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What does it really take to build a writing career out of your hardest story and stay whole while doing it? In this episode, I sit down with author Tia Levings, whose memoir A Well-Trained Wife has become an increasingly timely reckoning with religious trauma, patriarchy, and survival. With her second book I Belong to Me just hitting shelves, Tia pulls back the curtain on navigating back-to-back book launches, genre-hopping with intention, and growing a 110,000-follower platform without burning out or exploiting your own pain. If you've ever wondered how to turn a cooked story into a sustainable career, this conversation is for you.

Episode Highlights:

• 05:23 When Your Story Becomes the Work
• 13:11 The Cost of Visibility and Finding Regulation
• 24:25 Where Memoir and Self-Help Meet
• 35:12 Doing the Work Without Getting Stuck in It

Resources for this Episode:

• Order I Belong To Me
• Get Your Free Human Design Report
• Register for Build an Author Platform that Aligns with Your Design and Nervous System
• Ditch Your Inner Critic Now

Tia’s Bio: Tia Levings is The New York Times Bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife, her memoir of escape from Christian Patriarchy. She writes about the realities of religious trauma, evangelical patriarchy, and the Trad wife life, decoding the fundamentalist influences in our news and culture. Her work and quotes have appeared in Teen Vogue, Salon, Newsweek, and the HuffingtonPost. She also appeared in the hit Amazon docu-series, Shiny Happy People. Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, she is mom to four incredible adults and likes to travel, hike, paint, and daydream. Find her on social media @TiaLevingsWriter. Her second book, I Belong to Me, releases May 5, 2026.

Connect with Tia:

• Read Tia Levings, Writer on Substack]
• Instagram: ⁠@tialevingswriter⁠⁠⁠
• TikTok: @tialevingswriter⁠⁠

Connect with your host, Lisa:
Get Your Free Copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: https://lisacooperellison.com/subscribe/
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What does it really take to get into a state of creative flow and what pulls us out of it? In this Editor's Round Table episode, I’m joined by fellow editors Sarah Chauncey and Lynn Shattuck to explore the Law of Increasing Flow: a framework built on presence, strategic rest, and stopping before you hit empty. Together we dig into the problem of tech distraction, the power of the subconscious mind, and why percolation–not pushing–is where so much of the real writing happens. If you've ever wondered why flow feels so elusive, this episode will leave you with both the insight and the practical tools to invite more of it into your life.

Resources for this Episode:

• “The Critic, Cookies and a (Cautionary) Colonoscopy” by Lynn Shattuck
• “To Write More, Better and Faster, Do This One Thing” by Sarah Chauncey
• Creative Intuition: The Skill That Makes Life and Work Easier
• It’s not Your Money by Tosha Silver
• The Walk for Peace
• Get Your Free Human Design Report
• Ditch Your Inner Critic Now

Episode Highlights

• 4:54 Constricted Writing Stories
• 6:19 Law Of Increasing Flow
• 8:46 Productivity Versus Creativity
• 23:35 Nervous System Practices

Connect with Lynn:

• Website: www.lossofalifetime.com
• Website: www.lynnlshattuck.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064888772287
• Instagram: @lynn_shattuck

Connect with Sarah:

• Substack: https://sarahchauncey.substack.com/
• Counterintuitive Guide: https://counterintuitiveguide.substack.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahkchauncey/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sarah.k.chauncey

Lynn Shattuck writes on topics like grief, parenting, and mental health. She was a columnist at Elephant Journal for ten years, where several of her essays on the topic of grief and sibling loss, and parenting went viral. Lynn co-founded the website lossofalifetime.com, a hub of resources and community for those who’ve experienced sibling loss. She co-edited the essay collection, The Loss of a Lifetime: Grieving Siblings Share Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope, which was released in June 2025.

Sarah Chauncey is a nonfiction writer, developmental editor, and writing coach. Over her decades of experience, she’s written more than 100 articles for a variety of outlets, including Writer's Digest, Jane Friedman, Tiny Buddha, Lion’s Roar, and Modern Loss. Sarah is the author of P.S. I Love You More Than Tuna, the first gift book for adults grieving the loss of a pet. She also writes the Substacks “Resona

Connect with your host, Lisa:
Get Your Free Copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: https://lisacooperellison.com/subscribe/
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About this episode: Have you ever come to a point in your life where giving up was the way forward? If so, how was that different from defeat? In this episode, I unpack what healthy surrender really means, how it can actually strengthen rather than diminish your sovereignty, and how to practice it in both the big and small moments of your life. If the word "surrender" has ever felt triggering or like defeat, this episode will change the way you see it.

Resources for this Episode:

• Healing Ancestral Trauma: How Family Constellations Free You from Inherited Stories
• Get Your Free Human Design Report
• Register for Find and Refine Your Memoir’s Narrative Arc
• Ditch Your Inner Critic Now

Episode Highlights

• 00:00 Surrender Is Not Giving Up
• 01:58 What It Really Means to Surrender
• 17:10 A Daily Practice of Letting Go
• 23:46 Holding Boundaries with Compassion

Lisa’s Bio: Lisa Cooper Ellison is an author, speaker, trauma-informed writing coach, and host of the Writing Your Resilience podcast. Working at the powerful intersection of storytelling and healing, she blends her writing expertise, clinical training, and soul-centered practices—including Akashic Records work and Human Design—to help writers turn their hardest experiences into art. Her essays—on sibling loss, grief, trauma healing, and the craft of writing—have appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, and The Loss of a Lifetime: Grieving Siblings Share Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope, among others.

Connect with your host, Lisa:
Get Your Free Copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: https://lisacooperellison.com/subscribe/
Website | Instagram | YouTube | Facebook | LinkedIn

Produced by Espresso Podcast Production

Connect with your host, Lisa:
Get Your Free Copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: https://lisacooperellison.com/subscribe/
Website | Instagram | YouTube | Facebook | LinkedIn

Produced by Espresso Podcast Production

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About this episode: This week, I’m joined by Jeannine Ouellette, author of The Part that Burns and a writing instructor whose deepest passion is using writing to connect us with our humanity. She sees the craft of writing as so much more than the words on the page, and I couldn’t agree more. We talk about how writing is a practice that helps you show up more fully in your own life, and how you can do this by finding your writing voice, writing close to the lived experience, and exploring from a place of discomfort. And you won’t want to miss our conversation about our shared obsession with a particular punctuation mark that we are absolutely claiming regardless of what anyone else thinks.

Resources for this Episode:

• Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto by Sonya Huber
• Acetylene Torch Songs by Sue William Silverman
• Innocence & Experience: Voice in Creative Nonfiction by Sue William Silverman
• Finding Your Voice and Crafting Stories that Ignite the Soul with Sue William Silverman
• Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma
• “The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard
• Get Your Free Human Design Report
• Register for Find and Refine Your Memoir’s Narrative Arc
• Ditch Your Inner Critic Now

Episode Highlights

• 00:00 The Question That Opens Everything
• 04:33 On Voice (and Finding Yours)
• 15:27 Writing as a Living Practice
• 29:33 The Quiet Work of Finding Joy Again
• 32:57 Craft as a Way of Being

Jeannine’s Bio: Jeannine Ouellette’s lyric memoir, The Part That Burns, was a Kirkus Best Indie Book and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Women’s Literature. Her other books include Mama Moon and The Good Caregiver with Robert Kane, M.D. Her essays and short fiction have appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including Narrative, North American Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Masters Review and more. Her bestselling Substack, Writing in the Dark, explores writing as a metaphor for life and attention as a pathway to becoming. She teaches writing at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and the University of Minnesota and her craft book, One Word at a Time: A Creative Practice for Transforming Your Writing and Your Life, is forthcoming from Penguin.

Connect with Jeannine:

• Substack: https://writinginthedark.substack.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jeannine.ouellette.7
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/msjeannineouellette/?hl=en

Connect with your host, Lisa:
Get Your F

Connect with your host, Lisa:
Get Your Free Copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: https://lisacooperellison.com/subscribe/
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In this Ask Me Anything session, writer and advocate Meagan Justus brings two questions that so many writers are quietly wrestling with. 1st: when you keep circling the core of your story without being able to reach it, do you shape what you have or keep writing until you get there? And 2nd: when your story involves people or institutions with power, how do you protect yourself while still telling the truth?

Together, we dig into why writers circle their stories, how changing names doesn't protect you legally, what the vetting process actually looks like, and what the unfolding controversy around Amy Griffin's memoir The Tell can teach us about the publishing process.

Resources:

• The "but/therefore" principle
• The Queen’s Path
• The Beat Sheet
• Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn
• Some Ether by Nick Flynn
• The Ticking Is the Bomb by Nick Flynn
• The Liar's Club by Mary Karr
• Cherry by Mary Karr
• Lit by Mary Karr
• https://authorsguild.org/
• How Can I Avoid Lawsuits When Writing Memoir?
• Legal Vetting for Manuscripts to Manage Risk
• The Billionaire, The Psychedelics, and the Bestselling Memoir by Katherine Rosman & Elisabeth Egan
• Lawsuit Accuses Writer of Using Classmate’s Story in Best-Selling Memoir by Katherine Rosman & Elisabeth Egan
• Examples of Hermit Crab Essays
• Get Your Free Human Design Report
• Find and Refine Your Memoir’s Narrative Arc
• Ditch Your Inner Critic Now

Connect with Meagan:

• https://www.creativelyvisible.com/
• https://substack.com/@creativelyvisible

Meagan Justus is a writer and advocate exploring the messy middle of chronic illness, disability, and trauma. Through essays and storytelling, she works to make invisible struggles visible and a little less lonely. Her writing blends honesty, humor, and the occasional chocolate metaphor to explore resilience, self-advocacy, and the stories we discover while living through life’s hardest chapters.

Connect with your host, Lisa:
Get Your Free Copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: https://lisacooperellison.com/subscribe/
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Produced by Espresso Podcast Production

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What if the stories we tell about ourselves aren't really ours, and what if we could finally trace them back to where they began? This is something I’ve been asking myself for years, and today I’m excited to share a few ways you can answer those questions for yourself through Family Constellations work. This week’s guest, Tania Gonzalez-Ortega, is a Family Constellations practitioner with twenty-five years of experience in energy work. During our conversation, we explore the benefits and challenges of the dark night of the soul, how some of what we experience during the dark night isn’t ours, and how we can work with those connections in ways that allow us to live our fullest, most empowered lives.

Episode Highlights

• 07:31 The Lessons Inside the Dark Night
• 11:37 The Trauma That Was Never Yours
• 17:16 What Happens in a Constellation Session
• 22:43 When Writing Becomes Healing
• 28:25 The Ripple Effect of Healing Your Lineage

Resources from this Episode:

• Story Alchemy with Lisa Cooper Ellison on the New Earth Consciousness Podcast
• Waldorf Education Model
• What is Family Constellations Therapy
• The Dark Night of the Soul, poem by St. John of the Cross
• Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross
• Get Your Free Human Design Report
• Sign up for Find and Refine Your Memoir’s Narrative Arc
• Ditch Your Inner Critic Now

Tania’s Bio: Tania Gonzalez-Ortega has been practicing energy work for over 25 years. Her background spans ancestral healing, nervous system regulation, and deep emotional integration. She’s studied in India and the United States and guided hundreds of clients through profound personal transformation. Tania is also a financial educator who helps women and families build real wealth in a balanced, ethical way. Her work bridges two worlds most people keep separate: Inner transformation and financial structure. Yet true sovereignty requires both. She lives in the mountains of Washington State with her husband and son on 64 acres of land that constantly reminds her that stability and growth can coexist.

Connect with Tania:

• Facebook: facebook.com/taniamama
• Instagram: instagram.com/@newearthconsciousness
• YouTube: youtube.com/@newearthconsciousness

Connect with your host, Lisa:
Get Your Free Copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: https://lisacooperellison.com/subscribe/
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What if the key to unlocking your creativity wasn't about doing more but about finally understanding who you are? In this episode, trauma therapist Jessica Eure and I explore how Human Design is transforming the way we work, create, and heal. From decoding your body graph to learning why you say yes when you mean no, this conversation is a masterclass in radical self-acceptance. Whether you are a trauma survivor trying to reclaim your creative life or a writer searching for more energy and focus, this episode will give you a new map for understanding yourself as well as the practical tools to use it.

Episode Highlights

• 00:00 Why Human Design Isn’t What You Think
• 05:10 The Moment You Start Trusting Yourself Again
• 16:45 Where You’re Still Operating from Conditioning
• 21:52 How Human Design Changes Your Relationships

Resources for this Episode:

• Toward a postmaterialist psychology: Theory, research, and applications
• Neurofeedback
• Get Your Free Human Design Report
• Register for Find and Refine Your Memoir’s Narrative Arc
• Ditch Your Inner Critic Now

Connect with Jessica:

Websites:

• www.jessicaeure.com
• www.virginianeurofeedback.com

Email: jessica@virginianeurofeedback.com

Jessica’s Bio: Jessica Eure is a mental health counselor and educator working at the intersection of nervous system repair and consciousness. She is the co-founder of Virginia Center for Neurofeedback, where she integrates QEEG-guided neurofeedback and trauma-informed psychotherapeutic approaches to support regulation, resilience, and deep healing. Alongside her clinical work, Jessica has spent 25+ years studying reiki, chakra systems, tarot, astrology, contemplative traditions, and more recently, Human Design, weaving these frameworks into her understanding of identity, purpose, and personal transformation.

Connect with your host, Lisa:
Get Your Free Copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: https://lisacooperellison.com/subscribe/
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Produced by Espresso Podcast Production

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Resources for this Episode:

• Get Your Free Human Design Report
• Ditch Your Inner Critic Now

Do you feel aligned, or are you burning out? It’s a question we must ask ourselves repeatedly during the year of the fire horse. In today’s episode I share the simple Human Design tool you already have at your disposal that can help you stay in alignment as you live your life’s purpose whether you’re wrestling with the big issues or daily decisions.

Episode Highlights

• 02:00 The “Am I On Track?” Question
• 04:30 Why Alignment Prevents Burnout
• 06:30 Using Emotions as Your Compass
• 11:00 My People-Pleasing Pattern (Real Story)
• 19:10 Satisfaction vs. Excitement (What Actually Matters)

Lisa’s Bio: Lisa Cooper Ellison is an author, speaker, trauma-informed writing coach, and host of the Writing Your Resilience podcast. Working at the powerful intersection of storytelling and healing, she blends her writing expertise, clinical training, and soul-centered practices—including Akashic Records work and Human Design—to help writers turn their hardest experiences into art. Her essays—on sibling loss, grief, trauma healing, and the craft of writing—have appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, and The Loss of a Lifetime: Grieving Siblings Share Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope, among others.

Connect with your host, Lisa:
Get Your Free Copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: https://lisacooperellison.com/subscribe/
Website | Instagram | YouTube | Facebook | LinkedIn

Produced by Espresso Podcast Production