Divorce can leave you feeling like your old life had a name and a role, and your new life has only questions. We sit down with Kathleen to talk about the moment she finally looked at herself and decided she was done living in the dark, then used that spark to rebuild identity, confidence, and direction after a long marriage.
We get practical about what actually changes a life: noticing the emotional “hit” when a question lands, tracing triggers back to limiting beliefs, and understanding how the mind builds protective patterns that quietly run our choices. Kathleen explains how she coaches using tools like Seven Layers Deep and her 20 Questions exercise to uncover joy, values, and the passion point that can guide a new career path or a more meaningful next chapter. We also touch on approaches like EMDR and RTT as ways people explore the roots of old stories and loosen their grip.
Then we go inward. Intuition isn’t just a gut feeling, it can show up as heaviness or lightness in the body, a song lyric at the perfect time, or a repeated nudge you can’t ignore. We talk about surrender, alignment, and faith as a way to stop fighting your way through life and start moving with purpose. If you’re navigating divorce recovery, women’s empowerment, mindset coaching, or spiritual growth, you’ll leave with clear next steps and a calmer way to trust yourself again.
Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs a reset, and leave a review so more people can find the support they’ve been looking for.
To connect with and purchase her newly released book Whispers Within Us, visit Kathleen’s website at whisperswithinus.com
To download a free chapter of host Sylvia Worsham’s bestselling book, In Faith, I Thrive: Finding Joy Through God’s Masterplan, purchase any of her products, or book a call with her, visit her website at www.sylviaworsham.com
Transcript:
If you’ve ever struggled with fear, doubt, or worry, and wondering what your true purpose was all about, then this podcast is for you. In this show, your host, Sylvia Warsham, will interview elite experts and ordinary people that have created extraordinary lives. So here’s your host, Sylvia Warsham.
Welcome to Release. But she’s here to talk to us about the journey. The journey of coming out of a divorce of 22 years and getting into this depressive state that all she could do was walk her dog, come back and get into bed, and that’s all she could do for two years straight. Until one day she had this pivotal moment, this thought that just popped into her head of that’s it, you need to get up and you need to get your yoga training back in practice. She had acquired this during her marriage and then just put in a back burner. But we all know that that’s not how God does things. We don’t just get trained and equipped just because, it’s because it’s preparing us for the next chapter, the next big thing that’s going to happen to us. And he starts to prompt us in a way that will get us into stepping into our divine calling and purpose. So without further ado, Kathleen, thank you so much for joining us on Release Tower Reveal Purpose.
Yes, thank you for having me. I so appreciate you taking the time and speaking about my journey a little bit.
Of course, you know, your essence, as we were discussing prior to getting on the interview, is so bright. Your light, the light around you is so illuminating. It’s radiant, actually. So I know that despite this dark chapter, and I and I do want you to get into it a little bit for the listeners, for those currently navigating a depressive state after a divorce, after a marriage of 22 years, it’s a long time to have a certain identity and then to step out and not really know what you’re doing. So could you honor us with that story of transformation you have to share with us?
Yeah, absolutely. So um, little correction, it was two weeks. I was really depressed for about two weeks. And I just remember one morning I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror and I was brushing my teeth and I caught myself in the mirror. You know how you do that sometimes? You’re like, you’re always there, but you’re not like staring at yourself. And I was brushing my teeth and I caught myself, and I’m like, okay, that’s it. That’s enough. Get your stuff together, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, however you want to say it, let’s live our life. There’s there’s no more hiding in the dark anymore. And I just didn’t know what my next step was. So I went down the rabbit hole of self-development. I found a course that called to me, it actually kept popping up in my uh Facebook newsfeed over and over again. And um, with my book that I just brought out, you know, listening to your intuition, well, that was my higher power saying, listen, check this out. So I checked it out, I joined right away. That led me a year later to joining the Napoleon Hill Institute, where I got certified as a um uh transformational mindset coach, is what I call myself. And I brought out a program, Missus to Miss. It helps women that are in a phase in their life, it doesn’t necessarily have to be divorced, but that’s mostly what I work with, is women that were missus and they have to find their life again on their own, like I did. I had so many people asking me questions and just reaching out to me after my divorce. And I’m like, okay, there’s there’s women that need help here, they need direction, it’s in them, but they need to know how to find it and pull it out of them. So that’s where my dark, I call them tower moments because they’re sometimes very unpleasant in divorces, they’re not pleasant things to go through. That’s how my dark tower moment brought me to where I feel like I have a purpose to inspire others, which led me to writing my book a year ago, which just came out in the last four months and has been doing phenomenal to help people like go inside and just pull all that out of them and listen. You know, so many of us we go through our days, we don’t listen. We don’t see the cardinal that keeps showing up on the railing every morning when we’re drinking our coffee. We don’t see the three rabbits that you know are in our yard every night at eight o’clock. Well, if you listen and look up what the spiritual meaning of those things are, it is your higher power telling you something. You’re just not listening. So it’s been such a transformational journey for me, and just helping other people become their the best versions of themselves, I always call it, is the passion. That’s my passion point. Like, I just want to pull it out of them and be like, it’s right here. And so, you know, you you take them through questions. Like, I would sit you down, Sylvia, and I would just start asking you questions. And as soon as I hit a question where you kind of get emotional, that’s where it is. That’s where it is.
That’s the block, that’s the block that’s holding you captive, and because it’s tied to an emotion, and this is like something we need to break down for the listeners because you and I have lived it, so we’re talking at a very high level, right? So let me break it down for the listeners. And I’ve it’s happened to me before when I’ve coached people and the tears like immediately hit, and you see their reaction. It’s like, oh, what feeling is that? We gotta break it up. There’s a trigger that triggered that emotion in them, right? And they they’re feeling it now, and their eyes are like streaming, you see the tears, they probably are sensing it in their heart space, their throat. You know, we gotta kind of examine, like, as coaches, good coaches, we we look at the person and we ask the follow-up question, like, what where did that emotion come from? What emotion is showing up for you? And if it’s like, well, I just I don’t feel worthy, okay? So, where where do you think that belief is coming from? Like, what what experience did I trigger in you? Uh, where do you think you’re at? Where do you think your mind is at? Because what happens with the mind, and this is where therapy can also help people, uh, they can take you through EMDR to see where these connections are being made in your brain. And that circumstance that happened to you as a child, you’ve actually created some grooves in your in your mind, the the what they call the neuropathways. And what therapy does through like therapy, like EMDR therapy, is to re-examine that that circumstance and and get rid of that emotion slowly by talking about it, right? So as coaches, we take that emotion and we try to figure out what the mind is is is telling us. It’s telling us that when that emotion shows up, there’s certain behaviors that are attached to that emotion, right? You know, in everyday life, we have habits that we form around these behaviors. And uh it’s an automatic response. And it comes from deep within us, like from something that happened to us long ago when we were little kids. And so our mind developed these patterns to kind of just protect us from not feeling that pain anymore. But it’s important for us to discover them so that with that clarity, with that awareness piece, now we can actually have a way to help them out of that, right? So guide us, Kathleen, how do you guide your clients out of those feelings, that emotional state, that trigger to gain that clarity, that awareness to move.
Okay, so I like to use examples a lot of times because I think it helps people put themselves in the situation. So I’m gonna use the example of a limiting belief I held on to for a long time from my childhood, and it is to not be seen and not be heard. I had divorced parents who we would often go with our dad to work. He was a refrigeration repair man, and you know, we’d be in businesses or whatever, and it would be like, I need you to be quiet, I don’t want you to be loud, just stay out of the way. So don’t be seen, don’t be heard. Then we would visit my mom once in a while. We didn’t see her very often, but once in a while, and it was she would work nights sometimes, and she’d be like, I need you to stay inside and I need you to be quiet. So again, don’t be seen, don’t be heard. So I had somebody take me through some RTT therapy, um, which brings you into uh awake uh you’re in an awakened state hypnosis. Um I’m I’m planning on getting my training in it because I just it’s so amazing. And literally, she brought me back to three times of my childhood, and each time it had something to do with not being seen or not being heard, yeah. And one of them was when I was an infant of all things, like she brought me back so far, I was like an infant, and I like was trying to tell her what I could see and all the things, right? And so once you realize your what your limiting belief is, then you can work on it, right? Because that’s not who you are, then you can work past it. So um after I had that done, I started working on myself a little bit, and then I started working. I had this client, I won’t use her name, we’ll just call her Joan. I had client Joan, and we were working on some things, and I took her through the seven layers deep to kind of answer more of your question when I work with somebody. Take them through seven layers deep. I ask them a question, depending on what they’re working on. Like, are they trying to find a new career path, their passion, their purpose? Are they trying to find out what their limiting beliefs are? But I’ll ask them a question, and then from that question, they’ll answer, and then I’ll ask why, and then ask them a question on their answer. And I keep going until I hit that emotional state. Because somewhere in there, when you’re asking those questions, it could be number three, it could be number seven, it’s gonna hit that emotional state if they’re being honest with themselves, like all of a sudden they’re gonna get like you know, a little feel feel tense, right? And they’re gonna get emotional, and then we discuss it. Like, so why are you emotional about this? And then once you find out what it is, then you can work on it. So it’s finding out it’s finding out what it is. Is it a limiting belief? Is it, you know, did your parents tell you that money doesn’t grow on trees? So your entire life you think money is harder to get when it’s not, it’s fluid, it comes and it goes. It you know, that’s what money does, it’s energy. And so that’s how I work generally with people. The other one I do is the 20 questions. I have them write down 20 things they enjoy. It can be something as small as their morning coffee. But they write those 20 things down, then I say, pick your top 10 out of those 20. Wow, and then it’s and then I’m like, okay, now pick your top four out of those 20. And usually those top four all are similar. And so you can you can find the one thing that brings them joy, and that is usually the thing that they need to either bring more into their life, or maybe it’s their purpose, and they need to put it out there, they need to shine it on to other people and help let other people feel that light from them to help other people. You know, it just depends. It depends on what we’re working on. But those are two things that I work with people when I’m working on trying to figure out what is keeping them stuck, or you know, where that passion point is or that purpose that they’re looking for in life. Because so many people, especially after a divorce, so many women, they forget who they are, they don’t know what their favorite meal is because they’ve been making their twin boys their favorite meal for the last how many years? You know what I mean? We take it over like the nature side of us, and it’s a beautiful sign.
It really is, it’s a beautiful sign. But when we take it to an extreme, like anything in life, anything extreme is going to be bad for us, you know. Uh, God doesn’t like extremes, by the way. I didn’t realize this until I got into his word. And I I grew up Catholic, so I didn’t really know the Bible. They don’t teach us the Bible, they teach us about their religion really well. I I knew about their religion really well, and I love their traditions, they’re very beautiful traditions, but I didn’t know him. That was a problem. And then came my divorce, like from my son’s first, you know, like from his dad. And and the first girl round, it was it could be dark. Like you picked up your yoga mat, and I became a Zumba instructor as the hobby of choice, just to be able to divert all of that energy, that negative energy into something positive, right? Which is what I had done as a child. Being bullied, my mother was a very kind, very loving light. She still is to this day, and she’s like, Sylvia, channel that energy, that negative energy into something positive. And so I took that that negative energy of how I was feeling so unworthy and so rejected by people, and I started doing community service to to feel better, you know, and serving my community. And and it just it it it lifted my spirit in a way that was so amazing, you know. And I usually have this quote uh in my office. It’s called Service is Love Made Visible. It was an anonymous quote, but it was gifted to me when I went to college. I started serving in the service station and I had so many community service hours. The first year I was away from home. I think I was missing my mom a lot. And um, and I served so much that I I got this major award. I had I had surpassed everybody’s community service hours on my own. That was just crazy. Uh, but it it it it was a lesson learned early on that helped me channel that negative energy into something positive. And by becoming a Zoom instructor, it was the reason why I met my second husband. Because in one of the certifications, I had to fly to Houston, Texas. I’m originally from South Texas and right on the border, and Houston is, of course, the medical center. And so I flew in, did the certification. One of my best friends uh from college, Kelly Petrie, um, lives in Houston. And I called her up and I, hey, I’ve never met your family. I’d love to invite you all to dinner. And she’s like, Well, instead of you buying us dinner, why don’t you just come over to my house and have dinner? My husband loves to cook. And and Scott, Scott’s an attorney, and but he also just for the joy of it, uh creates uh makes his own beer, brews his own beer, and and throws this major uh fundraiser in November called Scott Togo Fest, uh, where he brews his own beer, but they uh raise funds for I think for ALS. So it was like service oriented, great people, amazing people. And so I went and had dinner, and it’d been three years since my divorce, and I’ve been through therapy and the whole nine yards, and I said, Hey, uh I Kelly, do you know? You know, I’m ready to date if you guys know of anybody. And Scott goes, I know the perfect guy for you. And he’s gonna be coming to Scott Toberfest in November. You might want to consider coming, and and this was August, and so I just kind of kept it in the back of my mind, and then my intuition, I got an intuitive hit. The Lord himself made himself known and said, You need to go. I need to go to that party, you’re gonna meet somebody. I want to answer your prayers, and um, and I did, I met my second husband and and the rest is history, but um, but I’d love to learn more about how you guide your clients by their intuition because you know turning inward for answers is way more powerful than searching outside of ourselves. Can you give some perspective on that?
Yeah, yeah. Uh so a lot of times when I’m working with somebody, you know, we’ll be talking about things, just life in general, right? And then I’ll be like, Well, how does that resonate with you? And I thought it was so cute. I had this one client, she’s like, I don’t know what resonate means. And I’m like, Oh, okay. And I said, Well, how does your body feel? And she goes, How does my body feel? And I’m like, Well, that’s one way to get um your intuitive sayings, so to speak, you know, those are your intuitive signs. Like, if your body’s tense and you like feel sick, it’s probably not a good thing going on. But if you feel a little excited and like got little goosebumps on the back of your neck or your hair standing up, or whatever it is, and I’m like, then then it’s a good thing. Like that that’s telling you that it’s something you should look into. And so I’m like, Well, how does your body feel? And she’s like, Well, I think I feel excited. And I’m like, Well, that’s good. Do you feel light about it? Like, do you feel heavy about it, or do you feel like, oh, this would be something fun? And she’s like, No, I feel light about it. And I said, Okay, well, that is saying when I say well, red, how does that resonate with you? That’s what I mean. So you need to pay attention to those things, and a lot of people forget that signs are just not gut instincts, it’s this just not how your body feels, but they’re also signs that your higher power gives you when you’re out walking around, and also you can’t some people I’ve only had one audible sign in my entire life, but you can hear things, you might hear something. But another way of getting audible signs for people is music. A song comes on, and there’s a certain set of words or something that means something to you, right? Yeah, yeah. Listen to that because it’s probably for you, it’s probably your higher power telling you, you know, listen, I’ve been trying to tell you this and you’re not listening to me. So not everything’s a sign in the world, right? You don’t want to like spend your whole day going, ooh, a fly, ooh, a bumblebee, you know.
Right, yeah, but like you’ll feel it though in your heart space. I know I feel it in the crown of my head and I feel it in my heart space. Yeah, and there’s like fluttering, like butterfly wing fluttering inside my heart space. Sometimes it’s like tingling sensations on my cheeks, my face. Like I know he’s in the room, and I know that this whatever is being said is meant for me. It’s a message from him, and so I like several things you’ve stated, I’ve already gotten those flutters. So I know someone on the other side of this interview is meant to hear this, and this was a divine in introduction. Um and so I’m grateful that you’re on because you’re gonna help people move through the mountain. Instead of, you know, how people say you scale the mountain, we don’t scale the mountain, we move through it because it’s the journey of moving out of that darkness into the light and into ultimate surrender to that purpose. And because when we surrender to that purpose, there’s no normal resistance anymore. I I I find the alignment comes like it feels like what it feels like to float in the ocean, and you’re just like carefree, and you’re just like it just feels so awesome, you know. You you’re in full alignment to who you were created to be that light, that essence. There is no resistance, there’s this just like you’re just moving through life very, very easily. Now, the alignment piece, I addressed it in my book in Faith, I thrive, finding joy through God’s Master Plan. And that it’s it’s when the ego identity, when the ego is not the enemy, it’s the self-image. When we shift, it gets empowered to be this true identity piece, and we take our identity, you know, and we we believe that we are the daughters of a king, and we stand in that embodiment, right? In that power, and then the soul and the spirit become one. When all those pieces are one, that to me is that feeling of floating in the ocean. Because now there’s no more resistance, there’s no more fighting, there’s no more sabotage going on because you’ve gotten out of his way, you’ve let go of that need to control your circumstances, and you’ve released it to a higher power that can then come in and say, Okay, are you ready to listen now? Like, are we ready to move and in our light? Good, let’s start moving in the lake. Come on, let’s go, follow me, you know, and then we really we stop resisting, we stop resisting, we stop fighting. When we stop fighting, and we just like allow and just open up our hands. It’s like a the symbolism of opening up your hands. That means you’re also opening up your heart and your mind to receive the gifts he wants to give you, he wants you to get out of his way so we can do it. You know, there’s a scene in the movie that I’ve been talking about a lot, the war room. It’s uh it’s a Christian film, it’s by the Kendrick brothers, and the war room is is what they termed a war closet where you go to war with the true enemy, the father of lies that wants to keep you in the dark for a long time. If you’ll let him, like he’ll just keep you there as much as you let him, right? And when you when you face the mirror like you did two weeks into this depressive state, for you, it was like, okay, that’s enough. I’m not gonna listen to you anymore. I’m gonna get out of my own way and step into my light. And I’m just gonna listen to my intuition now. So bye. Out you go, you know, you’re kicked out of heaven already. So I don’t know why you’re like messing with me. I’m I’m the daughter of a king, I’m seated next to Christ in heaven. So why are you messing with me? You know, and so you stop listening to those, to that noise, right? And you start moving in that direction. So you’re not scaling the mountain, guys. You’re moving through the mountain. And and Kathleen has like the 20 questions, which by the way, I love. I love that idea. I think it’s an amazing idea. I’m sure you have PDFs and free free gifts on your website on this, or yeah, yeah, okay.
There’s a freebie. There’s a freebie.
There’s a freebie. Um, so do tell us, Kathleen, how can we reach you? Who wanna work with you? Because you sound like you’re this amazing light. And I know that there’s women out there that are currently navigating through this this chapter of divorce that need to find their way back into their identity and into their calling. So, how do we how do we reach you? And do you have any last words of encouragement for those women listening?
Yeah, okay, so uh I’m gonna start with this. There’s a saying that I took under my arms, you know, when I was going through my darkest times, and it’s be gentle with yourself. Life is a journey, not a destination. So you’re gonna hit lots of ebbs and flows in life, and that’s just how it is. That’s part of the journey, and that’s okay. So be gentle with yourselves. And then um, they can reach me at uh whisperswithin us.com and uh there’s a discovery call on there if somebody wants to reach out and just see if I’d be some if they want me to help them with their journey at where they’re at right now. And I guess the other thing I just want to say is to everybody you know, listen, just listen to your inner guidance. I call them whispers, that’s what my book is, but listen to your whispers as they come to you because that is your journey. Your whispers is your higher power keeping you on your path because you’re born with an identity and we stray from it and we get reminders, that’s when things happen that we don’t want to happen. Um, I always say to my 20-year-old son, come from a place of love, and one day he’s like, I do not know what you mean by that. And I’m like, when you’re driving and someone is irritating you, slow down, smile to yourself, and let them go. That is coming from a place of love, and you will see how your day redirects. So just come from a place of love. If somebody’s doing negative towards you, just come from a place of love because it’s how you react, it ultimately affects your life. So I guess those are the last words I want to give just to help people move through their journey.
I love that! I love that because you know, my son just reached out to me prior to the interview and he said, Oh mom, like I asked God to um to give me something, and and I got this instead. And I said, That’s not usually how that works, dude. Sometimes the sometimes it takes a little time to set things up in motion, you know, and sometimes he sends messengers and there’s different ways he communicates, but just because you had a dream and it went bad in the dream doesn’t mean that that’s God. I said, You’ve been reading his word, buddy. Does that sound like God, something that God would do? And he’s like, No. And I said, Well, that’s where you start. You know, you gotta kind of start from a place of love and presence and light. Um, because from that space, you’re only gonna go up, you’re not gonna go down, that’s for sure. Because he’s gonna guide you out of there, he’s gonna guide you out of that darkness into a light brighter than you’ve ever imagined. But you gotta have the the heart to receive it. Yeah, the heart to receive those little gifts that he gives us of joy every single day, but we miss them because we’re so busy looking at the darkness of what we don’t have. Yeah, that we it’s this gratitude. I was walking my dog prior to all the interviews I had this morning, and I can’t think of the plant, but it’s gorgeous, it kind of like grows on like vines and it creates these vines and it has like these white flowers, they’re so aromatic, you know. And I was walking the dog and I I stopped to smell them, and I looked up at the sky and I go, Thank you, Lord, for creating these beautiful flowers, for giving me the scent right now because it’s like heavenly. I can’t imagine what the scents in heaven you know smell like. I have experienced his love in the ICU when I was dying, and it is a love like no other. You don’t want to leave that presence. It’s beautiful. So that’s the love that we receive when we go to heaven. I want to go. I mean, I certainly want to be there. And and the people that have died and gone to heaven and come back to to reveal their testimonies, they captured these stories on a book uh called Imagine the God of Heaven, is written by John Burke. He is the founder of the church that I belong to here in Austin. He was an electrical engineer who was not, he was angry with God, so he was really like, I wouldn’t call him an atheist. He doesn’t call himself an atheist, but he kind of came from that space. And then when he started to uh study near-death experiences, um people that clinically died went to heaven, met Christ himself, and then came back, and these were all people from all walks of life, all religions across the board, atheists, Buddhists, Christians, Catholics, the gamut, Jewish, you know, all of them, yeah, and Muslim everywhere. And they all came back with the same testimony, very similar testimonies. And they said that the colors in heaven and like the sense of peace, like they didn’t want to come back. They’re like, Why do we have to come back? I don’t want to come back, you know, and some of them are coming back to like broken bones and like horrible situations. And and he’s like, But because your purpose, you haven’t fulfilled it, you have a bigger purpose, it’s so bigger than what we imagine, you know. But but when we’re grateful and we we start from a space of love, like you told your son, it it’s beautiful, it’s a beautiful way to be. And so I want to thank you, Kathleen, for for coming on the show and sharing your light and your warmth and your love with my listeners. I know they’re going to be so blessed. And the book Whispers, when did it release?
It’s uh called Whispers Within Us, and it released in November. So it’s out, it’s available. I want to get it.
So I definitely do it. That’s something I do for my guests. I I get their books and I want to read them and I want to just experience you through a different lens, like through your thoughts and your love and and the love that you have to share with the world. So thank you so much, Kathleen, for joining us. And for the listeners, remember Matthew 5.14 to be the light. Be the light, like Kathleen’s been the light. Don’t let your darkness overpower you and keep you there because you have so much more to give to this world. God loves you, He’s always been with you, He’s never abandoned you, He will be your light if you need Him to be your light, uh, like He was our light. Um, we followed Him out into our own light and our radiance and purpose. So be confident, have a spirit of confidence, power, love, and self-discipline, and step into your light unapologetically. Have a wonderful one, blessed rest of your week. Love y’all. Bye bye now.
So that’s it for today’s episode of Release Doubt Revealed Purpose. Head on over to iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on iTunes. We’ll win a chance on the grand prize drawing to win a twenty-five thousand dollar private VIP day with Sylvia Warsham herself. Be sure to head on over to sylviaworsham.com and pick up a free copy of Sylvia’s gift and join us on the next episode.