The Virtue Method. Shona is also a personal friend of mine and I love her energy and how open she is.

In this episode we go in on sex and relationships and we are not holding back on this one. It's not every day that you hear women talking about sex in this way so brace yourself you are in for a treat. But before we get to her I just want to check in with our astrology expert Flo Devereux who's helping us understand what's really happening during our Saturn return. In episodes one and two Flo explained how Saturn return comes about and why Saturn in particular has this connection with authenticity and responsibility. So this time, I wanted to know a little bit more about how we can become more authentic and responsible and the role that Saturn plays and why those lessons can often be so painful.

It's quite a long transition of kind of birthing yourself as an adult, letting go of what is no longer serving you, kind of taking responsibility for yourself. That's the main thing with Saturn Return is... Responsibility. Yeah. And I think if you start listening to the sort of pings and the things that are happening,

you can start working with it rather than oh yeah it's the resistance i think that causes the uh resistance the conflict and the main the main thing is saturn is a lot about accountability so it's like personal accountability so if things aren't going well in your life look at what you're doing and because it's all about like if we think about what responsibility is it's like your ability to respond and saturn wants you to become a master like badass flexible high level wise person how you respond to life i had the biggest test of that in the last couple of months because i've been learning about this stuff and thinking that I'm incorporating it into my life and then suddenly something will happen that makes you revert back to form behavior out of habit and then there was this moment when I was like

I can't choose what's happening to me but I can choose how I respond to it that's exactly right and when you have those moments you're like that is kind of even if it's something awful there's something empowering about that because you're like i see what's happening and i'm gonna choose a different way i can choose how i respond to this exactly that's that's the key lesson to learn over saturn return but i think saturn does teach through struggle. So in a way, it's also learning how to embrace struggle because there's a friction. Yeah, there's a friction because I think also a nice way to think about it is Saturn is the last planet that we can see with the naked eye

and everything before Saturn is, if we think about the structure of the psyche and we have all of the conscious stuff going on, but then there's all of this vast unconscious, the personal unconscious, and then also the collective unconscious. Saturn rules the boundary between the two. And I think what Saturn teaches us is that for true self-mastery, we need to be able to have quite a flexible boundary between the two

and be able to navigate our own personal unconsciouses so that we are actually aware of the choices that we're making and so we often gain insight into our unconscious through struggle and so saturn sits there on the boundary between conscious and unconscious and says how mature are you going to be stepping across this boundary in a flexible and what about so that way acknowledging what might be a part of you that's operating from a subconscious level basically and having the ability to look into that and take ownership over it rather than just being reactive yeah exactly which is always really tough i think also my nature was always to run away yeah and um someone said to me recently they were described i'm going to be transparent it was a therapist and she was saying that you

know your coping mechanism of things has always been to move country or run or like reinvent yourself or change yourself. And I was listening to her and I was like, part of me thought, yes, it's genius. It's worked really well, thank you. But I also was like, what other way is there? And she said, you just have to sit with the pain. And ever since I was like, it's brutal that, but there's so much in that. And that is where the growth comes.

That is like, you know, these painful experiences are here to teach us. And I think if we can work a bit more with that rather than again, like resisting it, these things, because it's going to come. It's going to come anyway. Life serves you up challenges. And if you can kind of make really good friends with the saturn in your chart your saturn and you can do that a lot through your

saturn return then then you have this inner authority and strength within yourself to know that you can that you can handle it if you have any questions at all about this please do get in touch you can find flow at astrology for the curious on instagram or you can reach out to me at kaggy's world now back to our guest today shona virtue shona and i first met i think it was about seven years ago in Australia and we were introduced through a mutual friend Maddy Shaw and we hung out a bit and then I didn't see her for a really long time but when I was in Australia this Christmas that's just passed I saw that she was there and so I reached out and we ended up having dinner together and we just ended up having the best time and talking about so many interesting things and we're just on the same wavelength about a lot so it just became incredibly obvious to me

that I had to get her on the podcast and as you will discover we discuss sex and relationships in a very open and honest and considered way it's I hope it doesn't come across as vulgar to anyone because you don't usually hear women talking about stuff like this that openly. It's still considered quite taboo. I absolutely love this episode and I think that you're going to take away a lot from it. So have an open mind and I hope you enjoy this episode. Thanks so much for listening. Hello and welcome, Shona.

Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming by. Yeah. You literally just walked in and we went fully in. We dove straight in. So we figured we should get this rolling. What we were just talking about a few seconds ago in the kitchen, I want to get it on. Let's do it. Let's just bring it, bring it to the table. So it feels like today's topic is going to be sex and relationships. Let's unpack it. let's unpack it let's we both are well well versed in failed ones i don't know i certainly am i'm i'm i'm well versed in good ones too

but it's a relationship over a failure well it's hard isn't it because it's like according to disney absolutely oh god disney has a lot to answer for. Yeah, Disney has basically fucked up a generation. Because every single Disney cartoon back then, when we were growing up, definitely was about rescuing the woman. According to my interpretation of Disney growing up, it was very much like meet the person and then live happily ever after.

So if that was the standard, then yes, I feel like there is failing relationship however I think even the ones that have technically failed according to the Disney test actually the things that I've learned and developed and we talked about this in Sydney was like whoa like it's a mirror yeah it's an opportunity to up level and when you stop seeing things in that way everything changes because even when a relationship falls apart you can be like oh okay this is bringing up this this is what this has shown me that I needed to see and then up level from that experience

absolutely were we talking about healthy interdependency yeah because again the sort of Disney thing is this very like dependent and I'm'm 100 guilty if in a lot of my relationships have been modeled on this like someone comes and saves me i follow their path and abandon my own yes and in that i rely on them too heavily in in many many ways and then so when the relationship ends it's obviously you're you're upset about the relationship ending but then there's a sort of like the abandonment of self that you have to acknowledge that may have happened months before but you didn't feel it because you were just attaching yourself onto another person and I think both you and I oscillate between being really dependent on someone or so independent so like when a relationship falls apart and then you go

back to you know the self-care and the work and all this stuff and you feel really good in your independence but then you kind of build up this armor around it and and because women are also celebrated for like being independent but where is the line and where does that become unhealthy too yeah and it definitely became unhealthy for me and I took it straight into my next relationships. So it was like- The independence. And then that, what I came to realize, was really an avoidance of intimacy because intimacy takes vulnerability

and vulnerability is scary as fuck. So it's like, and that's a huge thing for me. I feel if I have needs, if I am vulnerable, if I express my needs, that I will be abandoned. Does that stem from childhood? A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I seek so hard to avoid abandonment that... It keeps coming up. It comes back. It comes up because it's the fear that I have of it. And truly,

I'm the only one that abandons myself no one in the past not even in my relationships have they abandoned me I have actually abandoned myself by and we talk about this choosing to disconnect from our own needs and just give ourselves like a martyr to this person or this relationship or whatever it is in a desperate act to abandon myself. So the abandonment actually is coming from you. It's 100% coming from me. Do you think that's because it's going to keep coming up until you actually learn to go about it a different way, which is basically to honour your needs at the beginning?

Because that's what we said, like relationships will bring up all the stuff that you don't want to face. Also what you said about intimacy, because I think intimacy commonly is thrown around as like a thing about sex often. Absolutely. You can have like intimate sex

and then people think that's intimacy. That is not what intimacy is. Like that's intimate sex, very different thing. But intimacy in a relationship is being completely vulnerable. And that's something that we've been conditioned our entire lives to avoid at all costs. so people can be in these relationships and never actually experience intimacy absolutely which is kind of scary you know which very commonly can occur

particularly in a society that may not necessarily encourage us to unpack this stuff oh no we're encouraged to numb it by whatever means we can find totally whether it's alcohol or some form of substance whether it's social media where whether it's sex itself it's like there's so much that we can utilize to sort of avoid this stuff and and that's the thing is we don't take enough time to question that stuff because society has really placed a taboo and a stigma on checking in with that stuff. You know, like we were just such a culture of numbing, numbing ourselves. So whether it's like, you know, you've got back pain, take a Panadol.

You know, we're so used to being in that mindset, numb the symptoms so that you can keep working or numb the symptoms so that you can get on and you don't have to pay attention. There's a reason the pain is there. And it's the same thing for, you know know when we feel sad thoughts or uncomfortable thoughts they're there for a reason they're guidance right and if we continue to numb and don't check in it's like turning off the gps when you are lost that is so that's such a good explanation of what it is what i had happened for me at the end of last year was suddenly for the first time in my life,

I was getting the worst period pains before my period. Like agonizing. First time ever. And I was like, what? Where is this coming from? And then some stuff happened, like some not so great stuff in my life in terms of relationship. Yeah. And then I was speaking with a friend that runs a retreat and is very very spiritual and I've been telling her that this

like this stuff around my period was coming up and she said I bet it stops now that like everything's come out come out and you're yeah not yeah exactly and I was like no that's crazy and it stopped and now i don't get anything because you i mean to go back to again what we mentioned in the kitchen yeah let's bring it back at the moment single celibate single and celibate yeah i didn't know which one you're going to use well we're going straight in straight in can i talk about yeah you can totally i actually have been wanting to talk about this and i've been trying to think of like i'm sort of just experiencing it at the moment so i've made this choice to be celibate so no masturbation no um sex that's a big decision to make it is but also it's it was it's sort of been gradual so masturbation is a really interesting one particularly

for me i have a really interesting relationship with masturbation i discovered masturbation at a very young age and i utilized it a lot during a tumultuous childhood and as an escape as an escape and as a stress relief and that's common when you speak to psychologists they often talk about the fact that children will use it as a means to relieve stress and adults definitely do but it's something that we we learn in childhood and we shouldn't feel ashamed of it um and shame is a really dangerous thing around things like sex because then they it festers and leads to crazy ass shit oh my god i know right so sex, not a good idea. Just drop the shame. Um, or find ways to unpack it at least anyway. So I wanted to try to find a way to sort of stop the masturbation, but then

because actually when I left the last guy that I was seeing, um, and, and that was quite a heavy departure, it hit me quite hard. And to be honest, he was really a rebound for another relationship that had hit me really hard. And so I've just had like a succession of painful heartbreak kind of scenarios. And just before the last one was ending, I found myself getting incredibly horny, incredibly horny to the point where I just was like seeking sexual gratification in so many places like him from him, but also because it was ending and we weren't, we weren't ever together together, but we were, um, we were just seeing each other and we hadn't ever put kind of like we're a boyfriend and girlfriend but we had a very intense emotional connection um and i really started to convince myself that you know this was love and this was

the man i was meant to be with for the rest of my life and it was really intense but as i started to feel myself slipping away i was suddenly seeking validation sexually from so many other people and it was like this physical feeling of like i just want to masturbate all the time i just want to find like i'd have people you know guys in the dms or like whatever it was it was like this physical feeling of like i just want to masturbate all the time i just want to find like i'd have people you know guys in the dms or like whatever it was it was like just constantly needing that validation yeah the validation and because there's addiction in my family as soon as anything feels like it's beginning to become an addiction i check i check yeah i check myself before i wreck myself because i know where that goes. And so it was purely becoming an addiction, that validation. How long was that period of time? I would say it was like

probably a few months. And I think it got to the point where I realized I, it was actually that this moment where I looked at my phone and I had like, probably like four or five messages from different guys that I was sort of entertaining a sexual flirtatious connection with. And I suddenly, and I wasn't having sex with them. I just was like, it was just that kind of validation as we said. And I looked at my phone and I just thought,

this doesn't feel like progression. It's not coming from a good place. This is not coming from a good place. This is not coming from a good place. And this is not where I want to take my life. Maybe when I was in my early twenties and I was exploring, you know, myself sexually, but it's like,

I'm 33. I know what I want. And I decided actually, I want to pull it all back and just focus on the discomfort for me of what it would be to sit in the discomfort of celibacy and not get that validation from anyone. That is huge. And i actually think it's more at least for me in my life right now it's more powerful and empowered for me to acknowledge my vagina as being precious but i think before it was kind of i didn't really acknowledge the power of getting to know someone first

and then choosing whether I want to allow their energy inside me. And also... And their dick. But also of them really choosing you. Because people can say all the right things and message you compliments or whatever and say they miss you or all this stuff but them actually choosing you and their behavior is a very different thing and

you know the difference we all know the difference of how that feels and I think women and we're guilty of doing this collectively is like when a guy is treating a girlfriend badly and she's upset and she's analyzing it and girls sort of will like pat her on the back and be like oh no but he is he's just scared and i was like no no no he's not choosing you he's giving you fucking breadcrumbs and you deserve the full seeded loaf this is what my friend my girlfriend says to me so thankfully now i've surrounded myself with girlfriends that will call me on that bullshit and And you know, that ties in perfectly to this idea that I've always had. It's like, we're on our own path.

All of us are. Yeah. And then someone comes along and you just abandon yourself to go off on their path because like they're going on theirs. Like they don't give a fuck. And then you're like, well, I'm going to lose them if I don't abandon mine. It's like that thing of breadcrumbs. You're like, wait, come back.

So true. So true. And before you you know it you are lost in that wilderness lost in that wilderness you have to find your way back and so much of the pain around like and i mentioned this earlier is like the having to go back and find your way i think a huge part of that is the abandonment of self because yes oh my god i just realized this the other day yes and then you sacrificed your own needs to be with this person and we often hold resentment to that person because of that but actually to take ownership of that and be like i let me down dude this is mega like i'm 33 and i'm only just realizing this i wish i knew this when I was in my early 20s or even my teens oh god yeah but I think you have to learn that lesson real time and feel the pain and sit

in that because I just think it's so fucking true like honestly the pain of these last two relationships have been because I willingly chose to abandon self to become who I thought they wanted me to become or to meet their needs. And the pain of realizing that I had abandoned myself brought me straight back to childhood and the fear of abandonment. Cause it's like, that's the original wound. The original wound is that you're not lovable. So if you are reinforcing that point to yourself essentially your your external universe or external manifestations in relationships are trying to reflect that back to you so you can see where you're doing it you're doing the damage we have to take ownership of that definitely and that's not me saying you're doing the damage to the

relationship you're doing the damage to yourself yeah because yeah and that's also a really complicated thing to reprogram like i mean anything's really complicated to reprogram and takes a lot of work because you're having to rewire yourself so i guess your way of doing that is through the celibacy celibacy yeah Because it's the most uncomfortable thing for me to do. It's just suddenly go, do you know what? None of this. And also our sexual drive is such a powerful one to about like probably the most powerful in terms of the abandonment of self.

I'm trying to also reprogram what I find attractive because I think that for a long time, I know it's really hard. Okay. I've got a really interesting theory on this because I went and did this thing a few years ago when I was in like a really, it was like the beginning of my Saturn returns-ish, but I didn't really know that that was happening. I was just like, oh my God, I'm miserable.

I'm lost. What am I doing? Who am I? Yeah. And this girlfriend of mine that, she was like, I really feel like you should come on this retreat that I run. And anyway, I ended up

going and it was at the beginning I was like uh-uh I hate this no no no no I am booking my flight out of here and she called me out on it and she was like give it a day and it really put me on this path like in a massive way and one of the things that we did there was that we had two days of silence and we had to journal around relationships in our lives like whether it's friendships parents whatever you just wrote you had a timeline and you wrote about people that came up it could be even something that seemed insignificant but if that came into your mind like write it down wow and then you would write about the like really key ones and like journal around and I was like what are we like what are we doing here they were like just do it and anyway after doing this for two days I started looking at it I was

like oh my god and there was this theme with all my relationships that I would go for addicts fuck and I mean with that like I don't want to share too much but like that's from a parent thing so so much of what we seek in a relationship is and you either go is like it's called like a recoil thing where you will go for like the opposite so if you've got a a father that's like never ever present always working you might go for someone that's like really unambitious and always there so that's one way it can go or you will find someone that possesses a lot of the similarities often bad yeah because that is what your concept of love is growing up and that's what you've observed yes so you go out and you

seek it in the world so to have that awareness is really powerful yeah so it's about knowing what those things are that draw you to that person but being aware so it doesn't become like a damaging trait which is really hard which is really hard if you're if you're attracted to addicts yeah well it's the extreme i've always been i've gravitated towards extremes whether they're good or bad yeah and having someone that has that sort of flightiness that makes me feel a bit unsafe, I find very attractive. That's something not great. That's so dysfunctional.

But I can totally relate. I mean, so it's, what do you go for then? What is it about the addict that you find attractive? The unsafe, okay, but what's the good? Like, how can you describe the good things about them? It's not actually like the addiction. It's the sort of character that goes with it. Totally.

Yeah, no, no, absolutely. Perhaps. I mean, it's damaged. Right, because it's something that you want to, that you're seeking to fix? Probably. Yeah. Probably it's like, there's that.

Then there's, and less so now, but when I first acknowledged this pattern it was also to do with well don't look at me I don't have to take ownership over my own issues with addiction interesting yeah because it's like well look at them yes you know that's interesting so I think there was that but again like I've really like you're working through it yeah and that's not really so much of a thing because I was so self-aware of it and I could like again that feeling of like this is coming from a really bad place and I you know speed this up over the next couple of years like this could get really ugly and so I just was like cut that

out for my life until I can reprogram myself right but with I guess what's attractive about it's I don't know it's something to do with feeling unsafe that's interesting so I I feel like for me because I have a similar pattern I've definitely had most of my boyfriends recently especially but like yeah they, yeah, they've all been, uh, not all, I can't say that, but many of them and the ones that I've fallen really deep for have been addicts and they probably wouldn't appreciate me saying that about them. Cause I don't think that they're addicts that have made the decision that they are. But, um, I think also I like, I like the way Russell Brandt kind of explains it in his book uh i think it's called recovery but he talks about the fact that most of us are sort

of on a spectrum of addiction 100 and so like if you're a substance addict it's it's dangerous because obviously there's damaging physical effects that can occur in the in the short term um but with you know things like love it's like a human need so we with, you know, things like love, it's like a human need. So we can't, you know, if you're a love addict or a sex addict, those are things that humans still need to be able to survive.

So it can be quite complex to try and navigate that. And there's almost more shame wrapped around that. There's more shame, totally. And then social media, shopping, gambling, like there's food, there's all kinds of things that we can fall into and not realize that there is a level of addiction there. And I think ultimately at the core of addiction, it's purely just distraction from trauma, something that we're trying to ignore.

And I think that's the bond for me in finding addicts attractive. I think you hit the nail on the head for me, especially with my first interpretation of you saying, don't look at me, was actually because I thought, yes, actually it's both an excuse for me to not have to check my own shit because I'm so busy handling their trauma that I don't need to acknowledge my own. And the other thing is that I feel like when they're so deeply lost in their own pain, they won't see me. And what I mean by that is like, because to truly be seen is to be vulnerable and it's this thing this common theme for me is avoiding this vulnerability

and so if someone is locked in their trauma or their pain through addiction through whatever they're avoiding i can just join their journey and they won't have the ability to turn and look at me and take care of me properly so it's that's this interesting a lot of women do and it's this sort of caretaker thing where it's like the more trouble to man is the more like let me save you yeah because it's like i feel i have shame around my needs and so i feel like if someone else can't serve my needs, that I can ignore them and escape it. You know, and you know, it's really, that's just reminded me of my situation last year when I had a relationship end. And it was like very traumatic, but I dealt with it at the offset very, very well.

And then after a couple of months, I started thinking like, I want this. I think I want it back. And I went and met up with the person and I mean clearly like my body's response was like he is not in any place to be able to give you anything and like dealing with serious you know trauma stuff but I wanted to dive into that this is like really fucking personal thing making me feel a bit sick but it was like I and I journaled around it often it was like I want to dive into that person's like void almost to fill it to make myself feel like I belong so that was my that's my thing a bit rather than I but again it's the

same thing of not having my needs met yeah and it's just like being absorbed by by them but actually he he turned around to me and was like no and the sadness that I experienced or like whatever happened to me after was almost worse than the initial breakup because I was out of control I couldn't control the situation at all and I wasn't able to do that thing that i would have always done in the past he was at like and he did me the biggest favor by doing that yeah because i would have dived straight into that shit show because it makes me feel like i belong like i have a purpose yeah in someone else's shit in someone else's shit it's crazy and it means you don't have you have an excuse to not face your own basically yeah it's it's a set yeah it is essentially that because it's painful to face our own pain yeah

it's so much easier yeah completely then look at some like you look at someone else you're like oh you've got some serious shit to deal with why don't i just help you that and just leave my tools in the shed totally and then what it brought me back to is having to like deal with my own stuff and then you have to deal with your own and it's almost worse because you've been ignoring it for so long it's like it's like when you leave a sandwich in your locker at lunch and it's like probably a terrible analogy you just like leave it in there the whole school term and then the next term and then the next time you just kind of like i really should get to that but it's so moldy and disgusting and awful that like the like the longer you leave it the harder it gets to

actually put your hands on it and take it out whereas had you just dealt with it initially but yes that was an odd analogy to come up i like it but i think if you're one of those people that whether you're in a relationship and you're fine and you're finding that you want to leave it or the other side, you're single and you're resisting relationships. I think that a really good way to gauge, I mean, obviously I always recommend that people go and see psychologists, like absolutely, or a psychotherapist, but I think the gauge is kind of like journal on the things that you're resisting. Like what's the thing that brings up the most discomfort. It's like usually in there. That's what I always find. It's that thing when, when the, um, when my psychologist initially brought up this idea of not having sex

too quickly, what she'd, she didn't say go celibate. What she's actually said to me was if you meet someone that you have an interest in, you have chemistry with, I want you to wait six weeks before sleeping with him. And when I say that doesn't i don't flinch it's like yeah cool probably wait eight maybe even longer but actually when she first said i cannot tell you how uncomfortable i was and i literally like i laughed i was like you're fucking kidding me joking like what the fuck? Of course I'm going to have sex with him immediately. That's how I'm going to know.

And that was my gauge, was this like sexual thing. But it was such a... Which is not, was the best gauge. No, I don't think it's ever. I genuinely don't think it's ever the best gauge. But interestingly enough, the only thing I will say is a good gauge. Oh God, this is such an overshare but my vagina always knows we talked about this before but she always knows i don't know if i

trust mine do you not i'm joking well so what i mean is my sexual energy doesn't always know because my sexual energy can definitely lead me astray but my vagina will always do something in the relationship or in this experience with someone else that is rejecting them when it's not supposed to be like on a chronic level so basically i knew that this relationship that i was in was supposed was over like i just knew and i was really becoming a shell of a woman because i was constantly putting up with pretty not ideal treatment, constant gaslighting of my needs, constant like things where he didn't even have time to have a like phone conversation with me or anything. And it was just getting to that point. Whereas if I expressed any need, it was like he would express back how much of a burden that was.

Oh, wow. would express back how much of a burden that was oh wow but interestingly we I had started to get thrush really badly and I hadn't had thrush in my life before and it can be common that like you kind of share it with your partner sometimes like but anyway I basically was like this is like a chronic level I was like constantly having to take canistin and I was like I don't understand why I keep getting this nothing's changed in my diet i don't understand we broke up i stopped having sex with him when no thrush yeah that's no mental i had sex with someone else after we'd broken up and it's like way way later and no thrush and and the sex that i'd had with this guy was way more, you know, we knew each other. We were like comfortable. It was a much more safe place for my vagina.

And she didn't, there was no reaction. Now, science will be able to like, will say something along the lines of he might have been carrying the bacteria that caused some kind of reaction and change. But we'll ignore that. But I just had experiences in so many relationships over the time where like this has come up and sometimes it hasn't. And it's always been in the relationship that's very, very unhealthy. Well, it's like what I said about the thing. About your pain, your period pain. Totally.

There are messages and warning signs that we get from our body that science cannot always explain. That doesn't mean it's not valid. Would you say then from before, to go back to our overarching theme, before your Saturn return, was your relationship to relationships vastly different? It's hard to say because the level of awareness I had then versus now, it's very difficult to remember a lot of those relationships

and the red flags I probably ignored in those. And I've been in long relationships as well. Like it's only recently that relationships have been very short, but actually in my earlier days, like I've been in relationships since I was 16. And so my first one was four years. My second one was seven years. Then I had another four year one. Then I had a three year one.

Then they've kind of become progressively shorter. And I think that... Do you you think they become a bit more I sort of have a theory that at that time at that transition like things just speed up and the lessons get like more like quick fire totally rather than being this kind of like slightly more fluid feeling your way around like having more time to play with yeah it's totally a time thing i think also if we take it to like financial theories we can talk about like the sunk loss fallacy where in finance it'd be like continuously investing in a company that you know is failing and i think that i probably was definitely doing that in relationships that were failing but i was just so fucking codependent and so i was very very good at being in relationships

that weren't actually meeting my needs because I just was really a shell. So I stayed in those relationships for longer. And now to take another financial theory, which is failing fast. So good financial practices in companies are to fail fast. So you kind of go balls to wall with a company. And if you know it's failing then you get out and acknowledge its failure fast those are really good things to apply actually to relationships because i think people if they've been hurt especially and i worry a little bit at

the moment whether i'm going to be closed off from new experiences i think you're going to be cautious yeah which isn't a bad thing and i don't think that's a bad thing and and my manager who's like one of my best friends she turned to me and said i think you're going to be more careful with your heart this time yeah which is really important actually because i think we've we both obviously have been quite reckless with ours and our vaginas so i like that sounds dodgy but i think we've been reckless with who we've allowed like this is what we were saying before we wear our vagina on our sleeve no no no i said our heart and our vagina yeah i was like i used to always

say this my heart was in my vagina because i'd say about it's a bad idea to sleep with x's because my heart is in my vagina yes and then i stupidly said my vagina's on my sleeve which just makes me sound really thirsty it's not the right thing it doesn't make either of us great no it doesn't it's gonna help my case in celibacy though, isn't it? So how are you going to shift from, you know, this? Have you given it a time or? I kind of thought maybe a year, but I don't know because I also thought if I meet someone that I have a really strong connection to, am I going to want to sleep with them?

Obviously I will if I like them. But I think one of the things that my therapist said to me actually was shona if they're worthy of your love and your sex um then he will wait and this is again about someone choosing you like when you meet someone and you're into them they have to show up and the scariest part of that is risking that they won't and staying in your worth and your worth grows from that process so if you have low self-worth things will keep coming up like a guy will keep coming up that's basically rejecting you and you're then rejecting yourself so the way that you grow your self-worth i believe is by when those experiences happen and you you step into it with vulnerability and you

you know say your needs and everything like that and when they don't meet it like at the beginning before it goes too far you would I guess I use the word retreat back into yourself yes and it feels so uncomfortable because I think we think when we're saying like self-worth and all these like empowering things like they don't feel that good when you're growing them. Actually, they feel hugely uncomfortable. But you go back into that place, you acknowledge like there is a rejection to acknowledge, but it's not of self. Exactly. And I think self-love and self-respect are really interesting concepts and things that, you know, you can talk about it.

You can run yourself a bubble bath and light a candle but you know that's not what it's not really what it is it's like choosing yourself choosing to honor your boundaries you know or it can be as simple as like actionable things that are like like what so some of the things that i realized that i was doing particularly when we broke up was that i was sort of like i just i'd have late nights where i'd be like scrolling through instagram and i'd be sort of like stalking him. Like I think stalking your ex, particularly if you're still, if you still have feelings for them and they've rejected you, or you feel like they've rejected you, um, is a form of self-harm. A hundred million percent. Yeah. And I think masturbation

for me felt like a means to procrastinate. And I also think procrastination is a form of self-harm as well because essentially it's like whenever I procrastinate in whatever I'm doing it's really because I'm avoiding self-care doing something that I know will enable me to live life in a better way for me even paying a bill is a form of self-love because it's going to enable your life to be better better and relationships if you are somewhat addicted to negative ones can be a form of self-harm in which you are choosing to procrastinate from yourself and like taking care of yourself via that other person and their problems and how do you think people can become more aware of that? I think step one, if you can afford it, therapy is a really good place because you have trained professionals who are capable of unpacking this stuff with you. So for anyone listening that can

afford it, what I will say about affording therapy is like, particularly if you are a drinker, if you were to take the money or work out the money that you spent the last month on alcohol and you were to add that all up and then look at that balance the following month you could maybe say okay for this next month i'm going to take that amount and i'm going to put it into therapy and just see what happens fuck it right it's like one month out of your life if you hate it you can stop but i guarantee what's probably going to happen is you're going to go, shit, I actually need this. Yeah. And I should have been here a few years ago.

And I should have been probably. Exactly. So that's I would say that's step one. I think step two is there's a few people I think you can follow on Instagram that that post things that can cause you to think about this kind of stuff. I think Mark Groves, we both follow on Instagram. He's create the love and he posts incredible videos. He has a breakup program. So another person that I would definitely recommend following or elite and also listening to is Brené Brown. She has a really quick talk on, uh, I think it's Oprah's super soul Sundays where she

delivers a talk on the research that she's done on trust uh it's called the anatomy of trust and she just says some extremely powerful things about trust in relationships like friendships too not even just romantic partnerships but just like you know are your friends showing up for you and what does that mean and and also saying if you don't show up for yourself it's very difficult to expect other people to show up for you. And if you want to read some great books on relationship theories, I would highly recommend reading a book called Attached, which is on attachment theory.

It's a very, very digestible and accessible book on complex theory, psychological theory around how we develop relationships and how we develop attachments about insecure attachments and, and secure attachments. And it's just really worth a listen and you will feel probably put at ease. If you sit in any of those two categories, if you're really honest, you know,

that sounds amazing. Yeah. It's a really great book. Well, anyway, I think, I think we're done. think we're done I think we've covered so much so much stuff well thank you so much for coming on thanks for having me bye bye so I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Shona um one thing that I already took away from it

and it's been such a big part of my experience over the last couple of years is is taking responsibility within a relationship I believe that relationships come into your life when they're supposed to at the right time to uncover something about yourself and I don't ever view a relationship as a failure I used to and I used to have this sort of victim mentality within it but I don't anymore and I you know I value every experience and I've grown as a person through each relationship and I think that really connects back to what Flo said at the start like discovering our authenticity and taking responsibility isn't something that's easy and I think when we start to embody this work and and learn about it and really cultivate it into our life opportunities will arise that challenge that and I think it's just about having the

the mindset to approach it and be like I can handle this so if you want to hear more from Shona you can find her on Instagram at Shona underscore Virtue Virtue is spelt V-E-R-T-U-E and you can find me on Instagram at Kagi's World Saturn Returned is a Feast Collective production the producer is Hannah Barrell and the executive producer is Kate Taylor. It was mixed by Gabriella Jones. If you did enjoy this podcast, I'd love it if you could share it with someone you think might find it useful. So until next time, thank you so much for listening. And remember, you are not alone. Goodbye.