My guest this week is Josy Frotton, a cosmic weaver, bodyworker, traveller, and host of the Soul Dancers podcast. We met in a masterclass where I was on the hot seat, and something I said that day stayed with her. So we sat down to talk about overgiving, receiving, and the standards most of us were never given permission to have.
The Line Between Caring and Disappearing
Josy's mother had just had surgery, and Josy made a choice that would once have felt impossible to her: she supported her mother without dropping everything to be physically there. Not because she loves her mother less, but because she has learned the difference between caring for someone and abandoning herself to do it. We talked about what it costs a woman to keep confusing those two things, and about the standards nobody hands you a manual for.
I do not even call them boundaries anymore. I call them standards. This is my standard, this is my yes, my no, and at the moment, no thank you. A boundary sounds like a wall you have to defend. A standard is just the truth about what you will and will not carry, stated plainly, with nothing to prove.
Overgiving Has a Body, and Mine Gave Out
I told Josy something I do not always say out loud. I had four children within three years. Then I met someone with three children of his own, and we blended into a house of seven, all in different schools. I was giving from a cup that had been empty for a long time, with no backup coming in behind it. My body decided to make me listen the only way it had left: it made me faint. Again and again, until I could not move without it happening.
One of my own children called me selfish while I was sitting on the sofa, unable to stand. At first that landed like a blow, because I had been so far from selfish, I had been giving until there was nothing left to give from. We inherit overgiving the same way we inherit anything, down through the generations, taught to us before we ever had the words to question it. Naming that pattern out loud, without shame attached to either generation, is the beginning of actually rewiring it.
When Writing It Down Does Not Work
Josy asked me how I learned to read a room the way I do. It goes back to teaching children on the autism spectrum, before any of this became my full practice. Not every child could process a feeling by writing it down, and it was never because something was wrong with them, it was because writing was not their way in.
So I taught them, and I still teach adults the same thing: speak it out loud instead. Say your truth to the room, or go for a walk and say it to the open air, get your hands and your feet into the earth if you have somewhere to do that. People used to speak out loud far more than we do now, and we decided somewhere along the way that it meant something was wrong with them. It does not. There is no single right way to process what is moving through you. Find what works today. Let tomorrow be different.
Listen to the full conversation
From Overgiving to Receiving, with Josy Frotton, on The Scrumptious Woman.
You can find more of Josy's work through the Soul Dancers podcast, linked in the show notes.
This conversation sits inside Juliette Karaman's body-based work on touch, desire, and structured connection.
Work with Juliette: feelfullyyou.com/work-with-me