NEW PODCAST SERIES HOSTED BY VANESSA BENNETT Vanessa Bennett, LMFT, is a licensed depth psychotherapist, author, and facilitator known for her no-nonsense yet compassionate approach to healing. She’s the author of The Motherhood Myth and coauthor of It’s Not Me, It’s You , and the founder of Inner Compass Academy. She hosts the Inner Compass Podcast, where she explores the intersection of depth psychology, relationships, and cultural conditioning to support personal and collective liberation.
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In this episode, Vanessa sits down with Ailey Jolie, Chartered Psychologist, somatic psychologist, certified sex therapist, and creator of INBODY, for a conversation about what embodiment actually means beyond the performance of being calm, sensual, regulated, or healed. Together they explore why disembodiment and dissociation can be intelligent survival strategies, how food and sexuality both ask…
If you’ve ever wondered whether suffering can be meaningful without becoming your whole identity, this episode is for you. Vanessa explores the difference between suffering that humbles, transforms, and moves us toward greater honesty, and suffering that becomes a role, a claim, a performance, or a way to stay morally protected. Through depth psychology, meaning-making research, Viktor Frankl,…
If you’ve ever gone through something that changed you so completely that the language of “getting back to normal” started to feel almost insulting, this episode is for you. Vanessa explores initiation as the kind of rupture that does not return us to who we were, but reorganizes the self entirely. Through rites of passage, liminality, trauma, witness, and the loss of ritual in modern life, we…
Narcissism is usually imagined as arrogance, dominance, and the loudest person in the room, but it is not always that obvious. In this episode, Vanessa explores narcissism as a problem of selfhood: what happens when a person does not have a stable enough inner sense of Self to stay emotionally coherent without constant reflection from the outside. Through Kohut, Kernberg, the myth of Narcissus,…
What if trusting life doesn’t mean trusting that everything will become stable, coherent, or reassuring? In this episode, Vanessa explores change as both a spiritual and psychological problem: why we confuse trust with continuity, why change can feel like abandonment, and what it means to stay in relationship with reality as it keeps moving. Through Octavia Butler’s “God is Change,” Heraclitus,…
If you have ever felt fear in your body and then immediately made that fear mean something bad about you, this episode is for you. Vanessa explores fear not as something to conquer, transcend, or shame, but as something ancient, intelligent, protective, and deeply human. Through polyvagal theory, Buddhist psychology, the teaching of the first and second arrow, RAIN practice, and self-compassion,…
Betrayal doesn’t only break trust in another person; it can also rupture your trust in yourself. In this episode, Vanessa explores why betrayal can feel so psychologically disorganizing, especially when harm comes from someone or something that was supposed to feel safe. We talk about betrayal trauma, betrayal blindness, attachment injury, projection, reality testing, and why not every devastating…
In this episode, Vanessa sits down with Clara Schroeder, ecotherapist and author of Re-Nature: How Nature Helps Us Feel Better and Do Better , for a conversation about ecopsychology, climate grief, ritual, and the healing intelligence of the natural world. Together they explore why “we are nature” is not just a poetic idea, but a psychological and spiritual reality - and how separation from the…
What if some of what we call healing is actually an argument with the Self? In this episode, Vanessa explores the fantasy that enough therapy, coaching, spirituality, or self-development will eventually turn us into someone without friction: endlessly patient, available, social, regulated, and easy to love. Through Jung’s ideas of persona, Self, and shadow, along with research on self-discrepancy,…
If you say you want to feel more embodied, but what you really mean is “I want my body to calm down enough so I can keep functioning,” this episode is for you. Vanessa explores the body not as a problem to solve or a machine to manage, but as intelligence, using the archetype of Gaia as a map for rhythm, instinct, descent, and embodied truth. We talk about productivity culture, chronic override,…
If you can name the pattern in real time—"I’m projecting, I’m shutting down, this is my attachment stuff"—and still feel unable to stop the behavior, this episode is for you. Vanessa explores the burden of consciousness: the exhaustion of being aware when insight has outrun integration, and the nervous system hasn’t caught up to what the mind can explain. We unpack why the observer can become its…