Bridgett Brown
We think that our bodies, aren't supposed to change because that's what we see again in the media. So, if we see more representation of bodies changing, we will accept ourselves more. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Welcome back, everybody, to another conversation in the Parenting with Impact podcast. My guest is Bridgett Brown and we're going to be making all kinds of connections today. We're going to talk about beauty, but we're going to talk about body image. And then we're going to talk about perfectionism and how all those things interplay. And who knows what else will come out of this fabulous conversation? So, Bridgett, welcome.  

Bridgett Brown
Thank you. Welcome to me. Oh, my God. I told you it's Monday.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
When you interview a fellow podcast host, she's as comfortable welcoming as she is being a guest. So I'm so glad you're here. Thank you so much for having me. So, tell us a little bit about how did you get to be doing what you do that makes you a guest on the Parenting with Impact podcast? 

Bridgett Brown
Yeah, so I have a project, the Beyond Beauty Project, and I help pre-teens, teens, sorority girls, college kids, up to adults navigate how to have a better self-image when it comes to their body image and just really embracing who they are in a very unique way and celebrating that.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Is it only for girls? 

Bridgett Brown
No, but I really focus on girls right now and women because I'm a woman and I have a daughter, but I just did a pre-teen workshop, and the moms, I get messages from moms all the time, and they really want this for the boys too. So I need to do that. That's a potential. It's for all of us, though. It's really all of us. Yeah, like what I do, it relates to every gender. You know, it's about embracing our unique selves and knowing that we're all so individual and that we're perfectly made. And we're worthy just the way we are. So, it's for all of us.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So how did you come to do this? You told me earlier that you have kind of a secret backstory that brought you here. Tell us a little bit about that. 

Bridgett Brown
Yeah. So I started modeling when I was 19 professionally, and I was always a bit of a rebel in the industry where I was like, "Oh, they're telling me like I have to lose weight or be a certain way." But I did it for a long time because I was making a better life for myself. But along the way, I really started studying the mind, body, and spirit because I knew if I was going to have to be a certain weight or look like I had a certain image, I wanted to do it in a healthy way. My mental health was getting triggered and destroyed sometimes in the process. So, I really had to learn these other modalities. So I went on to model for a long time, and I had sort of this rock bottom moment where I lost my mom, my dad, and my brother in under two years. And I went on to have a string of miscarriages, and yeah, and it was right after, so it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom. And, you know, I had lived the 20 kind of years prior working as a model and being able to sort of control my body and almost like an athlete, I would say, like, I knew it, and I could. And the last miscarriage I had was twins at five and a half months, and I already had my daughter, which, thank God, right?

But, I was destroyed. I had lost my family. Now, I lost my babies. I lost my body, my mental health was in the toilet, and I went back to my agency after taking like a little bit of time to heal. And one of the first things they told me at 41 years old was, “But first, you must lose weight.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
You must lose weight. You must put your body through more stress despite it's already been through. 

Bridgett Brown
Yeah, like my body wasn't healing enough. Right? And I just got off the phone and I cried and I had this moment of like full body dysmorphia in the mirror and my daughter ran in and she asked me what I was doing and it was like, "What am I doing?"

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
"What am I doing?"

Bridgett Brown
"What am I doing?" And you know, I grew up with my mother having multiple sclerosis. So, she was in a wheelchair by the time I was 5. And, I always had this dream, like, I'm going to help. I'm going to help us one day feel so confident in our skin, in our bodies. I'm so lucky that I have an abled body, right? I'm not going to lose weight and shove it into something that, and also, I'm a 41-year-old woman. Why can't I be a size six? Where's the representation in the media? And so, I had a little daughter who was looking at me. I had a niece who was around 5, who thought I was the coolest thing ever at the time. And, I just thought, no, I'm gonna leave, and I was all set up. I was with a big agency in New York for a long time, and I was set and ready to go. I walked away a couple of days later, and I started this project, but I didn't know exactly what it would turn out to be. I love it, and I'm super passionate about the work I do, but I just started a podcast, and then I put together these workshops that I offer, and then I started doing keynoting, and like, here I am, you know.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
There's so many different directions we could go, you know, the people listening are parents and professionals who are supporting complex kids, and with complex kids, there's lots of body dysmorphia, there's lots of impulsivity, there's lots of eating disorders, there's lots of challenges navigating our body and regulating ourselves and our bodies, right? There's inaction, there's hyperactivity, like there's so much around our bodies in this brain-based condition, and what really strikes me when I hear your story, and I have a similar story about a very late miscarriage because that's a whole different thing, what happens then was this ability to trust your body. And I don't know what your story was. “You already had a child.” For me, it was my first pregnancy. But I had this story about my body: "Can I trust my body?" "I can't trust my body. It doesn't tell me what I need to know." "I did everything I was supposed to do and still had a problem." Will you talk a little bit about self-trust in the context of this work that you're doing?

Bridgett Brown
Well, I love that you brought that up because that moment that I felt like I couldn't get back into the size four jeans, right, that I said, I almost had this like body, I felt like I couldn't control for 20 years. And all of a sudden, I couldn't. And I really, really couldn't. My body wanted to heal so badly. It was this moment of full surrender. I had to say, first of all, I was having postpartum. There were a lot of not-good thoughts going on in my head, but I had to say to myself one day at a time, little by little, I'm going to trust that I'm going to be OK. So when I started even my project, I just said, "I'm healing along with everybody else." So I started really sharing all the kind of feelings that were going on around the miscarriages and stuff. But I had to trust that it happened the way it was supposed to happen, and it's hard. I was really mad for a really, really long time. I was mad at my body then, too. Yeah. But I came around.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
What really strikes me is there are so many parallels in these when you're raising complex kids because it's oftentimes, when parents first come into our community, they start with, I want it to be different. And it takes a while to get to the point where we invite them to see, "This is it, this is your journey." "Your journey is to be with them on their journey." "This is their journey." And as you say, we need to trust that things are happening the way they are supposed to, that we are the parents our kids need us, need to have, and that we can learn how to be the parents our kids need us to be. 

Bridgett Brown
Yeah. Well, and I talk about this a lot like we feel in a society that things are supposed to be one way. And it's all-around perfectionism, right? And we're showing these images in media all the time of the perfect family and the perfect child and the perfect body and the perfect husband or wife or, you know, and that's what I really talk about in my workshops is that there's a whole world out there. It's so beautiful and complex and different. We're so bio-individually different, and that's awesome if we can actually really embrace how cool it is that our brains work differently. Right? And if we can keep expanding that message and say, "I'm not going to fit into a box." I actually don't fit into a box. I have ADHD and dyslexia and all this stuff.

So, I've never fit into the box, but I tried for a long time, you know? But embracing how unique the world is, I talk a lot about just body diversity too in my workshops, and I always show a few of the images from the media, you know, it started with the Victoria's Secret Girls and then Dove has done some great work in the body image space. Yes, they have. But I will say, and I love what they're doing. I'm like a big fan. But I will say it's still not so diverse; there are older people, different genders, and different abled bodies. And the more we see it in the media, the more we embrace it ourselves as parents or caretakers. And the more our children will say, "I'm cool just the way I am." "I'm unique just the way I am." Yeah. "Because I was born worthy, and then society told me that I wasn't."

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
It's a concept right there. "I was born worthy." Let's pause here. We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back, everybody. My guest is Bridgett Brown, and she just led us through into the break with the most powerful term, which is "I was born worthy." And, when you're raising complex kids, when you're supporting families with complex needs, part of what we forget to look at, I think, is the underlying messages that are making it harder for us to support our kids. The “I'm not worried,” the “I'm not good enough,” “I'm bad.” All of these messages that kids can internalize really young and that we humans all take with us into adulthood on some level. Absolutely. So, a lot of your work was to undo some of those foundational messages. 

Bridgett Brown
Absolutely. It really is. I always say, "If you think about when a baby's born, and you're holding that little baby or you see that little baby, I don't care what skin color they have." "What abled body they have." "What kind of brain they're going to have." You are like, "They are so precious. They're worthy." Then they grow up, and we receive these messages. So, I have a complex child myself. So, and I'm complex myself, so I do understand first-hand some of the sensitivities and the nuances that go into it. And I'll just share a little bit of my experience with my daughter. We live in a very sort of keeping-up-with-the-Joneses area, and I had lived in New York City for a long time, which is very diverse, and everybody's like very accepting, you know, and then I moved to this little sort of lovely, but more cookie-cutter neighborhood. And that's sort of when we discovered, like, "Oh, she has dyslexia." "Oh, she has ADHD." "Oh, she has dyscalculia."

Oh, she has to go to a special school. You know, and it just kept, "Oh, I have ADHD too." So, I had to walk my talk and say, "She's so perfect the way she is." And in a way, I'm going to share this just in case this is helpful for anybody. It almost took the pressure off of me, right? Because we can't keep up anyway. So we have to do things, and this is what I talk about a lot, too. Whether I'm doing a keynote or a workshop, it's like, "What do you want?" "What do you need?" "What works for you?" So, that's what we have to be like, guiding ourselves all the time because we live in a perfectionist society, and we trigger "yes" all the time. And before we know it, we're putting pressure even on our children that fuels the "I'm not good enough" or "I'm bad" because we've just been, I hate to say it, but like, brainwashed.  

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Conditioned. Yeah, now we have been conditioned. 

Bridgett Brown
To have certain images and wear the masks, and we gotta take it all off and just really really feel confident in ourselves and the way we are. And I think that we just have to practice it.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I was gonna say, which is not easy to do. It's something we have to practice. We have to decide to do it and then practice. I have a question for you because what strikes me about your story is you said you grew up with a mom with MS in a wheelchair, right? There's this constant story that the parents have of I'm not enough, and I'm not doing it enough, and I'm doing enough, and I can't, like every moment I have needs to be focused on my kid, right? And I'm wondering what the gift was to you of having a mother who was differently abled.

Bridgett Brown
Yeah, I think I learned a lot of compassion early on. And a lot of resilience, I had to really figure things out for myself, and I was, you know, pushing her wheelchair at 7-years-old and navigating things that maybe, you know, a 7-year-old normally doesn't. I think the gift as I got older and I really processed what really happened to my psyche is I got this really first-hand experience into how her body losing her body image affected her mental health. And that's just giving me, I think, really good insight into the work that I'm doing because my mom was very tall and beautiful and she had a beautiful body. And as she lost her body. It really affected her, you know, self-esteem and her mental health. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
It's almost like her self-concept.

Bridgett Brown
Yeah, because we, as women specifically, our appearance can be so important to us that when we lose it, it's tough. Making everything else more important than that is really important.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I want to say it's interesting because I'm hitting that next stage of my life, and this is something I've been dealing with personally for the last year as I move through menopause, this like shift, "I didn't do anything different, but my body's changing anyway." Finding a piece with that has been more difficult than I expected it to be. 

Bridgett Brown
Yeah. It is. That's why I always like to say, "Bodies change because bodies are supposed to change." But we don't see that in the media, you know, so really trying, and it doesn't happen. It's not going to just happen by saying, "I'm going to accept my body." It's really this intention first and then the practice of it.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Well, and the other thing that really jumps at me is that just when we think we've kind of come to terms with it, it changes again. And so much like parenting complex kids where you think you got it, "I got this," "I figured out my kids got whatever," "I can handle this." Then their peers hit another milestone that they're not hitting, and it slaps you in the face again. And then they got to come to terms with it again because now you're at a different place, and now you've got another layer, and I suspect it's very much like that with our bodies as well. 

Bridgett Brown
Absolutely. We're all part of nature, and we're really flowing, and we're changing, and it's this sort of lie that we've been told that things are supposed to be a certain way and go like this, and not be different or not change. So, I think it's embracing. But we think that our bodies, sticking to our bodies, aren't supposed to change because that's what we see, again, in the media. So if we can see more representation of bodies changing, we will accept ourselves more. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
So talk a little bit about representation as we're looking at the lens, whether it's about our kids looking at the world and saying, "This is what my body should be." "This is what my brain should be." I think about the unbelievable gift that Simone Biles gave girls to say, "Take care of your mental health first." Talk a little bit about representation a little bit deeper because I think it's so important, and it's so hard for us because we don't have control over it. Right?

Bridgett Brown
I know. Yeah. But we have to keep talking about it. So, we are putting the message out there, the demand a little bit that we want to see ourselves. I think it's important because if you're a little kid, let's say. And you never see yourself in the media. You never see your body size. You never see your skin color, or maybe you only see it sometimes, or when you do see it, there maybe they're the house cleaner or the janitor. They're not the doctor. It's like subtle messages that make you feel like you're not good enough, like "Where am I?" "I don't see myself." So, I think it's almost like that mirror work; it's very important to be able to say, "Oh, somebody else, they look like me." "There I am." Because if you never see yourself, you don't feel like you belong in the world. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Well, and what's really jumping at me as I'm listening to you is that your work, some of it is around that external piece of "You see people who look like you?" And our work is very much is around identifying the people who think like me. Like I'm not the only one who thinks this way. Yeah. The brain works this way. It's all combined. 

Bridgett Brown
I love talking about our brains now that I'm digging in with my daughter and my own brain, but my team, I think most of us have ADHD, and we just like talk about it openly, and I'll just be like, "My brain's not really working today, how it was yesterday?" And they're like, "That's you." And, you know, because it's also like my brain isn't perfect. So, what is really my ADHD? And what is the perfectionism I've put on the way my brain's supposed to work? I remember I went to my therapist, this was a couple, a couple months ago. I'm like, "I don't know, my mental health, it's just not like it was a month ago." And she just looked at me, and she goes, "So your mental health's not perfect right now?" She's like, "I don't know if you should be so happy this week; you had a tough week." And I was like, "Yes, OK. You got me."

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
I love that. And I have a child in particular. I look forward to sharing that with you. So thank you. Bridgett, let me tell people what I've learned and how people can find out more about you. You can find Bridgett at the project called Beyond Beauty Project. So you can find them on Instagram. I think it's @beyond.beauty.project. You can find them at beyondbeautyproject.com. She does workshops, keynotes, schools, and corporations. She has podcasts Beyond Beauty Project. So if you want to find out more, if you've got a pre-teen or older girl, you want to support more consciously around this. Cause as you say, and as we say, "First, you got to set the intention, then you got to practice." You can find out more about Bridgett and all of these wonderful places at Beyond Beauty Project. 

So as we begin to wrap up this conversation, what have we not talked about that you want to bring up or is there something else we've talked about that you want to kind of hone in on? How do you want to end your part of this conversation? 

Bridgett Brown
Yeah, I feel like you said something about parents putting a lot of pressure on themselves. They're not doing it all. It's usually doing it all or doing it the way they want to, and I would say to give ourselves grace and to know that we're also not perfect, and there's no perfect way to parent. Yeah, I think it's just going little by little. 

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah, the thing that got me through was when my kids were younger, and I was really struggling as I used to have a necklace. I have a necklace that I used to wear every day for a dozen years. And the Hebrew is Gam Zeh Ya'avor, and the English means "This too shall pass." Yeah. And it really got me through everything, the good times but the bad times, and it was that reminder one step at a time. This moment is just this moment that can be so powerful. 

Bridgett Brown
Yeah, it's like sometimes we take baby steps instead of milestones or big steps. It's just a little step, one foot in front of the other.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Yeah. I often ask, as one of the things we teach with parents is taking aim and often parents are trying to take aim on way big things or way too much. And so sometimes, I ask, "What's the next step?" Right? We don't have to have the whole thing solved. We just have to figure out what the next step is, where that next footing is going to go.

Bridgett Brown
It's also, just from my experience, it's also hard sometimes. Life starts and it's hard raising complex kids, and often we're complex, raising complex kids. And so I try to give myself a hug and welcome myself in the beginning, but sometimes I just have to say, it's OK, you're doing an OK job.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
Probably better than OK. If you're listening to this, chances are it's better than OK. Absolutely. I agree. Awesome. Well, Bridgett, thank you. Thanks for what you're doing, and thanks for bringing it to this community. You have a beautiful, joyful, positive message and I'm happy to share it. Thank you so much for having me.

Elaine Taylor-Klaus
To those of you listening, what did you take away from this conversation that you want to bring forward with you into your week? What's your insight? What's your A-ha? What was that one gem that you want to bring forward with you? For me, it was, "Oh, your mental health isn't perfect right now," which I think is really powerful. But what is it for you that you want to bring forward with you? 

In the next episode, Diane and I are gonna be talking about, not exactly sure what, but it's gonna be the two of us, and it's gonna be something hot-and-happening in the community or issues that we hear parents raising in recent weeks. So join us for that and click below. Keep going. And until then, as always, folks, thanks for what you're doing for yourself and for your kids. You make an extraordinary difference. Take care, everybody.