The following podcast is a deer media production.

Hey, this is Alexis Haines and welcome to Recovering from Reality,

where I illuminate the messy and magical path of coming home to yourself.

Whether you're on the road to recovery, seeking self-care techniques for surviving the

capitalist machine, or just need a moment to remember that you're not alone in your loneliness,

we're serving up the ultimate truth. Your challenges don't define you, how you deal with them does.

So are you ready to recover from reality?

Welcome to February, the month where we focus on love.

And I just really want to take a moment to talk about some stuff that has come up for me recently

that has allowed myself to deepen and soften into more self-love, because I think that

that's really important. I think that the whole aspect of like you have to love yourself

before you can love anyone else's bullshit, and let me actually explain why, because we heal

in relation to one another. I say this all the time. And so much of me being in this partnership

with Evan has, I mean, through pain and through beautiful moments, and through his honoring of me,

and through hardships that have led me forced me into honoring myself. That's forced into discomfort,

right? And once I had a willingness to stay in the discomfort, it led to this deepening of love

for myself. But so I just, I think that the whole notion of you can't love anyone until you

love yourself is just kind of bullshit. Now, do I think that it is important to love yourself?

Absolutely. Do I think that we can engage in unhealthy behaviors when we don't? Absolutely.

But God, my children have taught me how to love myself, and in deeper ways that I ever thought

was possible. And so it is the month of love. This is the Q&A episode. But I wanted to talk about

a recent experience that I had that basically forced me to go deeper and to explore ways in which I

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