Reclaiming Confidence After Trauma And Abuse with Deborah Kagan

Welcome to The Limitless Women podcast. Our mission is to help women business owners like you grow profitable businesses and actualize your opportunities to serve and give to yourself and others. Here's your host, the founder of limitless women. Laura Gisborne,

Welcome back to The Limitless Women podcast. In today's episode, I want to give you a heads up, and kind of like a warning in case you have little people with you, we're going to talk about some subjects that are a little tough and some subjects that might be better for adult audiences only. Now it's my pleasure to introduce you to my dear friend, Deborah K and Deborah and I met years ago when I was in California, and at the time, she is the woman to meet if you were to get your mojo back. Fast forward, she's written several books. Her latest is called undressed, and she's a person who leads with such passion and clarity. She brings this amazing balance of confidence and really courage, and I think that you're going to very much enjoy what she has to say today and find some ways to maybe be a little more courageous yourself. I hope you enjoy the episode. Hey, I am so excited today to be able to share with you my good friend, Deborah Kagan and Deborah, thank you. Thank you so much for making time. Thanks for being your magnificent youth. Thank you for bringing all of that hair, and we're scrolling, and it's just fun to be with you again. I think the last we were on stage together was in 2018 and we've been friends for a long time, without exactly how long, but many years. And it's just such a pleasure. I'm so grateful. I was going through my contacts and saying, I think we need to talk. It's time to catch up. So I said, let's let's do it live and help everybody else. Yeah, for your brilliance and share you. So thanks for being here today.

It's my pleasure. I, you know, jump at the chance to spend time with you. So this is great.

Yeah, we need to do this more in person. Yes, yes, please. We'll just do more of that this year. All right, my love. So I think you know, you've got an incredible history, you've got beautiful work, you've got an incredible message as a leader to help women. And the reason that I wanted to interview you today is that I feel like part of what has me love you so much is the way that you lead with courage and confidence, and how you say the things that other people are not saying. And you know, I think that we need more of that. We need more of that in the world. So can you tell us a little bit about your origin story, kind of like where you started, and what had you do the work that you're doing today?

Yeah, well, thank you for that. And I I always say that I grew up in a functionally dysfunctional household, you know, good people, and yet my folks divorced when I was young. They both remarried. Those were incredibly unhappy times for me. My mom's second husband was emotionally and physically abusive, so I grew up in a home of domestic violence and abuse for eight years. And you know, what's fascinating to me is when you really look at kids, and now I'm an aunt, and I've got, you know, nieces and nephews, and I'm so grateful I consciously chose not to have children, and I knew that long, long, long time ago. Frankly, yeah, I think in high school, I knew, and I just thought that was strange. In any case, that's I digress. But I look at, you know, my nieces and nephews, and as they're growing up, and they're still, you know, young we are so resourceful as young people, okay, like, you know, if a kid wants something, it's gonna figure out how to get the thing right, like some way side door, back door, this that I bring that up because I was living in this abusive household, which obviously was not fun for anybody. And I just thought, Well, my mom's not doing anything about it. I got to get out. Like, this is not working for me. And I heard a girlfriend, this is in seventh grade, and she said, I'm going to boarding school. And I said, what is that? So basically, I got myself to boarding school and got out of the house. And that was great. My mother finally realized that the end of my freshman year in boarding school, like, oh, wow, this is really bad. And she then finally left. I think that had to do a lot, because I wasn't there to buffer right? And unfortunately, I love my boarding school. I stayed there for four years, and it's a really wonderful place. I was already doing drinking and doing drugs, and that had started before boarding school, and mostly to numb myself, right? Just not a happy young person. So I had befriended the

local drug dealer in town who was older, right? I was 14 and about to be 15 at the end of my freshman year. Anyway, he ended up breaking into my dorm at the very end of my freshman year, and he raped me. So my. Early years, had a lot of unfortunate experiences, things I don't wish upon anybody. However, in hindsight, I see why, personally, I went through those in order to do and serve in the way that I'm here to serve in this lifetime. So we'll like jump to college, which is when i i believe that that is really when my spiritual life began. It was early on in college, a friend gave me a book and and that woke me up. I had already had, I would say some when I look back on it, actual spiritual experiences. I didn't know that's what they were then. This was in boarding school, but it was spirit trying to be like, Hey, I'm here. I'm with you. And I didn't have that language. I didn't have that understanding. I still was like, let me numb myself, because I didn't, by the way, tell anyone this is relevant. I didn't tell anyone about the rape. I was embarrassed. I thought it was my fault, because I knew him, because we I would go into town and we would party, and so I thought, well, I brought this upon myself, right? And so there was a lot of shame. And it wasn't until I ended I did go to film school. I went back to New York. I grew up in New York City, and I went to film school, and I ended up making a film about it, which was six ish years after the experience, and it was a very artsy kind of poetic version of the experience. However, you know, friends were like, Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. Of course, I didn't know that happened, and that broke my silence. And I haven't stopped talking about it ever since, which which I bring up and is important because the shame and the holding of it is and that silence is what festers inside and eats away at your confidence and at your natural life force, right? So that was brilliant to finally free myself of holding that in

for all of those years. And my and then my spiritual life, really, you know, started to take off in college, and then I had an opportunity to get a job in Los Angeles, which is where I've lived now for 31 years. And I now I see, oh, I wasn't meant to come to LA to actually work in the film business, which I did for a number of years. I was meant to come to LA to get out of the metaphysical closet, to be to serve in the way that I'm actually here to serve, which is this very the blend of, as I like to say, that, you know, the very practical sort of New York situation, and bringing blending of the metaphysical and the the Woo, like I bring it, not, not the Woo, woo, but I bring the Woo to you, right? So we blend that together so that you can really access all your here to be, yeah? And that's, that's a bit of the background of what brought me to here,

yeah, well, and I just would say, you know, thank you for living in the deep end of the ocean with me. Wait, just dive right in there and give it to us. I think that this is really the place where your role, I would say it's my understanding of your divine purpose, Deborah, is to really, again, that boldness to take off the band aid, if you will, right away and let us see what's going on underneath. Is so courageous and vulnerable and just so grateful to you, so grateful to you. And as a person who also was in a domestic violence relationship myself, and then you know the stories of sexual molestation since the time I was two until the time I was nine, more incest. I mean, there's just all these layers. And I'm and I will say that I don't want to make this about my story. I feel like this is about your story. What's important is how much this is not unusual. Yeah, that's really not, you know, we're here in the context of, how do we build a business that creates profits for purpose and what lies underneath that? Because we only really, I know our tribe. I know our community of women who are spiritually connected, who have a calling. Many of us have experienced different layers and different levels of trauma in our childhood and in our early adulthood, and often even longer that we didn't talk about not talking about the rape, you know, and I and I just remember, as you're sharing that. I just remember the feelings of not being able to tell anybody, yeah, and years and years. And then when I did tell someone, having them say, you know, well, at least it wasn't this, or at least you're like, having it poo pooed, right? Like, oh well, yeah, you're fine. And it was like, Okay, I guess we don't have any feelings about that. Let's keep moving on. So I wasn't numbing myself with drugs or alcohol. As a young person, I learned to numb myself with being a workaholic. I learned to numb myself because it wasn't safe to have feelings, right,

right, wool and be tough and be Teflon. My ex husband called me Teflon. I don't think that was a compliment, bless us, but I think that that's, you know, really the place again, like. What do we do to survive, and how do we move out of that and heal and have it not be the definition, you know, how do we create a new normal for ourselves? Is big part of this journey as leaders, and I think it's I'm curious about. In your own experience, where did you see yourself? When did you start to say, Okay, I've had this time. I've had a certain level of healing and blessings have come through. Now it's my turn to give back. Where did that start happening for you?

Well, it's it started happening here in Los Angeles, and this specific work with women, and the way that I've been serving now for over 20 years really happened at when I had an experience at Eve Ensler, she, she's now named V, she's the one who wrote the vagina monologs, right? And and so I saw that originally in 1998 and I thought, oh my goodness, you're saying all the things that I have thought inside and that nobody else has ever given voice to. And wow. So I started following I step found out about her organization to end violence against women and girls, obviously, as we now know, close to my heart. And I decided, when I went to this big event of hers, which has happened to me in New Orleans, that I had a spiritual download, if you will. I walked into the Superdome, it was kind of like, beam me up, Scotty, I write, and I stopped, and I literally felt this energy just go like body just vibrated and tailed. And I was okay, something's happening here. And I heard I'm clairaudient, and I heard it's time to do the work with women, and I just I stopped, I looked, glanced up, and I said, I hear you. I don't know what you want me to do. And you know, I'm listening. I'm continuing to listen. And I came back from that event. It was a whole beautiful, amazing weekend, celebrating the organization, and I was sitting at a coffee shop with a girlfriend two days later, and again, it was just like this. It hit me, and it said, Oh, I'm starting a women's group out of my living room. And it was specifically to talk about our bodies, our intimacy, sexuality, and how we are in terms of our own personal power, if you will, our divine feminine power, and to have a space for that. So like many things in my life, I didn't exactly know where this was going, or why our women came and, you know, and then it grew out of my living room, and here we are. 20 years later,

Here we are, yeah, yeah. So when you look back at the last 20 years, like I'm excited to see where the next 20 years takes you. But if you look back at the last 20 years and look at the women that you've met, what's been, what are the most compelling things that's happened for you in the act of service to others

This always brings tears to my eyes, because and I this is why I do what I do to witness a woman stepping into what I call a turned on life, to witness that in their body, I lead a mentorship program, and part of that is we do weekend retreats. We do that twice a year, so it's called the embodiment experience, those weekends, because we get to really dive deep with embodiment, work in person like in the flesh, together, and to witness these women who will have come to me and with all the layers like we've all had, with pains and the traumas and the shames and all of these false ideas of who they are, and then to watch them peel that off through this embodiment, work through breath, work through learning about the different roles that they play in life, and like really taking that on. Then by the end of the weekend, where we finish and there's this beautiful circle and every woman really exploring and sharing themselves for the the greater good of the group. You know, these the like, they're grown women, of course. But I think, like, these are my babies, you know, like, this is this is these. This is what I am nurturing and what I give to and to watch that process. That's the most extraordinary thing every single time. Fantastic.

And what's coming up for you in the future? Tell me a little bit about what you've got now in the way of offers based on all these decades of incredible service to women and in the evolution of you as what's your current hobby?

It's very interesting. You know, the beginning and long time of the work that I've done, I referred to it. Many people called me the Mojo lady, yes, and right, yeah, that was, that was the whole brand, and that was beautiful. And that was, you know, that, and that brought the wave to where we are now. And I know my gift is utilizing my own life and my own experience and having it move its way through me so that I then. Can offer that it's, it's what for my astrology people out there, it's the Chiron effect. It's the wounded healer effect. It's conjunct my son. So I am a walking, you know, wounded healer, who heals the wounds and then supports you to do the same. And I had an extraordinary experience almost two years ago. Now, it was in France, in the cave of Mary Magdalene, and there was an activation that happened for me, very unexpected. I didn't even know I was going to be going there. And that has changed the trajectory of the work. And so what's happened is the framework of what's being shared is coming from what I'm calling the six sacred gates, and this is still all about embodying your own confidence, being comfortable in your own skin, and living that turned on life, and it is coming through a space of your divinity, of really feeling that life force and that aliveness within you, connected to your divine feminine. My last book, which I encourage everybody to connect with, is called undressed, and that really blends the spirit and the sexuality together. Specifically, it's an invitation to claim your erotic nature. So it brings the divine as well as our human flesh, you know, to to the conversation. But where I'm going is supporting women with activating these six sacred gates within themselves and continuing to run the mentorship. I have international retreats that I offer now. We went to Costa Rica last year. We've got one that I'm planning to bring women to Scotland. And so those are, those are on the on the table

as well.

So exciting. Yeah, so well stuff. So it's really beautiful. It really is. So if you were to go back in time to this young girl, I know you've done so much healing and so much work, but what words of advice would you have had? And I think, you know, not even so much. I think it's, it's almost like two versions of you are curious. For me. One is the girl who had the courage to say, I need to get out of here. I'm going to boarding school. Let me know what boarding school is when I'm on my way right? What would you say to her today?

I would tell her that she, number one, is loved, and that she is considered she matters. That was things that I did not know. I did not know those things, and that, you know, that is really one of my part of the work. But certainly, the deep wish in my heart is that each of us knows the kind of love that is always available for us and that we're always connected to, and when we allow ourselves to peel off, you know, the wounds and to peel off the trauma, it's right there. It's always right there. Precious.

There's so much, there's so much goodness in the healing, that what comes out is is newer and younger and fresher and or, you know, we think it's, we go back to the beginning of your talking about your your fam, your young people in your family, and the resilience, right? Yeah, against it, and it's as we age, right? I'll be 60 this year, and we think about, you know, what's the next 10 years? Next 20 years, right? How do we embrace this process and have it be just juicier and more enriching and us and everybody around us, right? And I think there's something in the role model like of being called at this season of life, to talk about sex, to talk about all to talk about passion and embodiment and really the greatness of our bodies. You know, I didn't have role models that I could remember as a young person who I would look at and say, That's what I better look like when am I my 50s and 60s, you know, didn't have that. So it's an interesting thing that you get to create what, what you're passionate about, yes.

And I look, I always say you can be sexy and in your juiciness until your last breath, yes. And also, it's about getting free. And what's interesting is, you know, the wave of women in their 60s and 70s who I'm working with now, because they are like, You know what? Hey, I want to get free. I'm still here, right? It's all right. And that thrills me. Thrills me, because no matter what age or stage you're at, it is possible, and you just make the choice. It's about that choice

I think so. And I think you've got some really great methodology that you've crafted and created, the culmination of your wisdom and then your divine guidance and the journeys you've been on. If you were to go back and talk to the young girl who went to college instead of waking up spiritually, what would you want to say to her

Now you don't have to try so hard? Oh yeah, yeah, she was still trying really hard, you know, to be accepted, to be like, to be loved, to be considered, acknowledged. And I would just say you don't need to try so hard. Just great the way. Like, you know, you are really fantastic. Just keep doing what you're doing. Keep shining how you are, you know, grow continue to be curious. Like, Curiosity is one of the greatest, if not the best quality, I think, in any human part. And, you know, having a curious nature, I feel so blessed. Actually, we just celebrated my uncle, who turned 80. He's like a second father to me, and he's one of the most delightfully, deliciously curious humans I know, and I learned so much about that way of being from him and his mother, who's my grandmother, and she definitely was my everything. And yeah, so I would have said to you know, my sweet college day itself like you just you don't have to try so hard.

Yeah, I think there's this place to this unfolding. There's two things there. First is the curiosity piece. I'm reading Bill Bill Clinton's book citizen right now, and that's one of the things he talks about right at the beginning. It's just like the the richness of his past, or to say, 23 years since he came out of public office, has been remaining curious and about other people that I've known in close, personal friends who, as they age, and some of them have passed, and some that are still here. There's something about that, that nature of being right, and it's a bit of a superpower. And I think if we can stay more curious, so we can actually enjoy every day of our lives in a richer way. So it's good, good, good. So we can get the book undressed. Where on Amazon and wherever books are sold?

Yes, on Amazon, for sure, yeah. So it's, it's there for you. And that's, yeah, the most recent book. I'm so super proud of it. It was a labor of love. And took, I would say, it got rejected, by the way. So this is another thing for people to remember, like, whatever you might be doing, I got this book had been kicked around publishing houses, agents, you know, for many years, and lots of rejections. And then, you know, there was the Yes. And so she's she's been out in the world, and she's living her life now the undress book.

Good, good, good. And so where do we find you? Online if we want to follow up and know more about what you have coming up, adventures, retreats and how to connect with you.

There's a, well, there's a free gift that I put together for your folks, and it is the how turned on are you quiz, and this is how turned on are you in life? Okay, and it will walk you through the six sacred gates. And so it'll ask you very simple questions. You can do the quiz, and I think, under 10 minutes, and it will help you to discover which of those gates are actually blocked and which ones are working well, and it's going to give you lots of free resources to support you in whatever gates happen to be blocked. And then you'll get to be a part of the community over here. I mostly play on Instagram at Deborah Kagan. I'm on Facebook as well, Deborah Kagan official, and YouTube at Deborah Kagan, yeah, cool.

We'll make sure to include those links, and I would just say, to reiterate that you know, what we know today is the brand of limitless women started as powered with passion. Because people would say to me, how do you do this? And how do you do that? I was just following what I was passionate about. And it's an easy thing when you get into the routine. Let me say for myself, when I get in the routine of doing things to forget that the power that lies in that right, when we actually are turned on, we're fired up about something, it's like with that, that all the hows start coming together. So I love that. Yeah, that's a resource to turn that back on. If we've got a block, let's figure that out. And you know that's that's wonderful. And I look forward to seeing you again, my friend. It's really such a pleasure to be with you. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your wisdom, and I'm looking forward to playing with you again really soon.

Well, me too. Thank you for having me on so good. Huddy, thank you.