living my name is Brooke Sproul and I have on the show today my dear friend Alex federici Alex and I Alex and I have
known each other since we were a tender age of 18. children yeah what 20 years
now and Alex has been hugely instrumental in my own personal journey of kind of
personal development self-awareness learning and growing in my relationships
um and my ability to kind of understand and communicate more effectively understand boundaries and consent as
well as more recently conversations about how the personal is political and how our internalized systems of
Oppression in our households can map onto our political views and sort of the feedback loop between those two things
and I’ve had sort of a profound Awakening in this regard which I credit largely to Alex and our ongoing
conversations and I thought this would be a really important conversation to have and invite others into so welcome
Alex and thank you it was an incredibly kind way of welcoming onto your podcast thank you so
very much Brooke I’m super happy to be here yeah so uh we’ve had this conversation I
mean we’ve been I mean if we really Trace back the roots it’s been a few years now um and and it really started with you
know conversations about how in a particular relationship I was in
um ways in which my value as a woman was perceived in relationship to physical
attraction and how I was objectifying myself and like therefore perceiving it
as normal and okay to be objectified by others or to have my value perceived in
relation to this kind of cultural standard of what is agreed on as Beauty
and so that was really the beginning of some very long conversations that have evolved significantly but um just sort
of curious if you wanted to share anything about about that topic because I think that has some really important
you know ramifications um and and things to explore it’s interesting because it when it came to
your sense of self-worth and I feel this way too because it’s it’s different for a hetero or hetero representing men in
our society but there’s like a strain of it that’s similar of uh what we have
been told our value is based in um and then we know to some large degree
that there’s a desire for perfect expression of that thing that is not possible right so like you’re not going
to be I mean this in the in the most chauvinist the gross sense like attend right like nobody is a 10 everybody has
faults and so then you’re looking for people to validate that you are worthwhile as opposed to recognizing
yourself as being perfect in your own imperfect Humanity from the get-go and so you then subconsciously start
looking for partners who will tell you things like you being perfect in not an imperfect way but in the like no no
you’re this thing or oh my God I get attention from this person and if this person is giving me attention I must be
worthwhile and now you’re seeking validation externally and it’s not even like
you know there are times in my life where I’ve wanted to be around people that are most certainly smarter than I am and there is certainly a feeling of
like oh I’m like in a conversation with a very smart person and there’s something there’s a type of validity
that’s occurring in there but there’s I think relationship where
uh it isn’t actually about the way that the two of you are dancing and it is about what the person is
willing to give to you and what the person can take away from you and so then you end up in relationships with the other person holds the keys to your
self-worth because you perceive yourself as I’m only beautiful because this person says that I’m beautiful they can
take away that at any time they can revoke that sense of self-worth and whenever they mistreat me they can give
it back to me as a way to allow for the mistreatment um yeah really well said and the framing
that I use to think about some of those Concepts is a little different maybe than yours you know um I think about you
know my frame of kind of the spectrum of narcissism and the ways in which we appeal to things outside of us for worth
it as a compensation for our internal sense of unworthiness or internal
traumas that we experience we then compensate by seeking external validation and that creates a
transaction transactional and consumeristic approach to relationships in which we commodify ourselves and then
as you’re saying we’re looking to others how good how how um I had a friend who we used to talk
about this a lot and I think it’s a really damaging framework but it’s the thing we’re trying to dismantle so I
think it’s important that we talk about it like how valuable are you in the sexual Marketplace like where do you
fall in that like as you said kind of deliberately chauvinistic like that that framing like where do I fall in that one
to ten where am I on that and then we’re constantly looking for people and things and trying to present ourselves to raise
our status as opposed to seeing ourselves as intrinsically valuable in our unique expression and seeing
relationships as you said as a dance that is co-created and emergent between
two people that’s less about any particular characteristics and how we live up to certain standards and more
about kind of the way you particularly connect with the given you know with the way in which two individuals connect and
relate and what they bring out in each other and what emerges in that dance and so I’ve had you know I’ve gone through a
huge shift in my relationships but it’s still ongoing I mean I still feel like I’m dismantling a lot of these
transactional kind of consumeristic ways of viewing myself and others and what’s
really beautiful though that we’ve we’ve talked about is you know as we dismantle this internalized oppression and
commodification like what opens up in terms of possibilities to connect with
people is so nourishing and Soulful it’s like you’re no longer sort of
um in this constant state of judging and evaluating and seeking seeing others as
instrumental or um uh you’re you’re kind of just you get
into this experience of just connection and kindness and um and seeing the beauty like the beauty
in the uniqueness the beauty not in the you’re a 10 but in the actual kind of
genuine soulfulness of another human being and it’s quite like it’s quite
radical how it shifts your perspective and I’m not suggesting that I have that lens all the time or that it’s been sort
of a linear right yeah right it’s like I never want to present like when we have these
glimpses of a more awakened State of Consciousness I never want to present that like I’m now enlightened and that’s
just a fixed State and you know by you know and we’ve expressed this before that I
think for what for the two of us it comes from the opposite directions but for me you know the whole that I’m trying to fill and and the
commodification of other people the perception of other people as being in this Marketplace which whenever I see
the dating or the sexual Marketplace my body like does one of these like you
um that for me there is still a desire to prove to myself that I am worthy that I
am and so in that way it’s like am I a good instrument would someone want to purchase me even if that purchasing is with their time
and I can know which I do that I have intrinsic value that far outweighs that
that that that the intrinsic value that I have gets diminished the moment I try to put a monetary or temporal value on
who I am and what I am you know but I am uh if we look at it from a religious
perspective like I am a child of God that the thing that created all things has gained for me to exist in this
moment and that there is n
