Kate Bowler: There are these stories that we tell ourselves, and some are the kind that smooth over the past, making it easier to carry, but others, the truer kinds, have a way of cracking us open. I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. My guest today is Amy Griffin. When Amy was in middle school, something really terrible happened. She was sexually assaulted by a teacher. And it is a painful memory that she had suppressed for years. When she first spoke about the abuse, it was after an experience of psychedelic therapy. Psychedelic therapy is a topic we haven’t addressed on the podcast yet, but it’s more that we just didn’t address it explicitly because there are so many people that I’ve met through Everything Happens who have psychedelic therapy somewhere in their past, and they usually sought it out to process trauma or manage grief. It’s a very interesting topic. There are several clinical trials currently investigating the use of psychedelics specifically for grief and trauma. So it’s a topic that’s much under discussion, but for many, it’s a topic that still feels taboo. So the fact that Amy’s story involves this form of therapy could have stopped her almost right away from telling the truth, but instead she let it do something else, something braver. Amy let it make her more open to herself, to others, and to the power of truth telling. She became someone who could both tell her own story and believe others when they told theirs. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to Amy today. She is the biggest champion of women I know. She is the most ra-ra, I’m-on-your-side, let-me-be-there-for-you person I’ve ever met. She’s the founder and managing partner of G9 Ventures, which invests in brands that you know and love and probably use all the time like Bobbi, Bumble, Oura, and Spanx. And she wrote a beautiful memoir that is searing in its honesty and its courage. And it’s called The Tell. So without further ado, the kind, the generous, the absolutely, deeply compassionate of heart, Amy Griffin. Amy, what an absolute gift to see your gorgeous face here.
Amy Griffin: What a gift that was. Kate, thank you so much. This is the highlight of my day, of my month, of my year to see your smile. How can I not receive your smile? I loved you from the minute I met you.
Kate: Oh, hon, you too. I feel exactly that way.
Amy: What’s that line in Steel Magnolias? It’s like, I love you more than my luggage, Blanche.
Kate: Right. Yes. That’s good.
Amy: I love you more than my luggage.
Kate: One of the things you name immediately, which I felt like you named this familiar thing in me, was you named this ridiculously strange ache that we all feel that I see so often in women. But it’s this kind of relentless churn. Like I’m in motion, I’m helping. I’m loving and caring, but I’m also, like, working constantly. Don’t you see all these plates I’m spinning? Please don’t look at all these plates. And I wonder how that started to manifest itself in your life?
Amy: There was just this constant running that there was this nagging that I felt where I kind of looked around at all the other moms as I was in a drop off, and somebody had a snotty nose, and I was picking up a lunchbox, and I was running off to a meeting and then to a board meeting, but I wanted to pretend like I had all my plates spinning perfectly and I started looking around wondering, is there anybody else dropping the ball in many of the ways that I am, and is it okay to talk about it? And even that was kind of scary to think about. Are we allowed to talk about the fact that we it’s really hard to hold all the plates and keep them all spinning at one time? And for me, I think it was this constant nagging of not being honest with myself about my past that in some ways was, you know, it’s like you’re running and and it was catching up with me and it was the time that it finally, you know, it came to me where I realized it was harder not to tell. It was harder to be still. Stillness was hard.
Kate: Yeah. There are these very aggressive cultural scripts that we don’t sometimes realize that we’re living to a tee, and one that sounds like it was particularly, almost painful for you, was this story about perfection. Like Amy is the perfect one. Amy has it together.
Amy: In my case, it was this idea that people sometimes would say it to me, or my children would say, we don’t know how you’re perfect mom, you do everything right. But this idea that when enough times it was said to me, I’d look over my shoulder because I had been looking over to think, you know what? I’ve been building up all these castles around me, this idea of what perfection really looks like and, you know, perfect is just not going to happen. But good enough is perfect. Good enough is perfect. Like where you are in this moment. And I think that was, for me, the most important moment in my life when I finally sat down and said, Amy, you’re perfect, just as you were before all of this happened, and you’re perfect just the way you were whenever you were a child and you did cartwheels and you were free. And that was this, that cartwheel question is really that idea of perfection. When did we stop doing cartwheels as children? When did we stop having that just joy, pure joy for life where everything didn’t have to be just so. And so I really you know, we talked about starting the book at the beginning, but in a way, I really retraced my life to find that moment when I stopped doing cartwheels.
Kate: It sounds like your daughters have been a big part of you, I guess, like, our kids reflect back to us who we kind of a step beyond who we think we are, and they just tell us who they are, who they think we are. And it sounds like Gigi said something especially helpful and maybe painful in your discoveries.
Amy: Yes. And you know what’s fascinating, and I’m thinking about it now, both my girls, they’re my teachers. They’re my greatest teachers. They’re the greatest reflection of myself in moments when maybe I didn’t want to listen. And in the moment, Gigi says to me, mom, I don’t know you. Who are you? And you’re perfect. I can’t be perfect. And there’s that word again. There’s that word again. And I was sad. There was a door slammed, which there aren’t a lot of doors slammed in our house.
Kate: I might have gone to like, excuse me, have I not built you a universe in which I have not let you suffer?
Amy: I did, I said that. I think it was something along the lines of I do everything for you. I set up everything for you. I plan every activity for you. I take you to school every day. I get you ready for breakfast, get you breakfast. But that wasn’t what they were saying to me. They were saying, I want you to show up in our life and pay attention in a different way that is not about the doing, but the being. There’s a lot of pivotal moments that I write about that I kind of have only been able to backtrack on now and realize how I’m finally being honest with myself and connecting the dots as to what happened in the past. So I’m grateful for that door slam. I’m really grateful for it.
Kate: There’s a person we want to be, like in that case, I want to be the kind of mom that does everything and also and makes sure you’re okay and also cares about you, but like, at the same time, there’s these parts of ourselves that we don’t always know, we don’t always have access to. And you are very curious and very brave in the way that you approached this. You heard about this form of therapy that was gaining traction. It’s called psychedelic assisted therapy. And you decided to be very curious about it, where other people might be, like hesitant or judgmental. And I just wondered, like, what initially drew you to it? And if you could just describe it for me.
Amy: I think I’m one of the most boring people on the planet. My friends will be like, Amy’s gonna order a margarita tonight. Like we put in text chat. She’s going to have a margarita, like everybody plan your night around it as if it’s big news.Because I don’t really like it, and it’s more ceremonial. I don’t like alcohol. I was an athlete growing up. I’m very, very square.
Kate: So for you to be like, of all the people that we know, Amy would be interested.
Amy: They were like, what? There was this deep knowing that I really needed to be honest about my life. So there’s so many factors that I think really led me to explore psychedelic assisted therapy. One was that my girls were also at the ages that I was when my trauma experiences happened. So I’m told that that is quite common, that, you know, it would be bringing up these feelings in me. And I think that’s where the girls felt it too. I had and have an incredible spouse and had a 20 year marriage under my belt where I had this safety level that I couldn’t have recreated in any relationship. It was just, you know, it had been built up over 20 years. And then this ability to sit with someone, when I sat with someone who was able, I was able to work with, whenever I use psychedelic assisted therapy to know that I felt safe and to know that there was space for me to make space for myself to go in and have this help, for me, it is crazy to me that my story does involve psychedelic assisted therapy and the use of MDMA, but I actually only look at that as a very small piece of how I was able to open myself up, and it was really this permission that I like to talk about the idea that because I was someone who was not a drug user or had not, you know, for recreational use, I think this was like the ultimate permission for myself to say to, okay, I deserve to unlock this. I deserve to have compassion for myself. And that’s what I did when I went in to have the experience. And what was so fascinating for me, which is what I also talk about as people experience, they’re hearing my story, is I don’t have a lot of experience with it. And I wasn’t looking for, I didn’t go in looking– I did say to the woman I was working with that morning, I know I have a lot of trauma in my childhood, sexual in nature, even saying the word sexual in nature, I could barely say it. But she said, well, let’s go find out. This is your day. This is your time. It was this permission that I trusted myself enough, and whether, you know, my psychiatrist always said all the time, Amy, I would bet on it, this had nothing to do with the fact that you took the pill because it was within five minutes, and I said, you know, I raised my hands. I’m ready to, I need to tell you all these things. And yet, just that the ability to swallow the pill and move forward and say, this is what I’m going to do for myself. And then, you know, I spent eight hours in that first session of just telling for the first time, telling my story. And like you said, it was like I opened a door and walked into a home.
Kate: It was almost like it was fully furnished with all these memories.
Amy: Fully furnished, and I had lived there for my entire life, and every corner of the house I knew intimately. And it was as if I was inviting my parents and my husband into this house that I knew so well. The other way I describe it, which relates to a house, is you imagine that you walk down the street and you’re you’re walking us through, and we always walk down the street on one side of the street and then, you know, you know all the trees on that side of the street and you know where the deli is and you know who lives next door. And then one day you decide, and in this moment of me deciding to take ownership of my story, I decided to cross the street and walk down the street a different way, and then look at my house, look back at it and think, oh wow, there’s a whole new way of looking at this. And it was like a puzzle above my head that just came together. And this honesty of this all happened. And it was so freeing. It was so liberating. Kate, I can’t go back like it was, I’ve been asked many times, would you ever take it back? Do you wish you didn’t know? Well, the truth is I always knew, I always knew. And until I told myself in that moment, and then, until I brought my husband into the room and said, I have to tell you something. I have to tell you this.
Kate: How did you start that sentence, Amy? You’ve never said it before. Like, how did you say it?
Amy: I have to tell you something. No matter how much it hurts you, no matter how much it hurts me, I’m going to tell you something. And so, in that moment when I told John what happened to me, it was wildly liberating. Free. Honest. I can even say in the depths of the greatest pain in my entire life, it was joyful.
Kate: I totally believe that there is like, because you can’t be joyful at the same time that you are sad. You can be joyful and in the exact moment of like a kind of sorrowful full release and just finding the truth. Like coming to the truth of what’s happened to you and being able to trust that all the words you say are, are the really real. Like there’s a, there’s like a standing to full height.
Amy: Yeah. And you probably know this too. Do you have those moments where, you know, there were nights, horrible nights where I literally slept on the floor in the closet, when I just couldn’t function. I, there were days where I couldn’t get out of bed. There were these moments. But somehow I look back and I think of the when my husband would come and cover me with a blanket or a friend would come over and say, put on your shoes right now, we’re going to Starbucks. But so I remember those moments of connectedness, and somehow I don’t miss being that low but I miss that connection of real human connection. And I want to go back to that point. But you ever have that where now you get back in the busyness of life and–
Kate: Yeah, when you’re in the worst moment and there’s like the beauty of that intimacy where even though you’re devastated, you’re loved, you’re known. And you know what’s real like you know what’s important. There’s like a sorting, I think.
Amy: You’re seen.
Kate: Yes.
Amy: There’s like a seeing, like I’ve never felt more seen before in my life. The idea was the telling was another relationship for every person I told. And every person I told, it was a little easier to tell my story and, frankly, to look someone in the eye and see that they could take your story and that they believed you. It wasn’t trauma dumping. I think it was this idea that if someone was truly in your life and they could make the space for this, then they were really going to be in your life for forever.
Kate: Yes, I totally believe that. That’s such a good distinction to because there’s the people who tell you like they’re just dropping an anvil, and then there’s the people who tell you like they’re giving you a gift. Like this is a part of of everything. Like, I’ll never forget a nurse that sat down beside me when I was in chemo and she said, I meant to tell you, but I had a son. And just the way she said had it was just, because she knew I was scared. She knew I was so worried that I wouldn’t have a certain future, that all my dreams would come away, and for her to just to give me the gift of the end of one of her dreams, it really, it really felt like when people tell you the truth, with the right person, it really does feel like a gift. Before we head into our first break, I want to take time to think. One of the sponsors of our show, the Cologuard test. As my listeners know, screening for colon cancer is something deeply important to me. And because March is National Colon Cancer Awareness Month, there is no time better to emphasize the importance of getting screened. Not getting screened next year or next month, but right now. Currently, colon cancer is considered the most preventable but least prevented cancer. And we have to change this statistic, because when caught at early stages, colon cancer is more treatable in more than 90% of people. And here’s the other crucial message we need to get out there. The American Cancer Society recommends that those at average risk should start screening at 45. A lot of people mistakenly think it’s 50 or 55, leading to an estimated 60 million adults aged 45 plus in America who are not up to date with colon cancer screening. We can do so, so much better people. And one way to change that is with a new colon cancer screening option that is convenient and affordable: the Cologuard test. The Cologuard test is a one of a kind way to feel more in control of your colon cancer screening through a prescription based test. And if you’re reaching for one of the common excuses like I don’t have time to take off work, or drinking a bunch of liquid prep and then getting a colonoscopr, no, thanks, well, hey, I’m thrilled to say you’re out of excuses, my friend. Because with the Cologuard test, you can use the Cologuard kit at home. You then ship the kit back to the lab for testing, and you can do this on your own schedule with no prep needed, like a standard colonoscopy. And it’s the only FDA approved noninvasive option that looks for both altered DNA and blood in your stool. Plus, the Cologuard test is not only convenient, but also affordable. Most insured patients pay $0. With no downtime, no special preparation, and an easy to use test delivered right to your door, it’s time to take control of your health care journey right off the bat in 2025 in honor of National Colon Cancer Awareness Month. So if you’re 45 or older and at average risk, ask your health care provider about screening for colon cancer with the Cologuard test. You can also request a Cologuard prescription today at cologuard.com/podcast. The Cologuard test is intended to screen adults 45 and older at average risk for colorectal cancer. Do not use a cologuard test if you have had adenomas, have inflammatory bowel disease and certain hereditary syndromes, or a personal or family history of colorectal cancer. Cologuard test is not a replacement for colonoscopy in high risk patients. Cologuard test performances in adults ages 45 to 49 is estimated based on a large clinical study of patients 50 and older. False positives and false negatives can occur. Cologuard is available by prescription only. Did you worry a lot about how people would see you? Like I guess partly just as. I don’t know, sometimes there’s parts where you just there’s a seamlessness, you know, it’s like you don’t want to crack it. Even if what you’re saying they would understand, like, sometimes it’s hard to want to even let people know that there’s sort of a tear in the fabric of the universe.
Amy: Well, I think I was living that way for such a long time. I think we all do. I don’t know when we crack that egg to recognize that it’s okay. But what’s so interesting to me is once I really cracked the egg and I said, this all went down. I have a lot of childhood trauma. Childhood abuse from a teacher. But that’s not what the story is. The story is the vulnerability of the telling. Not even what happened to me. And I think that one of the main takeaways I have for me was this idea that I thought that secrets would keep me safe, controlled, measured, and really, they keep us stuck. When you do tell, this vulnerability is so much more powerful. That permission to tell and connect with another person that creates this incredible bond, whatever it is that you’ve been through, is the antidote. And I feel like there’s literally like a chunk of my brain that has been reprogramed back in. Like a whole new section of my brain, which says I can be more connected, I don’t have up the guard rail rails. I can also put boundaries up for myself and that’s okay, which is hard to do. But I’m more joyful. I think, ask my kids, they may say I harp on them still about their homework, but I don’t, I don’t anymore, I don’t. They already have enough pressure on them. I’m not going to talk to them about their homework, because that is not where I’m going to create a relationship with them.
Kate: Something you said about that, that moment of discovery, but it’s kind of like this terrible fever where you’re realizing something and you’ve got these, it sort of consumes everything. It reminded me of my friend Nikki Grimes. She’s a poet. And she wrote about that very strange relationship that trauma has with memory. And she had this description that I thought you’d absolutely love. I saved it for you. She calls trauma a memory hog. She says it gobbles up all available space in the brain, leaves little room to mark daily happenstance or even routine injuries which are less than life threatening. I thought that sounded exactly right, that there’s a sorting that memory does, and some things are in crystalline detail, and other things, even if they were probably important at the time, just you forget entirely. And it sounds like a lot of this memory work you’ve done, it sounds to me like it was a kind of grace.
Amy: Kate, that’s so right. I don’t think of this story as a story that is about my trauma. It’s this sort of tapestry that I built of the relationships from how I sorted out everything that happened to me. And I am not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I’m not going to throw out the fact that I am competitive and athletic and competent and ambitious and a leader. I love that southern part of me, that community mindedness that I got from living in a small community where everyone took care of each other. And I don’t want to throw that out. But then there are other parts of me that are people pleasing, care about what everyone thinks, wants to make sure everyone is taken care of in the room before I get a drink or use the bathroom. I think I can get rid of some of those now.
Kate: Yeah, there’s the going through the terrible thing, and then there is just all the accidental wounds that happen when other people find out. And you’re very honest about there were not always like easy responses that people had. Some people responded by being like, I’m trying to think of another description than like patriarchal, but like trying to take over again and not allow you to stay in the driver’s seat of situations and imagine you need to be taken care of or other people, I mean, really just sort of found a way to make it about them and their response. I think many of us, by the time we’re done with a problem, actually look around and we find that we either have some new friends along the way, or we have a different relationship with the people that we do have in our lives. I wonder if you have any advice for people who either want to be a good friend, or how might we advise people who are like untangling a complicated past?
Amy: I came to realize that I have a multitude of friends who, in all different ways, gave me what they could give me in that moment, which also really helped me understand as to why they were in my life. For the most part, with everyone I’ve talked to, I can now have a poignant answer for why that person is in my life. And they showed up the best that they could in that moment. There are many times now when I talk to someone, or I realize that in that reaction that someone else had, oh, that I’m stepping into what their problem was, their trauma. I can now see it, and I realize they can’t even get out of their own experience to be helpful to me or to engage with me, and that’s totally okay. But because I know who I am and I know what happened to me. All that I can do is be authentic and honest, and I can’t do any more.
Kate: That’s right. Or less, like I like that of just being like, well, but my authenticity still has to be the bottom line.
Amy: You know, the going to tell my parents what occurred, I thought would be the worst day of my life. And then I thought it’d be the worst day of my life to go and tell my children. And in reality, they were some of the best, hardest memories I’ll ever have in my life in terms of reactions. But my life was all the better for the telling, For the sharing.
Kate: We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. I’ve talked to a lot of people over the years who have like a dot, dot, dot at the end of their story where there’s not a tidy ending, there’s not a clean ending. You spent a really long time dealing with the fact that this case fell outside of the statute of limitations in Texas, you couldn’t pursue a criminal case. And yet the telling still remained like the gift you wanted to give yourself. Like there’s a no-matter-whatness to what you’re doing, I guess is just what I want to ask you about.
Amy: It’s such a good question, and it goes along with the telling in that the achiever side of me thought that, well, if I could just prove this outwardly so that such that others would then believe me, because there was a, you know, I held this person accountable. Plus every fiber of my being wanted to make sure, first and foremost, this person wasn’t doing this to anyone else again, and that I could help other people so this wasn’t happening. And I don’t know that I realized it til that, but I wasn’t even really present in my own healing because I was trying to do so much at one time and manage, you know, the phone calls to make sure I held this person accountable from a legal perspective. And then I would go and do, you know, go for a long walk or talk to a therapist or do whatever it was I was trying to do on that front. And I realized, you know what? Like the greatest gift I could give myself was to let that go and recognize that that actually wasn’t going to do anything. I don’t think it was going to do anything anyway. And the realization that I would really want to spend all this time in a Texas courtroom away from my family, it was like, is it that important to you that you prove this? That you build up that castle so that everyone sees that and, you know, I beat myself up over it endlessly over this idea that how can you let this, this go? Because then you’re not going to have that perfect outcome. You’re not going to tie this up with a bow and talk about compassion for myself to say it’s okay, I’m letting it go. I’m choosing me over it.
Kate: I like that, where you’re like that little, that young self that should have been protected, that grown up self that still has this beautiful life to live, that like explorer self that always wants to make sure that she can grow and things don’t hold her back. Like in all those versions, you’re finding a way to move forward even when an almost impossible reality could, like, threaten to make that impossible. So I’m just, that sounds really like that’s the difference between, like, knowing something and then the hard road of wisdom. It’s really lovely. There’s this quote by the poet Adrienne Rich that means a lot to you. And it sounded, when you wrote it, I felt you in my core. It goes, there must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors. And you describing that kind of like deep belief in yourself, and also just like deep desire to carry what you have to and move forward, I just think you are a joy, a champion and a warrior. And I feel really honored to have had this conversation today, my love.
Amy: Kate, I could I could go on for ages and talking to you because you are the exact type of conversation I want to have that helps me move forward in the telling again. And I just hope, as I saw through the writing the twists and turns of the story, that it helps one person who then goes and finds that person in their life that can listen, and that they can look them in the eye and say, I’m telling you, I need you for this reason, and I may not need you to do anything, but I just need you to hear me. I just need you to hear me. And so I’m really grateful for these conversations. I’m grateful for you. I’m just grateful for who you are as a person. I’m grateful for the fact that when I met you the very first time in person, that my nervous system dropped like 40 notches, which I think is the highest compliment someone can give someone. And for every part of who you are. I’m a little bit miffed around the idea that you’re a Duke professor with my UVA background, but I’m going to forgive you for that. You know, so I’ll forgive you for that. But I am a Wahoo I want to say that for the record. Through and through.
Kate: I really love your description of like everybody needs the person they can come say, I really need to tell you something. You’re the person that I genuinely, immediately believed is the person I can go to if I said no, I don’t actually, I’m scared I can’t fix this. Because you said, it was like one second into knowing you and I was going through a difficult situation and you were like, hey, just so you know, you’re wanted here. And I thought that was like, when I’m scared, I feel like I’m in the too muchness, means I don’t belong. So you gave me back the feeling that I will be wanted even in my mess. And so thank you for the fact that you are, you’re just the kind of person who wants to backstop somebody else in their in their terrible moment. And I can see it all over you.
Kate: Something happens when we open ourselves up to others in the brave, awkward, completely unnecessary act of saying the truth out loud, we let ourselves be known. Amy’s story didn’t have a tidy beginning, and it didn’t have a tidy ending. Justice wasn’t possible in these circumstances, but she didn’t let that stop her, or silence her or shame her. Instead, she continues to practice the courage to name what’s real, to be seen, and to trust that even in the hardest moments, we are not alone. So maybe healing isn’t about erasing the past, but about learning how to carry it with more honesty and a whole lot more support. Because in the telling, we find others who reflect back to us everything that’s already always been true, that we are loved, that we are believed, that we are worth knowing. Every beautiful, painful detail of our lives. Your life, my life, can be held with care. Frankly, that really is what we deserve. So here’s a blessing for truth tellers and the people who believe them. Blessed are you resisting the urge to reframe. You who are sick and tired of silver linings, you unable to go back to before. Everything is different now. So blessed are you who risk sincerity. Especially when the world around us craves the bright side. You who speak honestly about what is right in front of you. This is hard. I’m scared. Things might not get better. This really has gone horribly. There might not be a different way. Blessed are we and our gratitude and our pain. Our pleasures and our limitations. Blessed are we the truth tellers. And what a miracle it is when our candor finds a chorus that echoes back, same. The friend who will hear it. The parent who will stomach it. The partner who doesn’t roll their eyes. The careful listener who says I believe you. They are paying attention and it feels like a revelation every time. May we feel our truths answered by this language of love, changing where we can and confirming where we can’t. Loved, loved, loved all the same. Thank you for listening, my dears. Hey, if you’re looking for a gentle way to walk through this season, we would love it if you joined us. We’re practicing Lent. It is that stretch before Easter, it’s 40 days, and it is a time where we can practice the kind of radical honesty that we talked about today. And you can download a free daily reflection at katebowler.com/lent or find the link in the show notes. And if you want to keep the conversation going, call us and leave a voicemail at 919-322-8731, or find me online @katecbowler. We love hearing from you. Thank you so much to the team that put all this work into this episode here at Everything Happens. Thank you to Jess Richie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Baiz Hoen, Gwen Heginbotham, Brenda Thompson, Iris Greene, Hallie Durrett, Anne Herring, Hope Anderson, Kristen Balzer, Elia Zario, Katherine Smith and Megan Crunkleton. Thank you, my dears. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
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