Ep. 2: Dr. Solomon On High Quality Relationships & Kylie Morgan Opens Up About Being Bullied

Published Aug 5, 2024, 5:02 AM

Morgan brings on two guests this week. First she interviews professor and therapist Dr. Alexandra Solomon, who has been studying relationships for over two decades. They discuss why grief is synergistic, the importance of stepping into love, why two opposite things can be true at the same time, and how to have high quality relationships. Then country artist Kylie Morgan stops by to talk about the beginning stages of her career, her experience with bullies in high school, and why she went to couples therapy with her now husband when they started dating.

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Follow Dr. Solomon: @dr.alexandra.solomon

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Personally with Morgan Juelsman.

It's the second episode of Take This Personally. I'm Morgan. You may know me from the Bobby Bone Show. I've always found that it's easier to get through some of life's challenges when we feel less alone, which is really why I started this podcast. I'm hoping you can connect to one of my guest stories or their pieces of advice. This week, I have on doctor Solomon first, who is beyond an expert with over a twenty years of experience. She studied psychology and women's studies at the University of Michigan and she also received her PhD in counseling psychology. Than I have on country artist Kylie Morgan, who is a friend and came on to share some of the most vulnerable moments in her life that led her to wear her career is now. I'm so excited to talk to doctor Solomon right now. Thank you for joining me, and I want to get your expertise on several topics, but we're gonna dive right into the deep in to start, I want to talk about trauma and growth. Do you feel like people have to go through almost traumatic things to feel that growth or do you think they can still feel that growth.

Without having gone through something terribly bad.

I love the idea of gentle awakenings right of just sort of, you know, as I remember years and years ago Oprah Winfrey talked about, you know, sometimes when we get the first brick upside our head, you know, the first little inkling that we are creating a pattern for ourselves, it's painful. If we don't pay attention to the brick up side the head, then we will get the entire brick wall crashing down upon us. And I think some of us, yeah, some of us can get a little bit more like, no, no, well I got this. I'm good. I don't need help. For some of us, the you know, the sort of wake up call has to be louder, but it doesn't have to be that way. As you're saying, Morgan, that there's you know, I think we can resource ourselves at any point in time. It's you know, one of the things I do is I teach an undergraduate class at Northwestern University called marriage one oh one. Well, those students aren't going to get married for you know, any number of years, but there's lots that they can learn about understanding who they are and what they want and need in their intimate relationships. So I like, I'm here for therapy early and often I'm here for you know, gentle lessons. But I hear you. So did you have to learn some things in your life the hard way? Oh?

Yes, I mean I from boweying in high school to some abusive relationships. I've been through the trenches, and I don't wish that upon anyone, but I also look back and it helped me to become who I am today in almost an unfortunate series of events. But now and today I look at that, and when people ask how and why, I'm like, well, this is where I came from, and so of course I would hope I'm better from that, But you don't hope anybody ever goes through that so.

Well, and you didn't have to become better for it. You could have taken all those painful experiences and you could have said, see, that just proves that life is unfair and I'm a constant victim and nothing good is going to happen to me. Right, that you could have taken those experiences and allowed them to make you hardened and bitter, and you know, you could have experienced like a loss of vitality, and you could have just kind of stayed stuck there. And I hear that you have done what you needed to do in order to use those experiences to fuel you into purpose and passion and capacity for joy.

So that's yeah, absolutely, I've loved that for me, but I would love that for other people too. So, you know, do you have any good ideas for people who maybe have gone through that and they may find themselves in a very negative space.

I mean, I do think part of it is teasing apart that thing happened to me versus that thing defines me. I think part of what creates the conditions for people to get stuck is they can fuse the things that happened to them with their identity. And all of us are more than any given painful experience. I believe each of us is an expression of divine consciousness. Whatever you know, each of us belongs to this huge collective of humanity and as part of something like far, far, far bigger than any one of us. And so to me, whatever pathways people use to kind of remember that, whether it's movement or music or dance or conversation or prayer or volunteer work, like whatever. Those gateways are that help people remember like, oh I belong, I belong and I'm part of something bigger than me. That I think is what helps us get clear that the bad experiences we live through do not define us.

The older I get, I've been in some relationships at this point, and just the older I get, the more I realize everybody comes with things.

You're just going to have to accept certain.

Things that you want. Nobody's going to come perfect. There's going to be baggage along the way, no matter what.

How that looks is up to you.

And I just want your kind of advice on for so many people because relationships, regardless if they were even good, maybe they weren't as bad as mine in the dramatic sense that they were. They're just hard and they can be traumatic and very hard to move on from. So how do we jump into another relationship after, say, our heart gets broken and things are hard. How do we go into a new relationship and find that level of vulnerability again?

I think we don't spend nearly enough time talking to people about healthy relationships and healthy sexuality and all of that good stuff. But we also don't spend enough time talking with people about how to break up well, how to integrate after laws, how to start over again. I'm finding myself doing more and more of that work, even with therapists when I'm presenting at therapist conferences, and very often I'm talking with therapists about how to help clients break up well, heal heartbreak start again, because I think that there is not something that therapists necessarily have been trained in doing, and it's what you are talking about. I think heartbreak and relationship endings hurt for all kinds of reasons, including literal brain science. Our brains code emotional pain in the same way that our brains code physical pain. So heartbreak hurts because it hurts. It is painful, And I think we sometimes have these like misguided coping mechanisms where will say to ourselves, it shouldn't hurt like this because they were no good for me anyways. It shouldn't hurt like this because it was only a three month long relationship. It shouldn't hurt like this because whatever my friends didn't like them anyways. Well, all that will do when we invalidate ourselves, all that's going to do is make our healing journey take that much longer because we aren't even letting ourselves start the journey. We're invalidating ourselves out of the journey versus letting ourselves grieve the loss of that relationship. Even if we're the one who ended it. You can be the one who ended a relationship and still grieve the loss of that relationship. You're losing the future you imagined with that person, and you are having to let go of what that relationship meant and the experiences you had and every grief. You know, grief is synergistic, meaning that the grief in the loss of this relationship is going to awaken the grief of the loss of my father or my grandmother, or that move that we had to make, or that tragedy that happened in my community. Like grief's chain together. For as hard as it is, there's also that opportunity in a breakup to just have that season or that chapter of loss and letting ourselves just be very much present to that without shrinking it, minimizing it, rationalizing it, moving through it, getting the lessons and then starting to kind of come up out of it. That's a process that if we don't constrict it, it will just happen. We will come through it, and the goal is to come through it open hearted, rather than to come through it kind of scabbed over and hardened and cynical. And I think the way that we do that is by just letting the loss be exactly the length and width and height that it is.

I love that, and I think it's so true. There's so many people.

That I know a lot of my friends who I've seen them hurt from two month relationships compared to each sureer relationship sure, And I think there's something to be said that we bond with people so differently, and that there is no one size.

Fits all for everything that's right.

It's important to share and reiterate because I just don't think we hear that enough.

One hundred percent. It was a podcast episode that I had done We're One of the points that I made is some of us who've had heartbreak, some of us who have survived trauma. One of the things that sometimes happens is that we no longer fall in love. We become the kind of people who step into love, and that can feel sad, like I miss the fact that you know, when I was younger, before I new hurt, like I know hurt. Before that I would fall head over heels and I don't do that anymore. Rather than seeing that as something that's wrong with us, just allowing that to be what it is and to know that there is not as you're saying, there is no right and wrong way to bond with somebody, and stepping into love is beautiful. There's a wisdom to that, there's a gentleness to that. There's a way that when we step into love, we aren't short circuiting our nervous systems, right, so it can be a kinder process that that's okay. I want people to know that that's okay.

I mean I'm someone who's sitting here listening to this, and I'm like preach yes, because I have done both. I have been the woman in the enticing, intoxicating relationship and I've also now been in this incredibly healthy relationship. And i can tell you on this side of things, on the healthier side, it is so much more rewarding and enjoyable than the intoxicating situations that we see in movies that we think we want.

Yeah, you don't perhaps feel intoxicated, but what you do feel is I imagine safe and calm, and like your nervous system is like taking a big exhale, and that can feel really different.

I want to talk to you too about the ways that we invalidate ourselves.

I'm guilty of it.

I know a lot of people are of saying others have it worse.

How do we get away from doing that and feeling that way?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well the only way that I know how to do it is with something in something that comes from psychology, which is called dialectics. So dialectics. You know, our research has shown that a lot of our emotional resilience and emotional well being rests upon our ability to hold a dialectic. And a dialectic is a space where competing truths, where two things are true at the same time, two things that seem opposite are actually both true. I had a terrible day and I am blessed. Those both are true. We can be blessed and suffering that both those things can be true. I don't have to prove that I have it worse than anybody else in order to be entitled to my suffering, and the way that I do that is by holding both my grief and my gratitude my courage and my fear, the fact that I'm whole as I am and I'm forever a work in progress. Like these things that just seem like they can't possibly both be true at the same time are as part of the thing that makes being alive so complicated. So I think if I have one of those moments, I certainly have had those moments where I am just in the suck. I am just like suffering and struggling and wanting to host a big old pity party for myself, and then I'm just like, ah, I'm being ridiculous because there are people who have you know, quote unquote actual problems. Both those things are true. Yes, I am absolutely blessed and I am absolutely you know, burnt out or struggling. So that's where I try to go, because You're right, if I cannot validate my own suffering, you can bet that I'm not going to be able to validate the suffering of people around me. And then I'm not going to be very fun to be around because I'm going to be judgmental and dismissive, you know, and like roll my eyes at people, and that's not going to be a recipe for healthy relationships.

And being self aware is kind of one of the big buzzwords right now in psychology and therapy. Visit living up to all the hypes? Should we be focusing so much on that? And what does that look like? If somebody hasn't ever heard the word self aware and they're like, what do I need to.

Do with that?

What would be the first steps you'd tell someone to get through this first phase to be on that journey.

Self awareness is my that's my jam, That's how I spend really all day every day is supporting people in different ways to understand with curiosity and with compassion who they are and why they are the way that they are. And I think it's it is essential if what people want is high quality relationships, whether that's relationship with partner, relationship with their family members, relationship with their kids. We have to be willing to get curious about why we are reacting the way we are reacting in any given moment, Like that's just the work of it. So I think the first step is to just begin to notice how we're talking to ourselves, notice when we have rise and fall of different emotions during the day, Like just getting really curious and starting to view our thoughts and our feelings and our behaviors as data. It's just data that we then can sit with and wonder about. I think one of the things, you know, you started off by asking about, kind of what's changed in the last couple of decades the whole field of self help. As I was growing up in the eighties, my mom always had a stack of self help books next to her nightstand. So self help isn't new necessarily, but we're living in this really exciting time with social media of podcasts, where there's so many resources that somebody can bring in and I think just listening to different podcasts that are about relationships or about psychology, or reading, you know, following different Instagram accounts there like daily small doses of self awareness work. I think those are really gentle ways to start, especially if someone's not interested in committing to therapy or something like that. But there's little things we can do each day to just begin to check in with ourselves.

How do you suggest I think it's hard for people to receive feedback. There's criticism and there's unkindness, but then there's feedback, and because of social media, there is also this other side that we've seen this very cruel side of the world, so it's really easy to loop in feedback with criticism and negativity.

So how do we kind of.

Look at something like, Okay, this is feedback to help me, versus this is criticism to hurt me.

That's right. I think that's a very very good point, And it's all about the strength of the relationship. Yeah, I will not take feedback from somebody where I have a sense that there's an ulterior motive or a hidden agenda, or a lack of willingness to be in dialogue with me, in community with me. I won't take feedback from somebody. If I don't have a s that somebody has my back or has my best interest at heart, or who really can feel the core of me as a good, decent person, they don't get the right to give me feedback, right, you know. And that so that I think it really is about the strength that's I want us to be cultivating the kinds of relationships where there's enough trust that then feedback feels like a generous gift rather than an attack. And that's what there was. Right with my husband, I trust that he's in my corner. I trust that he has my back. I trust that whatever he wants and needs to say to me is in the service of everyone in our family feeling safe and understood and held and celebrated, rather than to take me down or to prove some point or to diminish me.

When I do think in that same area, there's also resentment. We see a lot of relationships that people feel and resentment builds up over so much time for new couples, for even couples that have been together a long time, how do you avoid that resentment rut that everybody falls into.

Resentment is a big one, and I think resentment happens when we don't have that ability to give and receive feedback. Right If I can't give, if you've shown me that you are a closed door and that you will not take my feedback, and everything I try to bring up with you you flip it back on me, then that's right. The absolute side effect is going to be that I'm going to build a resentment because I'm biting my tongue because it feels really difficult to talk to you. So resentment is going to be the side effect. It may help you in the moment because you don't have to deal with the difficulty of me giving you feedback. So in some ways you might be like, sweet, this is easy because she's not riding my ass, she's not telling me what I've done wrong, quote unquote. But so the moment might feel like it's been solved. But the problem is I'm building up a well of resentment because you aren't open and available to dialogue. Now, it's incumbent on me that when I do have feedback for you, that I do it in a deeply loving way where I convey to you, Morgan, you are my heart, like I am deeply invested, and here's what I love about how things are going, and here's what I value, And I really make sure that I am forward and explicit about all of the ways I can see you putting an effort, trying hard, like ways in which you know I show you that I have your back. And then I say to you, I want to give you this feedback because because of how much I love you, because of how much I want the space between us to feel good and safe and close.

It sounds like along these same lines that communication is so important, but it feels like that's the bottom layer of all of this communicating is where it starts.

Absolutely, oh, absolutely yeah. And you know, communication is more than just saying words. It is talking about something, talking about my internal experience, my thoughts, my reactions that I'm having in my relationship with you, saying in a way that communicates also empathy and benefit of the doubt. Right. Sometimes I I spend quite a bit of my time in couples therapy with people who are like, I'm just expressing my feelings. I can say what i want because I'm communicating. Well, communicating isn't. It's not just a free for all. We have to be mindful of. We have to start with the end in mind. How do I want this conversation to go. If I want you to be open and receptive and to take what I'm saying in, then I had better start by calming myself down or like whatever it is. I mean, like literally, like listening to music, like taking some deep breaths, asking you first, hey, like Todd to gesture with me, are you available for feedback? Right? There's things that we need to do around communication. It's more than just spitting out every single thought and feeling. That's you know, knocking around inside of your head. But we also need to have a set of skills around how we make repairs, how we apologize, and lots of us grew up in homes where we didn't see apology and forgiveness modeled for us, so we may actually not even know how to make a heartfelt apology. So when we do go into that tempson of the time where we say things, where we speak before thinking, where we allow our emotional brain to be in the driver's seat rather than our wise brain, we have to learn how to and be willing to look our partner in the eyes and say I'm sorry, I don't like how I said that, I would like a redo or with our kids.

Thank you so much.

It's been incredible talking with you, and I appreciate you taking some time to come on and teach us a lot of things that I think we all needed to hear.

Thank you, Morgan, it was a fun conversation. Thanks for having me.

I don't know about you, guys, but I feel like I've just been seriously educated on matters of relationships. So if you feel the same and you want to connect with doctor Solomon, her website is doctor Alexandrasolomon dot com spelled Solomo in or you can follow her on Instagram at doctor dot Alexandra dot Solomon. On with me right now is country artist Kylie Morgan. She's had a crazy journey to get to where she is today with her career and with her personal life, which is why I'm really excited to have her on this week. Hi, Kylie, thanks for coming on. Please give the people a little bit of your beginning story just in case they haven't heard any of this yet.

What's up, everybody, I'm Kylie Morgan. Thank you so much for having me. So. I got my little pink guitar for Christmas from my papal when I was twelve, and truly there was no turning back. I told my mom when I learned my first three chords and wrote my first song on guitar, I was like, Mom, I'm skipping college and moving to Nashville to be a country music card.

You knew very early.

Yeah, my mom, My poor mom was just like, oh no, what did I get myself into? And I did it though. I just like was always the kid that said if she was going to do something, I would figure out a way to do it, and so it kind of always made sense that I felt like a fish out of water because my mindset and my dream set, I would say, it was just so different than anybody that I went to school with, and so I just kind of always felt like I was different from everybody. Sometimes good, but most of the time bad. Dealt with like bullying all growing up and just kind of being in a different mindset makes people think that you think you're better than them, but truth is, it's not the case at all. I just think differently and had really big dreams, and so I started going to Nashville to co write songs. When I was fifteen, I met this guy that pretty much took me under his wing. His name's Russ Zabatson. He's been a song plugger for years here in town and is still one of my favorite people and has been just a huge part of my story. I pretty much signed my first indie record deal when I was fourteen with this super small like company in Oklahoma that pretty much created their label for me. It was this guy that was just loved music, and his wife actually ended up slipping one of my CDs to his LA music friend and pretty much said what do you think of her? And there he was like, I think you should fly out to LA and let me hear her. And so I went out to LA and played a song for him with an attitude guitar, but truly from it, just like we grow from anything that we struggle with. And so started going back and forth to Nashville at fifteen and found people that would be willing to write with me. One of them was a guy named Walker Hayes, and he was one of the very first people I ever wrote with when I came to Nashville, which is insane that he would agree to write with fifteen year old first of all, and now to see where he is now, It's just so cool to have that piece of my story in art history that we have together. And so I just knew once I walked down Broadway for the first time that Nashville was gonna be home. And so I toured full time, ended up doing sophomore through senior year online so that I could spend full time touring and just like figuring out who I was as an artist, getting my feet wet, going back and forth to Nashville, writing continuously, and finally at nineteen, I packed up a bunch of thrift store furniture and moved to Nashville. I saved up all my money from touring and was able to buy a house my first publishing deal. When I moved here and signed my first pub deule, I was making twenty k here, which is impossible to live on, especially in Nashville. But thankfully, since I bought my house, I had a room, so like, she paid my mortgage and I just had to pay for my food and so that was the only way I was able to survive off of that. But that led to another publishing deal with a guy named Shane mcinally. I'm sure that some.

Of you have had another, as you should be bragging.

I met him when I was I think I was twenty years old, and it was actually when Walker signed with Smack and Robin Palmer, who is the reason actually Shane got his first cut ever. I got a call from her, and long story short, I was in the middle of being like, WTF, what am I going to do? I lost my last deal because they lost their investor, and so like, I moved to town with the deal, so I never met with any like managers or like publishers or anything like that because I already moved here, so no one knew who I was, and I was terrified. And so I got a call from Robin Palmer and I'll never forget this voicemail. It was like, Hi, this is Robin Palmer. I heard your songs through Walker Hayes's catalog and I was just calling because who are you? And I want to know you?

So call me back.

And so I immediately called her back and we got a meeting and I've just played her some of the stuff that I've been working on and she was super stoked about it, and it played it for Shane. Shane came to see me play at the Bluebird Cafe and I got my publishing deal right after that, and that led to a management deal, and then three years of just branding myself, figuring out who I was an artist, what I wanted to say. That led to Shane bringing me into Universal, introducing me to Mike Dungan, and got my record deal and then it was like, Okay, we're here, right, We've made it. Those are the highlights, and it's still a journey from here.

No. I think it's a great to show just how far you've come where you are now and what happened along the way. There was something that really stuck out to me when you were talking about that and you were saying you were a fish out of water for a really long time because of the mindset you had, and I think for a long time. Especially you and I are very close in age, and when we grew up, it was hard to be different. If you were different, it wasn't understood yet, you were weird. Yeah, today, being different it's like the best thing.

I would world best.

You're unique, Yes, thanks to talk and all the other things that are out there.

Being that fish out of water.

What do you feel like kind of during that timeframe of your life where you're trying to figure everything out and nothing was really making sense.

What was that.

Kind of hardest moment for you that you look back on and you're like, that really kind of changed the course of my life.

Yeah, I actually never forget this moment. When I started writing songs, I started writing it for me, like I thought, it was just therapy for me. It made me feel better. I would go home and like lock myself in my room with me and my guitar, and I would just vent to my guitar and write about what I was going through. Also much cheaper than therapy. Music was my healer, and I just always knew that. Like at first, when I started making music, I thought it was for me. And then I begged my mom for MySpace music when I was like thirteen, and back then like just like social media had just started, you know, like happening, and my mom thought that I was going to get kidnapped and killed if.

I like put anything on the net.

And so I like begged her, begged her, and finally for Christmas, she gave me a MySpace music and she put it in a little card with a pass and it was like Mom's trust and I like, She's like, I'm trusting you to get on this. Every time you type it in, you have to think of me. And so I went on. I was write when the MacBooks came out with Garage Band, and I just recorded just me and my guitar some songs, put them up and ended up getting a lot of like plays in traffic from it. Started putting stuff on YouTube, same thing, and that led to actually, this is the moment that I realized music was not for just me. When I went to Nashville for the first time. That week of first writing songs, I wrote with this beautiful human named Liz Hangber and other beautiful human named Rob Crosby. Liz Hangber has written a bunch of like Riba hits and Brooks and Dunn songs, things like that. Rob Crosby wrote Concrete Angel by Martina McBride and again, for them to even agree to write with me was just unreal. And we go into the room. We start talking about, you know, what's going on, and she said, Liz was like, I just want to bring this up. You know, when you're in a writing room, you never know what you're gonna write about that day until you get in there, see where everyone's head's at, see what everyone's feeling. And Liz was like, I have this thing wing on my heart. I just want to bring it up. I heard this story of this girl named Phoebe who I recently kind of dove into, and she was fifteen, and she recently just committed suicide because of bullying and dealing with that and couldn't take it anymore, took her own life. And I was fifteen at the time and had been dealing with bullying, so like, it was hit home for me really hard to know that it led to that for someone else. And so we just decided to write that story, and we wrote this song called Phoebe in honor of her and ended up putting it on YouTube. It got like seventy thousand views in like three days, and I ended up reading all the comments and it was just these kids were being like, this song saved my life, thank you. I was I was thinking about doing this, and now that I saw the effect it had on other people, like I don't, it was just it was one of the moments I was just like, music is not for me at all. My music is yes, it's for me, but it's also for others. And that's what gave me the inspiration to be like, Okay, no, this is this is going to happen because I want I want to help more people through music. And that's what helped me all growing up was I would, you know, lean on artists like Taylor Swift, Shania you know, all those original artists that helped me get through things. And I wanted to become that for other people. And so, knowing that that affected I wanted, I didn't want to stop there. So I actually ended up starting my own bullying prevention campaign called It Matters What We Do, which is a line from the song. I ended up touring from schools all across the country, from pre k all the way up to university level, and would go and fly in and talk about bullying and then play and perform and like make it a fun, you know thing, rather than adult being like, don't do this.

You know.

It was like a peer to peer thing, and I would just do meet and greets after and I would just have kids crying in my arms. That point in life was just no matter how frustrating the music business gets, I have to remember why I started music, because that is the reason why God gave me this talent.

So it gave you this super charged passion.

Almost not only was it something that was like in your blood, it became something that was like.

I have to do this to help others.

And do you think, as you've gotten older, do you look back on that.

I know, for me, like I look back on that and I'm not thankful for it.

That's not the right word. I don't hate that it happened because it changed the course of my life.

I cannot wait for you to hear the song. It's called Me and Girls. The top of the chorus it says thank God for me and girls to show me how bad words can hurt. And the whole point of the song is because all these bad things happened to me, I got the good things that truly made me who I am. And instead of looking back and being like, yeah, thanks for like spreading all those rumors about me and like saying that I'll never get anywhere, and like no, like I'm not saying that, but I'm saying, like, thank you for giving me the strength to overcome the words that you're saying and continuing to find a way to move forward in that way I know how to deal with it. And even in my adult.

Life, I think the message that you were constantly sitting, not only just being an artist but as a person. Thank you. Which is why I was so exciting to have you on because we get to talk on this like very human side and it's so much different. I did also want to talk to you because you know, you do have a song that's that went viral still going viral independent with you. You know, earlier on this podcast, I was talking to doctor Solomon, who's an expert in basically all things, but definitely in relationships.

A little bad. I need to listen to that part of the podcast. For sure, I could always use tips and tricks on that.

No, but like and she's so awesome, and she talked about how to have these really refreshing, honest conversations with the people in your life. What's important about it is that you make sure that space is there and that they're ready to have that conversation. What kind of healthy things have you and Jay found that work for you, guys.

Yeah, well, I'll be honest, Like, so I met him when I was nineteen, the little baby Kylie, and I was the girl who was married to her career. I mean, that's all I thought about. That's all I ever. I eat, breathe, sleep, music. So it's like I've had a goal since I was little, and ever since before I met Jay, every relationship I was in I was forced to choose between the relationship or my music, Like whether if music was thriving, then my relationship was in the tank. If my relationship was thriving, then music was sucking. Like it just was never a balance. And so truly, when I was nineteen, I saw him walking down the stairs of this publishing company on music Row. I was like, that's my husband. I knew it, and I was just terrified to know it, but also like wasn't willing to admit that I ever wanted to get married because I always thought that I would still continuously have to choose and I just was always like, oh, I'm the girl that I'll never get married, and that's fine, Like I'll just I'll be in a happy relationship. We'll be together, but like you know, we don't got to put any label on it, or like the word wife still terrifies me, Like it kind of grosses me out. Sometimes. I just feel like I also haven't always had like the best examples of marriage in different parts of my life, and so it just the idea of it just scared me. I just always thought that one was above another, and like that's how it was. He for the first time showed me that I could have both because he treats me like an equal, and so for me and us, it is continuously learning about each other in a way that like when you, I mean this, you know your taste buds change every seven years, how are you not going to change every seven years? And continuously growing together? And I mean we we had a mishappen in our relationship we were like make or break and we decided to go to therapy, which like helped us tremendously. And usually people are like, especially in the South, they're like, oh, therapy, like what's wrong with you? And I'm like, oh my god, please change your mindsecaus, therapy is the best thing in the entire world. Like it just makes you think so differently and it gives you it makes you learn things about yourself that you didn't even know. So we started doing therapy and we just applied those things that we learned there in everyday life and we don't go anymore, but we truly like learn so much from it. And I think the biggest thing that we learned is continuously realizing that we're both going to evolve and we're both going to change, and we can either do that together or we can do that separately. And that's how it always ends in divorce usually when that happens. And so if we can agree to like continuously grow together and evolve together in different ways that each other is needing, whatever stage of life that's in, then that's when we can continuously be closer and like continuously not feel like it's work.

Kylie, thank you so much.

This is so cool to hear your story and just hear you get really human with me, absolutely share this side of you. You guys heard earlier doctor Solomon talk about a lot of things, and Kylie and I broke down a lot of what Doctor Solomon and I talked about. Not that Kylie realized it, but it's cool. You know, when you go to therapy and you come in, you talk about it with your friends.

So again, thank you.

Thank you for giving artists and you know, people a space to come to to just kind of check out and realize that we're all on a journey and it's like no one's life is all put together, even if it seems that way. And I think it's just so cool that you're now giving somewhere some people like took place to go for that reminder.

I loved having two incredibly awesome women on this week. If you want to connect with Kylie Morgan, her music is everywhere you stream music and her social media is at Kylie Morgan Music. Now you can go follow the Instagram page at Take This Personally. You can also hit us up on the email Take This Personally at gmail dot com if you have questions or topics you want us to bring up with experts, whatever it may be. Hit us up on either one of those, and there's some full interviews. If you go to YouTube at web Girl Morgan, you will find some full interviews with some of these experts and guests that come on. Next week is a special episode. I'm really excited about this one. Nicole the neuroscientist comes on to talk to us all about brain health, but not only that, we're also wired to eat bad foods. How do we break habits, how do we fix negativity bias? And how can you learn to be creative?

All of these things are helpful when understanding the brain.

And then on that second half, I'm bringing on Jared, who is my personal trainer and a really good friend of mine. Not only are we going to talk about physical health, but also Jared has an incredibly inspiring story from homelessness to where he is now as a celebrity personal trainer. And if you love this podcast and you love this episode and there's more to come, please get rate it five stars. I'm so happy to have you here in the outpouring of love and support for this podcast has been amazing to me and I'm just so excited to see how more connected we can be and less alone in this crazy, crazy world.

Take This Personally with Morgan Huelsman

Honest Conversations with Experts & Friends, helping us all feel less alone. We’re all trying to be  
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