The Femme Cast
Welcome to The Femme Cast—the podcast for women who are truly ready to break free from toxic relationship cycles, choose themselves, and become a magnet for the love they deserve.
I’m Maria — Master Energy Healer, Radical Self-Love Leader, and Relationship Mentor.
I work with the women who are cycle breakers, grid shakers, and truth layers — the brave souls who came here to dismantle the inherited beliefs that told them they had to chase love, prove their worth, and beg to be chosen.
I help them break free from the karmic cycles and generational patterns that keep them stuck in toxic relationships and self-abandonment — so they can unapologetically choose themselves, reclaim their inherent worth, and become magnetic to soul-aligned love, expansive opportunities, and the liberated life they were born to lead.
Without ever shrinking, settling, or self-abandoning again.
I’ve been where you are, stuck in cycles of chasing love, begging to be chosen, and abandoning myself again and again in the name of love. But I turned my pain into purpose, and now I’m here to help you do the same.
Each week, I share personal stories, actionable insights, and a blend of spiritual and practical tools to help you heal from past wounds, reclaim your self-worth, and rewrite your love story. You’ll hear everything from vulnerable truths about my own journey to breaking toxic patterns to empowering lessons that will guide you toward creating the healthy, loving relationships you crave.
Join me as we say goodbye to self-abandonment, people-pleasing, and unhealthy dynamics, and hello to radical self-love, emotional freedom, and true empowerment.
It’s time to reclaim the version of you who never had to beg to be chosen.
You ready?
Let’s do this.
The Femme Cast
Breaking Toxic Relationship Patterns | How to Heal Childhood Wounds and Build Unshakable Self-Worth
Have you ever wondered why certain relationship triggers send you spiraling into anxiety, insecurity, or chasing validation from someone who can’t give you what you need? I know that feeling all too well—and what I’ve discovered is that those moments aren’t just uncomfortable experiences… they’re powerful invitations to heal at the deepest level.
In this episode of The Femme Cast, I’m sharing how relationship triggers are actually mirrors of our childhood wounds—and how they keep us stuck in cycles of self-abandonment. For me, that looked like people-pleasing, chasing emotionally unavailable partners, and silencing my true needs. And if you’ve found yourself repeating those patterns too, I want you to know: there’s nothing “wrong” with you. These behaviors often come from the beliefs we formed as children about our worthiness.
I’ll guide you through how to recognize when you’re truly triggered (hint: it usually shows up as an intense emotional reaction, obsessive thoughts, or even physical sensations in your body), and how to use that trigger as a doorway into healing. Inside this episode, I’ll share:
🎤 How to identify the exact moments when you’re about to self-abandon to “save” a relationship
🎤 Why those triggers are connected to the unmet needs and emotional gaps from childhood
🎤 A simple practice to reparent your inner child and give her the love, safety, and validation she’s always needed
🎤 Ways to break the cycle of overgiving, chasing, or silencing yourself in relationships
🎤 How to build a foundation of unwavering self-worth so that choosing yourself feels natural and empowering
This isn’t just theory—I’ll give you prompts and practical tools you can use the very next time you feel pulled into old patterns. I’ll also share some of my own story of how I broke free from the belief that I had to earn or prove myself worthy of love, and how this work has transformed the lives of the women I’ve supported.
If you’re ready to stop abandoning yourself, reclaim your power, and finally attract emotionally available, healthy love—you won’t want to miss this conversation. Your triggers aren’t here to punish you. They’re sacred invitations to come home to yourself and embody the love you’ve been searching for all along.
PS: Still bending, chasing, and settling? That ends now.
In a 90-min Sacred Reclamation Intensive, you’ll break the cycle, reclaim your power, and step into the woman who never begs to be chosen. Spots are limited — grab yours here: 👉 [Book now]
But fair warning—authentic connections, aligned opportunities, and breakthroughs in love, money, and purpose are inevitable.
Hey you guys, what is up? Welcome back to the show. I am so excited and grateful to have you guys here. Welcome if you're new.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Today I wanted to talk about bringing your inner child back into the room when it comes to your own personal healing and how uncovering you know, how some of these relationship triggers that we experience again and again in relationship, how they're not something to you know fear or to feel uncomfortable about, but they're actually invitations to do some deeper healing work. So relationships are our greatest teachers and I say that again and again and I truly believe that a hundred percent, because it's through our relationships that we do most of our healing work right. We're going to talk about how to recognize when you're, you know, in a relationship trigger. We're going to talk about breaking that cycle to self-abandon and break the cycles of toxic relationship patterns at the root, and how to do that using inner child healing work. We're going to talk about how to reparent your inner child so that you can finally get into you know, step into your power and really start to choose yourself unapologetically, without those wounds kind of you know, calling all the shots for you right, and so that you can become magnetic to you know, healthier relationship, emotionally available relationships, opportunities and just being the fullest and most expressed version of yourself, right, which is what happens when we do a lot of this inner child healing work. Right, and I know it sounds fluffy, but trust me, you know it is really powerful work, and we do it together. When we work together in one on one, and the the, the magnitude of the transformation that people experience from just one session is like it's just so mind blowing. Obviously, we're not gonna do that here. It's just a short little podcast, but I'll give you just a few little prompts that you can kind of play with to start doing some of this work on your own and get a little taste of what it's like when we do this in process.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Okay, so first of all, let's just talk about what we're talking about when we're talking about triggering relationships, right? So triggers, moments that are triggering, you know we hear people talk about oh, I was in a situation and it was very triggering, or that person triggered me, or this situation triggered me. Trigger is a very specific trigger has a very specific meaning when it comes to, you know, an emotional response. You can have an emotional response to many things, but it's not necessarily be a trigger. Trigger usually means, when we say the word trigger, what we usually mean is having an experience where their emotional response is triggering something from a previous experience that hasn't been fully processed or brought to completion yet. Right, so it's triggering an old wound, an old pain body, an old soul fragment that hasn't fully healed or moved through whatever the experience was for them. So when we experience something, especially in relationships, right, that becomes triggering.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:The emotional response to that trigger is usually very intense. We usually feel it very deeply emotionally. Sometimes we even feel it physically, right. So we'll feel this emotional intensity, like we may feel it in our throat, we may feel it in our neck sorry throat, chest head we may feel it in our stomach. We may, like you know, have clenched fists or tighten our jaw, like there's so many ways when you get an upset stomach, right days when you get an upset stomach, right.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:And usually what happens is you know, and this is how I always say, this is how I always help my clients realize that they're talking about a trigger and not just you know, because sometimes when we think we're being, sometimes when we're being triggered, we actually think it's justified, we think it's all the other person's doing and they were just behaving badly and we're just responding to their bad behavior in a healthy way. But really, when you break it down, even if the other person was in the wrong, if we're having this kind of disempowering, emotional response to what happened, that's when we know we're triggered. And I always take people through this exercise. When they're not clear that it's a trigger, I'll always say to them well, just very briefly, explain to me what was happening when you started to feel this way, and they'll start telling me all the terrible things that the other person and then he said this, and then he did that, and then, and then, and then, and then you can see that they're second guessing their words and they're starting to go over it in their mind. They're starting to. They're starting to like, like, go over it in their mind. They're starting to like, like, they're starting to hear themselves and they're realizing that, okay, actually wasn't that bad when they did, but it felt bad, and I know it's bad and I know it felt really bad. So that's when they start justifying. I know it doesn't sound that intense, but, trust me, when I was in it it was intense or something along those lines right, because they realize that you know, as they're recalling the situation, there's a part of them that there's a part of them deep within that is already aware yo, your response, no matter how bad their behavior was, was completely disproportionate to what was happening, right? So, even though they may have behaved that person might've behaved really badly, done hurtful things, disrespectful things or whatever your emotional response is disproportionate to that. Right. That's your first clue.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Second clue that you're dealing with a trigger and not just bad behavior in general is you can't get past it. It eats away at you Like for hours, for days, it's all you can think about. You're obsessing over it. You're obsessing over what to say or how to respond or how to handle it. You're talking to everybody that you know about what happened and probably you know doing that whole I swear you know it doesn't sound like it's bad now, but I'm telling you in the moment it was really intense. You know. That's how you know that you're dealing with a trigger. You feel it deeply emotionally. You probably also feel it viscerally. Your response is how you're feeling it, or the intensity with which you're feeling it is disproportionate to what actually happened and you cannot let it go Four signs you're dealing with a trigger. Was that four or three? I kind of lost count, anyway, okay.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So, knowing that we're talking about, you know self abandonment, you know healing self abandonment specifically at the root, using inner child healing. We want to look at number one, the things that trigger us in relationship and the triggers specifically that want to compel us to self-abandon in order to save the relationship, so that we don't lose love, so that we don't lose that person's interest, affection, whatever. You know, we have to look at all those moments where our first response to the trigger is to feel compelled to self-abandon. Every time that comes up, that is a powerful opportunity to heal something within ourselves that made us believe that we needed to chase, convince or prove to other people that we are worthy of love and worthy to be loved. And you know, to convince them to love us, to give us their love, to give us their heart, to give us their commitment. And oftentimes these are behaviors that we learned as children.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So the next time you know you're triggered in a relationship and you know you're feeling compelled to self-abandon, whether it is, you know, to go the extra mile to people, please, and get that person's approval or validation, whether it's to. You know to chase someone who isn't giving you really the time of day. You know write, send them another text message, check when the last time they were online. You know to overgive to someone who really isn't giving you much of anything in return in the hopes that they one day will reciprocate. Avoid being honest about something that might maybe was uncomfortable for you because you're afraid to be confrontational, you're afraid to rock the boat, you're afraid to be too much or to ask for too much. You know sending that extra long text to somebody who treated you badly, who you know, you know made you feel shitty and you're hoping that by sending them this long, very long winded text you'll help. You know it'll help them realize the error in their ways and maybe you'll even get an apology. But you know this person has shown you time and time again that they really don't care about how you feel.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:You know these are the ways that we tend to want to self abandon. So the next time you get triggered by something in a relationship and you feel that urge or that that inner compelling feeling to just abandon yourself again, I want you to stop. Okay, and here's what I want you to do instead. So we're going to, we're going to go back. So now, we're now depending on you. Know, I want you to listen through this right now, but I also want you to save this episode so you can kind of go through this practice the next time that you're triggered or the next time you feel compelled to self-abandon, because again, it is presenting you with a powerful opportunity to heal. So I want you to go through these prompts the next time you're in this kind of a situation so that you can start to finally break that pattern and cycle and become magnetic to more loving and healthy relationships.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Okay, so the first question that you want to ask yourself whenever you're in one of these situations is what is this situation making me feel or believe about myself? So, if you can just isolate the moment, right, take everything like, take the meaning out of your head, take everything that this person did, what you think of it, whether it was right, whether it was wrong, doesn't matter. Take that all out of your head and I want you to just focus on what is the situation or what is this person making me feel or believe about myself? Is it that I'm not loved? Is it that I'm not about myself. Is it that I'm not loved? Is it that I'm not good enough? Is it that I'm not worthy of love and affection? Is it that you know? Whatever, whatever it is that it's making you believe.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:You know, I really just want you to take a deep breath. I want you to visualize, maybe even visualize, the person in front of you. Visualize you in front of them, right. Visualize and tap into what's happening in the moment, right, really, really start to get specific. You know, I want you to feel like you're in the moment, physically, emotionally and mentally, and from that place, you know, if you can just kind of pause and ask yourself what is the first thing, take a deep breath, if you need to, so that you can get centered. We're basically calling on our intuition now to doing. A lot of this work is done very intuitively. So I want you to just take a deep breath and get centered and I want you to ask yourself what is a situation making me feel or believe about myself, right, or about relationships in general, right? So for me, a lot of these relationships came back to this belief that I needed to earn love, that I needed to fight for love, that I needed to convince people to love me, that I needed to kind of get it out of them, right, like there was a part of me almost that believed.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:You know, because you know my dad not that he was, he was emotionally. He was an emotionally unavailable father in the sense that you know he was not comfortable with his emotion. He didn't know how to express emotion. I know love was there. It wasn't that. It wasn't there, probably wasn't the healthiest. You know he had his own trauma that he unhealed, trauma that he was dealing with and that he hadn't processed. But also he was very uncomfortable with emotion. My father was a man who had a lot of patriarchal conditioning and emotions were bad, right, he did not know how to be present with them. He did not know how to feel with them like, feel through them. He had a very unhealthy relationship with his emotional body and that unhealthy relationship translated into his relationships as being emotionally unavailable.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So for me, when I was younger, that looked like trying to extract love from my dad, because I'm somebody whose love language is words of affirmation and I just was not getting that from my father. So I was doing everything in my power to try and extract those words of affirmation and constantly work towards hearing the words I love you, you know you're beautiful, you're this, you're that, you're whatever, right. I needed to hear those things and I was constantly pulling, chasing, strategizing for how to get them right. So, for me, whenever those situations happened, whenever I was in a triggering situation, it was usually because something they were doing was making me feel like I wasn't loved, and so I needed to fight, to chase. I needed to fight to chase, to strategize, to hear the I love you that I was wanting to hear, to finally have their affection for me, their love for me, their intentions for me verbally validated and spoken right. So that's what was usually happening for me in these situations and that's usually what was true.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So what would trigger me is if they left me questioning how they felt, if they were like, really, you know, into the relationship one day and then went MIA the next day. Or, you know, they had this hot and cold thing right. They're texting, texting, texting like fire, texting me for days, and then all of a sudden, they're reading my text messages and not responding and not explaining why. You know, we make all these amazing plans and then they ghost and I don't hear from them for like days, or sometimes weeks on end, I would start to spiral and I would immediately go into this pattern of wanting to chase love, of wanting to chase validation that I was loved, right, and to strategize for how, what I was going to do to get that validation. So you know, that's kind of you know.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:For you it might be totally different, but I want you to ask yourself what is the situation making me feel or believe about myself or about relationships in general? And then I want you to go back and I want you to ask yourself when was the first time or who was the first person who made me feel this way? So again, for me it was my dad, right? That was the first time I remember feeling like I needed to fight for someone to say I love you or to verbalize their feelings for me or to validate their feelings for me, and there was a part of me that, as a child, desperately needed and wanted that validation. And so what ended up happening was I was repeating that cycle as an when I grew up, as an adult. So when was the first time, you know, whatever it was, that this relationship was making you feel about yourself, or the situation was making you feel or believe about yourself.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:When was the first time or the first person who made you feel that way? And just trust the first person that comes to mind. You know whether it's a father figure, a mother figure, a sibling, a teacher, a friend, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how old you are. I want you to get first person that comes to mind. And then I want you to ask yourself what did they do that made me feel this way and what did they do to what did I? What did I make it believe? What did I make it mean about me when they did this? So what did they do to make me feel this way? What was the behavior? What was the pattern? What was you know? What was it that was triggering for you that made you feel this way? And then, what did you make it mean about you?
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So, for me and my dad, right going back to that example, my triggering, the triggering behavior, that, that the behavior in him that triggered this in me, was this inability to express his emotion, like to express that he loved me, to validate his love for me, to say it out loud, to say it verbally, to make me feel validated and reassured, that I was loved, right. So what did I make it believe about me? Well, I mean, I think many things. I think it made me believe that I had to work hard for love, I had to chase love, I had to get it out of people, and I think beneath that because there's always multiple layers, beneath that there's this belief. If they didn't say it that well, I wasn't loved, and if my own father doesn't love me, then maybe I'm not worthy of love.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:This is how we kind of process information as children, right, because really, as children, when we're processing information, we're processing relationship dynamics. Everything's about us. Like, children are the most ego-driven, and it's not in a bad way, you know. But when there's usually when there's something goes wrong in a relationship, or you know there's pain or there's drama or there's fighting or there's disappointment or whatever, children always make it mean about them poor things, you know. So when we go through things and we experience them as children, it's always about us, it's always our fault.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:I didn't have the capacity at four years old to understand that my father was an emotionally available man because of his own unhealed trauma. I thought he was being the way he was being, because obviously I was not good enough, he didn't love me enough. You know, obviously, if he loved me enough, he would tell me that he loved me, and if he didn't love me enough, I had to work for it, right. And so this is the same mentality that I ended up bringing to my relationships. I ended up dating a whole bunch of emotionally unavailable people and trying to get or extract love from them, trying to get them to validate an emotional experience, validate an emotional commitment to me. That just was not there, and I thought that if I worked hard enough at it, I could turn the situation around right.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So then, after you've kind of, you know, explored those questions, you've, you've talked, you've, you've kind of given some thought with okay, who was the first person, first person to make me feel that way? What did they make me believe about myself, or what did they do to make me feel that way, and what did it make me believe about myself? Then you want to ask yourself what was the truth? Now, Now, knowing what I know now, right, what was the truth about the situation really that I wasn't seeing at that time when I was a little girl? So, like I said, for me. I wasn't seeing when I was four years old, five years old, seven years old. I wasn't seeing the fact that my dad had all of this unhealed trauma, that he hadn't moved through a process that was making him behave the way he was behaving. I just interpreted as he didn't love me, I had to earn his love right. He didn't love me, I had to earn his love right, and I had to work hard to get him to validate and verbally affirm that he loved me. Right Now I know different. Now I know that my dad was dealing with a lot of unhealed trauma and a lot of issues that were going on beneath the surface that made it very, very difficult for him to be in his emotional experience, very, very difficult for him to be in his emotional experience. And so now it makes total sense to me, but it's still, even though it makes sense to me now, mentally it still was not making sense to my inner child. My inner child was still acting out Okay.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So next question is what does that little girl or boy need to hear from me right now? That would make him or her feel better and know their true worth, right? So what if you were to see your inner child, if you were to see like and if you could go back to that version of you that first felt that way. If you can get a picture in your head what did you look like? What were you wearing? What kind of shoes were you wearing? What were you doing at the time? Who was there? You know, if you can just get a random picture in your mind of you when you were younger, the first time you remember it doesn't have to be the first time you felt that way, but the first time you remember, the first recall that comes to mind of when you felt that way. Maybe it was the most significant or just the one that you can recall the easiest, doesn't matter. Or maybe it's just a random picture you built in your head, doesn't matter, just go with it. Right, and you've identified what the truth was about the situation. So what can you tell him or her now to make them feel better? Well, number one you can list.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:The first thing you do is you want to listen to them. So if they have anything they want to say to you, you get them to let it out, and you do not interrupt until they're done. You do this all intuitively. You get them to let everything out that they've been holding onto every pain, every heartbreak, every disappointment, every negative belief they had about themselves, everything that made them sad, every tear, every scream, every whatever, whatever it is they want to let out. You just let them let it out and you just hold space and you love them and you hold the space and you let them let it out and then you validate their feelings. Okay, very important. You want to validate your inner child's feelings. You want to make them feel seen, loved and heard and held. Okay, that's what every child wants when they're acting out and having a tantrum. They just want to feel seen, heard, validated and held. So you want to do that for them and that's the first thing you do.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:And then, when you finally feel like they've, this inner child within you has calmed down. Now you can start to explain to them what they weren't seeing back then, what you didn't know about dad or whoever so-and-so was X, y, z, but they always had love for you, or I love you, or something, something to make them feel whatever it is they needed to hear in that moment, whatever it was they needed to hear in that moment. You give them that now. You love them, you choose to see them, you choose to value them. You tell them that you are not going to let, you're not going to let anyone hurt them ever again. You tell them that you've got their back and that you are going to make sure that they are loved and they feel and know that they are loved, because you are going to tell them every single day just how loved they are right.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So you take on the role of the parent. You become the parent that your parents couldn't be, or whoever the caregiver was or whoever the person was in the experience. You take on that role and you start to reparent your inner child and you start to build them up emotionally and mentally right and start to make them believe a different story, a more positive, tell a more positive story and feel a more positive story about themselves. And you know, make sure that your inner child really does and truly know their true worth. Right, set the record straight, because they probably made this mean something about what they were worthy of or what they deserve. So set the record straight. What are they worthy of? Do they need to fight for love? Do they need to convince other people to love them or chase people to love them, or campaign for people to love and affection? No, they don't Right. So these are the things that you want to try and start to instill in them and reassure for them and and and and and and really remind them of on the regular, even if it means you know great practice.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:Get a picture of yourself when you were around that age. We get a picture of yourself when you were four or five, six or seven. Pin it up on your mirror, talk to it every day, write it a love note, tell it how much you love it, tell how amazing that child is, tell her how much amazing things she's going to do when she grows up. You know, really, you know bolster, bolster, bolster. You know I'm remembering the girlfriend. What was that movie called? Oh my god, mamma Mia, when she was telling her to like bolster the girl. Bolster, bolster, bolster. That's what you want to do.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:And then, knowing so, knowing then, so, knowing what you know now, and you know, having had this talk with your inner child, you know getting her to feel better about herself and feel better about her worth. Really, look at the situation from. You know, whatever it was that was triggering you, that kind of now we're going to take it full circle, right? Whatever it was that triggered you, that got you to go down this rabbit hole with your inner child. Now you want to say, okay, knowing what I know and knowing the conversation that I've had with my inner child, what action or non-action would feel right to take right now? Knowing what I know now, and if I truly embodied my worth today, would you send that text? I don't know. Would you? Would you sit in the bathroom and wait for them to call you? I don't know. Would you, would you overgive in the hopes that one day they'll give back to you? I don't know, would you? Maybe you would, and that's okay.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:But if not, you're starting to break a pattern, even in asking the question. Even in asking the question, does it feel aligned to please, to give more than I already have, to wait around for a phone call or to send just one more text? Does it really feel aligned, knowing what I know now? Does it really feel like the right thing to do If you can tell yourself no and be aware of that? No, you've already done some. You've already started to break the pattern, even though you may send the text later, in a weak moment. So be it like it is what it is each time you go through. And you will go through it again if you send the text I'm just FYI right, you'll keep going through this until you stop the behavior, right. But just knowing that you're catching yourself in the moment of and the awareness of that is half the, you've already started to break the pattern at that point, right.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So go through these steps Anytime you feel any trigger really, in any relationship specifically specifically any triggering that is making you want to self-abandon and to chase, beg, prove or work for someone's love and affection. Go through these steps and I promise you, every time you go through this, you will transform yourself just a little bit more, one layer at a time, and the goal is to get yourself to the point where your worth is unwavering and your ability to choose yourself is like it is undeniable, like you're unapologetic about choosing yourself now because you know. You know your worth, you know what you deserve and you're not about to settle for less. And the more you do this work and reinforce these beliefs with your inner child right, and do the work with your inner child to get her on board with these beliefs, the easier it's going to be. Every single time the first times are going to be. Every single time. The first times are going to be a little messy, a little uncomfortable, but that's okay, it's all right, it's all good, all right. That is all for now, you guys.
MARIA @THEFEMMECAST:So let me know in the comments or in the email if you're reading this in the emails, if you're listening to this in the email oh my God, if you listen to the, if you got this podcast through an email no-transcript and, as always, if you got anything out of this episode. Please, please, please, leave a positive rating and review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever the heck you're seeing this. Until next time, you guys, massive love.
