Maura McIntyre: Trauma, Shame, and Why the Pattern Repeats

Maura McIntyre met Lisa at a networking event, heard what BTGO does, and felt her heart start pounding. Her first instinct was that she did not want this conversation anywhere near her. She opens the episode by saying so, and then explains what she did with that reaction instead of obeying it.

Maura McIntyre is a recovery coach who also works as a nutrition coach and a trainer in barre and Pilates. She defines a recovery coach as someone who builds a plan with you and clears the obstacles in front of your recovery, and she is firm that recovery covers far more than substances: grief, divorce, trauma, and anything else a person is coming back from. Her own history runs through a difficult divorce and, during the pandemic, a cancer diagnosis that arrived while she was building a career in health and fitness.

The conversation is built around a few tools and one uncomfortable idea. The tools: breath first, because a shallow-breathing body reads the situation as an emergency; putting a hand on your heart and asking what you are actually feeling; talking to anxiety instead of pushing at it, since anxiety is always about a future that has not happened; and pulling up a stored memory of a time you felt safe and supported, in enough detail to use it. Lisa contributes the trick of adding the word yet to a catastrophic thought, and an example of walking her own daughter through pre-departure nerves by listing everything she had already survived.

The uncomfortable idea is Harville Hendrix's, that we select partners who will raise the material we most want to avoid, which is why the same relationship keeps arriving in a new shape. Maura's view is that most people never do that work, because it is frightening and because shame gets there first. She and Lisa spend the last stretch on that shame: the disinvitations, the sense of having failed your kids, the friends who turn out not to be there, and the remarks people make when something bad happens to someone they thought was exempt. She ends with a short list of things you can do in the next five minutes.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What a recovery coach does, and why recovery is not only about substances
• The loop: why the story keeps circling, and the first thing Maura does about it
• Why an ignored feeling gets louder and eventually turns up in your body
• How to talk to anxiety rather than push it away, and the question to ask it
• Adding "yet" to a catastrophic thought, and asking what if it works out
• Building a safe memory you can pull up on demand, in enough detail to be useful
• Harville Hendrix's premise on why the same relationship keeps arriving in a new shape
• Where the shame comes from after a divorce, and why very little of it is yours

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 The guest who didn't want to talk to Lisa, and what a recovery coach does
5:30 Breath, and the loop that won't switch off
9:00 Sitting with a feeling instead of outrunning it
16:00 Talking to your anxiety instead of pushing it away
18:00 Catastrophizing, "what if it works out," and adding "yet"
23:30 A memory where you felt safe, and reminding kids what they've survived
28:00 Harville Hendrix, and why we choose who we choose
32:30 Why most people never do the work
35:30 Shame, "failing" your kids, and the friends who vanish
44:30 Maura's cancer, and walking around the block
51:00 The five-minute toolkit, and where to find Maura

Keep going 💜
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll help you map your next steps: https://beentheregotout.com/call
📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict Divorce, and How to Stay Sane Under Insane Circumstances — https://www.amazon.com/dp/194627495X
📘 Been There Got Out: When Your Ex Turns the Kids Against You (our parental-alienation book) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/1967674183
🔗 Maura McIntyre at WellnessM2: https://wellnessm2.com/

About Been There Got Out
Chris Barry and Lisa Johnson are high-conflict divorce, custody, and co-parenting strategists, and the founders of Been There Got Out. They know these cases from the inside: both have successfully represented themselves in family court. Few attorneys have a playbook for a case like this — Chris and Lisa write yours with you, so you and your kids can get through it as unscathed as possible.