co-regulation19 Jun 2025

How to Stop Caring About What Everyone Else Thinks (Emily McDowell)

Holly reconnects with her friend and former podcast co-host (Quitted) Emily McDowell for a raw conversation about how extreme adversity can strip away everything that doesn't matter and reveal what does. After years of health crises, family loss, and business transitions, Emily describes arriving at a place of No Fucks Given that feels like coming home to herself. Together, they explore what it means to build real community, trust your body's wisdom, and stop proving yourself to the world.

Topics covered include how selling her business and facing health challenges (brain tumor, autoimmune thyroid condition) led Emily to question everything; the impact of her mother's sudden death on her relationship with money, work, and pleasure; Holly's parallel journey of family awakening and learning to trust her body over her mind; practical strategies for building intentional adult friendships with agreements and conflict resolution; the difference between self-love and self-friendship; why real community is inconvenient but necessary; discernment in relationships without guilt; and the shift from constantly striving to arriving in your own life.

About Emily McDowell

As an advisor, thought partner, and coach, Emily McDowell helps entrepreneurs answer the questions they can’t find the answers to. As founder and CEO of the stationery brand Em & Friends, Emily led the brand through explosive growth, and as a writer and illustrator, her work has gone viral countless times, and she has a decade-plus long track record of creating products that make people wonder if she’s been reading their diaries. Emily is also the co-author and illustrator of There Is No Good Card for This: What to Say and Do When Life Gets Scary, Awful, and Unfair to People You Love (HarperOne, 2017), and she offers unsolicited advice and missives from the great adventure of midlife in her newsletter, Subject to Change, a Substack Featured Publication of 2023. You can find her online at withemilymcdowell.com, and IRL in Portland, Oregon.

Credits

Original music by Gracie Coates (of Gracie and Rachel) @graciecoates @gracieandrachel on Instagram, gracieandrachel.com

Sound engineering, editor: Adam Day, adamdayphotography.com

Producer: Holly Whitaker, hollywhitaker.com

Co-Producers: Adam Day, Afton Swenor

Original art by Misha Handschumacher, cmisha.com

Support the show

co-regulation is listener-supported, made possible by us and by you; you can support this podcast by joining our Patreon community patreon.com/coregulation

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Episoder(15)

A pause; a new book; an upcoming series on ADHD and addiction

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Holly and author Cody Cook-Parrott dive headfirst into the raw realities of staying regulated in an unregulated world. Cody shares their journey from near-mental breakdown to thriving queer rural life...

28 Aug 20251h 9min

How To Stop Thinking Everyone Is Always Mad at You (Meg Josephson, Part 2)

In the second part of Holly's deep dive with Meg Josephson, they shift from understanding fawning to working with it. Continuing their exploration of Meg's book "Are You Mad At Me?", the conversation ...

14 Aug 20251h 4min

Why We Think Everyone Is Always Mad at Us (Meg Josephson, Part 1)

Part 2 of this is available now on patreon for patrons of this show! Check us out here.In this first installment of a two-part series with therapist Meg Josephson, Holly and Meg unpack the fawn trauma...

7 Aug 202559min

Can You Heal a Friendship You Keep Burning Down? (Laura McKowen)

Holly and Laura sit down for their first public conversation in seven years, since the abrupt end of their previous podcast, Home, after a falling out. Peeling back the layers of what is, for each of ...

31 Jul 20251h 30min

Why Christianity Is Still Calling Women Whores 2000 Years Later (Meggan Watterson)

Holly reunites with her friend, feminist theologian Meggan Watterson, to discuss her new book The Girl Who Baptized Herself Their conversation moves between Watterson's childhood religious trauma, ac...

24 Jul 20251h 37min

Why Soothing Your Nervous System IS Managing the Crisis (Erica Chidi)

Erica Chidi shares her unique perspective on navigating crisis and uncertainty, drawing from her formative years in post-apartheid South Africa and her work as a doula, author, and founder. She discus...

17 Jul 20251h 20min