Hit Me Up With Life

Oct 23

Episode 38 of Wellness Me Up — Wellness Me Up Diary Entry
with Hypnosis Trainer & Life Coach Miss Marissa
Written and hosted by Amanda Reece, founder of Wellness Me Up.

Maris — who works as Miss Marissa — is a hypnosis trainer and life coach helping entrepreneurs drop the mask and lean into their authentic energy. Lab grown. Dad's a scientist. This one goes everywhere — masks, curiosity, gin buckets, sex, and suicide. When a guest says "shit" because the wheel landed on coping mechanisms you know it's gonna be good.

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Who Is Miss Marissa?

Maris is a hypnosis trainer, life coach trainer, and the person who made me feel calm and chill before we even hit record. Something was happening over there and I still cannot fully explain it.

She is Estonian. She is lab grown — her dad is a scientist and she grew up surrounded by tests and data and tubes that she was loud enough to make explode. That curiosity about how things work started in an actual lab and translated directly into people, psychology, neuropsychology, and eventually the brain work she does now. When someone is in front of her she steps into their shoes. Feels what they feel. And asks from that place. That is where the work starts.

She works with the person behind the personal brand. Six month containers. Twice a month. And in those six months — every loose thread, every uncertain thing, every mask you have been wearing — it all comes up. Every area of wellness. Every layer of who you actually are.

You cannot hide from Miss Marissa. She can feel what her clients feel even when they are trying not to show it. And she will call bullshit. Lovingly. But clearly.

Life Can Be Messy. But It Can Also Feel Easy.

This is what Miss Marissa wrote on the questionnaire before we even started. And it is the thread that ran through every single part of this conversation.

She works with entrepreneurs — people who are putting their face and name out into the world and trying to show up authentically — and what she finds again and again is that the masks are everywhere. The personas people have built. The versions of themselves they think they are supposed to be. The rules and playbooks they have absorbed from everyone around them about how to show up online, how to build a brand, what success is supposed to look like.

And underneath all of that — the real person. Waiting.

She guides people through the shiny surface level. Not to blow it up. But to find what is underneath it. And what she finds is that when people finally drop the mask and just show up as themselves — the ease that follows is genuinely surprising. Not because the work disappears. But because the burden of maintaining the performance does.

You Cannot Hide From Miss Marissa

She said — even when clients try to hide, I call bullshit. Because I can feel what they feel. I did a little smirk and eyebrow raise and head nod as she explained this. Because yes. That tracks completely.

It is a habit they have picked up along the way. And it is beautiful — that habit of hiding — because it usually means they have been trying to protect something for a very long time.

But you cannot hide from her. She is going to feel it. And then she is going to get curious about it.

I jumped in with my own version of this. The years I spent wearing masks. Being taught to protect secrets, protect the family, show up in the role I was supposed to play. And how over time it became more and more impossible to hold those things. The filter just started going away. And I started saying the things.

The letter that cemented my family estrangement came from an aunt. It did not start anything — thirty years of a hamster wheel with people who were not going to change, either actively in addiction or enabling those diseased states, had already done that. But this letter was the moment I stopped second-guessing myself and acted on what I already knew.

Okay. I am going to keep going here. Because I usually do not. I usually mention the estrangement and move on. But this conversation with Miss Marissa cracked something open and I want to honour that. So if you are still reading — thank you. This is the part I do not usually say out loud and did not dig into on the podcast itself. So this is exclusive for this diary entry.

It opened by telling me she had thought about whether to send it and decided she should. And what followed was several paragraphs of assumptions. About my motives. About my character. About what kind of person I had become. I was called self-absorbed, self-centred, self-righteous, selfish, immature, and pathetic — in that order. I was told my life was never that sad. I was told to grow up and suck it up. The people who had supported my healing were called a bunch of selfish idiots too.

There was not a single question in it. Not one moment of genuine curiosity about what had shifted for me or why. Just a verdict delivered as fact and signed Regards.

And I found myself wondering — what if that letter had gone differently? What if it had started with genuine curiosity? Hey, things have shifted for you. I would really love to understand what happened. Can we talk?

That conversation never happened. And I have made peace with that. Because trying to get someone to understand your perspective when they are committed to misunderstanding you — and still very much in a diseased state of addictive behavior — was never going to bring the clarity or the accountability or the apologies I might have once needed. I have learned to not need them. And I have learned to not feel guilty for that either.

And I have to take accountability here too. I was taught to enable. I was also the addict. I wanted out for a long time and did not know how. Turns out cancer was the beginning of that exit. And sobriety followed. I did not plan it that way. But here we are.

What is interesting is that there was actually a lot of truth in that letter. Just not in the way my aunt perceived it. The letter revealed everything that had always been wrong with the family — the addictions, the enabling, the secrets, the loyalty at any cost — without anyone ever having to take accountability for any of it. I was exposed to addiction because the adults who were supposed to protect me were either the addicts or the enablers of addicts. My brother was an addict. I was ten years old begging my parents not to let him back into the home. Ten. And they kept letting him back. Every time they said it was the last time. Every time chaos followed. Eventually I started using drugs too. And my brother did them with me. I became my environment. I became the mirror. And nobody ever asked what that was doing to me.

Thirty years later my brother is still an active addict.

Aside from me being a customer of my brother's back in the day — which yes, my aunt put in the letter and yes it is true and yes I own it — the other specific thing she was raging about was that I was not showing up to her daughter's wedding events. The engagement party. The stag and doe. The shower. I had not attended any of them. And to her that was proof of everything she believed about me — that I was selfish, disloyal, a disgrace to the family.

Here is what she did not know.

I had found my cousin's fiancé on Tinder months before the wedding. I told my cousin one to one. She was shocked and begged me not to tell the family. So there I was — keeping yet another family secret, doing exactly what I had always been trained to do, stuck in an impossible position by someone I loved. And getting called selfish and horrible by her mother for not showing up to celebrate a wedding I knew was built on a lie I had been asked to protect.

I never replied to my aunt's letter. I just left. Quietly. Without defending myself. Without revealing what I knew. Without asking for anything.

I have shared this with therapists. With close friends. And now I am writing it in my very public diary. 😄

Part of healing is not protecting their secrets anymore. This is mine to tell. And I just told it.

The difference between me and them? I was ready to get off the hamster wheel and choose differently than generations before me had done. I did not have anyone in my family as a role model for this. No one had done it before me. So I had to figure it out on my own.

I worked extensively with therapists for years. First to try and stay in the family — before the letter from my aunt — where we worked on boundaries. And then with another therapist after the letter arrived — to work on exiting my family of origin entirely.

It was not a dramatic exit. It was not a single moment. It was years of quiet, painful, intentional work. And I would do it all again.

Side note — squirrel thought. If you are caught in an enmeshed family dynamic right now it can feel like there is literally no way out. Like the walls are closing in and the only options are to comply or to combust. But there is a way out. It is just rarely the one anyone tells you about. Miss Marissa talking about curiosity versus assumption hit me in a very specific place because in enmeshed family systems curiosity is almost never the default. Assumption is. And if any of this is landing for you, here are a few things that were signals for me that I did not have language for at the time:

🚩 Your boundaries are treated like personal attacks.
🚩 You become the problem when you name the problem.
🚩 Love feels conditional on staying in your assigned role.
🚩 Distance is interpreted as disrespect.
🚩 Being honest feels more dangerous than staying silent.

If those landed... you are not alone. And you are not the problem.

And that is what Miss Marissa does. I mentioned the estrangement on the podcast — when she started talking about masks and hiding I could not help but go there. But I did not get into this kind of detail on air. My brain just would not stop after our conversation. The journaling I did to write this blog kept pulling threads I did not expect to follow. That is the Miss Marissa effect. Even after the recording ends.

If that is what one conversation does imagine what six months looks like.

The Break in the Mind

This is how Miss Marissa describes the moment change actually becomes possible.

Before people can propel forward they need what she calls a break in the mind. An opening. Something must internally shift. And that is where hypnosis comes in.

People arrive carrying shame for hiding themselves but hiding so well. Guilt for not doing it sooner. FOMO around timing. All of it layered on top of each other. And in a session — through the conversation, the questions, the hypnosis work — there is a shift. A multi-layer emotional opening. And then they patch themselves up. And then they move forward.

She also talked about what surprises people most in working with her. Not the insights — though those are meaningful. But how easily recognizable their own patterns become. And then how easily they can actually change the pattern so it no longer brings up the same emotion or reaction.

That ease is the surprise. Because most people who have been in hustle culture — grinding to be visible, performing to be seen — have never experienced what it feels like to just be. To just show up. To not have to work so hard at existing.

And when they feel it for the first time it is genuinely uncomfortable. Because they are not used to it. And then it becomes the new normal. And they wonder how it was ever any other way.

The WTF Wheel Question: What's a Coping Mechanism You're Weirdly Grateful You Had?

When the wheel landed on this question Miss Marissa said shit out loud. You know it is gonna be good when a coach gets called out by the wheel. What happened next? Shit got real. That is what. 😄

Two coping mechanisms. Both of which she is genuinely grateful for. Alcohol and sex.

She was not a heavy drinker in the traditional sense — after having something put in her drink at a club when she was young it took her a decade to slowly come back to alcohol at all. And when she did it was through food pairing — the layers of taste, the upper and middle and lower notes of a really good smoky whiskey or a full-bodied red wine. She is not a big drinker now. But she is grateful she had it when she did.

And sex. She said her grandmother used to call her and ask if she was sure she was not a nymphomaniac. And can you imagine carrying the shame of having fun and being free and being judged for it by the person who was supposed to love you unconditionally?

She eventually told her grandmother — this is going to stop or we are going to stop talking. They did not talk for two years.

And what came out the other side of all of it was this realization — she had been looking for herself in each connection. Each experience. Hiding from shame that had come from family. And that was the real discovery. Not the coping mechanism itself. But what it was covering for.

I jumped in with my own.

Alcohol — because when I was drinking I could get into my authentic energy. I could be joyful and fun and playful and all the things I wanted to be. It numbed the pain in my body and let me feel free for a while. I am sober now. But I understand exactly why I loved it.

And sex — or rather the absence of it. I could not have sex for over a decade because of the pain in my body from endometriosis I did not know I had. And the shame of that silence. The story I told people — I just want to be by myself. I just want to be single. I just want to live my life. While underneath it I was watching friends talk about their sex lives and feeling envious and not understanding why it did not feel the same for me.

And then — the hysterectomy. The cancer that finally got me the surgery I had been asking for. The stage four endometriosis they found during it. And then after — the discovery that sex did not have to hurt. That it could actually feel good. That I had been missing something for over a decade that I did not even know I was missing.

I have also had to sit with the accountability of how I used to judge other people for having sex. The projection of my own shame and confusion onto people who were just living freely in something I did not understand. That is not a nice thing to sit with. But sitting with it is part of the work.

Miss Marissa's grandmother never took accountability for the judgment she placed on her. And that matters. Because accountability — for what we did to ourselves and what we did to other people — is a big part of wellness too.

What Wellness Me Up Means to Miss Marissa

She is Estonian. Her brain thinks in Estonian first, then translates, then answers back in English.

And when she looked at Wellness Me Up — when she ran it through that process — what came back was this.

Hit me up with life.

She has been suicidal. Not anymore, and not for many years. But she has been there. And so when she thinks about being here — about getting to feel all of it, the good and the terrible and the in-between — it lands differently than it might for someone who has not stood at that edge.

She said something at the end of this conversation that I want everyone to hear.

For the person who is having suicidal thoughts — do not be afraid that the person listening is judgmental. They are curious about your experience. Nobody is here to save you or push you in any direction. But curiosity can bring a light in. A different perspective. And it can unravel in better ways than you have thought or felt your way into by yourself.

Ask. Talk. Get curious. That is the answer to almost everything. And sometimes it is the thing that keeps someone here.

I am glad Miss Marissa is here. This conversation would not have happened otherwise. And what a conversation it was.

If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, please reach out. Talk to someone. A friend, a crisis line, a therapist. You do not have to be in it alone. In Canada you can reach the 988 Suicide Crisis Helpline by calling or texting 988.

Want to work with Miss Marissa?
Miss Marissa is a hypnosis trainer and life coach working with entrepreneurs who want to drop the mask and find the version of themselves that makes everything feel easier. Six month containers. Real work. Real results.

👉 heymissmarissa.com (Miss with two S's. Marissa with two S's)
📱 Send her a message — it costs nothing and she loves getting curious.

If this one made your brain light up... good. And subscribe to Wellness Me Up wherever you listen.