Season 3, Episode 6: The Connection We’re Missing — Relationships, Technology & Being Real with Dr. Elise Vandamia

We have more ways to stay connected than ever before — so why does real connection sometimes feel harder to find?

In this episode of Unfiltered with Love, I’m joined by Dr. Elise Vandamia, a licensed professional counselor with more than three decades of experience in mental health, relationships, family dynamics, trauma, anxiety, and emotional well-being.

We talk about how technology has changed dating and communication, why ghosting can feel so intense, the role social media plays in comparison and insecurity, and how constant contact can still leave us feeling disconnected.

We also get into texting versus face-to-face conversation, how easily tone can be misread, the pressure social media can put on relationships, and what authentic connection actually looks like in everyday life.

Toward the end of the conversation, we talk about something both of us feel strongly about — the importance of women creating space to reconnect with themselves and with each other.

Dr. Elise will also be joining me as a guest speaker at my upcoming Return to Yourself — Unfiltered Retreat.

Return to Yourself is an intimate women’s wellness retreat at LaPlaya Beach & Golf Resort in Naples, Florida, created around rest, reflection, authentic connection, and reconnecting with yourself outside of all the roles and responsibilities you carry.

Dr. Elise will be one of the facilitators joining us for the experience.

🎟️ Podcast listeners can use code LOVE100 for $100 off.

Learn more and reserve your spot here:
https://www.lavenderlanesocialsolutions.com/uinfiltered-retreats/return-to-yourself

If you’ve ever wondered whether we’re truly connecting — or just constantly communicating — this conversation is for you.

🎙️ Unfiltered with Love — honest conversations about love, relationships, growth, and everything in between.

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What if love is the one thing we actually get to keep?

In this episode of Unfiltered with Love, I’m reflecting on love, loss, fear, presence, and the ways certain connections stay with us even when circumstances change.

A recent conversation with someone I had just met opened up a bigger question: what happens when we become so afraid of losing something meaningful that we never allow ourselves to find out what it could become?

We talk about the fear of changing a relationship, the weight of grief and loyalty, and why sometimes the hardest thing isn’t knowing how something ends — it’s being honest about what it means to you now.

I also share a line from Ghost that stopped me in my tracks: “It’s amazing, Molly... all that love... you take it with you.”

Because maybe that’s the real point.

Presence is temporary.

But love has a way of staying.

And maybe the question isn’t how to hold onto everything forever, but how fully we’re willing to love while we’re here.

🎙️ Unfiltered with Love — honest conversations about love, relationships, growth, and everything in between.

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If this resonates with you, be sure to follow the show so you don’t miss future episodes of Unfiltered with Love.

If you’re looking for deeper support, I offer 1:1 Emotional Clarity & Guidance Sessions. Learn more here: unfilteredwithlove.carrd.co

Season 3 • Episode 4: Returning to Yourself — Embodiment, Yoga & Self-Connection with Liv

What does it really mean to return to yourself?

In this episode of Unfiltered with Love, Kerry sits down with Liv, a yoga instructor, social work professional, and facilitator for the upcoming Return to Yourself women’s retreat, for a conversation about embodiment, mindfulness, self-awareness, and reconnecting with who you are underneath expectations, productivity, and the roles you play for everyone else.

Liv shares her perspective on returning to your authentic self, the mind-body connection, breathwork, meditation, crystal sound healing, and the grounding effects of nature. She also talks about how yoga can become much more than physical movement — creating greater awareness of thought patterns, emotional habits, self-worth, and the way we relate to ourselves.

The conversation also takes an unexpected turn into confidence and being seen. Liv opens up about once struggling with stage fright and feeling uncomfortable being perceived by others, and how years of teaching helped her become more comfortable using her voice. That leads into a deeper discussion about self-empowerment, childhood conditioning, negative thought patterns, and becoming aware of the beliefs we carry without even realizing it.

Liv also shares how deeply she has explored the philosophy and history of yoga through Sanskrit study, meditation, and time spent learning from monks — and why she believes yoga and meditation can become a way of life rather than simply something we do for an hour in a class.

In this episode:

• What it means to return to yourself
• Embodiment and the mind-body connection
• Yoga, breathwork, and mindfulness
• Crystal sound healing
• Nature and grounding
• Self-worth and self-empowerment
• Becoming comfortable being seen
• Childhood conditioning and thought patterns
• Yoga beyond the physical practice
• Authenticity, self-discovery, and personal growth

Connect with Liv / Stargate Sessions
Liv shares upcoming yoga, breathwork, sound healing, and holistic wellness events through Stargate Sessions.

Instagram: @stargate.sessions
Phone: 239-204-7780

Return to Yourself — Unfiltered Retreat

Liv will be one of the facilitators at Return to Yourself, an intimate women’s retreat focused on connection, belonging, reflection, rest, embodiment, and creating space to reconnect with yourself.

Liv will be leading beach yoga, meditation, and crystal sound healing during the retreat.

📍 LaPlaya Beach & Golf Resort
Vanderbilt Beach • Naples, Florida

Podcast listeners can use code LOVE100 for $100 off registration.

Learn more and reserve your spot:
https://www.lavenderlanesocialsolutions.com/unfiltered-retreats/return-to-yourself

🎙️ Unfiltered with Love — honest conversations about love, relationships, growth, and everything in between.

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Support the show

If this resonates with you, be sure to follow the show so you don’t miss future episodes of Unfiltered with Love.

If you’re looking for deeper support, I offer 1:1 Emotional Clarity & Guidance Sessions. Learn more here: unfilteredwithlove.carrd.co

Season 3 • Episode 3: When Endurance Is No Longer Strength

When does endurance stop being strength?

In this episode of Unfiltered with Love, Kerry explores the difference between healthy perseverance and simply becoming really good at tolerating what no longer feels right.

From parenting adult children and learning where support ends and personal responsibility begins, to recognizing patterns around guilt, obligation, over-functioning, and always being the one who “handles it,” this conversation is about what happens when strength quietly turns into carrying too much for too long.

Kerry reflects on boundaries, consideration, emotional labor, family dynamics, and the pressure many women feel to keep accommodating simply because they can. She also looks at the generational patterns that can teach us to equate love with sacrifice, availability, and endurance.

Sometimes strength is staying.
Sometimes strength is working through something difficult.
And sometimes strength is finally saying:

“I don’t have to keep living this way just because I know how to survive it.”

This episode also includes an update on Return to Yourself, an intimate women’s retreat focused on connection, belonging, rest, reflection, embodiment, and creating space to reconnect with who you are underneath all the roles and responsibilities.

Return to Yourself — Unfiltered Retreat
📍 LaPlaya Beach & Golf Resort
Vanderbilt Beach, Naples, Florida

The retreat is intentionally limited to a small number of women to create a deeper sense of connection, belonging, and personal space to reflect and reset.

Podcast listeners can use code LOVE100 for $100 off registration.

Learn more and register here:
https://www.lavenderlanesocialsolutions.com/uinfiltered-retreats/return-to-yourself

Kerry also previews next week’s conversation with Liv, one of the retreat facilitators, who will be leading beach yoga, meditation, and crystal sound healing. Their conversation will explore embodiment, the mind-body connection, breath, the nervous system, intuition, nature, and what it really means to return to yourself.

In this episode:

• Emotional endurance vs. healthy perseverance
• Parenting adult children
• Boundaries and personal responsibility
• Family dynamics and emotional labor
• Guilt, obligation, and over-functioning
• Generational patterns
• Self-discovery and personal growth
• Emotional healing and authentic connection
• Learning when to stop carrying what is not yours
• Returning to yourself

🎙️ Unfiltered with Love — honest conversations about love, relationships, growth, and everything in between.

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Support the show

If this resonates with you, be sure to follow the show so you don’t miss future episodes of Unfiltered with Love.

If you’re looking for deeper support, I offer 1:1 Emotional Clarity & Guidance Sessions. Learn more here: unfilteredwithlove.carrd.co

Season 3 • Episode 2: Breaking the Silence — Domestic Violence, Mental Health & Stigma with Lindsey Dralle

Today’s episode is a deeply personal conversation about domestic violence, sexual assault, PTSD, mental health, stigma, and the courage it can take to ask for help.

I’m joined by Lindsey Dralle, founder of I Stand to End the Stigma, an awareness organization focused on mental health and domestic violence. Lindsey shares the experiences that led her to create the organization, including her own mental health struggles, PTSD, sexual assault, abusive relationships, and the loss of someone she met during treatment. Pasted text

We talk about why people stay silent, why getting help should never be viewed as weakness, and how stigma can keep people from being honest about what they are going through. Lindsey also shares how therapy helped her begin to understand the deeper wounds behind some of her patterns and why she now uses her story to help others feel less alone. Pasted text

We also discuss trauma bonds, the question of “Why didn’t they just leave?”, consent, abusive relationship dynamics, authenticity, and the importance of creating space for people to tell the truth about what they are experiencing. Pasted text

One of the most important reminders from this conversation is Lindsey’s message:

It’s okay not to be okay. Getting help is one of the strongest things you can do. Pasted text

This episode contains discussion of domestic violence, sexual assault, PTSD, suicide, and mental health. Please take care of yourself while listening and step away if you need to.

🎙️ Unfiltered with Love — honest conversations about love, relationships, growth, and everything in between.

Connect with Lindsey Dralle

I Stand to End the Stigma

Instagram: @reallifewithlindseyd
Email: istandtoendthestigma@gmail.com

Lindsey is currently building awareness around mental health, domestic violence, suicide awareness, and access to treatment, and is inviting individuals and businesses to stand with the organization and help amplify the message.

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Support the show

If this resonates with you, be sure to follow the show so you don’t miss future episodes of Unfiltered with Love.

If you’re looking for deeper support, I offer 1:1 Emotional Clarity & Guidance Sessions. Learn more here: unfilteredwithlove.carrd.co

Season 3 • Episode 1: When Patience Starts to Feel Like Stagnation

What happens when you’ve done everything you know how to do...and nothing seems to move?

For the first episode of Season 3, I’m talking about stagnation — that frustrating place where you’ve tried, changed, prayed, waited, had the conversations, taken the risks, worked on yourself...and still find yourself facing circumstances you can’t completely control.

Sometimes “just keep going” stops feeling encouraging.

Sometimes you’re simply tired.

And sometimes admitting that out loud makes other people uncomfortable.

In this episode, I talk about a recent Facebook post that prompted both concerned messages and messages from people saying, “I know exactly what you mean.” It got me thinking about how much more comfortable we seem to be with polished vulnerability — honesty after everything has been resolved — than we are with someone saying, “This is hard, and I don’t have the answer yet.”

I’m also exploring something I recently learned about: lamenting. What does it mean to bring frustration, grief, confusion and even anger to God without seeing those feelings as a failure of faith? That question has led me into a Bible study of the book of Job and a different way of thinking about what faith can look like when life doesn’t make sense.

And, perhaps appropriately, I’ve also started studying breathwork — which feels almost comical when all I want is movement and my current lesson seems to be...breathe. 😂

Maybe not every next step begins with a huge decision.

Maybe sometimes we need enough space to notice what’s happening inside of us before we know what comes next.

That idea of space, connection and belonging is also at the heart of something I’m incredibly excited to finally share: Return to Yourself, an intimate Unfiltered Retreat for women at LaPlaya Beach & Golf Resort in Naples, Florida.

And before we close, I’ll also share a preview of next week’s very different conversation — a guest episode about domestic violence and the realities people outside abusive relationships may not always understand.

This season, we’re starting without all the answers.

And maybe that’s exactly where we’re supposed to begin.

Question to sit with:
Where in your life are you being patient...and where might you actually be stagnant?

🎙️ Unfiltered with Love — honest conversations about love, relationships, growth, and everything in between.

Return to Yourself — Unfiltered Retreat

Return to Yourself is an intentionally small women’s retreat centered around connection, belonging, rest, reflection and creating space to reconnect with yourself.

📍 LaPlaya Beach & Golf Resort
Vanderbilt Beach • Naples, Florida

Attendance is intentionally limited so that this feels less like moving through a program with strangers and more like being part of a meaningful shared experience.

If this sounds like something you’ve been looking for, I encourage you to reserve your place sooner rather than later. Once the available spaces are filled, registration will close.

🎧 Unfiltered with Love listeners receive $100 off retreat registration with code: LOVE100

Learn more about Return to Yourself and future Unfiltered Retreats:

Explore Unfiltered Retreats

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing more about the retreat and introducing some of the facilitators here on the podcast.

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Support the show

If this resonates with you, be sure to follow the show so you don’t miss future episodes of Unfiltered with Love.

If you’re looking for deeper support, I offer 1:1 Emotional Clarity & Guidance Sessions. Learn more here: unfilteredwithlove.carrd.co

Season 2 Finale • Why Modern Dating Feels So Hard — with Lucrezia of The Empowered Muse

Why does dating feel so complicated now?

For the Season 2 finale of Unfiltered with Love, I’m joined by Lucrezia of The Empowered Muse, whose post Analysis of Modern Dating originally caught my attention because it put into words so many of the things I had already been thinking about love, dating, connection, and relationships.

Lucrezia believes the current dating crisis goes much deeper than dating apps and algorithms. In this conversation, we talk about authenticity, emotional availability, “half-presence,” modern independence, masculine and feminine dynamics, and why so many people say they want deep connection while still struggling to truly show up for it.
We also explore the difference between independence and interdependence, why receiving support can feel difficult for women who are used to carrying everything themselves, and whether healthy relationships require us to let go of some of the hyper-independence we’ve learned to protect.
And perhaps most importantly, we talk about something both of us have learned through experience:

Love by itself isn’t always enough.

Compatibility matters. Values matter. Emotional compatibility matters. And building the relationship you actually want requires more than simply finding someone you have feelings for.
Lucrezia also shares her own journey from a long-term unhealthy relationship into the modern dating world, how that experience led her to study relationship patterns, and how she now uses what she has learned through The Empowered Muse.

We close by talking about her book, The Evolution and Revival of Feminine Power, her texting guide, and her free dating-app blueprint designed to help women recognize patterns and make more intentional choices in dating.
And because this is the final episode of Season 2, I’m also taking a little time at the end to reflect on where this season has taken us — identity, healing, boundaries, independence, vulnerability, loneliness, relationships, and all the questions that come with figuring out who we are and how we want to live.

I’ll be taking a short break before Season 3, but I’ll be back.

Until then...

Keep asking good questions.
Keep being curious.
And most importantly...
Keep showing up as yourself.

🎙️ Unfiltered with Love — honest conversations about love, relationships, growth, and everything in between.

Lucrezia — The Empowered Muse @theempoweredmuse

Topics discussed include modern dating, feminine power, relationship dynamics, self-worth, compatibility, dating apps, and intentional relationship choices.

The Evolution and Revival of Feminine Power
Lucrezia’s book exploring women’s evolution, independence, feminine energy, and what she describes as the “superwoman syndrome.”

Texting Guide
A resource focused on communication and texting dynamics in modern dating.

Free Dating App Blueprint
A free resource Lucrezia created to help women navigate dating apps and identify mismatches more quickly.

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Support the show

If this resonates with you, be sure to follow the show so you don’t miss future episodes of Unfiltered with Love.

If you’re looking for deeper support, I offer 1:1 Emotional Clarity & Guidance Sessions. Learn more here: unfilteredwithlove.carrd.co

Season 2 • Episode 8: I Can Be Alone. I Just Don’t Want to Be Anymore.

There’s a difference between being unable to be alone...and realizing you’ve been alone long enough.

This week, I’m reflecting on independence, loneliness, partnership, and an epiphany I wasn’t expecting:

I know I can do life alone. But I don’t want being alone to be the permanent structure of my life.

I’ve spent a lot of my life learning how to handle things myself...from growing up as an only child, to feeling lonely even within marriage, to rebuilding my life after divorce. Somewhere along the way, independence became something I felt like I needed to protect.

And we hear that message everywhere: choose yourself, travel alone, take yourself to dinner, buy yourself the flowers.

But what if you already know how to buy yourself the flowers...and you’d still really love someone else to bring you some?

In this episode, I explore emotional healing, self-discovery, loneliness, interdependence, long-distance relationships, and the difference between needing someone to complete you and simply wanting someone to share your life with.

Maybe healthy partnership isn’t about two people who can’t survive without each other.

Maybe it’s two people who know they could stand alone...but intentionally choose to stand together.

I don’t want to be rescued.

I don’t want to be completed.

I don’t need to prove that I can survive alone anymore.

I already know I can.

I just don’t want being alone to be my permanent default.

🎙️ Unfiltered with Love — honest conversations about love, relationships, growth, and everything in between.

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Support the show

If this resonates with you, be sure to follow the show so you don’t miss future episodes of Unfiltered with Love.

If you’re looking for deeper support, I offer 1:1 Emotional Clarity & Guidance Sessions. Learn more here: unfilteredwithlove.carrd.co