132: A Big Announcement and A Sneak Peek Ahead

I have big news! Starting now, we will follow a new release schedule for the podcast, going to twice-a-month releases on the first and third Mondays. We’ve done weekly episodes for a couple of years now, and I need to free up some time for exciting upcoming projects. My new book releases on May 6 and is available now for preorder: Who Deserves Your Love? How to Create Boundaries that Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship. My next project is a cookbook that focuses on easy, stress-free meals and gentle nutrition with my compassionate philosophy. I’m also trying my hand at fiction writing with my first draft of a fantasy romance novel. I want every project to reflect my full passion and energy, and I feel strongly that it’s time to reallocate my focus toward these other endeavors. I’ll stick to the twice-monthly podcast release schedule for March, April, and May. The last episode in May will be the final episode of the Struggle Care podcast—for now. You never know what might happen in the future! Let’s keep in touch! Sign up for my newsletter at Struggle Care, and I promise not to overload your inbox!

Show Highlights:

• An exclusive sneak peek into my new book, Who Deserves Your Love? How to Create Boundaries that Start, Strengthen, or End Any Relationship

• My second book has the same disability advocacy perspective as my first book.

• You’ll find counter-culture messaging for communication and relationships.

• My book avoids standard attachment types and the language of codependency.

• An overview of the three parts of my book

• Listen as I read ch. 7 about The Decision Tree.

• It’s tricky to occupy the space between wanting to have compassion and grace for people while still having boundaries for yourself.

Resources and Links:

Preorder my new book: Struggle Care Website, Amazon, and Bookshop

Connect with KC: Website, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook

Get KC’s book, How to Keep House While Drowning

We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: www.strugglecare.com/promo-codes.

• Transcript

  KC Davis 0:00

  Hi friends. Before we get started, I want to let you know that my new book, who deserves your love is now available for pre order. It'll be out on Tuesday, May 6, and the subtitle is how to create boundaries to start strengthen or end any relationship. And yeah, I do mean any. This is for family relationships, platonic relationships, romantic relationships. It's sensible, it's practical. It's going to help you think through why you might be experiencing issues in your relationships. It has a decision tree that helps you make important relationship decisions, and there's a new take on boundaries. It's going to help you make those value based decisions and carry them out. Is love conditional? How do you navigate a relationship where someone's best efforts are hurting you. When should you step away? It's plain spoken. It's powerful. We're going to talk about vulnerability, trauma, disability, personal history, boundaries, and how to conflict well, and how to emotionally regulate, and all of these things packed into a little punch of a book. So check out who deserves your love. You can pre order on bookshop.org, Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Hello, you. Cynthia balls of stardust. Welcome to struggle. Care. I'm your host, Casey Davis, and I'm gonna give you some news first, and then we'll talk about today's episode. So the news is that starting in March, which should be March. Now, I'm going to be moving to a new release schedule for the podcast, where, instead of weekly episodes, I'm going to release episodes twice a month on the first and the third Mondays. This is the 100 and 32nd episode that you're listening to right now of struggle care, and I've been releasing an episode a week for a couple of years now. And while I've loved making this podcast, I need to lighten up my schedule to get ready for some upcoming projects that I am just super excited about. You know that ADHD urge, when you can just feel your passion and energy begging you to move to the next thing. Well, that's basically what's happening to me. My new book, which you can pre order now, is called who deserves your love, how to create boundaries that start strengthen or end any relationship. And it releases on May 6, and I'm ramping up press and marketing efforts for the book, while still working on my next project for you, which is actually a cookbook. So my cookbook is something I'm really excited about. I have a book deal for the cookbook, and it's going to focus on easy, stress free meals and gentle nutrition information, and it's going to bring that same compassionate philosophy to taking care of yourself and feeding yourself as my other books do on cleaning and relationships on top of that, just hobby wise, I have been trying my hand at fiction writing. Most of you guys know that I'm obsessed with romanticy and I consume romantic books like crazy, so I'm really a horrible fiction writer, but I've been having so much fun learning about it and trying my hand at it, and I'm currently in the middle of my first draft of a fantasy romance novel, so I'm having so much fun with that. But all that to say, I want everything that I produce for y'all to be something that I'm proud of, that I feel like my energy and focus is 100% in and I can just feel that it's time to reallocate my energy to these new things. So as I mentioned, I'm going to be going dropping down to a release schedule where I do two episodes a month, starting now in March. I'm going to do that for March, April and May, and then on May 19, that will be the last episode of the struggle care podcast, and I will officially wrap up podcasting for now. Who knows what will happen in the future? If you haven't already be sure that you are signed up for my newsletter, which you can do at struggle care.com I'm very judicious when it comes to my use of newsletters. I am someone who gets overwhelmed with my email and my text message is very easy, so trust me when I say that I will not be overloading your inbox. I truly only send out a newsletter when I have something to say, usually when there's like a new project happening or some new opportunity that I want you to know about. I think I sent a total of like, five or six newsletters in the whole last year. I never sell your data, and again, I'm super mindful about not overloading you, so your email is safe with me. If you want to keep on top of what I'm doing and the new fun things that come out, you you. So that's the big news. And for today's episode, I wanted to do something a little different and give you an exclusive sneak peek into my new book. I want to read you a chapter. So as I mentioned, who deserves your love is about relationships, but it's a unique. Book, because, first of all, I know there's a million self help books out there about relationships, but I want to tell you a little bit about what's different in mine, and then I'm going to read you a chapter. First of all, it's the same kind of disability advocacy that I have in my first book, like recognizing that the struggles we have in relationships aren't just about our personal moral failings, but are about a combination of the way we were raised and the systemic barriers that we experience, while at the same time having to explore issues of accountability and agency. And you know, how do we make changes in relationships, both for yourself, how you do that, but also, how do you deal with someone else who you want them to make changes, because something they're doing is not working for you or is hurting you. And you know, how do you assess a relationship where maybe someone is not doing their best and you can't get them to do differently, or maybe they're doing their best and their best is still hurting you? That's what this book is about, and it is about all relationships. It's not just about romance or partners. It's about friendships. It's about family relationships, it's about community members. And so it's a book that I think can apply to everyone and all your different types of relationships that we have. It also has what I believe to be some really important kind of counter cultural messaging in there, this idea that, like, I don't owe anyone, anyone is kind of popular right now in self help, and there's a part of my book where I specifically talk about how that's not true. We do, in fact, owe each other things, especially when we're in a community with someone, and even more, especially when we're in a relationship with someone, but how do we balance that with what I think a lot of us experience as feeling the tendency to over extend ourselves in relationships, or to give too much in a relationship, or to not really know when to draw the line, you know when to have a hard boundary and and so this book is going to address that. The other part of book, this book that I like is that I don't use the word codependency. I don't talk about attachment types. There are books about those, if you want to read those, but I think that there's a better way for us, at this point in our culture, to talk about that feeling of being over dependent emotionally on someone that I think we're trying to refer to when we talk about codependency, things like people pleasing and feeling as though your stability is like linked with somebody else's approval with you. And I'm going to talk about that in a different way that I think is going to be more helpful in this book. Same with attachment types, there's nothing wrong with attachment types. They can be helpful, but it's a very individualistic way of looking at things. And the first this, the book has three parts. The first part is called How to work on relationships. And instead of talking about things like attachment types, love languages, those sort of things, we're going to look at a concept called the vulnerability cycle, which is understanding not just what happens in you because of things that you've gone through, but what happens between two people bringing their own unique issues together. How do we get kind of locked in repetitive cycles with people, and how can we break those cycles with some communication skills and some emotional regulation? The second part of this book, and I'm super excited about this, is a decision tree. So you may have seen me talk about my decision tree on some of my online content, but basically it's this idea that, you know, if you were a client of mine and I was your therapist, and we were sitting in my office and you had a relationship and you didn't know what to do about that relationship, it takes you through a series of questions that help you determine what you want to do with a relationship, and it takes into consideration Lots of different issues, and it kind of gives you an answer at the end, like, it's almost literally like a choose your own adventure quiz that will kind of give you an answer at the end, like, should you continue to engage in this relationship, or should you maybe put some distance in this relationship? But in that these categories of stay or engage are very nuanced. I don't do cut off culture. This isn't a book where I'm going to tell you and now end that relationship, see you later, cancel them, never talk to them again. I'm not saying that that might never be appropriate, but the reality is, is that we are interdependent people, and you can't always do that, nor I think should we always be doing that. So the third section of the book is about boundaries, and I re explain boundaries in a way that's different than what a lot of people talk about with boundaries, that I think is going to be more helpful for us in learning how to stay in relationships with protection and boundaries, or to disengage with people with safety according to our values and integrity and with boundaries. So I'm really proud of it. It's made with the same sort of like accessibility as how to keep house. If, as far as text and things like that, easy to read. There is an audio book I just recorded it. It's in my voice. And I'm really proud of it. And I think you guys will love it too. You.

  Music. So I want to read you a little part of it. Now I'm going to read from Chapter Seven, which is the first chapter in that second part of the book about the decision tree. And this is the chapter that leads into decision tree, chapter seven. Compassionate stories do not justify harmful behavior. And the context of this, by the way, is that we talk a lot in the first part of the book about sort of like changing the story you tell yourself about people. Understandable behavior and acceptable behavior are not the same thing. The vulnerability cycle demonstrates that the stories you tell yourself about people are powerful. When you challenge those stories about another person's behavior, you can positively impact your relationships and your ability to emotionally regulate in challenging situations. Simply making room for the possibility that other stories exist can help slow down the vulnerability cycle and make us more open and thoughtful people. However, sometimes adopting a compassionate story about someone's motives gets us into trouble. Many find it hard to distinguish mistreatment or abuse from garden variety disagreement. When you challenge your story about why the person is harming you, be mindful that you do not justify mistreatment by telling yourself things like he's really trying, she's doing her best. She isn't a bad person. She's just really had a bad childhood and never learned the skills to be a good mother. They have a disorder. They can't help it. He's really sorry, although some of these statements may be true, a better understanding of why people behave in ways that upset or harm you does not mean denying the impact of their actions. It does not mean their behavior is okay. Their actions still have consequences. No one gets a free pass to lose control over their behavior just because they struggle with emotional regulation when you change the story that you tell yourself about your mother in law who constantly undermines your parenting in front of your husband and your children, it will look something like this, the initial story, this woman is a psycho who is out to get me. The new story, this woman is terrified of not being the center of her son's world and doesn't have the skills to deal with her own fears of abandonment that have likely been triggered by his transition to adulthood. The new story doesn't let her off the hook. You aren't saying that her behavior is acceptable or that you aren't allowed to stand up for yourself, nor are you obligated to heal her or be delicate with her. Instead, the goal is to stop making yourself the subject of her story. This helps to prevent your own insecurities from being activated by hers. You are adopting a new story that removes you from the center of the narrative. She is not picking on you because you are a bad parent or because she is out to get you personally, but because she struggles with her own insecurities and sensitivities, now you can decide how you want to respond rather than simply reacting. You can stop exhausting yourself trying to gain her approval or taking the bait when she lures you into a power struggle. Instead of exhibiting a knee jerk response to your own pain, you are now opened up to the freedom of choices. The choices are not limited to accept this behavior or never speak again, but include a spectrum of how or how not to engage with this person to help you make these decisions and see a path forward, you need to ask yourself a series of questions, and the decision tree can help you organize your thinking about what to do next. The takeaway, just because you understand where someone is coming from doesn't mean you approve of where they're going. And that's the end of the chapter. If you've read my other book, you know I'm a fan of short chapters. I'm a fan of getting to the point. I'm a fan of, you know, giving lots of examples that are of lots of different variations. So that example was someone and their mother in law, but there's examples in here of romantic relationships, of friendships, of conflict between siblings, of conflicts between friends. We're going to talk on issues of abuse. We're going to talk on issues of you know, what do I do if I can't leave a relationship with someone and I still want to have boundaries, or I need to make some decisions? And I'm hoping that this will be a book that is really practical for you and can help guide you, and can talk about something that I think has been missing in a lot of self help spaces about relationships, which is that disability part most of us have something going on in our lives. Lots of people are disabled, whether that is a physical disability, an emotional disability, a neurological. Disability, and I find that there's a lot of relationship advice out there that doesn't quite fit. It doesn't quite tell you. How do I deal with a partner that's experiencing depression? How do I deal with my relationship when I'm the one that has ADHD? How do I deal with the fact that you know my loved one is trying their best and things that are hurting me are maybe not their fault, but also I can't just continue to exist like this. So we're going to address that, you and me together in this book. We're going to do it with compassion. We're going to do it with boundaries, and we're going to talk about that tricky space of wanting to have compassion and grace for people while still having boundaries for yourself. So I hope you enjoyed that little sneak peek. And you can go and pre order the book now. You can pre order it on Amazon. You can pre order it on Barnes and Noble. You can go to book shop.org. If you would like to support an independent bookstore, and if you want to look at your various options you can go to struggle, care.com/books, believe right now, the US and the UK version are both available for pre order, and I would expect that other languages and regions will come slightly later. They're usually have a different release date than the US and UK versions. So again, who deserves your love, how to create boundaries to start strengthen or end any relationship. I hope you guys have a wonderful day, and I will see you in two weeks. You.