I’m building a “Sampler Platter” of classes and workshops – each one focused on a specific area of the complete transformation arc within the Framework + Foundation of Once Upon a Trainwreck™.
These are great introductions to Once Upon a Trainwreck™, and, me and my unique and abstract pov, and possibly acquired taste. Some of them go a little deeper on specific introductory concepts, all of them pulled from my particularly-peculiar mind, and proprietary framework + foundation – no kits, no scripts and no “koolaid”.
Inside Out vs. Outside In™
The world has been building your identity from the outside in for as long as you can remember, whether you’re aware of it or not.
What you look like.
What you achieve.
What role you play. What others expect.
What you perform, who you perform as.
Layer by layer, piece by piece – until the outside-in version of you feels so familiar it started to feel like the real thing.
It wasn’t. It never was.
It was the version of you that you were handed.
An identity built from the outside in, someone else’s construction – assembled to their specification, by their expectations, their standards, their narrative, their casting call.
An identity built by the world.
An identity built around your life.
Now let’s shift your pov to the abstract, let’s start looking from the inside out –
An identity built from the inside out is something else entirely.
It’s who you actually are, who you were meant to be all along independent of any outside definition, influence, expectation or standard.
This is where that distinction gets made – clearly, honestly, and for the first time for a lot of women.
No prerequisite.
Casting Call™
In a normal casting call, you choose to audition and you may or may not get the part.
A casting director decides.
But what about the roles you never wanted to audition for, but were cast in the role anyway??
It wasn’t your choice, yet somehow you felt like you had no choice but to play the role.
You were cast in a role, handed a script, and expected to perform it – perfectly, consistently, without breaking character.
But what if you didn’t audition. What if you didn’t choose the role. What if you didn’t want the script.
Yet this role became your life.
Different casting directors, different audiences – you play different roles, and none of them are really who you are.
Somewhere along the way the role started feeling like the real thing, who you actually are instead of just the character you were handed.
It’s not who you actually are. It’s not who you were meant to be all along.
It was a casting call – and no one ever asked if you wanted the part.
No prerequisite.
Perfect Princess Performance™
You’ve been performing for a long time, if not for your entire life.
Not on a stage, but in your everyday life.
In your relationships, your family, your career, your friendships, in every room you walk into – to every audience, you play a different role.
Not because you want to, but because each audience expects a different version of you.
Adjusting, accommodating, conforming and compromising, presenting a different version of you to fit the narrative, a version to meets the expectation, to keep the peace.
To be validated and accepted.
The Perfect Princess Performance™ isn’t something you chose, or intended to chose – it was built, piece by piece, out of everything the world told you that you were – are – supposed to be.
You’re exhausted.
You don’t recognize the woman in the mirror looking back at you.
This has nothing to do with being weak, or unable to perform any longer.
No one can perform indefinitely without it costing you something.
You feel isolated and alone, even in a room full of people.
This is the introduction to the performance – what it actually is, where it actually came from, and what it’s been quietly costing you the whole time.
No prerequisite.
Duct Tape + Superglue™
You’ve fixed it before, you’re outside appearance.
Maybe physically, maybe figuratively.
More than once.
Maybe for a relationship. Maybe because it’s what your family expected.
You’ve changed your job, started a new relationship, moved to a new city, “started over”.
Maybe it worked, for a little while.
Until it didn’t.
Until the same pattern showed up in a different zip code, a different set of “circumstances”.
But the “circumstances” were never the problem.
They were the symptom.
The actual problem – the root – was never touched.
Just patched with duct tape and superglue holding things together on the outside, the surface.
They never fixed what’s underneath.
This is the introduction to why the surface level fixes never hold, why the patterns keep showing up, and why identity is always – always – the root issue.
And why this is so unhealthy.
No prerequisite.
Imperfectly Beautiful™
The world has a very specific picture of beautiful.
What you’re supposed to look like, how your body is supposed to look, what your life is supposed to look like from the outside.
And for most of us, that picture has been running in the background, a standard we’ve been quietly measuring ourselves against for as long as we can remember.
And by design, we always fall short.
Because the standard was never actually about you, me or any of us – it was about the performance.
This is the introduction to what happens when you stop chasing the world’s picture of beautiful and start being from the inside out.
Not a better performance.
Not a better version of perfect.
Not a new standard to measure yourself against.
Just you – imperfectly, honestly, sometimes messy, actually, imperfectly beautiful
No prerequisite.
The Storyboard™
Every great story – or tower, trainwreck and transformation – has a storyboard – a visual illustration, a creative “map” of the good, bad, ugly and beautiful™, the characters, the hiccups, crow hops and plot twists, etc.
At the time, my storyboard was the only thing that helped. It was a creative way to process, to vent, to cry, to feel the hurt, which was something I had avoided altogether up until my epic trainwreck™.
I poured myself into the graphic representation of what happened, of what was still happening at the time.
The fonts, the doodles, the flourishes – designing my way through having been Rapunzel’d™, then out from under the rubble of my crumbled tower and wreckage of my trainwreck.
It wasn’t polished, but it was beautiful. It was honest and it was mine.
There is something genuinely powerful about illustrating the chaos of what you’re living through, naming the characters – not to be petty and point fingers, but to document honestly what happened, what was done and by whom and the impact it had on you.
Sometimes no one else hears the truth, and the storyboard may be the only way you have to tell it.
When you’ve been gaslit or manipulated, the people involved count on you not naming it, and that’s exactly what the storyboard does.
It was also a way to hold myself accountable, identifying the plot, graphically seeing the twists for what they actually were was a way for me to fully acknowledge it rather than stomping down to re-bury it.
It doesn’t make it hurt less. Not by any means.
But to my abstractly-creative and particularly-peculiar mind it made sense.
And when things start to make sense, you can begin to see it for what it actually is – not just something happening to you, but something you’re living through.
This is actually a monumental element of taking the pen and writing your own happily ever after, in a whole new fairytale™.
You have to muddle through the yuck first.
The Storyboard™ doesn’t require you to be an artist or graphic designer, a compilation of doodles is just as beautiful, and just as helpful.
No prerequisite.
Companion: The Anti-Princess™ Masterclass
All to Pieces™
You don’t often hear that falling apart might be the best thing that could ever happen to you.
Everyone tells us to “keep it together”, because as long as things look ok on the outside, everything is fine.
Right?
Nope. That just makes it worse.
A lot worse.
The tower doesn’t come down quietly, the trainwreck is catastrophic.
Relationships don’t fall apart easily. Versions of yourself you’ve been perpetuating, “circumstances” and situations – everything will likely come to a head, and then what.
You swallow it and keep moving forward??
That does nothing but make everything worse.
Your foundation shakes.
If you’re lucky it will shake until it shatters, until you can’t hold it together anymore.
The world doesn’t tell that hitting a breaking point of total collapse is actually a blessing – it’s not the end of your happily ever after, it’s the beginning of it, the beginning of your whole new fairytale.
It’s when you take the pen and write your happily ever after, in a whole new fairytale.
When everything falls apart, when you fall, all to pieces, is when you can finally heal.
This is that conversation.
No prerequisite.
Out of Sight Out of Mind™
What the mind can’t handle, it files away.
Stomping it further and further beneath the surface. Piling more and more on top of it.
What you’re told didn’t happen, eventually stops feeling real, it eventually feels like it didn’t.
What hurt too much to feel gets buried so deep it almost disappears.
Almost. Until something so catastrophic happens, the trainwreck – and when that happens everything comes to the surface – everything you’ve been stomping down, burying as deep as it will go, comes to the surface in an instant.
Traumatically. Painfully.
The body doesn’t file things away – it stores them.
Trauma, manipulation, gaslighting, suppression – your mind may have “moved on”, hiding it.
But your body holds it.
Still reacting, still responding, still carrying it beneath the surface.
You feel it, but your mind can’t name it.
When things are out of sight and out of mind, that’s when they can be the most dangerous.
This is the introduction to why.
This is the introduction to healing.
No prerequisite.
Turning Doorknobs™
Have you ever found yourself trying to figure something out, trying to understand something for a long time.
Maybe you’re not clear on where you’re starting, but you’re turning doorknobs to try and figure “something” out?
You can’t name it. You’re just frazzled.
Every explanation, every “maybe this door” solution has fallen short, or only got you partway there, maybe it got you to another door.
And it wouldn’t open.
When I was going through this it felt like I was turning doorknob after doorknob, but they were all locked.
I tried one door, then another, and another.
Nothing. None of them budged.
But I kept trying, through the frustration and confusion.
But I didn’t stop.
I was so confused, desperately trying this, that and the other, all I wanted was to find my way.
I took a step back and allowed things to come together, I allowed things to start making sense.
Identity opened one door. Yayyy, right? But the next one was locked.
Not because I wasn’t looking, or trying. I just didn’t have all the keys, and the doors weren’t labeled.
Here’s what I want you to hear: none of that was wasted. It’s actually all part of the storyboard.
Every doorknob you turned taught you something. A key. Specific to you, and the door you’re meant to find – specific to your tower, your trainwreck, leading you to your happily ever after, in your whole new fairytale.
The pieces were accumulating – the keys – even when it felt like nothing was working.
This is about taking a step back and seeing the full picture of what all of that turning and trying actually gave you – and what it was pointing you toward all along.
Your transformation.
Not giving up. Learning to recognize the difference between a door that was never meant to open and the one that actually was.
No prerequisite.
Companion: The Anti-Princess™ Masterclass
Realistic is Relative™
This one holds a special place in my heart, going back to when the King told me I needed to be more realistic.
Maybe someone told you to the same thing.
Maybe, like me, you’ve heard it more than once.
A parent, a partner, a friend, maybe the world in general, the social narrative.
We’re given parameters, taught to operate within realistic terms.
I never bought into that, my mind has never operated within the parameters established by the world.
You may have started to believe that their realistic was “the realistic.”
Nope.
Realistic is relative – relative to the identity you’re operating from, your reality, your frame of reference.
You were conditioned to believe that “realistic” was the tower, built for you by people living in their own tower – not even living, but existing.
People who don’t allow themselves to see the dreams that you see.
But you’re different. You see things differently.
Allow that, and live it.
The world has a version of realistic for women. Your family has one. Your partner has one. Your friends have one.
Let yourself dream and decide what your realistic is.
No prerequisite.
Curious Disruptor™
My curiosity tends to cause a ruckus, and I’m ok with that.
The world doesn’t love a curious woman.
Curious women pull threads, ask questions, challenge the narrative – and that causes a ruckus.
So it conditions the curiosity out of her.
Slowly, quietly, through casting calls, conditioning, compromise and compliance, until questioning feels dangerous and validation and acceptance feels safer.
But here’s the thing: challenging everything the world has ever told you about who you’re supposed to be requires curiosity first.
You have to be willing to pull the thread before you can follow it.
This is about giving yourself permission to be curious – even when it disrupts, even when it causes a ruckus, even when the people around you would rather you leave well enough alone.
No prerequisite.
On the Cows Nose™: Digging In
In my world, “on the cow’s nose” refers to when a dog is helping work cows and there’s a cow that won’t “do” and the dog won’t let up until the cow “does”.
I remember a dog named JR, he always helped in the cutting pen.
That kind of fixation is a superpower – when it’s pointed at the right thing.
It was definitely JR’s superpower.
For us humans, being “On the Cow’s Nose™”, and digging in usually starts with curiosity, or wanting to make a point – usually at this point you’ve moved beyond worrying about causing a ruckus.
A question requiring the right answer.
A belief requiring a second look for confirmation.
A theory to be proved, disproved, or deconstructed.
This is engrained in some of us, while others are still working through making it ok.
We pull threads, we dig in, we don’t let go until we have the actual answer – the truth – not the narrative we were handed.
The world tries to condition this out of us, telling us to leave well enough alone, or “that’s how it’s always been done” to not ask so many questions, stop picking things apart.
To this, there are some of us that just keep digging – re-inventing the wheel, when the one we’re watching has a wonky-roll.
This is about the methodology – what happens when you start pulling and follow the thread all the way down.
This is about making it ok within yourself to study, research, and deconstruct the nonsense until you find the truth.
No prerequisite.
Looking For Tire Tracks™
Sometimes the message isn’t in the words – it’s in what’s underneath them.
Literally in the mud.
The idea for this one came after my husband and I were taking care of a friend’s cows when he was out of town. This friend does not make it a habit to check his text messages, so it’s hit or miss as to whether or not he’ll see them. The day he was due to get back, we fed and I texted him. He called that evening to let us know he was back and said he saw our tire tracks and knew that we had fed.
He didn’t see the text, the words that had been said.
He saw the tire tracks.
Sometimes, in the silence, the actions, the proof that was there all along, often times we just didn’t see it, because we didn’t heear it, or because we didn’t know where to look.
Sometimes it’s right in front of us, in the tire tracks.
The instinct when something isn’t being said is to fill the gap – with assumption, with fear, with “figuring”, trying to formulate a conclusion that feels most familiar.
But there’s another option.
Look for the tire tracks …
Listen for what’s not being said.
Look at what the actions are actually telling you instead of fixating on what the words aren’t.
Then ask the harder question – not just what’s not being but why they’re not saying it, and why you can’t “hear” it.
Sometimes we have to look at our own assumptions, our own “figuring”, the things we might be projecting onto the people closest to us, or on the situation we’re trying to justify.
Sometimes the answer is right there in the mud and the mess, in the tire tracks left behind.
Plain as day, we just have to look for them.
No prerequisite.
Prince Charming
In most cases, there are usually two possibilities.
He’s not – and the evidence has been stacking up. All of the things you’ve been explaining away, minimizing, reframing.
Performing harder, the conforming deeper, the compromising more – not because you chose to, but because somewhere along the way keeping him became more important than keeping yourself.
The Princess Identity™ and her Perfect Princess Performance™ are what attracted him to you, building the tower higher without you realizing that’s what was happening.
Now, it’s either him, or The Anti-Princess™ you were meant to be all along.
Or, maybe he actually is Prince Charming – and the work now is learning to muddle through the debacles and kerfuffles, the misunderstandings, the withheld annoyances, aggravations, fears and insecurities, the moments that threaten to pull you back into the Princess Identity™ dynamic.
Both of you, growing together, without reverting.
From your Anti-Princess Identity™, not the performance.
In either case – you keep the pen. You keep being you.
Because a relationship that requires you to abandon who you actually are isn’t a relationship. It’s another tower.
Prerequisite: The Rapunzel’d™ Collective
Companion Study: The A Whole New Fairytale™ Collective
The Royal Family
Our upbringing is where the earliest conditioning lives.
The deepest roots.
The original Casting Call – where we first learned to perform to fit the mold required for love, belonging and validation.
Where the outside-in identity didn’t just begin – it was installed, bit by bit, piece by piece, before we were old enough, or aware enough – even strong enough, to question any of it.
This doesn’t always happen maliciously, the conditioning can go back generations built of a foundation of “this is how it’s always been”, the family operating from their own towers, passing down their own conditioning, their own outside-in constructs.
But sometimes it is built on a foundation of manipulation and control.
Learning to identify and understanding where the conditioning came from doesn’t mean you have to carry it forever.
When your identity begins to shift, from The Princess to The Anti-Princess™ – your family is going to feel it.
The dynamic changes.
The Princess Costume™ stops fitting – it actually never fit at all, you’ve spent your life up to this point trying to make it fit and now you can see what it’s cost you.
The people who name you Princess begin to notice.
Sometimes they get on board.
Sometimes they push back harder than anyone.
The Kingdom may get very uncomfortable, and you have to decide – do you keep existing to their preferred identity and conditioning??
Or are you going to stop existing in the tower and embody the identity of who you were meant to be all along?
Prerequisite: The Rapunzel’d™ Collective
Companion Study: The A Whole New Fairytale™ Collective
The Royal Court
Many of us have built friendships and acquaintances around the version of us that existed before the tower came down.
From the outside in.
Built on shared circumstances, shared complaints, even traumas, shared ways of moving through the world, and who it tells us we’re supposed to be – a pov that made sense from inside the tower, from The Princess Identity™, the costume she was trying to make fit while living her Perfect Princess Performance™.
When the identity shifts, the friendships feel it, acquaintances notice it.
It may happen gradually – a growing sense that the conversations aren’t landing the same way, that the dynamic has been outgrown.
It may happen suddenly, maybe in the form of a trainwreck – the moment you stop performing as The Princess, the foundation of the friendship shatters.
Some friendships and acquaintances can evolve.
But some can’t – not because anyone did anything wrong, but because the context of the friendship was built no longer holds.
Letting go of a friendship that belongs to the tower isn’t a failure. It isn’t a betrayal.
It’s part of taking the pen and writing your own happily ever after in a whole new fairytale™ – and being honest about which characters belong in it.
Prerequisite: The Rapunzel’d™ Collective
Companion Study: The A Whole New Fairytale™ Collective
Good, Bad, Ugly + Beautiful™
One of the reasons I love fairytales is because they encompass what I call “all of the things”, the good, bad, ugly and beautiful things™.
We can’t see, or appreciate the good, without acknowledge, or riding out the bad.
We can’t find the beauty without appreciating the ugly.
Life isn’t just the good chapters, it’s about the hard ones, it’s not about the beautiful moments, it’s about muddling through the hard ones.
All of it – the good, bad, ugly and beautiful™ – the entire fairytale.
There’s something genuinely beautiful in all of it, including the parts you may rather forget, including the tower, including the trainwreck.
This is about finding real gratitude in all of it – not performing to the narrative, not toxic positivity, not manufactured optimism.
Real gratitude.
Maybe even genuine forgiveness – not for their sake, but your’s, putting down what you’ve been killing yourself trying to carry, so you can pick up the pen and start writing your own happily ever after, in a whole new fairytale™.
Soft prerequisite – recommended after Masterclass.
On the Cows Nose™: Letting Go
We’re going back to the dog and the cow, at a certain point the cow does what it’s supposed to and the dog let’s it go –
That same fixation – when pointed at a hurt, a resentment, a bunch of yuck you’ve been carrying long past its expiration date – it’s become your tower.
A tower constructed brick by brick, and block by block from the pain, the hurt, the resentment, the and all of the yuck – until the pain became the framework, and the framework became the foundation.
Sometimes holding on feels like strength – that was actually the thing keeping you stuck.
Trapped in the tower.
This isn’t about pretending it didn’t matter. It did. It does. We fully acknowledge that.
It’s about recognizing when staying on the cows nose is no longer serving you, it’s no longer to your benefit – it’s about learning let go.
Not for them, but for you.
So you can put it down and pick up the pen.
No prerequisite.
Home + Ranch Day™
Sometimes the most transformational thing you can do is nothing remarkable at all.
We can get overwhelmed by the day-to-day and sometimes just taking a day to re-group, is the best thing we can do.
For me, sometimes just doing the simple things, picking up feed, groceries, catching up on laundry, helps more than you might think.
Piddling around the house. Tending to the ordinary.
Sometimes just catching up on laundry and dishes, taking a little extra time to feed, or watch the new babies.
Taking a moment to appreciate the good and the beautiful.
Let the day be unhurried, catch up on your to-do list, re-group and de-compress –
Sometimes the transformation happens quietly – in the most ordinary moments, when nobody’s watching.
When we’re just being.
Home + Ranch Day™ is about intentional decompression as identity practice.
No prerequisite.
Smoke, Mirrors + the Universe™
You did all of the work – as it was taught.
The vision board. The affirmations. The gratitude journal. The positive thinking.
Speaking it into existence. Believing it before you could see it.
And it didn’t work.
Or maybe it did?? For a minute – until you were forced to acknowledge that it didn’t.
And when it failed, it became your fault.
You didn’t believe hard enough. You weren’t positive enough.
You were blocking your own blessings.
That’s not empowerment. That’s harm.
The Law of Attraction borrows Quantum language to sell you something that was never rooted in actual Quantum Transcendence – and when it fails, and it will, it hands you the blame.
Quietly.
Dressed up in positivity and possibility. Leaving you with one more thing you couldn’t get right.
That ends here.
This is the deconstruction of the Law of Attraction, the shame it leaves behind, and the introduction to what I teach instead – identity as the root of everything.
Not your thoughts. Not your words. Not your vision board.
Who you’re actually being.
No smoke. No mirrors. Just the Quantum reality.
No prerequisite.
