We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Catherine Andrews a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Catherine, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

My mission is to connect highly sensitive people back to their self-trust, intuition, creativity, and magic. I do this through energy work, creative visioning, journaling, Tarot and inner child healing. As a life coach and spiritual mentor, my calling is to coach people who feel disconnected from their lives back into their authentic, compassionate and worthy selves, so they can design a life of their dreams and do work that will light up the world.

I’m particularly focused on highly sensitive people in my work. A highly sensitive person (HSP) is a neurodivergent individual who is thought to have an increased or deeper central nervous system sensitivity to physical, emotional, or social stimuli. As an HSP myself, I saw how I let fear, people-pleasing, and a dysregulated nervous system prevent me from stepping into my voice and worth for several decades. I didn’t gather the tools and courage to start my own business until I was 40. I don’t want this for other HSPs, who are empathetic, creative, heart-centered people who really can do so much good in this world. My mission is to empower HSPs with the tools and self-trust to reconnect to their worth and intuition so they can step forward and help others in the way their purpose is calling them to do.

Catherine, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

To look at me five years ago, you would have seen a modern woman who seemed to have it all together: making six figures in a senior leadership position in the corporate world; owning a Pinterest-worthy condo in a coveted neighborhood in Washington, D.C.; a life full of friends, dating, family, yoga, running, travel and more.

A lot of it was good. But a lot of other stuff was going on underneath the surface, where I was studiously refusing to acknowledge it. After a traumatic end of a 6-year relationship in my late 20s, I went from being a confident, joyful person to somebody steeped in shame, uncertainty, self-blame, and codependency.

I was nearly 40, and in the decade after this breakup, there was a dark and deepening whirlwind of anxiety, perfectionism, shame, and angst that was sitting in the shadows, and — though I didn’t really know or understand it at the time — running my life.

I was making decisions out of fear; relying on external validation to make me feel good about my choices; consistently beating myself up; feeling completely disconnected from my heart and my body; judging myself and others; and caught on a hamster wheel of people-pleasing, perfectionism, and total lack of understanding my own worth, values, and needs.

I didn’t know how to make decisions confidently or from an authentic place. I was deeply over-identified with my career because I had no idea who I was outside of it. I didn’t feel fully vibrant or alive to the existing joys in my day-to-day. I felt like a passive participant in my own life, riding the current of a turbulent river I had no control of, but that I was too scared to step out of.

And perhaps most importantly, I didn’t feel like enough — or that I deserved better.

It was around this time I luckily discovered several tools that connected me back to my intuition and led to a burgeoning spiritual awakening. Journaling, especially Morning Pages as taught in Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way, was one. Second was learning to read Tarot. Third was energy work, particularly Reiki and Feng Shui.

As I explored these holistic tools, along with practical approaches like nervous system regulation, family systems and parts work and more, I gathered the courage to quit my job, start my life coaching business and I haven’t looked back since.

Today, I write and host the Sunday Soother, a newsletter and podcast dedicated to practical spirituality, intentional living, and mindful rituals to create meaning, read by and listened to by over 5,000 people. I teach courses for highly sensitive people on how to start a business, how to date intentionally and how to connect with your spiritual side and intuition. Overall, I teach highly sensitive women to stop overthinking, conquer fear and increase their confidence so they can unapologetically set and achieve goals in career, love and life.

And my mission is to reconnect HSPs to their magic, intuition, creativity and joy.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn the lesson of what I call “the Gray Fog.” In short, it’s my story of recovering from toxic shame brought on my trauma in my childhood and young adult life, which resulted in Complex-PTSD – a chronic state of PTSD created by emotional relationship wounds over a long period of time. The Gray Fog affects my clients: They feel that life isn’t so bad. Surely they should be feeling more grateful and appreciative for what they have? But they can’t quite put their finger on it. Stuff is off but they don’t know why. Time goes by too fast but they don’t seem to remember or have been present for anything they’ve done. They tell me they struggle with knowing what they truly, deeply want out of life, both in the big picture and day-to-day. They’re often staying stuck in situations, relationships or jobs out of fear — fear of not knowing how to leave, and fear of what might happen if they do leave. They say that they know all the tools, have read all the books, listened to all the podcasts, and yet STILL shame and self-sabotage at times? They’re searching for a deeper sense to a confident, intuitive inner knowing that can help them make decisions authentically and unapologetically. Things seem gray. Confusing. Murky. Disconnected. Unsure. They often have everything they thought they wanted on paper (a good career, friends, a nice place to live, a solid life) but stuff seems… black and white. Dim.

This is what I call the Gray Fog, or the effect of toxic shame on a person.

I moved out of the Gray Fog and unlearned toxic shame over a matter of years. Basically, it started with the realization that I was exhausted of hating myself.

So I threw myself with wild abandon into personal development, reading every book and listening to any podcasts I could get my ears on. I began a one-year coaching certification program that urged me to lean into my heart, my vulnerability, my femininity, my softness (a wildly difficult and insane-sounding strategy; wasn’t I just supposed to be as tough as possible?! Wasn’t it a point of pride that I rarely cried?!). I learned about the nervous system and the fact that emotions lived and were felt in my body, even though I was incredibly out of touch with them and felt generally numb from the neck down. I began a deep and powerful but gentle journaling practice. Though I scoffed at practices like these beforehand, I dabbled with somatic exercises like dancing, focusing, breathwork, that were more life-changing than any intellectual exercise I’d ever done in getting back in touch with myself. I played with the idea that maybe nothing was actually wrong with me; maybe I could actually overcome the fear and self-doubt and perfectionism and rigidity that made up the cage I had willingly co-created with society.

Things started to shift. And then really shift. In the span of two years I fell in love, quit my corporate career, started my business and scaled it to six figures without burning out, took care of myself authentically, rebuilt family relationships that had been languishing, cleared my shame and low-self worth, confronted my people-pleasing and perfectionism, learned to set authentic boundaries, got deeply in touch with and allowed myself to feel my anger around white supremacy, the patriarchy, capitalism, and, most importantly, deeply understood this fact: I could have my own back. No matter what happened — if my business fell away, my relationship fell apart, whatever — I would always have my own back. And, most importantly: I was never returning to The Fog, to the way it had been before. I get to make the decisions in my life now. With clarity. With vulnerability. With righteous anger. With softness and compassion. With authenticity. With intentionality. With love. I get to set audacious dreams AND go after them AND get them. There was life beyond the idea that I “should be grateful” for what I had. A fully present, vibrant life where I trust myself, speak kindly to myself, make decisions from my highest self, where I process emotions instead of suppressing them, where fear still enters but isn’t in the driver’s seat.

I’m still loosening the grip of toxic shame every day, because it’s so over-presenting in our society and we’re so encouraged to feel this self-loathing. But toxic shame no longer has a leash on me, it’s no longer in the driver’s seat. And this is what I want for everybody I work with.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I think I’m in a pivot right now. I’m leaning more openly into my spirituality and my teaching of magic and energy work. I came to life coaching with a pretty straightforward approach; I would coach on life or career situations that my clients are stuck around and struggling in. But over the past five years I’ve created a deeply spiritual life, and that is influencing my coaching and starting to be in the driver’s seat, too, as I release shame and fear of judgment around that. I have started to incorporate Tarot, energy work and Feng Shui more directly into my work, as well as spellwork, ritual, nature ceremonies and more.

It feels a little strange to come from a background of success in Washington, DC, where I was hanging out in my 20s with folks who have gone on to lead some of the prominent think tanks or media organizations of our time. A lot of people look askance at spiritual teachings such as mine, often with skepticism, sometimes with derision. So pivoting from somebody who came from a very traditional background of corporate success and is now a spiritual life coach online feels a bit wobbly sometimes, but I’m doing it.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.thesundaysoother.com
• Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/catherineandrews
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherineandrews/
• Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/candrews
• Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sunday-soother/id1450087269

Image Credits
Rose Peck (images of me in a green tank) Others – Carletta Girma