Asking for a Friend - Health, Fitness & Personal Growth Tips for Women in Midlife

Ep.161 Losing Everything to Find Yourself: Breaking Free from Trauma & Overwhelm

• Michele Henning Folan • Episode 161

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When life knocks the wind out of you, how do you find your way back to yourself?

In this episode of Asking for a Friend, we sit down with Cristina Simmons—a mother, occupational therapist, Faster Way coach, and now author of Eat Your Feelings. Her journey reads like a survival manual for the modern woman: deep grief, childhood trauma, infidelity, chronic stress, raising adopted twins with prenatal drug exposure, and navigating the complexities of raising a child with autism.

But Cristina didn’t just survive—she rebuilt. Piece by piece.

After years of numbing pain with food, ignoring the signals from her body, and losing her sense of self, Cristina hit a breaking point. What followed was a radical shift toward healing—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. She discovered the transformative power of functional fitness, nervous system regulation, and true community support.

This episode is a lifeline for women stuck in survival mode—especially in midlife, when the emotional backlog can no longer be ignored. Cristina offers practical tools rooted in her EAT method (Educate, Accept, Transform) to help you move through grief, overwhelm, and identity loss with compassion and clarity.

If you’ve ever wondered, “Is this all there is?” or felt like you’re disappearing under the weight of caregiving, trauma, or unmet expectations, Cristina’s story will meet you where you are—and light the way forward.

🎧 Tune in and take the first step toward reclaiming your health, your power, and your peace.

Her book, Eat Your Feelings, is being released in July 2025.

You can find Cristina Simmons at https://cristinapsimmons.com

https://www.instagram.com/cristinapsimmons/

This episode of Asking for a Friend is sponsored by Better Help. Get 10% off your first month of therapy at https://betterhelp.com/askingforafriend

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Are you ready to reclaim your midlife body and health? I went through my own personal journey through menopause, the struggle with midsection weight gain, and feeling run-down. Faster Way, a transformative six-week group program, set me on the path to sustainable change. I'd love to work with you! Let me help you reach your health and fitness goals.
https://www.fasterwaycoach.com/?aid=MicheleFolan

Have questions about Faster Way? Please email me at:
mfolanfasterway@gmail.com

After trying countless products that overpromised and underdelivered, RIMAN skincare finally gave me real, visible results—restoring my glow, firmness, and confidence in my skin at 61. RIMAN Korea's #1 Skincare Line - https://michelefolan.riman.com

*Transcripts are done with AI and may not be perfectly accurate.

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Michele Folan:

Let's be honest, midlife can feel like a lot. Shifting roles, changing bodies, aging parents, and sometimes you just need a safe space to talk it all through. That's where therapy comes in. It's not a sign of weakness, it's an investment in your well-being and with BetterHelp, getting started is easier than ever. Betterhelp is entirely online, so it works with your schedule. You fill out a brief questionnaire and get matched with a licensed therapist in as little as 48 hours, and if it's not the right fit, you can switch. No awkward breakup required. Give yourself permission to feel better. Visit betterhelpcom. Forward slash asking for a friend to get 10% off your first month of therapy. That's BetterHelpcom. Forward slash asking for a friend. Health, wellness, fitness and everything in between. We're removing the taboo from what really matters in midlife.

Michele Folan:

I'm your host, Michelle Folan, and this is Asking for a Friend. What if healing isn't about pushing through but about finally coming home to yourself? Today's guest, Cristina Simmons, knows this journey intimately, from the depths of grief and trauma to a powerful personal transformation. Cristina has become a fierce advocate for trauma-informed wellness, especially for women who have spent far too long in survival mode. A mom, an occupational therapist, a faster-weight coach and soon-to-be-published author of Eat your Feelings. Cristina combines lived experience with practical tools that help women heal emotionally, physically and spiritually on their own terms and in their own time. In this episode, we unpack how Cristina's health journey, including joining Faster Way, became a key to her emotional recovery, what inspired her to write such an honest and empowering book, and how she's helping women everywhere rise again. If you've ever felt like you're holding it all together on the outside but unraveling on the inside, give this episode a listen.

Michele Folan:

Cristina Simmons, welcome to Asking for a Friend. Thank you so much for having me. This is so fun. Yeah, and I always love to tell the story of how we met. So, Cristina and I, at the end of February we're at a Faster Way coaches meeting and we just happened to be sitting next to each other at dinner. So and I as Cristina, as I always say, nothing ever happens by accident. There was a reason we were put next to each other. We just started chatting it up. You started telling me about your story, and what did I say when we were sitting there at dinner? That you'd have to have me on the podcast. Yeah, right. And then this week you had posted something on Instagram about your book coming to fruition here in July and I was like okay, timing's perfect, let's do it now.

Michele Folan:

I'm so thankful and grateful. Well, we're really happy to have you here and your bio is very powerful, and I would love it if you could kind of take us back to the moment when your healing journey truly began.

Cristina Simmons:

So it's probably not going to be an answer you're thinking it would be, but it actually started when my husband was unfaithful, and I often say that that was the turning point for everything, because it really caused me to take ownership of my part in our marriage. We've been married 26 years now and we're fully restored and never been happier. But obviously there was a time when that was not the truth, because we had been through so much and we stopped communicating with each other. But when he was unfaithful and then told me which he didn't have to because the affair had been over for a while I realized that I was not taking care of me and so I couldn't take care of him. I couldn't take care of our kids, I couldn't do my job as well as I should be able to, and I wasn't processing anything that we had been through. I was burying everything. I was acting like it didn't happen, and you can't live that way. It's all going to come bubbling to the surface, and so that's what happened.

Michele Folan:

So what prompted him to come clean about the affair?

Cristina Simmons:

Jesus convicted him actually, which is another big part of our story. He had kind of lost his way in our faith journey and he just came to me when he started acting very strange actually, and I was and I write about this in the book I was actually really sick, I had contracted strep throat and so I had like 102 fever. I could not barely lift my head up off the bed. And then he comes and tells me that he had been unfaithful to me.

Cristina Simmons:

And it was just, it was like this and I could I literally could not speak, and of course, course, after the whole thing happened, we kind of joked that he picked that day to tell me because he knew that I couldn't like physically kill him because I couldn't even get up off the chair, or at least like have, like serious words for him right well, but I think that not being able to speak actually helped me really process what was going on, and so I could sort of step back and take a beat and say okay, this happened, he's sorry, he knew that it wasn't right, he's now found his way back to his faith, and so together we can walk the journey forward. So that's what we started to do.

Michele Folan:

Now you mentioned some things that were kind of a precursor to you, kind of losing yourself. What were those things early on?

Cristina Simmons:

Well, we were married pretty young, and when I was 25, we were pregnant with our first baby girl and we learned that we carried a very rare gene that made very sick babies, and so our first daughter only lived for three days, and then we subsequently lost a second daughter and then a son. Oh gosh, yeah. So now we've been very blessed. We lost two girls and a boy, we adopted two girls and a boy. So God gave us back everything that we lost. But through that journey of loss, obviously I never really processed the grief from our first loss. Then I had a miscarriage, then we lost the next one.

Cristina Simmons:

It was just compounding and I came from a childhood of trauma, came from a childhood of trauma, and so I didn't come into our marriage with coping skills, strategies, anything, because my family didn't really talk about the bad things that happened. You know what I mean? I was sort of taught as a kid that we sort of shoved those down and if we don't talk about them they go away. So that's what I did in my adulthood and it did not work out very well for me.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, but you know what, though, that was kind of the era in which we grew up. Yes, you know, suck it up, we don't talk about it, we don't talk about outside of the four walls of the house, we don't talk about these things, right? There was the pride and all of that. That kind of goes with not sharing family issues outside of the home.

Cristina Simmons:

Yeah, because from the outside, everything looked perfect and I think, like you said, I think a lot of us that grew up in that era that's how it was, and as children, we were taught to, you know, be seen and not heard. So I always felt like I didn't have a voice growing up. A lot of different things. All of these are in the book.

Michele Folan:

And then okay, so you've navigated the grief and trauma, and then motherhood is there, shining right in your face. How did those experiences reshape your view on all of this?

Cristina Simmons:

So our girls were born with cocaine in their system and they were preemies and they were twins, and so right out of the gate we were dealing with all of these things and, never having had my own child before that, I didn't know any different, but it was lots of sleepless nights and, looking back, they had withdrawal symptoms that I didn't even realize. That's what they were at the time, and so, like I said, I hadn't really processed my grief from losing my biological children, and so I became very anxious about my girls and was one of those moms where I just thought that my girls were going to be taken too. Like that's kind of how I lived their childhood, was always thinking that something was going to happen to them too, because that's what I knew from before. And then, when our son came along, he was diagnosed with autism at the age of four and very sensory, very dysregulated, kicked out of every school daycare he was ever in, and so that in itself was a trauma.

Cristina Simmons:

I kind of had PTSD from my cell phone ringing because the school called me more than they didn't. I mean, it was every day that they were calling me, sometimes several times a day, and I was dysregulated myself. My nervous system was shot, I had fibromyalgia symptoms, I had chronic pain, I had all kinds of gut problems, and then trying to parent a dysregulated child when I'm dysregulated, you can imagine that that didn't go so well either. So it was just. It was a rough road, for sure.

Michele Folan:

All right. So how did supporting your son's needs lead to you discovering your own unmet needs as a woman and a mother?

Cristina Simmons:

So at the age of 39, I decided to go back to school to be an occupational therapist, because we were having trouble finding help for him and I had the other two young children and anybody that was in. Well, we didn't have anybody in our area and I kept calling places. Everybody had a wait list as long as your arm. I was going to have to drive him an hour away, and so I thought I'm just going to. I need to know how his brain works. I need to learn more, and I love education and I hated the job that I had, so it all seemed like a fine idea at the time. It was very hard, but I learned through occupational therapy. I love the holistic approach of it, and so I learned that not only was he dysregulated, but so was I, because I did not realize that what he was experiencing. I was experiencing some of the same things, and so I learned how to regulate both of our nervous systems so that we could get along better, Wow.

Michele Folan:

So okay, I got to back up because now I've got all these other questions that I didn't think I was going to ask you. But okay, first of all, how are the girls doing now?

Cristina Simmons:

So I love my girls. They're the best girls. They are 21, and they are having trouble finding their way into adulthood. Okay, and I have come to realize now, especially through writing the book, that I projected a ton of my anxiety onto them in their childhood. And that's why I want to talk about this now, because I wish that somebody had told me that that is a thing. Yeah, because they are very high anxiety now and like one still doesn't drive, and so they're trying to figure out what kind of career they want, and it's just, it's a lot. We're still navigating that, so that's going to be probably a whole nother story. I may be able to write a whole nother book on that later down the road.

Michele Folan:

Launching children after. Here's the thing.

Cristina Simmons:

At least now you know, and you can't necessarily you know, fix the past, but you can move forward. And it's that awareness piece, right? Am I correct in saying that? Right? Yes, well, and I really try to be an example to them and I've been talking more and I probably need to do this more with them, but talking more about the anxiety and when these things comes up and so that we can openly talk about it, because, like I said, that wasn't something that we've always done. If we felt uneasy about something, then we didn't talk about it. So this is going to make more of those opportunities to talk about the things that are bothering us.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, and also teaching them coping skills, because we all need those. We all need coping skills for anxiety, whether it's breath work or grounding or just going out for a walk, whatever, but it's learning the cues and learning when you need to step away, right, yes, and then how is your son doing? How old is he now? He?

Cristina Simmons:

is 16 and he is doing fantastic actually, and not that my girls are not doing fantastic. I don't want to take away from my girls. They are awesome kids and they have done a lot of raising my kids' kids. That has been one of their jobs, and so I thought if they can take care of and keep tiny humans alive, then I've done something right.

Cristina Simmons:

But my son so our son he was in an autism school for four years and one of the things that I learned about the whole entrepreneurial and self you know this, this space that we're in is people often say that if you're the smartest person in the room, you need to find a new room, and so he was the smartest kid in the room when he was at that autism school. They weren't giving him the academics that he needed, and he was very capable, he is high functioning and so I decided just this past year to take him out of that school and put him into public high school, which terrified me oh, I bet, Because just public high school in general, if you're a typical kid but he is quirky and awkward, especially in social situations, and I was worried that he wouldn't be able to handle a full caseload of studies and all the things that go with navigating that. But we just finished the school year this week and he did fantastic. He was able to keep up with everything he was able to test out of most of his end-of-year testing and they even invited him to be in the National Honor Society.

Cristina Simmons:

Oh, wow. So, yeah, yeah, he's, and it's not been without struggles. Don't think it's been a cakewalk, but just really, really proud of him and of me Also, just listening to that little voice and having the courage to take him out, to give him those opportunities. Because that's one of the things I regret with my girls is I sheltered them and so I didn't let them have their full independence, and I think that that made a big difference in their adulthood now too.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, it's not too late, right, I know it's not too late. We say that all the time as being faster way coaches and that's true, it doesn't matter, you just got to move forward, that's right. I do want to talk a little bit about Faster Way. Yeah, how did you discover Faster Way and what made you say yes to even joining the program initially?

Cristina Simmons:

So having all of this compounded trauma. I fully believe, and I would like to do more research on this, but I think that it threw me into early menopause, because I went into menopause in my 30s, but at that time I had no idea what was going on and my doctors were all telling me that I was too young. You know, your blood work is quote unquote normal, and so I had to really keep pushing and asking questions and doing research on my own, and I came across my coach on Instagram and from I started actually started watching a few different ladies that were in like my same age group and they were talking about all the things that I was going through, and so I was just watching for a little while, and then I happened upon an online summit where two of those women that I had been watching were both in that summit, and so I did the online summit and paid for the VIP upgrade and all the things and then watched all the interviews and then decided to go with my coach. And I'm kind of one of those girls that when I get into something, I go full bore.

Cristina Simmons:

You know what I mean, yeah, I know what you mean, yeah. So I just took it and ran with it. But I've been in the fitness and nutrition space for like 15 years. I was a Beachbody coach and I've been in all the multi-level marketing you know take all the supplements. And so I mean I had, I had tracked macros before I had tried out intermittent fasting, but because of all the hormone issues I was having, none of it was working, and so until I found like all the pieces to fit together, then that's when it finally all came together for me.

Michele Folan:

In what ways, then, do you think Faster Way has become more than just a health program for you? How did it support you emotionally and spiritually as well, supports you emotionally and spiritually as well.

Cristina Simmons:

Yeah, the community is unmatched. I have and I've been in several types, these types of programs and these types of communities, and I've never been in one where there's no competition, because and I have, you know, coaches in my area and coaches all over the country, and none of the not one coach that I've met has ever been like there's not enough.

Cristina Simmons:

there's not enough clients or being afraid that you're going to take one of their clients, or you know what I mean. Like everybody's so supportive, gives away all their tips and tricks and you know they're not. They're not trying to hide anything, I mean it's just a very open and loving community and I've been working on building new relationships and new circles, and the Faster Way really helped me to realize that that is one of the things that I was missing. I was in the wrong circle of friends, the wrong groups, so I'm really thankful for them for that.

Michele Folan:

So, in light of that, what do you need? What lights you up in terms of a friend group? What would make a difference for you?

Cristina Simmons:

I love deep connection and maybe it's our age, I don't know, but I'm so done with, like surface level small talk you know what I mean. Like I want to connect on a deeper level. I want to have friends that have big dreams, like I have, and their heart lights up when they're able to help other women Like those are the groups that I'm in now. We're all wanting to lift each other up and help each other and see what big things that we can accomplish.

Michele Folan:

You know, many women feel stuck right and stuck in survival mode we talked a little bit about that where you're just. The anxiety comes from being in a place where you're just trying to get through the day. I'm curious how lifting yourself out of that space physically affect your emotional healing.

Cristina Simmons:

So getting fit and addressing the outside, so that was part of what was happening when my husband was unfaithful. I had gained a lot of weight because I was depressed, and I was a functioning depressed person. I wasn't a lay around in bed type of girl when I was depressed, but I was also very disassociated and, like you said, in that survival mode, just in that fog all the time, and so I wasn't watching what I was eating, I wasn't drinking enough water, I wasn't taking care of anything, and so I think that me really looking at more, how he was seeing me, and then, because for a long time I didn't look in the mirror, and if I did I wasn't really looking at me, I never looked at myself in the eyes. That was something I always had a really hard time with because I didn't love myself, and so I had to figure out how to. And it's not just one thing, and I think that's where people get stuck to like everybody wants a magic pill. I mean, you've got to work on yourself mentally, physically and spiritually in order for it to really come together.

Cristina Simmons:

But lifting heavy weights, I learned, also regulated my nervous system, so I almost became kind of addicted to the gym, became kind of addicted to the gym and that was where I found another community as well. I loved my gym friends and going to the gym and working out, and that's where I started. And then, as I got older, I figured out that those workouts were too hard on my body. That was another reason why I was looking for something else, and I love the Faster Ways workouts because they're perfect for how we do everything. But I also found like workout clothes the workout clothes that I wore that made a difference, because they made me feel strong and pretty feminine, but still strong, like I could lift. Yeah, I could lift just as much as the guys were lifting. So, yeah, it all works together.

Michele Folan:

It isn't it amazing? It's like buying a new lipstick or a new tube of mascara. Having new workout clothes can also give you kind of that confidence to you know, feel kind of good about what you're doing, and I, I don't know. I just think there's that mental aspect of it, right? Yes, will you share a moment, though, when you realized that your body was finally starting to feel safe again? I think?

Cristina Simmons:

when I started showing up on social media and I wasn't worried about what people were going to say, Because I know that's a thing for a lot of people, and that was when I first started writing the book I was super nervous because I thought I'm putting all of my junk out into the world and now everybody's going to read it and everybody's going to know it. Everybody's going to read it and everybody's going to know it. But I started realizing that me telling my story was going to help other women not feel shame, not feel unseen, not feel unheard, and so I had to take myself out of the equation. It's not about me anymore. It's about helping others to find themselves.

Michele Folan:

I love that. That's quite an epiphany. Yeah, I've been doing a lot of work, Cristina. We're going to take a quick break and when we get back I want to talk about your book Eat your Feelings.

Michele Folan:

You listen to the podcast. You might even see my reels on Instagram. Perhaps you've even clicked a link or two, but you still haven't made a move. You're still waiting for the right time to start. But here's the truth there's no perfect time, but there is today, and if you're feeling stuck, low on energy and like your body isn't responding the way it used to, you are not alone.

Michele Folan:

That's why I coach women through Faster Way. We start with the basics fueling your body with real food, building strength and finally learning how to support your metabolism instead of fighting it. No extremes, no restriction, just a smarter, proven approach for women over 50. If you're even a little curious, click the link in the show notes or shoot me an email. I'm happy to chat with no pressure, but maybe it's time to stop watching and start doing. Let's do this together. Okay, we are back. I want to talk about your book. You said right before the break how it's a vulnerable position to be in to put yourself out there. It's really a very clever and honest title. Where did you come up with the name for the book?

Cristina Simmons:

So I realized that that is exactly what I had been doing all of these years was eating my feelings. I definitely wasn't processing them. So, and I started to really realize that when I felt a certain way, I wanted a certain type of food. When I'm anxious, I want something crunchy and salty, and I think that's that input to the nervous system, because a lot of kids you know, I work in the school system now and a lot of the kids that have they're always wanting to chew on something, but that sort of calms them, and so of course there's, you know, a thousand different emotions we can have. But every time I felt an emotion because I didn't want to feel it, I would go to the pantry. So that's where the title of the book came from.

Michele Folan:

Well, I love the title and it's perfect for this topic. You know, was writing the book cathartic or triggering? Yeah, or both, yes both.

Cristina Simmons:

Okay, it was very cathartic and I realized in the process that there were some things that I hadn't dealt with, things that I thought I had, and some of those things kind of came bubbling up to the surface. And, of course, the hardest chapters to write were the ones about our biological children that we lost because I had been avoiding that for so long. And our first daughter would have been let's see, this is she would have been 23. And around her birthday, like my body still remembers and I can have those feelings of depression and anxiety and like sometimes I won't even realize that what the date is. And then and I'll be feeling that way and I'm like what is wrong with me? And then I'll look at the calendar and I'm like, oh, it's March.

Cristina Simmons:

But that's why you've really got to process these, because it sits in your body and it festers and I had destroyed my gut health. That was another reason why I needed a program like the Faster Way, because I, just when your gut is leaking you know everything's inflamed, my joints hurt. Like I said, I had all that chronic pain and that makes you not want to work out. It makes you not. I mean, it's just a vicious cycle.

Michele Folan:

I think everybody's you know we we can't minimize the gut brain connection. You know, when our guts are off it can spiral with with so many things. So I'm glad that you have gotten that under control, because that's kind of the first step right is getting the gut healed before you can really do anything else. Yes, my next question, christina, would be how did you balance the deeply personal parts of your story with the need to provide tangible tools for other women? Because this couldn't have been just a story of you. You wanted this to be a help book for other women.

Cristina Simmons:

Yeah, I started really thinking about how I navigated all of this and I realized that I had been using frameworks, but I just hadn't written them down, and so there's actually four frameworks in the book and so you can kind of the way that I designed them, you can kind of put them to any situation in your life. Of course some of them are going to work in different situations better than others, but my main one is eat, which is E-A-T, which obviously I have an eat and I have a food, so obviously it goes kind of with the eat your feelings thing. But eat is educate, accept and transform. Because I had used education as a big part of my healing, mostly because I love to learn and I know that's not everybody's thing. But I don't think you can really tackle a hard or a big situation without fully understanding what you're up against. You need to have some understanding and some deeper education, especially if it's a big, you know, if it's cancer or like my son with autism.

Cristina Simmons:

That's, my biggest takeaway for the Eid was him, because I needed to understand how his brain worked so that I could better help him. But so then, once you educate yourself, then you can accept the things that you can't change, because there's in every situation. There should be something out of your control, and so when you accept that this is what I can control and this is what I can't, then you can start to transform the things that you can into beautiful things, which happened with my new career and me being able to help other families with autistic kids and working in the school system and in my community. So that's why I came up with the EAT framework.

Michele Folan:

Oh, I love it. And, like you said, as I'm sitting here, I'm like, oh my gosh, we could apply this to so many things in life. This isn't just dealing with kids or, you know, trauma issues. It could be really anything Right? What do you hope, christina, that your readers will feel differently about or do differently after reading? Eat your Feelings.

Cristina Simmons:

I just really hope that they will take a look at themselves and really start to cultivate that self-love. I think women have a really hard time with that, and we're so dedicated and focused on helping everyone else that we get lost in the equation. Because that's really what happened with me. I had lost my identity. You know I was a mom and I was a wife, but I had no idea who I was. So that was what I needed to figure out, and now I can help other people do that, I hope.

Michele Folan:

How do you define sustainable healing? What does that look like for women in midlife juggling a million things?

Cristina Simmons:

It's a daily practice, and we say practice because every day is different and there's always going to be a challenge. So I think you really need to have some. I know a lot of people talk about non-negotiables, but I think you do need to have some things in place that you don't let slide. You know you need to have some practices and some tools that help you to deal with, so that you're prepared to deal with a challenge when it comes, not you know, reacting in the situation.

Michele Folan:

Sometimes easier said than done, For sure. And then you've also said that your work is trauma-informed and we haven't really touched on that a whole lot on the podcast. And for someone who doesn't fully understand that term, what does that mean and why does that matter?

Cristina Simmons:

Because I have lived it. You know I'm not coaching or giving strategies or giving tools that I haven't used myself and that didn't bring me through trauma. So that's what trauma informed just means that I have lived it, I have been through it. There's nothing really that surprises me anymore. You're not going to shock me. But just that I've had the lived experience makes me an expert on being traumatized, because that's how I lived like two decades of my life.

Michele Folan:

Right, oh gosh. Well, you seem like you're doing really well right now. Does the excitement of the book and just talking about it is this kind of making you have a little different perspective on things?

Cristina Simmons:

I think it's just now that I can. I love to help other women and so, like I said, it was so long that I was kind of mucking through everything and it's almost like that fog has really been lifted and now I see a bigger purpose in it. I've always said that everything happens for a reason, and so I've often said before years ago, I've been talking about writing this book for 10 years and I kept telling my husband I said we haven't been through all of this not to help other people. So, and I think that's really why we're here and God told me to do it, so I'm also being obedient.

Michele Folan:

Good girl. And then I always ask this of every guest on the podcast. You know you speak about spiritual, physical and emotional healing, but what's one non-negotiable self-care practice that keeps you grounded?

Cristina Simmons:

I use breath work a lot. I mean, my workouts are pretty non-negotiable for me. I need to work out on a schedule, but I've really been using breath work. It really calms the nervous system and it does I know. I know there's a lot of talk about breath work and there's many different counts and all that kind of thing, but I think you just need to find the one that works for you. So I do box breathing, which is pretty simple, but it really does sort of calm you and brings you back into your body. And that's what I had so much trouble with all those years was I was so disassociated, so that helps me to get grounded again.

Michele Folan:

Does that work at night, at three in the morning?

Cristina Simmons:

Yes.

Michele Folan:

It can. Yeah, I do that. I was just wondering if that works for you, because I do that. That's kind of my thing If I do wake up at 3.30 in the morning, usually to go to the bathroom, but then I start ruminating about everything and so I do my breathing then. So I was just curious if you're doing the same thing. Yes, all right. So, christina Simmons, what is next for you after the book launch? Where is your energy headed for?

Cristina Simmons:

the rest of the year. I want more speaking engagements. I'm feeling called to speak on more stages and to help as many people as I can. So that's that's kind of where the whole book thing came. I mean, I've, like I said, I've been wanting to write the book for a long time, but having the book is another gateway to being on stage, which also terrifies me. But, like I said, it's not about me, it's about helping other people.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, and you know what? You're the expert. It's your story and no one can tell it better than you can, and so I wish you the best with the book and you and I will definitely be connected through faster way. But, christina, thank you for your bravery and sharing your story and putting it out there in print, because I know that is never easy.

Cristina Simmons:

Thank you for the platform. I'm so grateful for the conversation. It's been really fun. Thanks for being here.

Michele Folan:

Hey, thanks for tuning in. Please rate and review the show where you listen to the podcast. And did you know that Asking for a Friend is available now to listen on YouTube? You can subscribe to the podcast there as well. Your support is appreciated and it helps others find the show. Thank you.